The attention in the media given to Barak Obama's longtime associate and mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., former longtime pastor at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ during Obama's run for the presidency brought into focus the troubled position of black leadership in America. Rev. Wright's philosophical tone has been echoed by Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee, Danny Glover, that odious racist, Nikki Giovanni, that "premiere intellectual", Cornell West and a whole host of black Americans who, when given an opportunity either because of their celebrity or leadership roles, carp mercilessly on what they characterize as the baleful, oppressive and malicious influence white society has had and continues to have over black people instead of concentrating on the wonderful opportunities available to Americans compared to so, so many unfortunates in this world in the 21st century. On the white side of the equation you have bitter and glib racists like Time Wise and Ward Churchill who have no problem with assigning character traits to white people based on the color of their skin while stridently decrying any white folks who would do the same, perpetuating racism in the name of condemning it. This type of thinking leaves those who cater to it in a perceptual trap from which escape may be generations away when it comes to black Americans. While homeless Guatemalan women and children seek gold in a veritable mountain of garbage every single day in Guatemala City multi-millionaires like Kanye West talk about the oppression of black Americans - while Indonesian men climb up Sibayak Volcano in Sumatra and Ijen and Welirang Volcanos in Java, carrying raw blocks of sulphur for a few dollars a day until their shoulders are deformed; I know about the mountains of garbage and sulphur because I have stood there and seen it with my own eyes. Multi-millionaires like Alicia Keys make the most childish and racist statements - in a country like the United States, where cheap and high quality Community Colleges give any American the sure path to a prosperous life, you have a panel of prosperous black Americans at Tavis Smiley's annual State of the Black Union wringing their hands and sharpening their rhetorical knives at the expense of nameless white Americans; those panels talk as if Jim Crow was still here without any problem whatsoever. It's 2010 and that's the problem; it's no more right for these zanies of Smiley's to go on as they do than it would be for me to go up and slap the nearest German I can find because of World War II - it's 2010.
Although it is this self same attention to the woeful state of black leadership in the United States which motivated me to write this essay, I write with reluctance, preferring not to be lumped in with racists who use a string of code words in an attempt to hide the fact that they simply don't like black folks; lumped in with the likes of bigots like David Duke and Rush Limbaugh who has learned over the years to speak in code to great effect. I grew up disliking groups like Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan because where I had wanted to lump myself was with the cause of right and truth, amusing as that may sound. When I was a young man I remember reading about what happened with Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and what a great feeling of satisfaction I had as Owens turned Hitler's mythology of racial superiority on it's head in the very back yard of the Nazi's regime of hate. I was against those who harrassed Jackie Robinson or objected to blacks on college basketball teams; that was the mythology of my own phiosophical community - I felt it wrong to ascribe negative characteristics based on race or to disenfranchise based on race. I still feel that way and feel it is just as wrong when the opposite occurs from those injured by such attitudes. The white political left and it's hateful political correctness thinks it is an ally to black Americans but in fact, by indulging itself in racial myths about white America, it is doing irreparable harm to the American black community.
I remember seeing a preview on PBS one night years ago of Ken Burns documentary "Baseball" and distinctly remembering thinking if this coming documentary was about baseball or what jerks white people are. A steady stream of movies has come out in recent years that paints a broad stroke of a racist America wherein the the white and black protaganist's are depicted as lone voices in a sea of racism made by film maker's among who it has become fashionable to dislike the story of America as if to prove how little racism resides in the heart of the filmmaker's themselves, conveying the idea that they seek to expunge their own guilt by skin color which is racism itself. This is not a very nice way, for example, to portray my own family who came from northern Germany/Poland to central Minnesota after the turn of the last century and never had anything to do with black folks one way or the other. They were simple farmers who worked the land, almost oblivious of the outside world. Do they need to apolgize to somebody, or pay reparations or have their great great grand children deprived of a place in college in favor of someone with a darker complexion? I was born in 1954 - do I carry a burder of guilt because I am white? Can I never shake off the spectre of Hernando Cortes or Cecil Rhodes because I share a light complexion? Should I then by the same token hold all black Americans responsible because there are so many black gangs wrecking the heart of every major urban center in the United States? Am I even permitted to say that there are black gangs wrecking the heart of every urban center in the United States?
A more lighthearted example of these mythological attitudes that have swung the other way is the film musical "Hairspray" wherein all blacks in the film are depicted as racially savy and morally pure along with their white counterparts who nonetheless especially relate to the blacks only because of their skin color. It's really nice and one can easily say that such filmmaker's hearts are in the right place but they are in fact not helping the cause of race discussion in the United States in the 21st century, far from it. The lesson here is that it is as stupid to put black people on a pedestal merely because they are black as it is to want them to stand in a ditch because they are black.
Another film that buys into the childish stereotypes and bias of the new mythology is "This Revolution", a 2005 film directed by Stephen Marshall and starring Rosario Dawson. "This Revolution" is a virtual smorgasboard of trite and casual bigotry where successful people who just happen to be white are evil, ignorant and spiritually bankrupt and "the great unwashed" as they are at one time called in the film are the "real" people with the "real" insight into what is "really" going on on this earth. In it's own way, "This Revolution" is arguably as full of racism, bigotry and shallow stereotypes as some of the worst types of films from the 1930's or 1940's and yet because this bias comes from a "good" place it is not only utterly excused but swallowed whole as "truth" by eager American youths who consider rap music as the default cool and John Wayne a symbol of brutal idiocy. Oil, Che Gueverra, Bush, imperialism re-defined, colonialism and much much more imagery are trundled out as reflecting a truly sophisticated and compassionate view of the world when in fact such thinking represents a hopelessly biased, naive and puerile belief system in a world much more complex and even innocent than this type of thinking is able to perceive. In this stereotype successful people are some kind of self sustaining aristocracy with endemic immorality when in point of fact most successful and rich people are not generational, are self-made and come from middle or lower middle class backgrounds and are not demonstrably more unethical than a convenience store owner or taxi driver or college student; it is simply a convenient stereotype. The American success story resembles Horatio Alger more than a clannish guild though far too many black American voices argue otherwise. Furthermore, very successful and skilled people are almost always unique in their family - a man who helps to design a mammoth tunnel digging machine acquired those skills on their own as an individual through the sweat of their brow and avid interest and discipline and not as part of some private club who hands out such careers to someone. I laugh at films in the vein of "This Revolution" that can at once depict earnest Catholics in Latin America as soulful and spiritual people while depicting Catholics within the United States as fringe lunatics whose priests are prone to pedophilia. If you want to talk about a perceptual trap, a fllm like "This Revolution" is almost the very definition of the idea. It is hypocrisy on a mammoth scale and the young people who take to the streets at G-8 conferences are as lost at sea as any bigot ever was. Bigotry is not always where you expect to find it and that is it's own lesson.
Stereotypes of the "evil corporate guy" migrate from relatively harmless usage in fims like "Wallstreet" and "Jurrasic Park" where the guy with the tie in the latter film is satisfyingly eaten by mother nature herself in the form of a T-Rex and continue their migration to a film like "This Revolution", a rather more serious and careless use of such stereotypes because the film tries to depict itself as reflecting a political reality like "Z' or "Salvador". The migration of stereotypes continues more dangerously to moralizing propaganda entities like Michael Moore's so-called "documentaries" and suddenly have a real weight to them that is taken for truth. In point a fact, Moore's films carelessly trundle out lies and distortions and when taken to task about it Moore is every bit as difficult to pin down as "Roger", Moore's moral opposite who Moore in fact bears a great resemblance to. This is the hypocrisy, the perceptual trap, the lies that come from the "good" side of the ethical equation. When Sarah Palin exploded onto the national political scene she was immediately demonized and stereotyped in a most unflattering way. The stereotypes of which I speak migrate further into the news media and are parsed out as truth while anything inconvenient to these stereotypes is ignored. Arguments are made rather than reported by journalists and they are anything but nuanced.
The political right and left have become ever more polarized and each side stereotypes the other and themselves in ethical and moral terms rather than busying themselves with ideas based on common sense. Is it common sense to allow wholesale immigration of Africans to America who will commit 50 times as more crimes as the average white American because of a political view? How does this type of immigration benefit the people of the United States and why can't I disagree with it without being branded a racist; America is not an airport for the rest of the disadvantaged of the world to come to to at once enjoy economically and dislike because of the white people who made the country? How does it benefit the United States of America to have illegal immigrants marching down it's streets waving Mexican flags. Is this supposed to make me happy? Am I such a deluded racist that I can't see why? Why do other countries have the right to protect their own culture already in place and not I? Isn't this the very basis of the idea of why Jews had no right to immigrate into the British Mandate of Palestine because of the Palestinian culture which was already in place? How does it benefit America to allow illegal immigration to flourish and with it increased drug and gang activity because the larger presence of the Latin community masks this activity? One cannot even criticize this because one is accused of implicitly making negative judgements of other cultures and in the world of political correctness this is not allowed; all cultures are equal and allowance is made that they have fallen short only because of issues like the exploitation of these cultures and not their own inherent worth or value systems. This takes place in a twisted and misguided version of the idea that all people are created equal which has to do with inherent rights and is not in any way meant to express a measure of competence. One is simply branded as a racist if one is against uncontrolled immigration which is not in itself an argument but simply a convenient way to brush aside opposition because the accusation has such a terrible onus.
All people do bad things and to absolve people of racism or crime because they are black in some silly attempt to tread lightly and handle black Americans with kid gloves is pathetically patronizing towards black Americans not to say harmful; it's like treating black Americans as children who don't know any better and who in any event will thrive once they grow up from under the oppressive spectre of white colonialism and it's racist institutions symbolized in no small part by occupying armies of white police officers in black neighborhoods. In the meantime, let black Americans toddle along in diapers of imaginary oppression while being perceptually absolved of committing mountains of crime far outweighing any other group in America. In a way it is as if racism marches on except black people are merely being segregated in a new way, a new way that robs dignity and feeds anger in a much more subtle and perceptual way than white's only water fountains. Unfortunately, on the other side, all too many black Americans as symbolized by Rev. Jeremiah Wright have taken up the torch and run with it into a future where criminals are heros and police officers Nazi storm troopers.
Black Americans deserve the right to be treated as idiotic, loving, jealous, creative, lazy, hard working, murderous, compassionate, ignorant and as brilliant as anybody else in the United States without having the good and the bad separated out to curdle in a type of politically correct perceptual lunacy of a perceptual trap where the cat now has a bell but that doesn't ring. It's so simple; people are people, it's the 21st century - get some new glasses, not the rose tinted ones - and get a new clock. When I watch video of Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union I see a panel of people sitting in a giant, invisible mouse trap, happily nibbling on the cheese without for one second being aware that they not only put out the trap themselves but tripped it. These people are happily winning arguments that they cannot afford to win, also insisting that black American are different when that line suits them but that "you take our color away and we're all the same", a quote from 2009's "Prom Night In Mississippi", a documentary film about a high school's first integrated prom.
A different mythology has grown up surrounding the history of whites and blacks in the United States that is supposedly antithetical to racism but has evolved into a true mythology, an urban myth, if you will, with it's own code words and racism and unfairness. As wrongs have been set to right in regards to the issues of race in America, the pendulum of philosophcal justice has swung far, overshooting it's mark and flying off into an uncertain future. In ostensible atonement on the part of some white Americans and a vengeful feeling of wanting to bring those to justice who are dead and buried on the part of some black Americans, a sorry type of reverse racism has reared it's head, a type of misguided hatred that is in it's own way as blind and bigoted as any man who puts on a white hood.
The Conquistadors, slave ships and the settlement of the United States are things that exist now only in history books, far too late to bring the people responsible to account. Yet there are some in the United States of the 21st century who speak of and act out racial guilt, themes of apology and reparations as if being white bears some kind of "crime and punishment" which now eternally absolves black folks from doing wrong and hangs an anvil of guilt around white Americans in equal amounts from a certain perceptual point of view. It seems to me that a truly level playing field gives black Americans the right to be seen for what they are as individuals and not patronized to the point where they can blithely commit crimes out of all proportion to their numbers and speak racist remarks but be held to a totally different standard while doing so. In fact, that standard is the standard one might apply to a uncomprehending child. Clever code words on my part? I am saying no but it is up to you to decide. No one is going to read or take this essay seriously if they think I am merely trying on clever ways to pillory black Americans for it's own sake. Despite the tone of this essay, I am genuinely concerned that significant numbers of both black and white Americans are engaging in a type of racism that is helping to wreck the black community however well meant.
Though it is not commonly thought of in a bad light, this mythology of guilt by skin color has done uncommon harm to black America and is in it's own way as insidious and destructive as Hitler's mad dreams of Aryan mastery. I can see no other way to paint such recent incidents as the small rally in Oakland, California that took place in March, 2009 where the police were spoken of by one black man who feels they "are terrorized daily by the police force which is an occupying army in the African community". This Bakari Olatunji goes on to say that "everyday black people are dying at the hands of the police" and used phrases like "colonial system" and "slain comrade". Unfortunately this "slain comrade", Lovell Mixon, had just killed 4 police officers before being killed himself and Mixon's DNA had been tentalively linked to the rape of a 12 year old girl. To mitigate what Mixon did simply because his face was black is it's own form of madness and the use of rhetoric which dredges up a colonial past is all too common within the black American community and especially so among Afrocentrists. According to Olatunji's own way of thinking, should white folks go out and hold rally's for the 4,000 white Americans who will be killed by blacks this year? It is madness to think like this at all and madness for a man who is black to hold whites to utterly different standards of behaviour for whites while hiding behind a deluge of excuses like white racism, colonialism and imperialism that allows black intellectuals to smugly ignore and even sanction behaviour that is nothing less or more than simply criminal.
The mythology of white guilt by skin color is also insidious and destructive because black Americans are teaching their children that they have to be 10 times better than a white just to be equal, rap artists paint a picture of a glorious life that is the opposite of a boring 9 to 5 job, D. L. Hughley says right on CNN that he has told his son that it's a racist America out there. No wonder that an entire generation of young black Americans are disconnected from the American dream since they are being indoctrinated by mistakenly trusting by skin color, trusting in the words of the people they trust the most, other black Americans.
It is too late by far for this type of nonsense; the Conquistadors cannot be now turned away from the causeways of Tenochtitlan and the slave ships cannot be turned back to disgorge their cargo of humanity back onto African shores although, for liberals, it is not too late to change that history from one of national and cultural competitions to one of a all but decided episode of white imperialism and oppression - making the argument that whites are natural slavers is the same one that says blacks are naturally lazy. It is the 21st century and it is far too late for the type of rhetoric and attitudes that assign the same type of guilt by skin color, association by skin color, that is so hated by black Americans when used against themselve. A bright future looms for black Americans and it only for them to seize the day.
It is too late for an association for black market vendors, black journalists, an association of black mayors, black police chiefs, black data processors, black actors, black chemists and chemical engineers, the black caucus, black airline pilots and on and on and on; in fact it is too late for an association like the NAACP, chartered around and advocating for those with dark skin- it is shameful to all and harmful to black Americans to be pursuing such goals. Black Americans who on the one hand seem to agree that America is a racist country which cannot stop judging people by their skin color nevertheless voted for Obama 95% to 5% in what was clearly a vote by skin color. Such hypocrisy and the willingness to indulge in a double standard is the crux of this essay and the incredible reverse racism so prevalent and so little challenged in some segments of the African American community and political left today.
It is important to remember that many black Americans, when asked to defend the above issues, cite the fact that these activities are carried out in a spirit of defense and that it is not possible for a person not in a position of power to be a racist and therefore can never be guilty of racism. I disagree; to me racism is a language and not an issue related to one's position in society. Two wrongs do not make a right. Anyone who makes generalizations based on culture or skin color whether positive or negative is speaking a language of racism, bias or bigotry. It is the mindset that is the important thing and not whether that mindset is positive or negative. Once one has established that one can say something positive about someone by race than you have opened up the idea that there is equal credibility in saying something negative by race.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen photographs of native Americans from the United States or Central America with a caption that speaks to the internal grace and spirit in their face, as if a Polish truck driver from Ohio is devoid of such "noble" characteristics in their stance or features. This is a clear type of unconscious bias that speaks to stereotypes of colonial guilt and the notion that white people are in some way not only guilty by skin color for what other white people have done in the past but that Western societies are inherently morally bankrupt and lacking in soulfulness. To me it's is an unconsciousness, well meant, but patronizing attitude that degrades all concerned, viewer and viewed.
These concepts are trundled about as currency in our society without the blink of an eye in some circles. The day after President Obama's inauguration a black blogger wrote an article whose first line was, "It's a great day to be black". Had a white man won the Most Valuble Player of the Year Award in the predominantly black National Basketball Association and the next day a sportwriter had written on ESPN.com that, "It's a great day to be white", he would have been tarred, feathered and fired. There is no doubt that there is a double standard that allows the language of racism to run rampant in regards to those considered people of color and those who are not. This double standard is so pervasive that one is looked at with a weather eye in even bringing the subject up. Their "true" motives are suspect in the way that, for example, makes it difficult to be against illegal immigration into the U.S. without the subject of racism being at the top of the list and this fact is eagerly exploited by Latino groups who welcome illegal immigration. Ironically, there is a far better case for racism on the part of pro-illegal immigration advocates than the reverse since they seem more interested in Latino last names than in whether this issue is good of bad for the country as a whole from a neutral point of view.
This is the facism of the left, the dark side of political correctness that is slowly eating away at the United States. Old, discredited stereotypes are simply being replaced by newer and subtler ones that should be equally discredited but are not. We are left paralysed when it comes to policy decisions when a fair argument is not even permitted to be heard without obfuscating the issue with one word cries of racism; not exactly a nuanced argument. Those who are not Latinos or black are certainly not the gleeful recipients of increased property taxes when it comes to the cost of illegal immigration or to their sons and daughters not being allowed into a college because some white guy decided it would be a good idea to import slaves into the United States in the 18th century.
It is important to deride such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and the Neo-Nazis and everything they stand for but without in turn sanctioning such philosophies just because the person who espouses them is black. Racism is racism and ignorance is ignorance and neither possess a particular skin color. One could change a few words in Rev. Wright's sermons or the New Black Panther Party website and swear they were written by Adolph Hitler. Black leadership in America seems philosophically immersed in a point of view that they are speaking from a victim's defensive position and so they can in no way be accused of hypocrisy when it comes to bestowing attributes based on skin color, namely by characterizing white people the world over as empire building, colonizing slavers of dark skinned people. To believe this is to demonstrate a woeful lack of historical knowledge that is monumental in it's ignorance, an unenviable lodging in Plato's Cave for a Wayang Kulit puppet show in front of the flames. It is a dangerous philosophy because once a person attributes negative aspects to white people a Pandora's box of attributes based on skin color is released and that mythical plague on mankind itself knows no skin color and so can be turned back on itself.
Racism and an abnormal interest in people based on the color of their skin is dangerous to the morale of the United States and all who reside there because it is so unhealthy. Just because danger has always been perceived as having been perpetrated by white people against black people is not a reason to ignore a danger, treating the skin color of the person who perpetrates and perpetuates it like a moral armor.. Crime in black and Latino communities is endemic and to simply blame it on the fact that white people are racists helps criminals, patronizes Latino's and blacks and stops solutions from being talked about because the mere act of talking about it as if Latino's and black Americans are not a people fully responsible for their actions is at once tabu and terribly debilitating not to say insulting; the right to be as capable of crime for ignoble reasons as white Americans is being stolen away. Perceptually and philosophically this is an attempt at a type of reverse mental colonialism that is all the more harmful to all involved because of it subtle nature. Once again you have people portrayed as human and not so human but on a stage where it can barely be conceived as such. This is not change but a redirecting and perpetuating of racism in an extremely subtle way. To say that white Americans and black Americans have simplistic and simple minded views, one of the other, is an understatement.
An concrete example of racism redirected and it's harmful effects is the world wide economic crash of Oct., 2008. Before the recession and sub-prime crisis black politicians on Capitol Hill had pushed for rolling back loan requirements needed to purchase a house for no other reason than they were looking out for people who shared their skin color. This is not right no matter the skin color. Allies on the left in the form of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd had their part to play in the morgage meltdown.
If one needed any proof that black Americans are cheering on politicians by skin color rather than issues one need only look at that 95% support that Barak Obama has among black Americans and their voting a racist black congressman such as Bobby Rush, which is disgraceful in light of the way so many black Americans wrongly point fingers at white people for doing that very thing. If white Americans were indeed doing such a thing and if white Americans were racists in general then the white vote would not be split so evenly between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton in the democratic primaries and between Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain in the presidential contest; simply put, Barak Obama would never have been elected president.
The truly pitiful aspect of this issue is that even pointing this out leaves me open to charges of racism myself such is the politically correct climate in America today, where there is a gulf of double standards between what a white person is allowed to say and what a black person is allowed to say in the media no matter how truthful the statement.
Sadly, if one is not allowed to identify a problem then that problem can never be solved. This problem is Orwellian and perceptual in nature and where such an unhealthy political correctness can lead is brilliantly explored in George Orwell's "1984".
Video tapes of Rev. Wright's sermons made a furor in the press during the 2008 presidential campaigns because of the anti-American, anti-white tone in them. The furor was really about the fact that Barack Obama had considered Wright a mentor for 20 years and that the closeness of their relationship was reflected in the fact that Wright had married the Obama's and baptized their children. Wilting under media pressure, Obama eventually denounced Rev. Wright's sermons and denied any knowledge of his controversial comments in the way of explaining why he had never left Trinity Church. Eventually, just before the final 2008 Democratic primaries, Obama did leave Trinity Church. Still, many felt, myself among them, that Obama was being disingenuous about how he felt about Trinity. If Obama were not being disingenuous in regard to Wright he would have cut loose from him years before. The fact of the matter is that Trinity Church is a church of Black Liberation Theology, utterly steeped in race, and Jim Cone, whose writings about Black Liberation Theology helped inspired the church's platform wrote this about that theology, "Jesus reveals himself as black in order to disrupt and dismantle white oppression." This is from Wikipedia: "Stanley Kurtz of the National Review claims that 'A scarcely concealed, Marxist-inspired indictment of American capitalism pervades contemporary 'black-liberation theology'...The black intellectual's goal, says Cone, is to 'aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.' According to him such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt." Cone has also written: "Theologically Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.'". I myself find it hard to credit that Barak Obama shares none of these views.
This is the entry in the "About Us" page on Trinity's website as of Summer, 2010, "Our History We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain "true to our native land," the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community." Does it go without saying that would any white church has such a statement on their site that they would be pilloried as white supremacist's?
The following is from the Trinity page about "The Black Value System", "Disavowal of the Pursuit of "Middleclassness." Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the "talented tenth" of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor's control. Proverbs 3:13-14 - Happy are those who find wisdom and those who gain understanding, for her income is better than silver and her revenue better than gold. Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by: * Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another. * Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons. * Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of "we" and "they" instead of "us." * So, while it is permissible to chase "middleclassness" with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method - the psychological entrapment of Black "middleclassness." If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our "voluntary" contributions to methods A and B. And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons." And this church is where President Obama spent 20 years, blithely unaware of such considerations.
Also at issue was the fact that Rev. Wright, accompanied by Louis Farrakhan whom Wright has said "epitomizes greatness", went on a trip to Libya in 1984 to visit Moammar Khadafi, a self acknowledged enemy of the United States. The controversial New Black Panther Party whose rhetoric is anti-jewish and anti-white to the hilt had links on Obama's website during his campaign come and go. Malik Shabazz, the leader of the NBPP presides over an organization whose racist comments stretch belief. According to Richard Cohen at Washingtonpost.com, the Trinity Church founded Trumpet Newsmagazine, which is run by Rev. Wright's daughter. Trumpet gave an award and cover to Louis Farrakhan in 2007, singling out Farrakhan as a man who "truly epitomized greatness". In my mind, the only difference in greatness between Farrakhan and Hitler is a very large army. To his credit, Barack Obama has denounced Louis Farrakhan. The problem is that Obama himself has been on the cover of Trumpet, even sharing a cover with Farrakhan albeit Photoshopped and so surely was well aware of it's racist or at least Afro-centrist leanings.
People who are worried about this issue are worried about the Presidential Inauguration and the Presidency being turned into a NAACP convention in the same way that the intial doubts about electing a catholic John F. Kennedy as president, a first, would give undue attention to a specifically catholic point of view of governing the United States rather than the totality of the fabric that makes up American society. America does not need a president who is specifcally black or specifically catholic in his, or her, outlook.
Opponents of Barack Obama were quick to question his relationship with Rev. Wright and it's appropriateness for a man seeking the highest political office in the land, the Presidency of the United States. Rev. Wright, making comments in sermons to his Trinity congregation that the phrase God damn America would be a better choice than God bless America, referring to the U.S. as the U.S. of KKK A, preaching that 9/11 was a case of the chickens coming home to roost because of wrong headed U.S. foreign policy, (an analogy that endeared Ward Churchill to people across America), and also accusing the United States government of inventing AIDS and importing drugs into ghettos to kill off black people are just a few of many, many inflammatory statements Wright has made.
Wright's ongoing defense is that his sermon's have been taken out of context by not including the full context of his sermons or his sermons as a body of work in it's entirety. My own argument is that if one had a 100 page website about world peace and just one page said that black people were no good so-and-so's then that would invalidate the entire website. Wright's military service is similarly not an excuse as I am sure there are many members of the Ku klux Klan who have served in the U.S. armed forces. Yet such childish defenses have been bandied about as if obvious. Immediately after Sen. Obama was elected president Rev. Wright on Nov.7, 2008 spoke at a forum on race and religion in Milford, Conn. Rev. Wright said about the media, "Their intention was to use me as a weapon of mass destruction, to tear down that man's (Obama) integrity." No one ever had any "intentions" toward Wright; his own words hang him.
