In modern times, the popular culture is geared toward looking down in the gutter for examples. Every social pathology is celebrated as authentic and realz. That means black culture is dominant or at least everyone pretends that it is the greatest thing since pockets. Reality is always something different these days and it occasionally peaks through the cloud cover like when football legend Charles Haley tells young blacks guys to act white.

Charles Haley is the only player in NFL history who’s been a part of five Super Bowl winning teams, so it was no surprise in May when one of those teams, the 49ers, asked him to speak to their rookies.

What might come as a surprise to some people though is what Haley said to those 49ers rookies.

“As far as the rookies, and I know they probably got mad, but I said, ‘Why don’t you all act like the white guys? You never see them in the paper getting high or hitting people,” Haley said, via the San Jose Mercury News. “‘Why don’t you act like that?’ They all looked at me crazy.”

The 51-year-old Haley wasn’t necessarily trying to be controversial with his comments, he was just trying to get the attention of a bunch rookies — Something that’s much easier said then done in this age of cell phones, Twitter and Instagram.

“I just did it for the shock value of it,” Haley said. “The hardest thing is these guys, they have an attention span of a 5-year-old. I’m not the most gentle and kind person to sit there and deal with that crap. I’m a little more confrontational. I think I got my point across.”

He’s right, of course. White athletes get in far less trouble than black athletes and it is because the blacks guys have the self-restraint of children. One thing that you notice living in the ghetto is that black males stop maturing at around 12 and stay that way until they are murdered, go to jail or magically make it into their 40’s. The later group usually gets deadly serious about life at that point.

Segregation had a lot of problems for whites and blacks, but it did not spring from nothing. The historical record has been re-imagined, but in the original many blacks in the South liked segregation. They correctly saw that the rules on behavior benefited the black community, especially women. The trade-offs were not just, but there were trade-offs, which means some benefits.

Attempts to create a shaming culture such that successful older black males can shame young black males into behaving properly has been short circuited by Progressives, but it is probably the only reasonable compromise. Put another way, you cannot have a multi-ethnic society unless the people at the top of the various ethnic groups agree on the high culture and enforce it amongst their own. That means old black guys telling young black guys to act white.