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No.Anyone remember when Yoni called me antisemetic?
I believe the best place to live in would be an unsettled country with no government and very few other people to deal with!
No.Anyone remember when Yoni called me antisemetic?
That pretty much describes North America, pre-crackah landings.I believe the best place to live in would be an unsettled country with no government and very few other people to deal with!
Comparing the acts of individuals to the acts of entire cultures is beyond comparing apples to oranges.
A ing men!!!!!I believe the best place to live in would be an unsettled country with no government and very few other people to deal with!
So have black people...
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Don't you think there are different kinds of white people, like different kinds of hispanics? Don't lump all whites into one culture. We came from different countries, not all owned slaves you know.
Des, I'm not saying that all white people are the same, but comparing the acts of a culture to the acts of individuals is never going to work.
Example:
Comparing the acts of Nazi genocide to the act of a murderer who is Jewish.
Ten reasons the pro-reparations crowd needs to STFU.
1. There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery
Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?
2. There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits
The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous "nation" in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.
3. Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them
Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible moral principle would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again?
4. America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery
The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and then after 1960. What rationale would require Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, and Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution, Jews, Mexicans Greeks, or Polish, Hungarian, Cambodian and Korean victims of Communism, to pay reparations to American blacks?
5. The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury
The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim are payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans and African- American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial. As has already been pointed out, during the slavery era, many blacks were free men or slave-owners themselves, yet the reparations claimants make no distinction between the roles blacks actually played in the injustice itself. Randall Robinson's book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub- led "What America Owes To Blacks." If this is not racism, what is?
6. The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination
No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites (and nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective - and yet so critical - to the case?
7. The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.
The renewed sense of grievance -- which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create -- is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others -- many less privileged than themselves?
8. Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) - all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between African-Americans and other Americans. If trillion dollar res utions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not enough to achieve a "healing," what will?
9. What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?
Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies. But in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians - Englishmen and Americans -- created one. If not for the anti-slavery at udes and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end. If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves. If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere. Where is the gra ude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?
10. The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom
Blacks were here before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves? For the African-American community to isolate itself even further from America is to embark on a course whose implications are troubling. Yet the African-American community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists, nationalists and the political left, who want African-Americans to be no part of America's social contract. African Americans should reject this temptation.
For all America's faults, African-Americans have an enormous stake in their country and its heritage. It is this heritage that is really under attack by the reparations movement. The reparations claim is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left. It is an attack not only on white Americans, but on all Americans -- especially African-Americans.
America's African-American citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive -- a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under assault. The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African-Americans also need the support of the American idea. For it is this idea that led to the principles and ins utions that have set African-Americans - and all of us -- free.
YES! Now you get it! Because a very small percentage of people of European descent actually dealt with the slave trade, you can't make white people in general apoligise for the wrongs that they did.
huh????
Sending a steady signal of despair
Washington Times
April 10, 2001
Walter Williams
David Bell, Harvard law professor, counseled, "Black people will never gain full equality in this country." The late columnist Carl Rowan said, "Racism remains a terrible curse on this society, and . . . nothing in sight suggests that that curse will end soon."
Rep. Charles Rangel, New York Democrat, said: "Black men are not the problem. Black men are the victims." Jesse Jackson said: "We are under attack by the courts, legislatures and mass media. We´re despised. Racists attack us for sport to win votes." New York Supreme Court judge Ivan Warner somberly said, "The entire United States is a racist society."
These comments, observations and counsel are just a tiny sample of three decades worth of defeatist poison bestowed on the black community by leftist politicians, civil rights leaders, professors and teachers. Black people are taught that every waking thought of white America is racist; black people are perennial victims of white oppression; we have no control over our lives and destiny. The only way black people can achieve anything is to prey upon white guilt, and seek special privileges like quotas, handouts, and lately reparations and apologies for slavery.
We´re taught that racism is everywhere. If a disproportionate percentage of blacks are on death row, it isn´t because 50 percent of murders committed in America are committed by blacks and almost all the victims are black.
No, the disproportionate percentages are caused by racism in the criminal justice system and slavery´s legacy. When large percentages of black high-school graduates can´t muster even 700 or 800 on the SAT, it isn´t because they haven´t studied hard enough and applied themselves. It´s the result of racism and slavery´s legacy. The strangest feature of this particular claim, and a testament to the power of racists, is that racists are able to wreak the greatest educational havoc in the very cities where the mayor is black, the superintendent of schools is black, and most of the teachers and principals are black.
When it´s noticed that black illegitimacy is 70 percent, and less than 40 percent of black children live in two-parent families, and social pathology reigns supreme, it´s not because of personal irresponsibility. Instead, it´s racism and the legacy of slavery. Nobody bothers to notice that a century ago, when blacks were much closer to slavery, had fewer civil rights and far fewer opportunities, black illegitimacy and family breakdown was a tiny fraction of today´s. The victimization counsel of black and white liberals is debilitating. Think of it this way. Imagine you´re a high-school or college administrator. Your basketball-team coach counsels his players: "You´re going to play a team that´s better than you. No matter how much you practice, no matter how hard you try, you can´t win. The only possible way for you to win is if we can get the scorers and referees to cheat for you." What would you do to that coach? I would say simply firing him would be too kind.
The victimization vision teaches young blacks they have no choice or control over their own lives. Success depends not on their own efforts, but on handouts, concessions and leg-ups given by white people. As a black person born in 1936, who has witnessed and experienced gross discrimination and seen the personal sacrifices made by both blacks and whites to create today´s opportunities, I find the victimization vision not only offensive and racially demeaning, but a gross betrayal of the monumental bravery and sacrifice of those who came before us.
South Carolina Rep. Robert Smalls (1874-1886) said it best: "My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."
Blacks and Bootstraps
August 14, 2000
Thomas Sowell
ONE OF THE THINGS I have been falsely accused of many times over the years is advising blacks to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. But you can look through the 21 books, dozens of articles and hundreds of newspaper columns I have written without finding any such statement. That is because I am not in the business of giving advice to individuals and groups, but rather in the business of discussing public policy and trying to show where one policy is better than another.
It is considered the height of callousness to tell blacks to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the cold historical fact is that most blacks did lift themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps -- before their political rescuers arrived on the scene with civil rights legislation in the 1960s or affirmative action policies in the 1970s.
As of 1940, 87 percent of black families lived below the official poverty line. This fell to 47 percent by 1960, without any major federal legislation on civil rights and before the rise and expansion of the welfare state under the Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson.
This decline in the poverty rate among blacks continued during the 1960s, dropping from 47 percent to 30 percent. But even this continuation of a trend already begun long before cannot all be attributed automatically to the new government programs. Moreover, the first decade of affirmative action -- the 1970s -- ended with the poverty rate among black families at 29 percent. Even if that one percent decline was due to affirmative action, it was not much.
The fact that an entirely different picture has been cultivated and spread throughout the media cannot change the historical facts. What it can do -- and has done -- is make blacks look like passive recipients of government beneficence, causing many whites to wonder why blacks can't advance on their own, like other groups. Worse, it has convinced many blacks themselves that their economic progress depends on government programs in general and affirmative action in particular.
It is undoubtedly true that the careers of black "leaders," politicians and community activists depend heavily on government programs. It is their ability to lobby for government goodies that keeps such people in business and in the limelight. It was the breakdown of restrictions on black voting in the South that caused a rapidly rising number of black elected officials.
Even today, it is the politicizing of racial hype that enables many black public figures to remain public figures and to extort money and concessions from private businesses by threatening to call them racists or organize boycotts if they don't pony up. There is no question that the 1960s marked the decisive upturn in opportunity for race hustlers.
At one time, the aspirations of black leaders and the well being of the black population at large coincided, since both were striving to end Jim Crow laws and other racial barriers. But such coincidences do not last, either among blacks or among other racial or ethnic groups in the United States or in other countries.
"Leaders" have their own interests and agendas that they push, even when the effect on those for whom they claim to speak is detrimental. That is where we are today. Black leaders have a vested interest in black dependency -- on them and on the government that they can try to influence.
Independent blacks who make it on their own are ignored as irrelevant or distracting. That is true not only of individuals, but also of ins utions like all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, which for 85 years brought quality education to its students. Dunbar students exceeded national norms on IQ tests, years before the Supreme Court said that separate education was inherently unequal.
Dunbar was located within walking distance of the Supreme Court that essentially declared its existence impossible. Ironically, it was the political maneuvering following the historic desegregation decision of the High Court that ended Dunbar's long career as a quality ins ution and reduced it to just another failing ghetto school. But there are other quality black schools today -- and they are still largely ignored today.
We have now reached the point where virtually everything that serves black "leaders" -- dependency, grievance-hunting, racial hype and paranoia -- are major disservices to the cause of advancing blacks, at a time when their opportunities have never been better.
the truest post of all time
you definitely shouldn't apply to the nsa or any job that requires a security clearance if these are truly your beliefs...!!!
#1 The US grants me no freedoms. Those freedoms are mine. I need not ask anyone for them.
#2 The US DOES take away freedoms that are mine and does not let me use them.
#3 The history of the United States is one which has quite possibly hurt me more than it could have helped me. I'm not really sure which way it swings, but I've love for you to explain to me how I'm benefiting from it.
Self-Sabotage In Black America
by John H. McWhorter
April/May 2001
Is school a "white" thing? If not, then why do African-American students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds perform so badly in the classroom? What is it that prevents so many black college students in the humanities and social sciences from studying anything other than black subjects? Why do young black people, born decades after the heyday of the Civil Rights movement, see victimhood as the defining element of their existence?In January 1999, David Howard, the white ombudsman to the newly elected mayor of Washington, D.C., Anthony Williams, casually said in a budget meeting with two coworkers "I will have to be rdly with this fund because it's not going to be a lot of money."
rdly is a rather esoteric word meaning "stingy." Its resemblance to the racial slur ###### is accidental. It has been used in English since the Middle Ages, when black people of any kind were unknown in England, and had been imported to the country by Scandinavian Viking invaders in the 800s, in whose tongue nig meant "miser."
Howard's coworkers were a white person and a black person. The black coworker immediately stormed out of the room and would not listen to Howard's attempt to explain. Shortly thereafter, Mayor Williams curtly accepted Howard's resignation, his official position being that in a predominantly black city with a history of racial tension, Howard's choice of words was grounds for dismissal, akin to being "caught smoking in a refinery that resulted in an explosion." Black talk radio was abuzz with indignation, almost unanimously in support of Williams's decision. A former president of the National Bar Association, a mostly black group, was uncompelled by the fact that the word is not a racial slur, fuming, "Do we really know where the Norwegians got the word?" Meanwhile, David Howard was contrite, considering his dismissal deserved. "You have to be able to see things from the other person's shoes," he explained, "and I did not do that."
rdly is, to be sure, an awkward little word. Its chance resemblance to ###### is such that many of us might quite justifiably choose to avoid it in favor of stingy, parsimonious, or penurious. There are words like that -- the original meaning of horny was "rough or calloused," and one formerly had this word at one's disposal in describing, among other things, voice quality. In the twentieth century the word happens to have acquired the slang meaning of "sexually aroused," though, and as such it is now gracious to avoid using it in its original meaning.
Yet it was difficult not to ask whether a man deserved to be cast into unemployment because of this innocent and passing faux pas, especially a man who had dedicated his career to a troubled, predominantly black administration, and who had never shown any sign of racist bias. For many black observers, however, this was beside the point. "How would another ethnic group react if you came close to the line with a phrase inappropriate to that group?" asked the former National Bar Association president.
That rhetorical question cut through the whole issue in its way, because in fact, there is no other ethnic group in the United States today whose sensibilities would lead to someone's summary dismissal for a mere unintended allusion to a racial epithet applying to them. If Howard had made the equivalent slip-up in a Jewish, Asian, Latino, or even gay association, he would have been dutifully taken aside and informed that such a word was not the most felicitous choice and that he would be best advised not to use it in the future. He would then have been allowed to continue in his efforts to do good work.
Whatever our opinions on what happened to David Howard, only in an African-American context is the image of a man cleaning out his desk for such an evanescent little flub even processible. In other words, the firing of David Howard was "a black thing."
Like Howard's gaffe, the rdly episode in itself was a minor flap, which will surely be all but forgotten by the time this book is in your hands. Yet it was symbolic of larger things, whose significance comes through in a thought exercise.
In the 1970s, an anecdote used to circulate in which a man is killed in a car accident but his son lives and is taken to a hospital where the surgeon says, "I can't operate on him -- he's my son." Most people were more likely to puzzle over how the boy's father could be both the doctor and dead than to even consider that the surgeon was in fact the boy's mother, and thus a woman.
Now, keeping that in mind, imagine if a Martian came to our planet and asked to interview a representative member of several leading nations, and the representative of the United States was chosen by lottery, and that the person who came up was an African American.
The fact is that for most of us, this would require the same polite adjustment needed to spontaneously imagine a female surgeon. We know that, theoretically, black Americans are "Americans." However, it's a rather intellectual point for both blacks and whites. When writers like Shelby Steele and Stanley Crouch wax eloquent about black people being Americans and perhaps even the most American of Americans, they are pushing the envelope, stretching the boundaries, attempting a transformation of thought, not simply stating a truism. The reasons such statements are more transformative than observational is because in all of our hearts, black Americans are perceived as a "case apart" in a way that almost no other native-born ethnic group in the United States is today.
Our archetypal sense of the representative "American" would be a WASP male, for example. However, a female WASP would be perceived as no less "American," nor would a white Catholic male or female. Except for an increasingly small fringe of fixated anti-Semites, no one would perceive Jewishness as refracting the American essence to any substantial degree. Although the Irish would have strained most Americans' sense of "American" a hundred years ago, today, even Irishness worn on the sleeve would arouse no comment, nor would being Italian, a Pole in Cleveland, an isolated rancher from Wyoming, or even a poor Appalachian. Whatever their individual heritages, all such people are processed as being a fundamental "part of the fabric."
The native-born people who strain our sense of who representative Americans are include Latinos, who often speak Spanish natively and have strong ties to other countries; Asians, for whom the same factors apply; and American Indians, who also often speak another language natively, are descended from indigenes torn from this land, and are now often relegated to the margins of society, and as such often have only a hesitant sense of being "American."
In this light, it is significant that black Americans are as difficult to process as representative "Americans" as many Latinos, Asians, and Indians. This is perhaps unremarkable in the case of inner-city youth. Crucially, however, our sense of dissonance would persist even if the black American chosen was an upper-middle-class corporate manager living in a manicured suburb. Somehow, all of us, black and white, can imagine this person representing the American soul as a whole only after an awkward little pause. And yet, unlike many Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, this person speaks nothing but English natively, as have all of his ancestors and relatives alive while he was. He has no ties to another country: His distant ancestors came from not one but a number of distinct African nations, and which nations these were is probably lost to history; meanwhile, he is unlikely to have even traveled to Africa. This man is an American: there is certainly nothing else that he could logically be. And yet to all of us, what this man is first and foremost, regardless of his tailored suit, Volvo, and walk-in closets, is "black." Certainly this is how most whites see him -- but crucially, this is also how most blacks see him. As the rdly episode demonstrated, almost forty years after the Civil Rights Act, "black" is profoundly and incontrovertibly "different," drowning out all considerations of class, income, or accomplishment.
When someone asks "Why does everything always have to be about race?" the usual subtext is that whites keep this torch burning while black Americans are increasingly frustrated in their attempts to be accepted simply as "people." But this book is written in the belief that the idea that white racism is the main obstacle to black success and achievement is now all but obsolete. Today, ironic accidents of history have created a situation in which black Americans themselves are forced into the dominant role in making it so that most of us have to think twice to remember that even a black corporate lawyer living in the suburbs is an "American."
This is due neither to opportunism nor deliberate obstinance, despite frequent claims to the contrary. It is instead an externally imposed cultural disorder that has taken on a life of its own. As such, it no more justifies an indictment of the black community than a flu epidemic would justify censuring the administration of a city. However, we can only eradicate an epidemic and heal a community by identifying it -- trace it, face it, and erase it, as one hears in twelve-step programs. Along those lines, I will show that black America is currently caught in certain ideological holding patterns that are today much, much more serious barriers to black well-being than is white racism, and cons ute nothing less than a continuous, self-sustaining act of self-sabotage.
Importantly, my conception of black American well-being incorporates anything any black American might subsume under that heading. For some, the main index of black American well-being would be integration. In that light, I believe that the black community today is the main obstacle to achieving the full integration our Civil Rights leaders sought.
Yet I am aware that integration is now a tired, distant, and fraught notion for many if not most African Americans. This is encapsulated as I write in a sitcom called The Hughleys, in which a black man moves his family to the suburbs and finds himself uneasy at the prospect that they will lose their cultural blackness in the course of daily contact with whites. Whatever the wisdom or folly of this anti-integrationist trend, for such people, black well-being would be less a matter of integration than basics like financial success and psychological well-being. Crucially, however, the main thing today keeping even these goals elusive for so many black Americans is the very mindset with which history has burdened the black community.
The ideological sea of troubles plaguing black America and keeping black Americans eternally America's case apart regardless of class expresses itself in three manifestations.
The first is the Cult of Victimology, under which it has become a keystone of cultural blackness to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but as an iden y to be nurtured. Only naiveté could lead anyone to suppose that racism does not still exist, or that there are not still problems to be solved. However, the grip of the Cult of Victimology encourages the black American from birth to fixate upon remnants of racism and resolutely downplay all signs of its demise. Black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse. Victimology determined the rdly episode: The basic sentiment that racism still lurks in every corner led naturally to a sense that the use of a word that even sounds like ###### was a grievous insult, in alluding to a raw, relentless oppression and persecution still beleaguering the black community from all sides. The black coworker's bolting from the room deaf to appeal illustrated this, with the implication that the mere utterance of a particular sequence of sounds was an injury beyond all possible discussion, regardless of its actual meaning. More than a few black Washingtonians even surmised that Howard was using the word as a way of slipping the epithet in the back door, under the impression that racism this naked is still typical of most whites in private. Only in a community concerned less with solving victimhood than nurturing it would a mayor compare Howard's harmless little blooper to "being caught smoking in a refinery" and deny a man his job, instead of informing him of his mistake and allowing him to move on with the business of running the city.
The second manifestation is Separatism, a natural outgrowth of Victimology, which encourages black Americans to conceive of black people as an unofficial sovereign en y, within which the rules other Americans are expected to follow are suspended out of a belief that our victimhood renders us morally exempt from them. Because of this, the sad thing was that Anthony Williams was in a sense engaging in the business of "running the city" in accepting Howard's resignation. At the outset of his administration when the rdly episode happened, the low-key, Ivy League-educated Williams was widely suspected of being "not black enough" in comparison to former mayor Marion Barry. He had first been chief financial officer on the control board that had taken over the city from Barry by order of Congress. He had gone on to be elected by whites and successful blacks, and had then brought a great many whites onto his staff. As such, Williams felt compelled to let Howard go in order to show his allegiance to the predominantly black cons uency he had come to serve. Importantly, showing that allegiance meant firing a man for an innocent mistake. This irony was due to the fact that the Cult of Victimology has a stranglehold upon most of the black Washington community, and conditions various local rules considered appropriate for blacks in the name of victimhood, i.e., a Separatist conception of morality. One manifestation of this sovereign morality had reelected Marion Barry after he had run the city into the ground despite billions of dollars in Federal aid and been sent to prison for drug use. The idea that a white official uttering a word that sounds like ###### must be fired regardless of his intent was simply one more manifestation. In other words, for Williams, part of running Washington, D.C., was showing that he was rooted in Separatism.
Separatism spawns the third manifestation, a strong tendency toward Anti-intellectualism at all levels of the black community. Founded in the roots of the culture in poverty and disenfranchisement, this tendency has now become a culture-internal infection nurtured by a distrust of the former oppressor. As I will demonstrate in this book, it is this, and not unequal distribution of educational resources, that is the root cause of the notorious lag in black students' grades and test scores regardless of class or income level, and this thought pattern, like Victimology and Separatism, rears its head in every race-related issue in the United States. "Do we really know where the Norwegians got the word?" I recall the former president of the National Bar Association asking in reference to rdly. Yet the Scandinavians are not exactly well known for their role in the slave trade -- the Danes and the Swedes tried their hand briefly but never made much of a mark. This man might object that racism spreads nevertheless, but even here, a question arises: Blacks have been unjustly stereotyped as being many things, but "stingy" is not one of them. As such, how likely is it that rdly would ever have referred to black people? How plausible is it that people picked up the slur ###### in a region where few people had ever even seen a black person until a few decades ago? Even if we somehow allow this, why exactly would they then proceed to apply the word to people who are tight with their cash? ("Come on, Sven, don't be such a ###### -- buy me a beer.") But this past president of the National Bar Association obviously did not pause to even briefly consider any of this, even before making statements to the press. A minor thing in itself, to be sure, but symptomatic of a general sense in much of the black community that to dwell upon such things as the origins of arcane words and, by extension, books, is "of another world," specifically the white one.
One of the most important things about these three currents is that whites in America do nothing less than encourage them. This is partly, as Shelby Steele argues, out of a sense of moral obligation that leads most whites to condone Victimology, Separatism, and Anti-intellectualism as "understandable" responses to the horrors of the past. More than a few whites have come to see the condescension inherent in this, but only the occasional few dare express their opinion openly or at any length, since such an act is as likely to attract excoriation from other whites as from blacks. Whites also unwittingly encourage all of these currents via well-intentioned social policies like open-ended welfare and permanent affirmative action, which are intended to help blacks overcome, but in practice only roil the waters under all three currents. Whites are now implicated in nurturing black self-sabotage not because of racist malevolence, but because of the same historical accidents that have encouraged blacks to embrace these thought patterns. Yet the fact remains that interracial relations in America have congealed into a coded kind of dance that unwittingly encourages black people to preserve and reinforce their status as "other," and a pitiable, weak, and unintelligent "other" at that. This, too, was evident in the rdly episode, in which David Howard actually accepted the condemnation rained upon him by most of black Washington. Howard thought that he deserved to be fired for innocently uttering a word that even sounded like ######, even though what he was doing while uttering it was helping to improve the lives of the city's citizens.
One misconception about these three currents is that they are merely fringe phenomena, minor overswings of the pendulum that need not concern us in the long run. However, adherents of Victimology are in no sense limited to the likes of melodramatically opportunist politicians such as Al Sharpton, academic iden y politics mavens such as Derrick Bell and Lani Guinier, or sensationalist cultural demagogues such as June Jordan. On the contrary, Victimology has become, less fervently but with profound influence nevertheless, part of the very essence of modern black iden y. It now permeates the consciousness of a great many black Americans in all walks of life, most of whom in a recent poll were under the impression that three out of four black Americans lived in ghettoes, as opposed to the actual figure, which is one in five. Similarly, the furious and militant separatism of people like former Nation of Islam official Khalid Muhummad is but the tip of an iceberg. The general sense that the black person operates according to different rules was eloquently demonstrated, for example, by the muted concern with the open sexism of the Million Man March -- what group in America could any of us even begin to imagine convening an all-male march in 1995 other than African Americans? The Anti-intellectual current is often thought to be primarily an inner-city problem typical of underclass youth alienated from poor schools, but is in fact a tremendous impediment to black culture as a whole, as shown by the little-noted fact that even middle-class black students tend to make substandard grades even in well-funded suburban schools where teachers are making herculean, culturally sensitive efforts to reach them. In short, these three currents are neither only inner-city ills, mere cynical ploys by politicians, nor just smug fantasy churned out from the ivory tower by the brie-and-Zinfandel set. They are so endemic to black culture as a whole that they are no longer even perceived as points of view, but rather as simple logic incarnate. In other words, these defeatist thought patterns have become part of the bedrock of black iden y.
The most serious misconception about these three currents, however, is that there is nothing wrong with them, and even that they are an evolutionary advance that other iden y groups would benefit from adopting. On the contrary, these three currents hold black Americans back from the true freedom that so many consider whites to be denying them. Victimology is seductive because there is an ironic and addictive contentment in underdoggism. However, it also inherently gives failure, lack of effort, and even criminality a tacit stamp of approval. In addition, because focusing on the negative debases the performance of any human being, focusing on remaining aspects of victimhood rather than the rich opportunities before us is a ball and chain restraining any effort to move ahead. Separatism promises the balm of a sense of roots, and offers an escape from the vicissitudes of making our way into realms so recently closed to us. But the wary social remove that Separatism encourages blacks to maintain from whites regardless of actual experience is a much more powerful factor than white racism in making blacks less likely to be hired, or especially, promoted. Black Anti-intellectualism can often seem like a jolly and even healthy alternative to sterile nerdishness, but it is also, as I have noted, the main reason blacks underperform in school. On a broader level, a race permanently wary of close reasoning and learning for learning's sake is one not only spiritually impoverished, but permanently prevented from forging the best techniques for working toward a better future.
I have written this book under the conviction that it doesn't have to be this way, and that more to the point, it absolutely must not. Black America is currently embarked on a tragic detour. Accidents of history have condemned us to miss an unprecedented opportunity to reach Martin Luther King's mountaintop. In the first four chapters of this book, I will discuss the operations of these three currents in modern African-American thought. In the next two chapters I will show how these currents have shaped two race-related issues of wide impact, the affirmative action debate and the controversy over whether or not the in-group speech of black Americans is an African language called "Ebonics," which ought to be used in classrooms as an aid to teaching black children to read. The last chapter will outline suggestions for getting back on the track that our Civil Rights leaders set us upon. Following that track will require some profound adjustments in black iden y, which today would feel nothing less than alien to most African Americans under the age of seventy. Nevertheless, these adjustments are not only possible, but most importantly are the only thing that will cut through the circularity and fraudulence infusing so much of interracial relations in America today, and bring African Americans at last to true equality in the only country that will ever be their home.
In this explosive book, Berkeley linguistics professor John McWhorter reports from the trenches of today's college classroom to offer a daring assessment of what's plaguing the children of yesterday's affirmative-action babies. The Civil Rights revolution was the pinnacle of American history, freeing African Americans from centuries of disenfranchisement. Yet, as McWhorter shows, it has had a tragic side effect. As racism recedes as a serious obstacle to black advancement, most black American leaders and thinkers have been misled into a self-destructive ideological detour. Victimhood is exaggerated and enshrined more than constructively addressed. Following from this, young black people are shepherded into a separatist conception of "blackness" defined largely as that which is not "white." This in turn conditions a sense, embedded in black American culture as a whole, that academic achievement is a "white" realm that the "authentic" black person dwells in only for financial gain or to chronicle black victimhood and victories.
McWhorter addresses these problems head-on, drawing on history, statistics, and his own life experiences. He shows that affirmative action in university admissions, indispensable 30 years ago, is today an obsolete policy that encourages the counterproductive ideologies of what he calls Separatism, Victimology, and Anti-intellectualism. Most perniciously, it prevents black students from demonstrating the abilities our Civil Rights leaders gave them the opportunity to nurture, and it deprives them of the incentive to strive for the very top.
Racism is not dead -- but as McWhorter so persuasively argues, dealing it a death blow will require a reinvestment in the strength that allowed black Americans to triumph and survive this far. His pathbreaking book is certain to shock, inspire, and ignite debate among all those who care about race and education today.
More from Mr. Sowell
NO GROUP votes more solidly for the Democrats than blacks -- and no group suffers more as a result than blacks. Political spin makes Democrats the best friends of blacks, the party of civil rights laws, the party of affirmative action and the party of social programs to help the poor in general and blacks in particular. But spin and facts are very different things.
The fact is that a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite all the media hype about the confederate flag flying over the state capitol in South Carolina, no Republican put that flag there. The Democrats' Senator Fritz Hollings, who was governor of South Carolina in the 1960s, put that confederate flag there at a time when it was used all across the South as a symbol of resistance to the civil rights movement.
With all the criticism of Texas Governor George W. Bush for not telling the state of South Carolina what to do, there was scarcely a word anywhere about Democrat Fritz Hollings. That's the media for you.
Democrats can claim credit -- if that's the word -- for all the government social programs that have played such a role in the disintegration of families. These programs have done little to reduce poverty. Blacks did more to reduce their own poverty than the government ever has.
Between 1940 and 1960, the poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. Yet there was no major federal civil rights legislation or welfare state programs created during that period. The continuing rise of blacks out of poverty during the 1960s, when their poverty rate fell an additional 17 points, cannot be arbitrarily attributed to the Great Society programs, since this trend was already decades old before these programs were created.
As for the first decade of affirmative action -- the 1970s -- the poverty rate among blacks fell by only one percentage point then.
Education had much to do with the rise of blacks. As of 1940, black adults averaged just 5 years of schooling. By 1960 that was 8 years and by 1970 it was 10 years. Obviously, doubling your education within one generation tends to increase your income, regardless of which party is in power or what policies they follow.
In our own high-tech era, education is even more important. Nothing is more of a handicap to blacks today than inadequate education. There are many reasons for these inadequacies. How do the Democrats and Republicans compare, when it comes to the education of black youngsters?
Democrats are too completely dependent on the teachers' unions to be able to break the public school monopoly or to get rid of incompetent teachers or even to insist on the teaching of the basics, instead of the dumbed down education and amateur social engineering that the education establishment likes.
Republicans have a golden opportunity to offer blacks something that the Democrats cannot possibly offer -- the right of parents to choose where their own children go to school.
Whatever political support there is for vouchers has come almost exclusively from Republicans. Democrats are totally opposed -- and have to be, if they want to continue getting the millions of dollars contributed by the teachers' unions.
Another factor in the decline of American education in general and education in low-income minority communities in particular, is the difficulty of either punishing or expelling disruptive and violent students who destroy the education of the other students. Liberal judges have made it literally a federal case when schools crack down on disruptive and violent students.
Who appoints liberal judges? Usually Democrats, though Republicans have slipped up and appointed a few as well.
One of the other huge handicaps that black students face is the at ude that trying to learn is "acting white." Self-destructive as this notion may be, it is a logical corollary of the social vision that says whitey is out to get you and it doesn't matter how much you know or how hard you try. Which party panders to this victimhood vision? Which party cuddles up with race hustlers like Al Sharpton, who promote this paranoid tribalism? The Democrats in general and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton in particular.
These are the facts. But how much weight do facts carry on election day?
Nothing like facts, presented by blacks, to stop the Liberal mumbo-jumbo dead in its tracks. (<< Damn! I just realized how much that sounded like it could have come from the mouth of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton)
Don't debate me. Debate Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and John McWhorter...after all, I agree with them and they disagree with you.
Okie dokie.
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