On his Bill Moyers' Journal for May 2, 2008, Moyers defended Rev. Wright by saying that Wright is a complicated man and that it is normal for preacher's of Wright's ilk to deliver emotional sermons. Wright could have given the same sermon's very quietly and they would have been just as racist. Moyers contention that people all see Wright "through the lens of their own experience" is childishly disingenuous. There is a time and a place for that type of perceptual claim and the sermon's of Rev. Wright are not that time or place. One may as well claim that we see the KKK through a lens of experience and that when it comes to the KKK there are two sides to the story rather than a right and a wrong. Moyers is fond of defending things that are obviously wrong like genocide and popularly wrong like racism but anything more subtle than that tests his resolve. Or course, I am exaggerating but it's true as far as it goes. Just because some people defend Wright does not make him any less of a racist or liar. Black Americans themselves often argue that just because a majority believe in a thing does not justify it on moral grounds, using slavery as an example.
Moyers goes on to explain away Wright's comments as excusable because of the way Wright's ancestors were treated. Good thing the law doesn't work that way and there is no reason why anything else should work that way either. Claiming that no white man gets a pass on past racism simply because they are themselves white is itself a racist point of view, lumping together people by skin color and not only suggesting that they are all racist but guilty of past deeds to this very day. In this TV essay, Moyers says that white Americans are hearing Wright make an "attack on an America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle, forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them." The latter is certainly true but neither here nor there since it is an argument not put forward in regard to Wright and so a perfect example of disingenuous obfuscation. Also, no one I know was mad at Wright for general negative statements about a cherished America that Wright put forth in his sermons but were angry at very specific lies and distortions that went all over the map in time and place.
Moyers goes on to make the same tired defense of the chickens coming home to roost argument in regards to 9/11 by saying that when it comes to intervention in the affairs of other countries that "actions have consequences" and that this is all Wright was saying. In that part of Wright's sermon Wright starts out by claiming to quote an Ambassador Peck from a Fox News interview but in that interview Peck never uses the term "chickens coming home to roost" and in Wright's sermon he not only goes far beyond any criticisms Peck made on Fox but takes an obvious delight in the idea that in 9/11, America got the payback she had coming as if the morons who flew airplanes into buildings were avenging all the negative acts ever laid at the door of America. From the dispossession of America from native Americans to slavery to the first U.S. invasion of Irag, Wright portrays the 9/11 terrorists as performing the hijackings for all of those throughout history who had come to injury at the hands of America.
This is foolish on the face of it and never mentions all the good that Americans have done for people throughout it's history. To claim 9/11 as a type of karmic vengeance on America while at the same time ignoring the centerpiece of the idea of karma in the first place which is balance, is so childishly stupid and hypocritical that it defies my imagining the minds that create such ideas. Moyers claim that Wright was misrepresented by sound bites from his sermons holds no water whatsoever; if anything they are worse because the more Wright opens his mouth the more poorly thought out and poorly researched racist vitriol spills out. The problem with Wright is that he puts the entire onus in his sermons on everyone but the black community who are apparently immune to bigotry against others. A truly level playing field would include the idea that black folks are and always have been as capable of bigotry and enslaving another person as anyone else.
Moyers idea that Wright is angry over such things as the Tuskegee Experiments is one thing but we are not talking about anger here we are talking about lies, distortion and racism and there is no excuse whatsoever for that; how angry should I be because of 1,500 white folks killed by blacks in America which is mountains more than ever died in the admittedly horrid Tuskeegee Experiments or all lynchings from the end of the Civil War to present - their is absolutely no sense of proportion or fair play in such a hypocritical argument. It is worth pointing out that the fact that it's okay that Wright would be especially angry with illegal medical experiments on black people in a way that he would not be in regard to a similar situation with people of a lighter skin color and Moyers' apparent endorsement of this point of view for blacks but not for whites gives one an insight into how the minds of Bill Moyers and Rev. Wright work. If Moyers wants to talk about a double standard it's sitting right in front of him.
Moyers makes a point of saying that the attacks against Obama for Rev. Wright amounted to a double standard because they were no more correct than attacks not made against Sen. John McCain and the Republican party for preachers who made inflammatory remarks about Katrina being God's punishment against New Orleans for it's sins or Falwell saying something similar about 9/11 being God's vengeance. This is entirely missing the point because in fact there was an uproar amongst many, including myself, that McCain, who I do not support, would ally himself with a wacko like Hagee to the point of wanting Hagee's endorsement. The point is that two wrongs don't make a right. Moyer's also wonders why a 1972 White House tape wherein Nixon and Billy Graham make remarks disparaging to jews caused no uproar, failing to mention that the tape didn't come to light until 30 years later. Had it's existence been known at the time it would have cost Nixon a second term. I myself lament that Nixon ever had a first term.
The worry about Obama and Wright was about the possibility that Obama was coming from a 20 yr. background in a Trinity Church with a coherent Afro-Centric philosophy that did not like America nor the story of America, choosing to dwell on and distort the negative aspects of American history while not at all celebrating the positive aspects of America; after all, the story of America is not the story of black folks nor it should be looked at such unless one delights in provincialism. That was bad enough but to in turn use racism and lies to ostensibly rail against racism and lies was too much from Wright and his cheering congregation. The worry was that this Afro-centric view and it's perceptual lack of balance would favor a distinctly black viewpoint that was hostile to mainstream America. Hagee, madman that he is, never made the political mistake of hating America as a whole, today and yesterday. That fact, coupled with the fact the McCain had no long time association with Hagee and temporarily sought his endorsement for what many felt was wrong-headed political expediency ameliorated the whole issue. Once McCain saw which way the wind was blowing he dumped Hagee as did Obama with Wright but Obama would not disown Wright. One felt that the two separations were entirely different behind the scenes, Obama and Wright's remaining philosophically intact and McCain and Hagee's never having really existed in the first place. But make no mistake, Hagee is every bit as sickening a figure as is Rev. Wright.
When it comes to Rev. Wright and Obama, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that most people have no interest in anyone who views governments as killers of the innocent as if they do nothing else, as white people as racists as if they are incapable of any other point of view, of the world as a place of opression, of a world view of distrust, mistrust and blame. It may come as a surprise to Wright that many people view the world as a wonderful place full of magical surprise and wonderful opportunity. There is more to this world than the peculiar and dreary views of Rev. Wright, Jim Cone, Louis Farrakhan and the hapless and hopelessly provincial congregation of Trinity Church and Americans have every reason to be mistrustful of a man being president who may share these views.
One only has to look at how black Americans view Katrina to see an example of a people who see conspiracy and racism everywhere, even in a storm. Wright wants all Americans to share the view of black Americans in the same way that homosexuals want all married couples to share their own peculiar view of marriage. Put 50,000 "married" gay couples on an island in isolation and they'll die out within 50 or 60 years; that's not marriage. Rev. Wright and his Afro-centric adherents view of the world is not the world itself by a long shot and Wright will wait a long time for the rest of us to come to share his dreary and negative point of view where everyone flaunts the full panoply of negative human traits but him and his community.
For some reason I don't understand, but probably political, Moyers bent over backward to defend Wright. It's hard to imagine Moyers coming out with such an understanding point of view with someone like Alabama's Gov. George Wallace. In Moyers interview of Rev. Wright on his show, Wright states that Americans cling to it's positive myths and are not taught about, for example, how badly it treated native Americans and that when we are shown this that we bristle in "vitriolic hatred" because people like Wright are desecrating the sacred myth of America. Wright's view is that we are miseducated and not told the truth. This is wrong and smacks of a smug type of wishful thinking on the part of Wright. What people don't like about Wright is that his "truth" is all he talks about. No American in their right mind is going to allow the negative aspects of American history to be glossed over but neither are we going to dwell in it as if enslaving people is all America was ever about and it is this aspect that Moyers and Wright do not understand when it comes to the anger over Wright's sermons. What can one say about a guy who equates the word government with the word failure?
In Moyers original interview with Rev. Wright which lasted almost 60 minutes, Moyers only once touched on a controversial aspect of a Wright sermon which I found strange because I supposed Wright was on the show because of his controversial sermons and not to gloss them over; so much for "the rest of the story". In fact, Moyers did indeed want to gloss over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and show his "other" side. The part Moyers asked Wright about was the famous "God damn American" sermon. Wright responded that the seeming insult to America was really about choosing allegiance to a goverment over God and how governments "change, how they fail and how they lie". Needless to say Wright's answer was a lot of nonsense that had no bearing whatsoever on the sermon where he says him and his shouldn't say "God Bless America" but rather "God damn America" while his congregation cheered. I should point out that as part of his explanation for his God damn America sermon he once again brought up the notion that government's kill innocents as he also did in that sermon itself; a rather peculiar repeated emphasis considering the immensely complex role governments have played in human affairs. To say that Rev. Wright's view of the world at large as parochial, skewed and racist is an understatement.
One can only suppose that Moyers' easy interview of Wright was in fact an attempt to do what he could to help get Obama elected President of the United States.
Rev. Wright has no problem going on and on about slave ships and the violence done by white people in the form of rape and lynchings among other things from decades and decades into the hundreds of years ago but is strangely silent on the incredible violence perpetrated by black gangs in every major city in the United States. This is the double standard that Moyers and Wright grasp at so unsuccessfully and one can only wonder what world these people live in and who is glossing over who's history. How about "the rest of the story" when it comes to the role black folks had and continue to have when it comes to slavery. Wright doesn't want to talk about that because then it would not be Wright's favorite thing which is endemic white racism and supremacy because then the entire issue of slavery would become about man's inhumanity to man. Wright has no problem whatsoever in criticising America at large for not wanting to hear "the rest of the story" when it comes to it's history but to want to tell the rest of the story when it comes to his own black community then that is off limits and usually relegated to racism or a legitimate response to decades and centuries of white oppression. It is Wright's constant harping about transparency and his own lack thereof when it comes to the black community that has so many people hating the guy.
At the time of the controversy over Wright's remarks Obama at first said, "I can no more disown him (Wright) than I can my white grandmother", this in reference to some apparently racist remarks Obama's grandmother made in front of him. Some 6 weeks after that remark and with the heat around Wright's many controversial remarks rising, Sen. Obama finally denounced Rev. Wright, leading some to believe that it was more for political expediancy that actual outrage about what Wright had said. The argument was that if Sen. Obama was in fact outraged by Wright's politics and views on race then he surely would have left Trinity Church on his own long before rather than being hounded out by outside criticism.
The problem for Barack Obama is that it is apparent that he was not only aware of the anti-white, anti-semitic and anti-American leanings of the "circle of friends" associated with Trinity comprising the incredibly racist New Black Panther Party, Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Jim Cone and Trumpet but had to be immersed in their philosophies. Despite all this Barack Obama has become the 44th president of the United States. The most important question to ask Barack Obama in this context is this: have you read any books or essays by Jim Cone and if so which ones and what did you think of them and are they in your personal library? The entire context of his relationship with Trinity and it's racist philosophies could be laid out in full view for good or ill. One need only look at the books sold on Trinity's website to realize why this is an important insight. Rev. Wright himself says on the Trinity website that Trinity's vision statement is based on the philosophies of Jim Cone. Cone's philosophies are unabashedly racist, verging on the paranoid.
Furthermore, Wright's sermons were for sale in the lobby of Trinity Church so Sen. Obama could hardly have been unaware of them even if one believes he had no conversations with anyone in the church over 20 years but merely came and went for services.
Another and larger issue than Barack Obama revealed by Wright's sermons was the surprise many felt at the sudden realization of what a shambles black leadership finds itself in the United States, a leadership that increasingly lives in a past they seem to not only wish to keep alive but seem to wish to pass on the torch of victimization to new generations. Rev. Wright's sermons caused many journalists and writers to start looking deeper into the phenomenon typified by Wright's speeches because like me, they sensed that Trinity's cheering congregation in conjunction with many comments coming out of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina perhaps represented the tip of an iceberg; what was found was a wide spread network of black leadership in America who entirely share Wright's views of America and white people in general. To say that people who share Rev. Wright's views of America are intellectually bankrupt is an understatement. It was like stumbling upon a group of people who used to live on an island full of now extinct Dodo birds but who were still seeing them everyday; an ancestral memory that has overtaken and even superseded their daily consciousness, not any easy thing to do in a country in which black Americans commit hundreds of thousands of crimes a year out of all proportion to their numbers. The sheer hostility of the rhetoric was a surprise as almost a quarter of a billion white Americans were spoken of in Trinity Church and in the books sold on it's website as if slave ships from Africa were at this moment being unloaded in New York Harbor.
A 12 point declaration on the Trinity website on it's "About Us" web page has recently been removed, but you can see it here. If one were to substitute the word white for the word black you would get the distinct impression you were reading a document written by the Ku Klux Klan. Trinity obviously felt the same way or they would not have removed the document. This is a clear awareness of the double standard inherent in the philosophy of Trinity Church and so one can only wonder what the agenda of the church really is since the concept of fair play seems to have no part in it. Black leaders in America deride the US constitution because of its history of being unfairly applied but at least its core values are present and now being fully brought out. In the case of Trinity Church and its charter, there is not even the pretense that they are talking about justice for all but in fact are concerned only with justice for black Americans. White groups with such charters are called white supremicists.
Black spokesmen in the media who parade wholesale denunciations of white people often escaped unscathed, or so they think. However, there is a price to pay and that price is what takes place when a trusted leadership tries to convince an entire culture to go in a direction that divorces them from reality. The price is the price one pays when you yourself become the thing you fight against. Believe that this can happen; just look at Vietnam and Watergate where it took a new generation of American youth to tell their parents that they were going down a perceptual path of madness where America foreign policy came to resemble the very powers America fought against in WWII.
