How dismal is reality? [View All]

[msgadget]

Be forewarned, rough reading ahead...



I was traveling in China when pictures of the looters in New Orleans began to appear on CNN. They were black of course. Looting and raping and burning are what blacks do when the lid loosens. Yes, I could phrase this more cautiously: These things are what some blacks, etc. or, more cutely, not all blacks are looters, but all looters….blah blah.

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With the dismantling in the Fifties of apartheid in the United States, many hoped that blacks would rise, study, progress, and become genuinely as distinct from formally integrated into the country. I hoped it too, though my expectations were low. Southerners said it would never happen, but were dismissed as prejudiced. They were right.

The melding of the races just hasn’t worked and, if examined honestly, shows few signs of working. Fifty years after the Brown decision, blacks remain unassimilated. They appear to be unassimilable. This, after endless programs, after the nation has turned itself on its head trying to encourage, promote, force, or imagine assimilation.

Integration of the schools degraded the schools, but did little for blacks. Operation Head Start didn’t work. Racial quotas in the universities didn’t work, nor did the awarding of unearned degrees or the establishment of departments of Black Studies. Compulsory integration of restaurants didn’t work. Quotas in hiring, enforced by the federal government, didn’t work. Welfare didn’t work. “Hate-crime” laws didn’t work. Nothing has worked.

These attempts have not been without results, but assimilation of blacks into the country has not been one of them. Compelled hiring by race instead of merit has produced a black middle class, but those so hired are regarded as a sort of tax, a cost of doing business. Saying this aloud is a firing offense, so no one says it in the office. They say it later over a beer. This was not the intended outcome. It is what we got.

Neither race shows much inclination to associate with the other. Left to themselves, they quickly segregate, in housing, on campus, in night clubs. Only heavy federal pressure produces an appearance of togetherheid.

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Writers speaking of the looting in New Orleans regularly say that poverty causes looting, and that as a society we should do something about it. But why are blacks poor, and what could society do that it has not already tried? Blacks are always poor, in Africa, in Haiti and Jamaica, in New Orleans. It is a global pattern. Would that it were not, but it is. No one knows what to do about it.

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Be sure to read the Black Response link at the bottom of the article: