How dismal is reality?

[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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

[Brewman_Jax]

1. That's okay...

GD is bad enough.

[msgadget]

2. LOL! I rarely get into those

so finding this was quite a shock to me. It's so...unbelievable to read such in 2005.

[Karenina]

5. I attempted to explain

to a young girl who grew up in extreme poverty (which conferred on her absolute knowledge that race was not an issue) that her I-know-better attitude was ALSO part and parcel of the default, unconscious "assumption of superiority". My post was deleted. :shrug:

[Chovexani]

3. Bleah, just another angry white man

Defending his privilege.

[ismnotwasm]

4. Bucha bullshit

I like this forum. I spill my guts here a little at least so far. I will tell you, that back in the day, as a poor,angry young white woman, budding social prison fodder-- I would have been looting and robbing. I didn't travel down that road very far, or I wouldn't have the life nor the career I have today. But I AM NOT BLACK. I AM NOT MALE. I'm not even "part Indian" not a little. White as the driven snow.

Why the fuck anybody would think that a couple of generations since the civil rights movement, they have the right to perform some sort of perverted litmus test on the state of being black? Better minds and writers than I can speak of the culture of poverty, the dire damage generations of racism causes. Even Thomas Sewell, whom I personally can't stand, wrote a book called "Ethnic America" He attempts to detail (not well, but like I said, I can't stand him) the trials of blacks after slavery. There was no Ok, you're free now, here's how you live free in a society that hates or despises or thinks you're not quite human.

Black people performed a fucking miracle. Not that they were completely unassisted, but largely so. They preserved, generation after generation. They created there own neighborhoods, culture, music, joys and trials. In fact, they made it through trials the "angry white male" can't even fathom. They had to sit on the BACK OF BUSES. My Dad told me of a big billboard sign in some cracker town in South Carolina in the fifties that read "Nigger don't let the sun set down on your ass" Blacks persevered through that shit. They preserved through the Starsky and Hutch type "pimp" portrayal. That the black women was "easy". That all the black man wanted was a white women. They persevered through racist drivel like "The Bell Curve". They continue to preserve. They continue to pull miracles out of their hat. Speaking of miracle's, Blacks took the rather --by this time-- mundane Christian religion and made a dynamic living faith.
Personally, I'm amazed. I know poor white folks that just have laid down and lost themselves in a haze of methamphetamine. They have no color barrier to overcome. Trust me on this one, they would have been looting too.