In regard to hostile views on the part of some black Americans toward white America, Spike Lee's race laced "documentary" on HBO, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts", about Hurricane Katrina is a remarkable document. At it's heart is the idea that, according to Lee, "Most people think that it was Katrina that brought about the devastation to New Orleans. But it was a breaching of the levees that put 80 per cent of the city under water. It was not the hurricane." Part of the film then follows up this idea with the notion that it was mysterious forces that wrecked the levees; mysterious forces whose intent was to wreak havoc on the black community of New Orleans. There are references to an intentional blowing up of levees in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 as if to suggest the same thing happened in New Orleans during Katrina although in a secret and conspiratorial manner; Lee fails to mention that the intentional breach of the levees in 1927 affected white, not black neighborhoods. The levee breach in 1927 was in no way secretive and sacrificed smaller, poor white areas in order to save Greater New Orleans. Lee's racist rhetoric is echoed throughout the film and the villains are white people; never the white people who speak in the film however, but white people all the same.
Spike Lee unwittingly depicts the black population of New Orleans as a people without the ability or willpower to take the evacuation of their own city prior to Katrina into their own hands and not so unwittingly denounces white people who lives hundreds of miles away for the very same attributes in regard to that evacuation. If those native to New Orleans can be forgiven for not having the foresight to deal with the heat, history of the levees and hurricanes among other issues, why should people from other states have their feet held to the fire? To say that Lee has things hypocritically backwards in a racist daydream against white folks is an oversimplification. Lee's film about Katrina is full of denial, blame and lack of self-responsibility as well as outright lies; not qualities that are eminently American or endearing for that matter. It is these very qualities that are more to blame for the plight of black folks in America than any fantasy about hostile white supremacy. It is safe to say that self-reliance has not been a watchword either before or after Katrina when it comes to the population of New Orleans. What the local New Orleans government accomplished as Hurricane Gustave approached New Orleans at the end of August, 2008 could easily have been done in 2005 and there is no reason to fault anyone outside of Louisiana for what happened during and after Katrina. Indeed, hundreds of volunteers and thousands of donations from the rest of the United States give the lie to the so-called indifference on the part of those from outside the region. When it comes to New Orleans culture the inhabitants jealously protect their expertise and knowledge of local history but when it comes to heat and high humidity, levees and hurricanes, the only local expertise apparent is the expertise to blame folks and organizations from outside the region, even going so far as to say outright that "they" want to pare down the percentage of black people in New Orleans. Hand in hand with the disaster of Katrina is the disastrous failing of the local community to plan for exactly what happened. Even up here in Minnesota where I live one heard from time to time about the inevitability of the consequences of such an event as Katrina because parts of New Orleans are underwater; race has nothing to do with that issue. Even in 2010 there is now talk on websites about the 'ethnic cleansing' of New Orleans having taken place because of Katrina.
With it now taken for granted that Hurricane Katrina was a stage for black genocide, The International Herald Tribune online for Jan.18, 2006 published statistics that gave the lie to Kanye West's and Splke Lee's absurd assertions about what happened in New Orleans during Katrina. Even though approximately 61% of the city was black and 36% white at the time of Katrina, only 53% of the dead were black as opposed to 39% of the dead being white. In other words, the scenario bandied about by black voices all over this country about white folks helping Katrina do away with blacks was in fact quite the opposite. Meanwhile, Howard Dean unwittingly said, “We must ... come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not." Too bad the reality was the opposite of what he meant to portray. This shows for an absolute fact that white racism is taken for granted in a way that bears no relation to reality. These are the statistics from the Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals own website: African-American -451 (53%) Caucasian -334 (39%) Hispanic – 18 (2%) Asian/Pacific – 6 (<1%) Native American – 4 (<1%) Other – 5 (<1) Unknown – 35 (5%)
If this doesn't give you some idea of the snake oil being foisted on the American public by racists like Spike Lee, Alice Walker, Kanye West and a whole host of black notables then nothing will; the behaviour of black notables in the United States is simply appalling in it's distortions of the truth. Black Americans will go on and on about lynchings, slavery, Jim Crow and white baseball leagues during our history for example. The total of blacks lynched in this country during the worst 100 years may come to 10,000 if you stretch the statistics while the number of whites killed by blacks from 1965 to 2004 is easily in the tens of thousands. The difference is stark and heads up the propensity of blacks in America to exaggerate the damage done to them by whites while commenting not at all on the amazing discrepancy in the reality of the situation. Naturally I am a racist for pointing this out. Urban Myths indeed.
On the eve of Hurricane Gustav on Aug. 31, 2008, locals praised the efforts of city and state government for how much better prepared they were; but isn't the very concept of organizing government a taking of the bull by the horns and problem solving by individuals? If the local population would become more involved in their own fate if they feel the situation is hopelessly muddled by bureaucrats they would be far better off. You cannot blame the government if you are not involved in that government because it is by and for the people, not a relief or welfare agency for when your own poor planning lands you in trouble.
On that same Aug. 31, 2008, Mayor Ray Nagin at a televised press conference stated that any looters caught would be transferred directly to the general population of Angola prison and remarked, "God help you", if that occurred. This gives the lie to apologists who wanted to portray black looters during Katrina as somehow actually being needy people rather than criminals. Those 2005 Katrina looters were in fact criminals and on that Aug.31, 2008 ,were now properly portrayed as such in de facto hindsight by Nagin himself.
Despite the criminal utterances of Spike Lee, Kanye West and their ilk, it was complacency, lack of urgency and foresight on the part of the citizenry and local government that were to blame for what happened in New Orleans during Katrina and it's aftermath; you may as well blame Martians for what happened rather than FEMA, President Bush or white people for that matter. Spike Lee's film about Katrina comes off as hopelessly strident and ethnically self centered as well as entirely misguided in it's thrust. As far as I am concerned the only criminal behaviour that occurred during the entire Katrina episode other than the looting by part of the black community was the criminal complacency of the locals who knew all about the shortcomings of their levee system -add to that the criminal conduct of insurance companies, the latter raping wholesale, homeowners across the entire region.
On Aug. 31, 2008, as Hurricane Gustav was hours away from landfall, the city of New Orleans issued a statement on all the national TV outlets that said any residents who choose not to evacuate New Orleans can expect no city services. This is exactly the same scenario that caused such bitter complaint with Katrina but somehow it is okay to withhold those services with Gustav.
One cannot help but think that a documentary by a white film maker with similar statements about black Americans would not only be pilloried in the press but summarily rejected by HBO. One can seek out reviews about Lee's film and there is no mention of anyone thinking Lee's piece was racist by any major journalistic organization. From a perceptual point of view Lee's film resembled the Roswell UFO incident more than it did a documentary. Lee seemed to take a white people bad, black people good predisposition and laid it all over Hurricane Katrina and it's aftermath. Although Spike Lee is a really fine film maker, his politcal instincts are childish, racist and utterly parochial.
Subsequent to seeing Lee's film I watched a National Geographic TV show called "Explorer: Drowning New Orleans?" that showed video a fireman had shot of the actual moment the critical 17th St. Canal levee broke - the same levee about which a man named Sylvester Francis in Lee's "documentary" had claimed "They had a bomb. They bombed that sucker". Don't balance dishes on your head waiting for anything in the way of an apology from either Francis or Lee. The word disaster is a word devoid of any meaning to Spike Lee and other adherents of the "them" viewpoint; in fact, multiple levee breaks occurred during Katrina and the suggestion that white folks blew them up is a racist daydream. Rev. Wright's comments on Katrina come from a similar viewpoint that points fingers at everyone but the hurricane itself. One person in Lee's film made an analogy between the path the hurricane took and the routes slave ships from Africa used to ply. European ethnocentrist history books have nothing on people who seem to believe the entire world past and present revolves around the victimization of black folks.
If one would need further insight into Spike Lee's obssession with all things black you need merely read his comments about the lack of black faces in Clint Eastwood's 2 films about Iwo Jima, claiming that 900 black men who served during the battle, amassing 14 Silver Stars, deserved some representation. While people like Spike Lee like to characterize the United States Constitution as a document that never intended justice for all, i.e., black Americans, women, his own comments show a predilection for an interest in justice reserved for black folks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Constitution has shown itself as a flexible, all inclusive document far in advance and considerably more sophisticated than Lee's own philosophies on the subject.
It is no surprise that Wright's blanket crtiticisms of whole swaths of white culture reveal an uninformed, childish and almost paranoiac thought process because they come from the same family of thought as that which pervade Lee's Orwellian view of a tropical storm and it's aftermath, namely that elements of white society wished to use the aftermath of Katrina to somehow pare down the percentage of blacks in New Orleans. In regard to this type of thinking, Jim Cone, who Rev. Wright greatly admires wrote in his 2004 essay in, "Living Stones In the Household of God", "...white supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even tho black people are dying daily from it's poison." No black Americans are dying daily or in any other time frame in 2008 from organized or institutional white supremacy. It is as hard for me to read such abhorrant comment from Cone as it is for me to read the twisted views of Nazi or Klan websites.
In response to Jim Cone who's assertion about how white people treat blacks in America, here is a dose of realtiy by P. Atwood: "Each year, some 1.2 million violent crimes involving blacks and whites occur nationwide. In fully 90 percent of those cases, according to U.S. Justice Department figures, the perpetrators are black and the victims are white. Violent white felons choose black victims for fewer than 3 percent of their attacks, whereas violent black felons choose white victims about 56 percent of the time. Statistically, the "average" African American is an astonishing 56 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. In one recent year, approximately 100 black women were raped by white men; the corresponding number of white women raped by black men was over 20,000, according to Dinesh D'Souza in The End of Racism.
These numbers are staggering. If America were teeming with white racism, surely the perpetrators of interracial crime would be disproportionately white. Clearly, however, that is not at all the case. Though contemporary civil rights leaders strive to portray white-on-black crime as commonplace, their rhetoric rings pathetically hollow. With tortured faces and ostensibly anguished hearts, they will seek out any microphone or news reporter willing to publicize their lamentations about even the rarest instances of white racism in action. Meanwhile, they turn a deaf ear to the desperate screams of the thousands of white -- and black -- victims who fall prey to black assailants each year."
Even during the height of the enslavement of Africans in the New World it may be prudent to think back and realize that people who enslave other people have no skin color or rather, they include many skin colors; in the end they are merely people who are criminals. Last time I checked committing a crime was not an attribute of a person because of their skin color. Any reasonable view of the African slave trade reveals that the industry could never have existed without the connivance of Arabs and other black Africans. In some instances the economies of entire black African nations were heavily dependent on the slave trade during it's height in the 16th to the 19th century. Rev. Wright is setting a very dangerous precedent by espousing his philosophies of guilt by skin color, especially where no guilt as he paints it exists, as this can easily be turned against black folks. Racism is a double edged sword. Wright's idea that every white hand in America was turned against black for the last 400 years has attained the status of an urban myth that is taken for granted, just as it is taken for granted that, even today, the United States is a racist country.
In countries in Africa such as Niger, Mauretania and others in 2008, it is variously estimated by different sources that there are in total some hundreds of thousands of people living in slavery. This in no way justifies slavery in America but gives a lie to the view that slavery is an activity somehow endemic to white people as if anyone with a sane mind needed an actual example in the first place.
With voices like Cone, Rev. Wright, Cornell West, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte leading the way, black youth are being sold an extremely cynical and unreal point of view as the gospel truth. I don't understand why people who have been so successful in their careers feel as if they have been so discriminated against. I just don't get it, but apparently Rev. Wright's congregation have similar feelings.
Go to the New Black Panther Party's website and look at their 10 point platform "1. We want freedom. We want the power to practice self-determination, and to determine the destiny of our community and THE BLACK NATION. We believe in the spiritual high moral code of our Ancestors. We believe in the truths of the Bible, Quran, and other sacred texts and writings. We believe in MAAT and the principles of NGUZO SABA. We believe that Black People will not be free until we are able to determine our Divine Destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people and we demand the dignity to do for ourselves what we have begged the white man to do for us. We believe that since the white man has kept us deaf, dumb and blind, and used every “dirty trick” in the book to stand in the way of our freedom and independence, that we should be gainfully employed until such time we can employ and provide for ourselves. We believe further in: POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE! WEALTH IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE! ARMS IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE!
