Let's Have It
That vaunted "conversation about race", let's have it. Given that the accusation is that America is racist and BLM is the new racial arbiter, let's do have the conversation.
I really don’t care about race…I don’t make racial profiling a part of my daily life and I do not think in terms of racial divides but there are groups in America seeking reward and being rewarded with power by virtue of continually dividing us along racial lines through activism, cultural separation and political opportunism.
But it is not about race at all, it is about power.
In the 40’s and 50’s young black Americans emulated the dress and customs of the greater American culture. As did most “whites”, they dressed in coat and tie, their parents taught them manners and they valued education – all common values of all Americans regardless of race, creed or color.
But in the turmoil of the 1960’s and the concordant civil rights unrest, all that changed. Legitimate claims of racism and discrimination were met not with equality, but patriarchal programs created by a “white” majority for two reasons, one honorable and just, the other insidious and evil. The former was a drive for equal access and true equality, a manifestation of the ideals of Martin Luther King that truly “all men are created equal”. The latter was an attempt to pacify a radical minority by bribery – affirmative action, preferential treatment and promises of government largess in exchange for fealty to a “progressive” agenda and its progenitors and purveyors.
These two approaches were (and are) vastly different in the level of effort and individual sacrifice required to achieve their stated goals.
The honorable and just approach required the majority of America to level the playing field, to ensure the environment for open and honest competition where, to paraphrase the words of Dr. King, a man could be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. In short, to be true to the ideals expressed in our founding documents. This approach would demand much more of black Americans as they would be required to overcome a hundred years of second class citizenship (and there can be no denial that is exactly the case) through individual effort to compete to prove their equality and worth to society. On an individual level, one at a time, they would have to overcome generations of racial prejudice that had been fostered by government and society alike.
White Americans faced the same challenges as America expanded due to ethnic prejudices that were rampant as immigrants poured into the new country (i.e., “Irish Need Not Apply”) and had similar paths to walk, those paths also taking hundreds of years to overcome – women have fought a similar battle. As examples, when JFK was running for election in 1960, one of the questions about him was whether America would elect a Roman Catholic president and if he would be more loyal to the Pope than the Constitution.
I point this out, not to minimize the civil rights struggle of blacks in America, only to recognize that blacks are not the only racial, ethnic, gender or religious class that has been subject to organized cultural and economic discrimination in America. The difference being that no class has benefited more from massive government programs and preferential treatment than black America in the attempt at corporate remediation of that discrimination…not the Irish, the Polish, the Roman Catholics or women have seen the level of preferential treatment that blacks in America have.
The second and more insidious and evil approach was to give in to racial bribery and pay-offs in the form of affirmative action, preferential treatment and promises of government largess via social and welfare programs. This was the easiest path for a “progressive” culture burdened with “white guilt” – it has amounted to the equivalent of a culture of extortion where powerful whites adopted the position that if “we just pay them, they will go away”…and for 40 or 50 odd years, the leadership of black America accepted those bribes in exchange for the fealty I previously mentioned to a “progressive” agenda and its progenitors and purveyors. The problem is that this approach required nothing of the black community because the equality was a false construct of a “progressive” power base that never was interested in equality, they were only interested in keeping blacks on the “plantation” so that the party of “progressivism”, the Democrats, could count on this basis of support. For years they have kept the black population in line with the threat of the opposition party taking away the goodies while promising even more.
This second approach has led to a culture of welfare dependency and entitlement in the black community and has done virtually nothing to facilitate true equality…it has furthered the divide between the races. The perceived protection of this shield of entitlement has caused a sort of social deviation as the black community sought to define a cultural identity under this regime rather than pursue the goals of the dominant culture (as they did up until the 60’s), sharing the same values of success, self-worth, and achievement as that culture. This deviation is expressed in the radical counter-culture affectations of the “thug life” and the glorification of drugs, sex, “bling” and taking white women as trophies by popular rap black artists.
This process culminated in the explosion of a perspective that electing a black president was a “Now we have a black man in the White House, we are gonna get ours” moment. Remember Peggy Joseph and her Obamaphone?
But the larger black community has noticed that this process by the “progressive” power structure has failed…but instead of looking to the first, more effective and just solution, the patronizing white “progressives” and black leadership seeks even more separation and division. Race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton - and the new generation that includes people like Ibram X. Kendi - have aligned themselves with black separatists/black nationalists/communists like Jerimiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan in an attempt to extract payments due from their “progressive” masters.
Being the masters of political diversionary tactics, the “progressives” seek to divert this anger and disappointment from the black community toward conservatives. They desperately try to sell the idea that somehow the past 60 years have been a success and that if it isn’t the only reason is the obstructionist conservatives who kept them from giving away more – sounds a lot like the same argument Biden is using against the Republicans in Congress as the election gets closer, doesn’t it? Both arguments do share a commonality – they are illegitimate on their face.
Obama wasn’t a failure because he is black, he is a failure because he is a “progressive” and this nation isn’t built that way. That is the same reason Biden is failing – and in case you haven’t noticed, Biden is decidedly a honky.
It is time for us to have that vaunted conversation about race. Conservatives aren’t the one’s afraid to have it – the “progressive” establishment and the black leadership are the ones who do everything to prevent it.
Democrats will never have a legitimate conversation about race because can’t afford to have a conversation that will expose 60 years of lies and failure to honestly promote true equality.
All just too true. Having lived through it all and seen this awful change in America.
“I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for 200 years,” is an LBJ quote that was likely made in reference to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There are arguments about whether he actually said it, but it is consistent with his political views of that time. Democrat Senator Patrick Moynihan said in prescience of the point you're making "There is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos."