“Boomer!”
The insouciant snottiness of young Americans spitting this epithet at anyone older and more knowledgeable than them is now a normal part of public life.
CRBBs don’t want ‘equality’; they want infantilized black people as a permanent social accessory in which to reflect their own selfless glory.
Why even complain? After all, that’s just how kids are.
Except it isn’t. It was only in the 1950s that we encouraged teenagers to see themselves as a distinct population smarter than their parents and ancestors. Both the media and their feckless parents have groomed them to be narcissistic, disrespectful braggarts.
Unlike heightened sensitivity to reward and increased risk-taking, an obnoxious sense of entitlement is not a natural human adolescent phenotype. It’s just an outcome of postwar consumer prosperity.
Nonetheless, there are times when even the most stalwart “anti-ageist” (forgive me, readers) is compelled to employ the dreaded B-word.
The hippie elite
There’s a problem with a certain very prominent and vocal set of Baby Boomers, and it’s a problem almost no one will talk about. To mention it, even in a whisper, is to invite censure. It is to invite public excoriation, the loss of your job, and total reputation destruction in your church and your professional field.
If you signal that you know this thing I’m about to describe, you will be called the worst thing possible in 21st-century America: “racist.” And it won’t be only liberals; it will be older conservatives, too.
The problem comes from a subset of older people I call Civil Rights Baby Boomers.
CRBBs are the superannuated flower children of the 1960s and ’70s who, according to their own lore, saved the benighted negroes of the American South. They made Dr. King’s dream come true, in their telling. Alone among their species, CRBBs were so very good, and so very socially conscious, that they were the first generation of humans to see how naughty and bad it was to treat black people like second-class citizens.
Summer of self-love
As I write, and as you read, I suspect this sounds a bit over the top. A little uncharitable, a little broad-brush.
But it isn’t.
It’s only because the social identity of CRBBs has been placed on a pedestal atop Mount Very Good People that we feel churlish about criticizing the people now in their 80s who are still standing on street corners shrieking about every lefty-liberal neurosis. It’s why people find it so provocative to suggest that maybe the young-in-the-’60s set went on their political road trips more out of self-regard and vanity than out of “empathy.”
Civil Rights Baby Boomers are Americans stuck in 1965-1970. During their late youth and early adulthood, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. Some of them attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, and those who didn’t saw it on television like the rest of the nation. Anti-black racism was one of the most pressing issues of their day, so it’s understandable that the America of their youth left a deep impression on their minds.
The trouble is that they’re still living in 1965. They actually believe that white racism against black people is not only as virulent as it ever was in the antebellum South or in the Jim Crow era, but actually worse in the 2020s.
Systemic nonsense
That’s the only way to explain how huge numbers of white people in this age bracket swallow patent nonsense like the ridiculous claims of “systemic racism” in modern America. It’s the only way to explain why otherwise sane white people listen to narcissistic charlatans like black attorney Benjamin Crump, who never saw a false claim of racism that he didn’t want to take to court.
It’s the only way to explain why grandpa-age white liberals get more upset at their grandson who tells the truth about the antisocial and violent behavior of the black kids around him than about their own grandchildren getting beat up or carjacked. We all know the truth: Black crime and hostile, antisocial behavior are all around us.
That’s just your opinion, man
I can point right to the FBI statistics showing that black people, while making up only 13% of the population, account for more than half of all murders. I can point out that it’s even worse than it looks, since it’s young men who commit most murders. Young black men account for much less than 13% of the population, yet there they are committing more than 51% of murders.
I could point to other statistics, but none of that matters to Civil Rights Baby Boomers. Objective facts that do not flatter black people are, ipso facto, racist to the CRBB. Try bringing this statistic up at the dinner table with a CRBB. He will accuse you of racism for noticing the fact and stating the fact. It’s that deranged.
Freedom fogies
Have you ever talked, really talked, with a CRBB?