3. We want tax exemption and an end to robbery of THE BLACK NATION by the CAPITALIST. We want an end to the capitalistic domination of Africa in all of its forms: imperialism, criminal settler colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, sexism, zionism, Apartheid and artificial borders. We believe that this wicked racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of reparations. A form of reparations was promised 100 years ago (forty acres and a mule) as restitution for the continued genocide of our people and to in meaningful measure and repair the damage for the AFRICAN HOLOCAUST (Maangamizo/Maafa). We believe our people should be exempt from ALL TAXATION as long as we are deprived of equal justice under the laws of the land and the overdue reparations debt remains unpaid. We will accept payment in fertile and mine rally rich land, precious metals, industry, commerce and currency. As genocide crimes continue, people’s tribunals must be set up to prosecute and to execute. The “Jews” were given reparations. The Japanese were given reparations. The Black, the Red and the Brown Nations must be given reparations. The American white man owes us reparations. England owes us reparations. France owes us reparations, Spain and all of Europe. Africa owes us reparations and repatriation. The Arabs owe us reparations. The “Jews” owe us reparations. All have taken part in the AFRICAN HOLOCAUST and the slaughter of 600 million of our people over the past 6,000 years in general and 400 year in particular. We know that this is a reasonable and just demand that we make at this time in history.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings, free health-care (preventive and maintenance). We want an end to the trafficking of drugs and to the biological and chemical warfare targeted at our people. We believe since the white landlords will not give decent housing and quality health care to our Black Community, the he housing, the land, the social, political and economic institutions should be made into independent UUAMAA “New African Communal/Cooperatives” so that our community, with government reparations and aid (until we can do for ourselves) can build and make drug free, decent housing with health facilities for our people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this devilish and decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history/herstory and our role in the present day society. We believe in an educational system that will give our people “a knowledge of self.” If we do not have knowledge of self and of our position in society and the world, then we have little chance to properly relate to anything else.
6. We want all Black Men and Black Women to be exempt from military service. We believe that Black People should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that holds us captive and does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black People, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, “by any means necessary.”
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE HARRASSMENT, BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black People. We want an end to Black-on-Black violence, “snitching,” cooperation and collaboration with the oppressor. We believe we can end police brutality in our community by organizing Black self-defense groups (Black People’s Militias/Black Liberation Armies) that are dedicated to defending our Black Community from racist, fascist, police/military oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment of white America’s Constitution gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black People should unite and form and “African United Front” and arm ourselves for self-defense.
8. We want freedom for all Black Men and Black Women held in international, military, federal, state, county, city jails and prisons. We believe that all Black People and people of color should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. ‘Released’ means ‘released’ to the lawful authorities of the Black Nation.
9. We want all Black People when brought to trial to be tried in a court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by white law of the Constitution of the United States. We believe that the courts should follow their own law, if their nature will allow (as stated in their Constitution of the United States) so that Black People will receive fair trials. The 6th Amendment of the United States Constitution gives a man/woman a right to an impartial trial, which has been interpreted to be a “fair” trial by one’s “peer” group. A “peer” is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this, the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black Community from which the Black defendant came. We have been and are being tried by all white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning person” of the Black Community.
10. WE DEMAND AN END TO THE RACIST DEATH PENALTY AS IT IS APPLIED TO BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE IN AMERICA. WE DEMAND FREEDOM FOR ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS OF THE BLACK RED AND BROWN NATION! We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And, as our political objective, we want NATIONAL LIBERATION in a separate state or territory of our own, here or elsewhere, “a liberated zone” (“New Africa” or Africa), and a plebiscite to be held throughout the BLACK NATION in which only we will be allowed to participate for the purposes of determining our will and DIVINE destiny as a people. FREE THE LAND! “UP YOU MIGHTY NATION! YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH WHAT YOU WILL!” BLACK POWER! History has proven that the white man is absolutely disagreeable to get along with in peace. No one has been able to get along with the white man. All the people of color have been subjected to the white man’s wrath. We believe that his very nature will not allow for true sharing, fairness, equity and justice. Therefore, to the Red Man and Woman, to the Yellow and to the Brown, we say to you “THE SAME RABID DOG THAT BIT YOU, BIT US TOO!” ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!"
It has to be one of the most incredible documents I've ever read; only the Hamas founding charter can match it. I don't think anybody at Trinity will go out of their way to disassociate themselves from it let alone denounce it.
What is it that stands behind the rhetoric of men like Cone or Wright or Malik Shabazz?. When they look at a white person do they see standing behind that person a monolithic image of all the wrongs both real and imagined ever done in this world to black people? Guilt by skin color seems to be their stock in trade. At the same time they pillory anyone who would judge black folks by their skin color. This is hypocrisy on a scale so monumental that it almost requires that a new word be invented for it.
To watch a man of Wright's position and age rant with the logic of an ill-tempered 5 year old is bad enough but to actually see what appears on the videos to be a packed house cheering on Wright hurts the credibility of black folks in America because it leaves one to believe that the cheering is in fact going on all over America. The fact that the attendees of a celebration of Maya Angelou's 80th birthday at St. Sabina's Church in Chicago gave Wright a standing ovation in April, 2008 is indicative of this. What in the world can these people be thinking of? What was Wright's congregation thinking of? Can one get away with anything in the eyes of black Americans as long as they are perceived to be championing the cause of black folks? Isn't that the exact behaviour black Americans have claimed to fight against when it came to such things as jury nullification in the American South during Jim Crow?
It is no surprise that St. Sabina's white pastor is Michael Pfleger, who was villified in the media at the end of May, 2008 for his remarks about Senator Clinton and in Trinity Church of all places. Pastor Pfleger has said that he considers Louis Farrakhan "a brother" and their is video of him hugging Farrakhan before a speech Farrakhan delivered at St. Sabina's.
Pfleger, in speaking of Rev. Wright said, "We need a voice of hope that points us to a vision and we need a prophetic voice that makes us uncomfortable and forces us to acknowledge our sins"; the problem is that the word "us" seems to be reserved exclusively for white Americans. If Pastor Pfleger has sinned against black people he can acknowledge such and leave everyone else out of it if he is pointing fingers by skin color.
The problem with Pfleger's remarks and what, I think, people at Trinity fail to understand about the media backlash is that the people who should be forced to acknowledge their sins are always white people. To suggest that such remarks will bring about a healing vision of a better future in America in light of gang violence, drug dealing and general high rate of crime among African-Americans points directly to the divide between two points of view about this among Americans. One side, represented by Rev. Wright, Jim Cone, Farrakhan and others would have you believe that black folks commit crime because of generations of oppression by white folks. The other point of view is that people cannot be absolved of guilt because of past racial oppression or by skin color.
Imagine what would happen if the former view ever took hold in America's justice system? You are already seeing the beginning of such a pattern as New York state's drug laws concerning the amount and type of cocaine possession is being challenged as being biased against black people and Wright himself in his 'God damn America' sermon mentions the three strike law. In other words, if black Americans have a penchant for a certain type of crime and are being pounded by the subsequent penalties, then amend the laws in their favor. This is an Orwellian view of reality that treats crime backwards. How about not committing crimes in the first place? How has that point of view become lost? It is as if black Americans have given up on the idea of the crimes being committed in the first place and, becoming resigned to this fact, have gone over to the idea of reducing criminal penalties by race. White collar crime and serial killings are mostly done by white people; does this mean that the criminal penalties are somehow unfair? Arguing that longer sentences for blacks as opposed to whites for similar crimes is a reality that black folks object to is statistical flummery which takes no account of, for example, prior criminal history.
The point of view of black folks as regards New York state's tough drug laws is that equal percentages of white, latino and black folks engage in drug dealing but whites are getting by without being convicted. If this is true than the real reason is probably that blacks and latinos tend to sell drugs on the street to people they do not know and where they are easily targeted by the police while whites tend to sell out of where they live to people they have some kind of a history with. Anyone who knows anything about drug dealing in America knows this is true but it is beside the point. Don't sell drugs and it won't be an issue no matter how harsh the laws. I myself believe that drug users would benefit more by initially going to treatment rather than very harsh mandatory prison sentences and I do not believe that New York's sentences are fair however neither is it fair for black leadership to campaign for lesser sentences for crimes that mostly involve black folks; do it for everyone or don't do it at all. I have absolutely no compassion for or interest in, justice by race.
Wright's point of view consigns the rest of America with the sole choice of looking at the hundreds of thousands of black Americans in prisons across this country as political prisoners or innocent boy-scouts, while white America is seen to bear the brunt of all wrong doing in this country. Rev. Wright and the congregation of Trinity Church are an embodiment of a culture of failure and to whatever extent the perceptions espoused within that church are shared by black America is a measure of a larger failure as well; in such a scenario, it is no surprise that success in and of itself has taken on a taint of immorality while failure becomes almost a moral position.
It seems to be taken for granted by many around the world and inside the U.S. itself that America is a racist country. Even at the height of slavery America was never simply one or the other; at the outbreak of the Civil War 4 out of 5 Americans lived in the Federal north. Some 350,000 white Americans died in a war that black American scholars pointedly explain was a war, not about states rights, but about slavery. During the minor uproar occasioned by the state of Virginia inauguarating a Coferate History Month in April, 2010, black pundits on television were quick to criticize Virginia's governor for the absence of any mention of slavery and how this was wrong because the entire Civil War was about slavery. To me, black Americans are not only not living in a racist country, it is black Americans who have the burden of explaining why there seems to be such a consensus among black Americans when it comes to an almost obsessive regard for the importance of race. Between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama, 90% of black voters voted for Obama and 50% of white voters. Who is it who is looking at skin color here? Is this statistic a statistic that supports the view that Americans are a bunch of racists while black Americans are color blind? If America were a racist country then Obama would have no where near the stature that he presently enjoys. That seems to me to be pitifully self evident. Naturally and unfortunately, some few writers have come up with the idea that Obama's election clearly means racism is as present as ever, just sidled aside into a racism '2.0'; a foolish notion on the face of it unless one thinks a black man could have been elected in 1970. I agree that racism by whites has sidled aside but it is not because of whites assuaging their racist guilt by now not seeing skin color, rather it is by whites patronizing blacks in the subtle manner I have written about earlier in this essay.
There is a problem in Trinity Church and among black leadership across this country and Trinity's congregation must start pointing fingers back upon themselves if they want to find real solutions to real problems. People like Rev. Wright and Pastor Pfegler are disasters as social commentators. The only thing they have to offer black America is a soothing feel good massage that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with demonizing millions of innocent Americans by skin color simply to give their self esteem a boost. Good reason why they should stay out of politics - they are simply not trained for it. Their view of tens of millions of present day white Americans as the guilty and responsible inheritors of an evil racial empire is fine within the confines of St. Sabina's or Trinity Church but exposed to the light of day is revealed as a childish racist daydream emanating from deep within Plato's Orwellian Cave.It shows the danger of consorting with people who are obsessed with one common viewpoint: that white Americans are unapologetic and intransigent racists. To put it as simply as possible, these people simply hang around each other too much. They prop up each the other, indoctrinate their own children and the result is like a convention of Roswell UFO fanatics, or a polygamist compound where all the women come to share the exact same crazy hairstyle.
What comes to mind in listening to Wright is the saying "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". Taking into account a more reasonable view of reality, the effect of watching clips of Wright's sermons could easily leave one with the impression of a man with an I.Q. of 90 lording it over a group of people with an I.Q. of 75. When one talks about preaching to the choir Rev. Wright is a literal example of it. One has to realize that we're talking about an atmosphere where a man like Cornell West is considered an "intellectual". If you wish to experience the intellectual breadth of Cornell West then look at this essay in the U.K.'s, The Guardian online edition.
Almost every single thing in this interview of Cornell West is a lie, semi-lie or lie of less than self effacing omission which I could easily take apart line by line. This man's every breath is so steeped in race that I can only feel sorry for someone in such a perceptual trap. And yet West is welcome on shows like Charlie Rose and others in a way that idiots like David Duke never would be. People like West seem not to understand that an obssession with race is in itself a racist view of the world. Every word in the article is pro black and anti white. That such a man can not only consider himself enlightened but to actually think he has anything to actually say is something that must be chalked up to the mysteries of life. Black Americans who embrace the philosophy of such a man as Cornell West are at best embracing thin air and at worst becoming the very thing black Americans have fought against for years. To say the state of Black leadership and black intellectual role models in America is a troubled one is putting it lightly. This is not to say that there are not Black Americans who could fill such a role but with so many black Americans views so profoundly colored by race there is a very small pool from which good role models could be chosen from and I doubt there would be a prominent public place for them anyway. Black public figures in America seem to have a terrible, terrible time in wanting to or succeeding in getting away from a black identity (as if there is such a thing) never realizing how they sacrifice their credibility while white Americans effortlessly think of themselves in an entirely different manner. Black Americans with a more reasoned point of view on race are often reined in by other black Americans by being called "Uncle Toms" or portrayed as not black enough.
Cornell West also said in "The Guardian" article, "The history of black people in America is one of unbelievable resilience in the face of crushing white supremacist powers." This sounds awfully like there was some kind of a fence around America between 1865 and 1965 that kept black Americans from emmigrating. West's over the top comments like this do more harm than good. No one in their right mind would have stayed in a country where they were subjected to that type of treatment and 20th century history is full of those who in fact did not. The fact of the matter is that black Africans have been, and are kicking down the door to get into the United States so get used to the new reality.
It is pitifully obvious that the reason black Americans hold people like Cornell West so close to their breast is because West sticks up for black folks but racism is racism and in West it is a viper that is being held to the breast. It is time for black Americans to disavow people like West if they ever wish to have true credibility and equality and not to disavow such people only during a Presidential campaign but as a matter of course. Black Americans are trying to have it both ways and this simply cannot be while trying to advance to a brighter future at the same time. It's never going to work and white guilt is not going to last forever nor can one think up new forms of racism 2.0, 2.2, etc., to further account for lack of achievement by black Americans as Jim Crow fades ever further into the past. Strike while the iron is hot.
In reading essay after essay by people like Cornell West, or Rev. Wright, or Danny Glover or Harry Belafonte and too many others to mention, I find the recurring theme among them is to give more credit than is due if a black person is involved and less credit if otherwise and to put it simply one can grow tired of listening to such vicious views of America; it's racist and unhelpful. I believe that the reason these people are never called out on these half truths is that because of the political climate in the world today one cannot criticize such views without yourself being accused of being a racist. That is easy for me to see even as I write these words. I can only hope that many other comments in this essay tell a different story. I am neither pro-white nor anti-black nor anything else that would be considered unfair to a race, culture or nation. I have no interest in such matters although I do have an abiding interest in the spirit of fair play. I do not like to see people take credit for that which they do not deserve nor do I like to see millions of people alive, dead and not yet even born portrayed as being a part of a Nazi-like racial supremacy culture simply because of their skin color; to portray millions of white European immigrants as have any kind of thoughts like this in the forefront of their minds is terribly foolish, especially considering there were no black folks in Europe at the time - I doubt if the thought ever even occurred to them. My folks came from Poland to central Minnesota in 1910 and when I visited them from Minneapolis as a child, there was no talk whatsoever about any kind of race.
This is an awfully big world and I have seen a great deal of it and for long periods of time. I speak Spanish, Portugese and Indonesian. I have spent a year in Brasil, 9 months in Guatemala, 5 and a half months in Southern Europe, 8 months in Indonesia, 3 months in India, 3 months in Egypt, a year in S.E. Asia altogether, with 3 trips to Peru, 3 to Bolivia, 5 trips to Mexico, and there is Malaysia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Hong Kong and more besides. I have found the cultures of this world to be marvelous and endlessly creative. These wanderings with a back pack have shown me a world of wonder and complexity. It is no surprise to me that when Malcolm X journeyed to Europe and the middle east that his perspective changed entirely, his parochialism destroyed. He was able to get outside of his own head and a completely restricted environment where he lived and breathed race and black culture. There is so much more to the world than our normally narrow environments and in seeing it one truly feels like a citizen of the world. I feel that happened in part to Malcolm X; he began to feel a citizen of the world and his previous views of white surpremacy simplistic.
I have often felt that troubled teens in America of whatever color would benefit immensely from a simple trip to a foreign country, to change their narrow perspective and broaden their view of themselves and the world they live in and in more general terms this would be of benefit to everyone. In Europe it is a rite of passage for young people to travel around the world for months at a time on the backpacking circuit. I own music from all over the world and some of it is really wonderful. Conversations, sights, sounds, food, they all change one in wonderful ways and part of that is with you always, everyday.
If it sounds as if, in this essay, that I myself have usurped the moral high ground, have written scathingly of people from a smug and self assured point of view it is because I feel as if I can see the things of which I write with such clarity thanks to my experiences around the world and I am being unfair to no one. I will say this about this essay: I can defend every paragraph of it as having truths in perception and fact and I can easily tear apart such idiotic statements as those of Rev. Wright, Cornell West, Kanye West, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Nikki Giovanni and others I have mentioned; tripping up a racist is one of the easiest things to do in this world.
I started to write this essay galvanized by the ignorant comments of Rev. Wright, Jim Cone and others because it was so easy for me to see how full of racism and lies their words were and I was confused as to why there would be any controversy about this at all in the media. But these people get a free pass and are featured on shows on PBS, CNN, Charley Rose and others. Can you imagine David Duke and his racial notions getting such free play? It's the same thing - you just have to open your eyes to it; forget their skin color and listen to what they say. Forget about their background; two wrongs don't make a right. I write about perception and am driven to do so when I see a lot of bullshit all heaped up in one place. I realize that many people say there are always two sides to a story and that much in this life is subjective but to me, people who stress this too much lack confidence in speaking about what they know while others speak too much of those things about which they know nothing. Some people are simply better at seeing than others, but everyone believes they can see clearly. Some photographers are simply better than others but those who are not photographers have a hard time seeing this. Some illustrators are better than others but for those outside the field this is not always so obvious. Some people are dimwits who truly speak with glib force - how else can you explain a person like Rush Limbaugh? Many people genuinely admire this man but he is an idiot.
But there are other Rush Limbaughs out there and they don't always come from a direction one would expect. Alica Keys recently said that Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were assassinated "by the government and the media to stop another great black leader from existing." And she also said, " 'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. 'Gangsta rap' didn't exist." Nice. This type of paranoia is so prevalent amongst black celebrities that I wonder where in the world average black folks are to stand up and say what nonsense it is. The silence is deafening. Keys afterwards said, "Anyone who knows me and my character, knows that I am not a conspiracy theorist or, by implication, a racist." Evidently Ms. Key's has no idea what these words actually mean. Keys said that the AK-47 pendent she wears, in the context of the Black Panther Party symbolizes "strength, power and killing 'em dead". Who dead? It couldn't be whitey could it? Nice. If Brittany Spears or Miley Cyrus spouted such nonsense their careers would be done overnight.
Once again it's a tribute to the gulf that exists between black and white Americans that Keys or any other black person would admire such an incredibly virulent racist organization as the New Black Panther Party. It seems that in the eyes of most black Americans the reason for such admiration is that no matter what wrongs the Black Panthers represent it's okay cuz they're in favor of black folks. It would be pretty hard for Keys to argue that Nazis or Klansman are not okay for white people to admire just because they think they're defending white people. Do people like Keys ever think these things through and come to realize how much they have in common with the very white supremacists they claim to hate so much and which they claim to have been the source of all ills for black folks throughout history? You can't just change a few words around and claim to be miles apart from such hateful groups as the neo-Nazis; it's the exact same philosophy. I'm trying to imagine a white songstress saying things like Keys said and getting away with it. Although there were plenty of bloggers at the time who referred to Keys as mentally challenged, my instincts tell me none of them were black.
In this life, some people like to be diplomatic and not be overly critical. The good and the bad will always be there side by side, sometimes it's taste that decides, sometimes ignorance of quality and sometimes the creme breaks through to the top. In my case I didn't feel like waiting and so I'm writing.
I felt this essay needed to be written because black folks in America, because of their place in history, have come to have a terrible amount of baggage and this, together with being sold down the river by other black Americans in the public spotlight who endlessly complain about their plight rather than doing something positive about it are helping to block black Americans from a good future. Slavery is depicted as a specifically white versus black phenomenon when in fact, throughout history, evil men have sought out any excuse whatsoever to oppress and exploit their fellow humans; evil is the ideology and not white supremacy. Faceless millions of black Americans not in the spotlight quietly and anonymously stride toward a bright future but millions of other needlessly languish behind bars out of all proportion to their numbers. Others struggle with drugs and alcohol and broken families and broken educational values also out of proportion to the numbers that should be. Chalking up the plight of black Americans in the 21st century to white supremacists idealogy, past or present, passive or otherwise, keeps the spotlight on what cannot and will not solve the problems of black Americans while a bankrupt value system which has nothing to do with race per se oppresses black America.
I saw it all typified by Rev. Wright who, instead of preaching about values that can lift a people up, preaches unabashed racism. To a certain extent Wright is not the only one who bears the guilt as witness the crowd of people in that Trinity Church who enthusiastically cheered on Wright's despicable remarks, never realizing that in cheering such a philosophy, that they were building bricks in a wall that can forever block them off from a future of peace and plenty that all Americans should share because of it's unique and incredibly successful place in geography and history.
This wall that Rev. Wright helps to build and sustain along with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cornell West and others, is the perceptual trap.
It is likely that few outside black America and those arguably self hating and historically challenged people in the vein of Janeane Garofalo, Bill Ayers, Time Wise, Bonilla-Silva, Rosie O'Donnell and Ward Churchill believe a word of Wright's denunciation of the United States and white people in general. Isn't it racist to judge a people by their skin color? How can you in the same sentence denounce the idea philosophically and support it rhetorically? It would seem a form of hypocrisy rising to the point of madness; it is pure 'doublethink'.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that one would emigrate from any country that possessed such a hatred of black culture and skin color, and in the historical past, that is exactly what many people have done. But they have done it in the case of a more demonstrable persecution and not the kind that exists only in their own minds which is certainly a valid argument regarding any oppression of black Americans in the 21st century. In fact, one would be hard put to find any historical parallel for the diatribes of such figures as Wright, Shabazz and Farakhan except in the rhetoric of blame and hatred of the Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan. Normally one would only hear such rhetoric from people who have been exiled from their country. No surprise that black Americans feel they are exiles in their own country. I think the reality is a little closer to being exiles from their own brains. How oppressed can a people be if you are totally free to denounce your own country without serious penalty. If you have ever watched a news conference involving such people and also other luminaries as Danny Glover, Kanye West, Lauryn Hill and Harry Belafonte it seems to me that any reasonable person would come to the conclusion that they not only live in a world that doesn't exist but that they can be favorably compared to characters in a George Orwell novel with their insane and not so pent up hatred of White America. An appropriate rhetorical question for Rev. Wright and his colleagues might be: "Do Black Americans Ever Think of Anything But Black People"?.
The fact that such people as Wright and Farakhan have not emigrated gives the seeming lie to their rhetoric. People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and many, many others actually make a living on the premise that black Americans are an oppressed people. If they ever stopped they would have to get new careers but the one they have is quite lucrative. Astoundingly, many White Americans seem to believe that black Americans are disadvantaged in the early 21st century; they talk as if black folks were children and you read essays by white folks about "white privilege" spoken about as if it were a scientific fact and the opposite of this white privilege is the generational hangover from racism that black Americans suffer from; a killing blow to self-esteem and a boon to cultural lethargy. A harsh reality is that many people are naive enough to buy snake oil and don't know when they are being sold a bill of goods. Hip Hop artists would certainly seem to be selling the public a bill of goods with their not so poetic stories about how hard life is in the "'hood" which can be most charitably described as self fulfilling prophecy. What would the 'hood' be like if everyone hung out in the library all day reading books? It is a question of cultural priorities and values imposed from within and not priorities and values somehow imposed from without. This is what I found an anonymous commentator on a web blog had to say about the differences between cultures: "The difference is not only real, it is perhaps the cause of most conflict in the world, especially today. It is an ancient predicament. Differences are real; differences are noticed. Differences cause envy or contempt, which causes conflict and strife. Closing your eyes to reality doesn't change this dynamic and doesn't help us solve these festering problems."
I love the argument bandied about by some few black folks that drugs are purposefully brought to black neighborhoods with evil intent and that no one in these black communities have airplanes to bring in cocaine. I have a TV; if I and others didn't want a TV no one would bring them into the U.S.; whether or not I own a cargo ship isn't the issue.
Who is it that is oppressing black folks in the U.S.? Tell us all and let's go have a talk with them. The truth is that they are invisible as Jim Cone's glib and convenient argument says. It's never seems to be the guy you're talking to but someone else. Proponents of the reality of black oppression in the United States point to statistics like the dearth of black college students or the high proportion of black inmates in prison as if there is only one way to view such statistics and that way is white racism. The fact of the oppression of black Americans seems to be taken for granted by an uncomfortably large percentage of black people in America. In opposition to this idea, it is becoming harder and harder to blame failures within the black American community on some kind of psychic hangover that is the result of generational disrespect.
A valid argument is certainly heard that Black Americans have worked to shape America and that they are Americans and why should they emigrate to another. One wonders though about the reality of black oppression as Rev. Wright and his congregation continue to reside in a country so oppressive and immoral that they evidently feel it deserves to be damned by God as a result of it's harsh treatment of black folks to this very day among other sins.
The truth of the matter is that relatively speaking, Black Americans have a great thing going here in the U.S., complaints notwithstanding, and it is not difficult to make an argument that if black folks were oppressed to the extent as laid down in the rhetoric of the New Black Panther Party, Jim Cone and Rev. Wright that they would simply leave. Mexicans are leaving Mexico by their millions for reasons far less urgent than the oppression Rev. Wright constantly complains of. Actions speak louder than words. If there was a better place black folks would leave and the rest of us might too. Having a so-called stake in a nation has not kept truly oppressed people from leaving their cultures in the past. I'm sure Irish, Jews, English, Germans and countless others in the past would rather had stayed where their families had been for generations but if it's time to go it's time to go.
I was once on the Greek island of Karpathos and there I was told the history of a small community called Olympos. Apparently women came to have a special place of responsibility there beginning in the 1920's because the men were so desperate for work that they came as far as America to find jobs, being gone years at a time. If black Americans had that same work ethic they would have almost no unemployment problems in the United States. I tell this story to impress the importance of values and priortities as regards such matters in contrast to blaming a lack of jobs on white oppression. In 2004 I met many men in Hopkins, MN at a grocery distribution center who had come from Pittsburgh, El Paso and Delaware just to have a job. There is always a job of some kind in America, you just have to decide to get it and then get it.
To a dispassionate observer, Black Americans like Wright seem to be almost in love with the idea that they are an oppressed people. In the U.S. today words don't mean what they used to mean and this speaks to how good we have it today. You can judge the quality of one's life by the triviality of their complaints and semantics. Originally being a rebel meant possible execution for your stand - today it means you listen to wild music or get a tattoo. People playing sports talk about a game being a war. The word "oppression" isn't being used in a way I understand. A lot of people don't like things about other people, this is reality and is not a systematic oppression aimed at you.