I have. Many of my friends over the years have been CRBBs. “Linda” and “Gregory” were dear friends of mine; they’re both deceased now. They were generous, hardworking people, but they were terminal CRBBs.
Over countless suppers and gin-soaked card games at their dining room table, Gregory recounted his salad days of driving a VW bus down South to march with black civil rights protesters. His eyes lit up when he talked about “harboring” black passengers in his car and how he kept them safe from the stereotypically bigoted Southern sheriff’s deputies who, without Gregory’s presence, would probably have lynched his black passengers.
Yes, anti-black racism was a real thing, and it used to be much more widespread. But forgive me, Gregory, I think many of your tales of a modern Underground Railroad were embroidered by time, drink, and self-regard. It was hard to take them at face value when you claimed seriously that it was “dangerous” in 2015 for a black person and a white person to be seen in a car together in any state below the Mason-Dixon line.
‘Street’ knowledge
That’s the thing about the Civil Rights Baby Boomers. Despite their claimed goal — to end racism — they were strangely unable and unwilling to rejoice in any of the progress made legally and socially for black people. Their flower-child years were so formative and dramatic for them that they don’t want the problem solved. They don’t really want racism to go away, because then their claim to special status as a singularly selfless and enlightened generation would evaporate.
To claim that black people are in danger in the United States is a cruel farce. Your correspondent grew up in the late 1970s and early ’80s, weaned on socially progressive shows like “Sesame Street” that taught color-blindness. In school, my friends were white, black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, and more. As a liberal in my youth, I was proud to be above “racism,” and like many in the 1990s, I assumed America had achieved a mature and stable social and economic system with room for everyone.
Hold the mayo
We all know the truth in 2025. Not only is anti-black racism pretty much gone (it has been for decades), it’s been replaced by anti-white racism. For decades now, it has been socially acceptable — indeed, socially praiseworthy — for black people to call white people “mayonnaise,” to say that white people “have no culture,” to talk about “eliminating whiteness,” and much more. You hear it every day on “respectable” mainstream television.
Meanwhile, it’s still forbidden to talk about black crime and the dysfunctional culture that helps create it. Take the astonishingly high rate of fatherlessness in the black community: anywhere from 56% to 67% or higher, depending on your source.
Despite the predictable charges of racism that greeted Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to restore law and order in Washington, D.C., the fact remains that the anarchy in our cities — especially prevalent in Democrat-controlled cities — is disproportionately caused by black offenders.
RELATED: The DC nobody talks about — and Trump finally did
Photo by TIM SLOAN/Getty Images
The privilege to patronize
I live in the second-whitest state in the union: Vermont. It’s also probably the most liberal and progressive. Whereas formerly quaint Burlington used to have few shootings, they’re now a regular occurrence in our “upscale” downtown shopping district. And while the press goes to great pains to disguise the race of the perpetrators, black men are, of course, “overrepresented.”
When I used to shop downtown, I noticed black customers picking food off the hot bar at the grocery store and eating it while strolling, without paying for it. Staff saw it too. Nobody said anything about the theft, because it was black people doing it.
The fundamental irony is that CRBBs claim they are the only ones to treat black people like human beings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Civil Rights Baby Boomers wanted a set piece for themselves, something as dramatic and world-changing as the fact that their parents’ generation defeated the Nazis. Yes, I really do believe it’s that cheap and narcissistic.
But it is the CRBBs who dehumanize black people. To treat your fellow man as an equal means to hold him to the same standards of civil, civilized, and legal behavior that everyone is held to. CRBBs don’t want “equality”; they want infantilized black people as a permanent social accessory in which to reflect their own selfless glory.
Stop listening to them. It’s past time for the Civil Rights Baby Boomers to retire from the public discourse.
Culture, Lifestyle, Crime, Washington, D.c., Systemic racism, Policing, Crime statistics, Donald trump, Baby boomers, Civil rights, Intervention