Slavery is over, Jim Crow is over and it is neither fair nor right to behave as if it's not, but some people talk about it like it never ended and one has to ask oneself why someone would do that. It's seems to me more than simple a case of making sure history doesn't repeat itself. A reasonable person could assume that slavery was not supported by the majority of Americans at the time of the Civil War let alone in the 21st century. At the outbreak of the Civil War 22 million people lived in the North, and 5.5 million whites in the South; there was no slavery in the North. So why the vitriol, why pillory all white folks on this one? All things being equal, meaning one can assume there were white people in the North not opposed to slavery and white people in the South opposed to it, white Americans who opposed slavery far outnumbered those who wished for slavery to continue. There was never any slavery in the territories turned states after the Civil War that were located mostly west of the Mississippi River.
By the way, a teacher at Ohio St. named Robert Davis has estimated that 1 to 1.25 million Europeans were carted off and enslaved by North Africans from the 16th to the 19th century. If I myself had a mindset like Danny Glover I might be eating that statistic up with a great big spoon. But I'm not; who knows the true number, who cares? It's doubtful if any white Americans care one way or the other either; nor do they likely care if Hannibal or Cleopatra or the ancient Egyptians were black, white or from Mars. If only the Rev. Wright would read a few history books without such evident bias, he'd realize that the history of slavery in the last 5000 years has no color attached to it but only immorality.
In the case of Farakhan and Wright and other Afro-centrists who believe that the white oppression of black Americans is alive and well it is not time to leave this country and never will be. Why would they? In very real terms they like it here despite the empty rhetoric. In case I have not been clear this makes them either dissemblers or deluded hypocrites - what is there in between: that the government created AIDS, that the government imports drugs into black neighborhoods, that the government blew up the levies in New Orleans and all to persecute and kill black folks? Kanye West may take some sort of satisfaction in foolish comments along these lines but one can only feel a bit sorry for people like that and also for the many people around him that don't call him out on his behaviour.
When Wright states that Hilary Clinton was never called a 'nigger', this is a perfect example of the somewhat exalted place of pain the Rev. believes black America has exclusively occupied and continues to occupy on the world's stage, as if everyone who is not black has a life of ease. And he would seem to be far from being alone among black Americans when it comes to the belief in black America's de facto corner on the market when it comes to pain and suffering. Will we start saying the "H" word instead of honky? Probably not.
The truth is that for some reason, many black Americans, in common however with many people in general, love to believe that their pain is special, seem to love to exaggerate it. If you've been called an insulting name then you've been called an insulting name and everyone who has ever lived knows what this is like and the word nigger, contrary to the belief on the part of many black Americans and white apologists is not a worse name than any other insult; I don't like being called 'gringo' in Latin America - I just don't bitch about it.
When people make statements about reality that fly in the face of the facts then it is likely they are making these statements because they want them to be true and the reality of it has no impact on them because they suffer from a type of self delusion. Any time you see a person making a statement as if it was a fact and you yourself know that no one could know the truth of it one way or another then you can be sure that person is unknowingly revealing only that which they want to believe; that the thing they espouse is true and nothing about the real truth of the matter. You only have to think about Cleopatra and Hannibal, (not the cannibal) as being black heroes to illustrate this. That desire to believe is there and the reality of it is a side show. Being half Polish I naturally believe that Cleopatra was half Polish; so were Napoleon and Alexander the Great Polish.
A blogger named Scott Swenson at rhrealitycheck.org suggests that Wright's anti-American and anti-white comments are understandable because of Wright's anger in light of such things as current environmental racism and the syphilis experiments at Tuskegee among others. Racism is racism and there is no excuse whatsoever for the many, many incredibly racist comments that Rev. Wright has made. Do the activities of black gangs give white people the right to refer to black folks with racial epithets equivalent to "garlic noses" and say they should be sent back to Africa? It certainly would not. Black gangs across this country have been responsible for much more havoc than the Tuskegee Experiments ever were if you want to start singling out wrong doers by skin color; or does the fact that black gangs don't single out people by skin color take them off the hook? When Jim Cone laughably says "All white men are responsible for white oppression...", does that mean that all black people are responsible for black gangs? Are all white people responsible for the Tuskegee Experiments? I for one can say that I wasn't in on that one nor for any other negative thing that has ever happened to any black person in this country. This is why Swenson's talk is in very muddy, I might say, very dirty water. It just doesn't make any sense. It is very tough for me to see how such an unapologetic racist as Jim Cone is admired in some circles.
I've read many defenses of Rev. Wright and the argument is always off the point; disengenuousness is the only path to defending Wright. You see cases of people saying how other people are the same or worse, such as Falwell or Pat Robertson, or Bush because of the war deaths on Bush's hands. In other cases they will conveniently leave out Wright's racial slurs against Italians. Many people will say that Wright has a right to his anger because of the way black folks have been treated in America in the past. My favorite ones are the arguments that put words and feelings in my head such as I probably just don't like uppity black folks or that I am looking at it from the point of view of an average white person in my comfortable white community. Others bring up the legitimacy of the right of an American to criticize our foreign policy. No one is questioning Wright's right to criticize American foreign policy; who is angry at Wright because of that? Lord knows that the Vietnam war was a war crime. In any event, folks who have actively defended Wright shouldn't get on any debating teams anytime soon; they'd get creamed on just about any subject matter. What happened to two wrongs don't make a right? The fact that such lame excuses are the best anyone can come up with is one thing but why would anyone in their right mind, black or white, want to defend such hateful speech? The answer is that Wright gets a pass because of his skin color.
On the subject of Wright defending himself at the Spring, 2008 National Press Club event I found 2 of his remarks intriguing. First off, Rev. Wright suggested that it was God himself who was damning America and not Wright. Think about that one a little. It's the old pipeline to God argument. Secondly, Rev. Wright defended his patriotism by pointing out he had served 6 years in the military. Serving in the military does not in and of itself absolve one for subsequent conduct that belies that service. Wright in other comments mentions the U.S. government as training killers which I took to mean the military. So which is it; are we training killers ala Timothy McVeigh or are such people patriots for their service? it is a non-issue.
The reason that people are angry at Wright is because of the tenor of his remarks and how they all seem to fit into this context: white people bad, black people good and that the story of America is a horrible story from Christoper Columbus on and is all about racism. Wright even goes back farther into history to transform the crucifixion of Jesus into a "public lynching Italian style", with "garlic noses" in play and the whole nine yards, evidently changing the Roman and Jewish officials responsible into typical Italian mobsters and typical white folks, perhaps living in the ancient world's equivalent of the suburbs. Yes, Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no racist; certainly he is no historian, his own claims to the contrary. Check out this tender tidbit.
As regards foreign policy, Wright is not a man who has any kind of dispassionate view of the history of U.S. foreign policy; he gobbles up the bad and ignores the good. His view of the United States government as being run by "white supremacists" should give one a clue as to that. If Wright was dispassionate then you would see some kind of balance in his comments about U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. government saved the lives of how many Muslims in the Balkans for example, or liberated how many concentration camps in WWII? How about some sermons about that? I guess his detractors missed those sermons when they were cherry picking Wright's video clips.
There is a difference between someone whose views are dispassionate and full of facts and someone who has a point of view first and then tries to support it. Rachel Maddow's smug one sided views and Keith Olbermann's disingenuous TV rants and Michael Moore's laughable "documentaries" are a perfect example of that. You have to have judgement to be able to spot a person who has belief patterns as opposed to balanced views. By "judgement" I mean for example to be able to know at a glance at David Duke's website home page that it is nonsense, or to read a review of "The Bell Curve" to know that it is not a book worth reading. I'm willing to plead guilty to judging a book by it's cover on this one. There is only one race on this planet and it is human. Do you think a person who has a "I hate Bush" t-shirt and Che Gueverra posters on their wall is a person with a balanced view of the world or are they a stereotype with a set of belief patterns that is always anti-American or, on the other side, mindlessly pro-American for that matter? Sinead O'Conner is a perfect example of a person with a belief pattern and totally unaware of it. I don't think she ever understood why people found her so annoying. Sinead O'Conner looks down on the world from a very great height; she was politically correct before people were even using the term I think. One thing's for sure, her mouth was bigger than her talent. I can't imagine her laughing, her mouth is usually a grim slit. Without a hit song written by Prince, O'Conner would never have had a platform because we would never have heard of a woman who's talent as a musician has never risen above that of a coffee shop.
You will never get any usable facts from listening to anyone with a belief system in the way I have used the term. The fact is that U.S. government foreign and internal policy history is neither wholly innocent nor wholly guilty, nor is that of any other country in this world. I love the way people in Spain I met in 2002 had such a sanctimonious view of the U.S. With them it was, "Well, 9/11 was a terrible tragedy but..." Spain's own conduct towards the native-American population in Mexico was as bad as anything the U.S. ever did in the north and that's saying something. Yet they are never taken to task for enslaving, decimating and destroying the most brilliant civilization in the New World with their terrible version of diversity and multi-culturalism. Is there a moral statute of limitations on these matters? If so, there is no Aztec culture left to ask for an apology or for reparations. When it comes to innocence there are just countries with the military means and opportunity to advance their political agenda and those without. If Spain hadn't fallen from the world stage believe me, they would be right in the thick of things because they did indeed fall from the world's stage and didn't retire from it in a cloud of moral realization. Viewed in an historical context, the United States has shown more restraint in terms of pure naked aggression than any great power in human history yet morons who have little understanding of the term continue year after year to refer to the U.S. as imperialist and colonialist; in fact those terms have had their definition revised in recent decades to accomodate those who dislike the American story. This does not mean that the United States has not involved themselves in incredibly moronic military adventures such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or the Phillipines, but those were a long way from naked imperialism which consists of conquest, slavery and robbery. Were this not true, both Canada and Mexico would be enslaved. This is a rational view of history unless you wish to compare us to Costa Rica which has no army in which case they may be the nicest country in the world.
How would you like to have Rev. Wright as a history teacher. Or how about Rosie O'Donnell, or Janeane Garafalo, or Susan Sarandon, or Ward Churchill? This isn't China or the old Soviet Union where we need people like them to uncover the hidden crimes of America. One gets the feeling that such people think other Americans don't know about these things because we're simply ignorant compared to them and so they belabor the obvious to out utter fascination; to me they are only projecting their own ignorance and epiphanies onto others. The Trail of Tears isn't a secret, the Tuskegee Experiment isn't a secret, Vietnam isn't a secret, although American involvement in 9/11 apparently is. The point is that if this is all I'm going to hear about then I'm going to quickly get the idea that this isn't history, this is someone who doesn't like America and that is the entire point in regard to Rev. Wright and his stupid sermons which he passes off as some kind of a dispassionate view of "real" history. This is why it is so disturbing to see an entire church congregation cheering Wright or cheering Ward Churchill during a college campus speech. Do you think for one minute that Rev. Wright's congregation or Ward Churchill's applauding audiences have a balanced view of the United States? The United States isn't all of anything. It's like when one person says to another, "That's all you ever do is...." Of course it's just an expression to which one might reply that the only thing I always do is breathe. But in Wright's case it's like the only thing the U.S. government and white people do is create AIDS, persecute black people, kill babies in Iraq, and on and on. One time I met a woman in Brazil who said, when she learned that I was American, "I have a serious problem with Americans." She admitted she had never been to the United States. I asked her if her problem was with all 300 million Americans or somewhat less. Am I to take such stupid bias seriously? People love to talk and occupy the moral high ground and that's for sure; that doesn't make it reality.
Enough is enough with these people already. Can you spell bias? For those of you who wish to defend Wright you are going to have to do a better job than I've seen so far. Here's a hint: you'll have to do better than to say the media is "cherry picking" Wright's comments and taking them out of context. The sound bites being played on TV and the internet are entirely within the context of Wright's philosophies. The more you look into the incredible totality of comments this man has made the harder the job will be to defend him. The fact that Rev. Wright has many other sermons that are not racist is not the issue. As I've already written, if I had a website dedicated to world peace I would only have to say that black people are a bunch of so and so's one time to negate the entire site. In this sense bringing up Wright's military service to show he isn't anti-American is ludicrous. I could spend my life in the military and it wouldn't make racist comments non-racist or anti-American comments pro-American. Stay off that debating team.
The cheering of Wright's congregation has an even worse problem. When the congregation cheers Wright's anti-white comments and one takes into account the underlying philosophy of anti-white bigotry that exists at Trinity exemplified by the literature of one of their heroes, Jim Cone, do you think for a minute that those folks have made any white friends in the Spring of 2008; this can easily fit into the framework of subsequent racism being a self-fulfilling prophecy. How many buddies do you think Kanye West or Alicia Keys have made among white folks other than naive white teenagers? How much of the good work of Martin Luther King has Wright and his foolish congregation undone? How much worse will that be if white folks throughout American ever get the idea that this congregation reflects the thoughts of many more black folks throughout the United States? Like I said elsewhere: the harm this man has done to the black community is many and varied and probably cannot be underestimated and Trinity's congregation shares in this. Black Americans who do not agree with Wright and Keys and West should probably stand up and be counted about now.
Obviously, the Rev. Wright believes his comments about American society to be fair or he wouldn't have made them. Just as obviously, the Rev. believes his remarks to reflect truth and from the enthusiastic cheering of his church audience it appears they share these beliefs. Were they cheering when Rev. Wright talked about Italians and their "garlic noses"? Would they cheer at someone talking about the watermelon smile of a black person? I would like someone to straighten me out on the difference between these two expressions because I see none myself. This is the crux of why this congregation should be ashamed. Sadly, that congergation is not ashamed and I personally found their cheering of such a bigot as Wright extremely disheartening. I can easily picture the congregation of Trinity Church in white, pointed hoods.
There is strong evidence to support the idea that many black Americans do share similar feelings, including, by association, Barack Obama and, because of her comments about her pride in America, his wife. Mrs. Obama later tried to soft soap it but it was obvious to me that her comment about being proud to be an American for the first time was a chiding of white folks for their racist bigotry until that moment in time. Contrary to Sen. Obama's comments, it is obvious that he did know only too well about Rev. Wright's anti-American, anti-white philosophy since it is a huge part of the base philosophy of Wright's whole circle of associates. Jim Cone, one of those Trinity core philosophers for example, talks about "...the insidious tentacles of White power" and "All white men are responsible for white oppression...". Jim Cone is a star at United Trinity. Barack Obama didn't have to attend a single racist lecture of Wright's in order to know Rev. Wright's feelings about white Americans since Dr. Cone's writings used to be singled out as required reading at Trinity Church before this recommendation was taken off their website during Obama's election run. As I point out elsewhere, Wright is a great admirer of Jim Cone, makes no secret of the fact and this was surely well known by Mr. Obama. At the time of this essay there are 4 Jim Cone books available on Trinity's website bookstore, 2 others co-authored by him and 1 that includes his incredible essays in "Living Stones in the Household of God". This man's philosophical brother is Adolph Hitler as is Farrakhan who I always think of as Hitler without an army.
The real question someone should ask Barak Obama is whether he has ever read Jim Cone's writings and if so, which ones and when and what did he think about them. And, are they in his library? You'll see some squirming and truth telling then I guarantee you. Unfortunately no one has thought to do so. Those simple questions would be more inescapably revealing than any other questions yet asked about Obama's relationship to Rev. Wright and the Trinity Church.
In connection with this I think you can include Barack Obama's famous comment about small town Americans in Pennsylvania: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." My own feeling about this statement is that it may reveal some of Mr. Obama's true feelings and not really anything substantial about those communities. I was surprised that not one TV commentator I saw said that Mr. Obama was basically saying these people that he's referring to are bigots among other uncomplimentary things. That's the way I read it. He was making a blanket negative statement regarding people by skin color. In view of the back pedaling of Obama, his wife and Trinity Church itself, I can only come to the conclusion that they are Afro-centrists who know what they are saying is wrong, or at least, they believe white America believes this evidence of Afro-centrism to be wrong.
In regard to Rev. Wright's cheering congregation, wanting to believe a thing and the truth are 2 different things. Winners understand this and guard against it; losers do not, winners act, losers complain. The Rev. Wright is a loser because he has given over his life to hate and whining. He is doubly a loser because he has done so in the context of being the pastor in a church and Jesus was about love and forgiveness, not hatred and the keeping alive of negative events from generations ago as if they had taken place this week or of delusional and exaggerated fantasies about how cruel white people have always been.
To say that this is a sad state of affairs would be misleading because it is, in fact the sign of a disastrous gulf that exists between a large part of the black American population of the United States and reality. This hurts everyone involved in a sense, hurts the psyche of an entire nation.
The remarks the Rev. Wright made are shameful because they are such despicable lies with not an ounce of truth to them because of the context he puts them in. The Rev. Wright complains that the media has taken his sermons out of context but longer looks at the videos in question not only affirm that Wright's remarks were not taken out of context but that his sermon's themselves present facts in such a disjointed context that history becomes unrecognizable. Every person in that church who cheered the Rev's remarks should be ashamed of themselves because truth didn't matter but smacking white people did. If such an event were to occur in reverse where black Americans were criticized in the same fashion there would be a hue and cry from black Americans from coast to coast. One can assume that the congregation are not zealots, or fundamentalist radicals but are probably fairly normal people, caught up in the mistaken belief that when it comes to supporting black Americans you can never have enough of a good thing, even if it means denouncing others by their skin color.
The Rev. Wright's remarks indeed do not exist in a vacuum but in fact seem widely supported in the black community across this country from Kanye West, to Spike Lee and especially that despicable bigot Farakhan.
The fact of the matter in my opinion is that black America, especially each successive new generation is being done a disservice by their philosophical leaders in a way that is so damaging that the true harm is impossible to assess and probably could not be exaggerated. Wright's cheering congregation obviously believe themselves to be aggrieved, that they have right on their side. Any good will coming to them dissipated a long time ago; the good karma Wright's congregation believe to be in their ball court is non existent. Unfortunately lost in all this is that a skewed vision of reality is being transferred to a younger generation of black Americans by their unfortunate elders.
The problem is not that young people listen to their elders willy-nilly because often the exact opposite is true. The problem lies in the modern human propensity to readily accept excuses for a person's not doing well in life, even to exaggerating to what extent they are in fact doing well. How many times have you heard people describe themselves as survivors until the word itself loses meaning because so many people use the term? Why do people somehow fall in love with the idea that they are losers and how can it envelope an entire culture? When a people identify one with the other in an intense manner then such things can infect millions of people. Many black Americans identify themselves as black before any other considerations. For my part, and I believe, the overwhelming majority of people in the world, skin color is so far down the list of priorities of how I identify myself that the consideration basically doesn't even exist. Thinking of one's self in such a manner is harmful and for many reasons. If a person's skin color doesn't make a difference then it doesn't make a difference. However, if you claim it shouldn't matter to non-blacks but then black folks themselves give such prominence and importance to the idea then they themselves are not only living in a reality that largely doesn't exist but living a reality that you say you are diametrically opposed to. To live such a lie can lead to a person living in a state of unreality that infects their own good will towards others.
Let me give you an example of my own reality. When I am around other white folks or others in Europe or Asia or South America, conversations can go for days or weeks, more, without the subject of race ever once coming up. It simply isn't an issue for the vast majority of the world. When I am around black folks, you can barely have a conversation for 5 minutes without the subject of race being somehow interjected one way or another. This is a generality but it is true as far as it goes in my own experience.
The argument of Black Americans might be: "Well, we're never allowed to forget we're black; we've been made hyper-aware of our skin color and now it's in our cultural psyche". My answer is to put the car in reverse, you're not children.
You see evidence of the profit from believing that you are basically a loser all too much in our country today; things that used to be thought of as laziness or lack of discipline now have medical names attached and people, white and black, are only too ready to accept such explanations at face value because it not only absolves them of guilt, but exempts them from having to work to solve their problems. For some reason they do not see that things only get worse and worse. It is unreality, it is Political Correctness. It is compassion gone mad, it is a state of being unsane, a word that should be in "1984" if it isn't, to describe people who in real terms should have no mental problems but end up having an equivalence because they willingly embrace things that have no day to day basis in reality.
If I walk into a store and a white clerk is really rude for no reason I can readily assume that person is a jerk but if a black person with race on their mind has the same experience they will never rule out racism. This is what leads to black folks getting all pissed off cuz a white guy used the term "black hole". Black and white Americans are perceptually living in two different worlds and if you stretch this to it's logical conclusion then it is going to lead to some real problems. There are white folks who surely do not like black folks and black folks who don't like white folks but why allow either to pollute one's life with the view that it's a monumental white conspiracy? Rev. Wright should not be wasting his energy and time in writing and delivering sermons on basically what sinners white people are as if the Dred Scott decision was handed down yesterday.
I'm reminded of a MAD TV sketch where Bob Newhart plays a psychiatrist. His patient complains of how awful she feels about her recurring thoughts of being buried alive. The psychiatrist simply says to stop it. Today, however, people just can't stop it. There seems to be an increasing number of people who wallow in painful thoughts. Is it a modern thing? I don't remember people being so when I was young. You kept your head down and worked.
When you take as the gospel, literally in the Rev. Wright's case, such hate-filled and skewed views of reality and the place of Black and White America in it, you are going to have problems. Obviously the answer is to just stop it and not wallow in it but it's never that easy.
In the case of black American culture, they see the turmoil evident throughout their culture and, being all too human, many readily accept such hateful diatribes from people like the Rev. Wright as an excuse, an absolution from guilt. Why accept the blame when you can blame it on others? In this case, what matter if it's true or not if it makes them feel better, if it sloughs off their own guilt onto others? This is where mature leadership is so important in a culture because whether you like the idea or not, most people are followers and not leaders and if they are badly led then they will live badly. It is as simple as that.
In black America, you see a culture that, like every culture, values certains things and those values are shared among others of the same culture because people in the same culture identify with each other. In this way, cultures have identities that emerge. These values tend to feed on each other and spread. Values tend to identify cultures as winners and losers. It's simple; if you value things that make a culture strong it will be strong and if a culture tends to possess common denominators that will weaken it then you have a problem. It is a complex issue because there are cultures within cultures and it's not exactly like 2 + 2 equals 4. If one would spread ones interests and influences across many cultures you will be that much stronger. For black folks to identify too closely with one culture, even to the extent of making sure they are only hearing black lecturers, reading black literature, watching black films is problematic.
No one is forcing young black kids to not finish high school and the argument that they feel uninvolved in a country that doesn't care about them is weak. The issue is not whether the rest of the country does or should care about you but whether you do; the question is whether you want to succeed or not. No one ever said that a good life if easy to come by for anybody regardless of their skin color. Sometimes one gets the feeling from listening to people like Rev. Wright that white folks put success in a bag and hand it off to other white folks. In a sense they do, and that bag is a shared sense of positive values that in the long run outweighs the negative values that any society will have. You just have to have more good than bad.
Rev. Wright is playing a dangerous game, not for him but for this young generation of black youth. One could be led to believe in listening to Wright that black Americans are a group of innocent collective geniuses who have been held back by the vicious racism of white Europeans - he practically comes out and says this; people like Malik Shabazz and Cornell West unabashedly spread such garbage. One can only imagine what a paradise Africa was before the coming of the Europeans because apparently there was no war, slavery or other bad things that are the legacy of the rest of humanity. It's a blame game and not a particularly sophisticated one at that; you have to be an idiot to be mesmerized by the likes of Cornell West.
This is how Adolph Hitler mesmerized and wrecked a nation. By blaming a host of non-existant events as the source of the German peoples ills, Hitler not only galvanized a nation into seeking revenge on people who had never done them harm but gave the national psyche a soothing massage that made them feel suddenly not at all responsible for their involvement in and subsequently disastrous fate after WWI. A similar fate by the way has overtaken the Palestinians, who were all too ready to ally themselves with their Arab neighbors when it seemed they could not fail to militarily oust the Jews from Palestine. The subsequent turn of events and then readiness of themselves and their leadership to blame their fate on everyone and everything but the true source of their ills which is themselves and their own actions has left the Palestinians in a cultural, economic and perceptual wasteland. Such soothing massages from men like Yassir Arafat have condemned the Palestinian peoples to a fate horrible to contemplate.
In truth, nothing in our lives is ever solved if we do not as a general philosophy accept responsibility for our own lot in life. With such clown-like leaders as Farakhan and Rev. Wright and such hate filled persons as Kanye West and Spike Lee to name but a few, black America is headed down a disastrous path that will leave their fate in the hands of the wind and their future the same cultural wasteland that is inhabited by the ghosts of past losers in this world. The answer is to become winners and no one can do that for you.
When fate overtakes you and you are left in a bad spot, you hunker down, work to get yourself to a better place and think of the future.
In 1945, Jews across Europe, not only enslaved but starved, imprisoned, tortured and killed in their millions took only 3 years to set up the State of Israel against odds that are incredible to contemplate. It did not take them generations and they, being a culture of pragmatists, rejected the idea of their psyche being so damaged by others outside their culture that they could accomplish nothing, but this is the exact message of black leaders in America today and it is eagerly gobbled up by people unwilling to similarly reject the concept of psychic impotence and work to make better lives for themselves. And ironically and you might say pitifully in the case of these black Americans, the road they would take to a bright future is a far, far easier path than the post-WWII Jews had. There is no such thing as a generational hangover resulting in lack of achievement - there are only excuses and smoke.
Jewish folks didn't stay in Europe and make a career of blaming others, getting fat off the sympathy of the world to sit back and receive aid, instead, in 3 years, Jews pulled down the moon.
What black America could accomplish in 3 years could be a staggering success if they would only reject the idea of the blame game and stop not only living in a past that no longer exists but seeming to gleefully wallow in it.
Slavery is over and has been for a long time and any Black American who mentions it in a way that links it to the present is doing the opposite of what the Jewish people did after WWII when their disaster was only months in the past, not a century and a half. The negative aspects of the history of mankind has been what it is and to reject it and plan and fight for a better llfe is one thing, but to simply expect the negative aspects of humanity to simply not exist is unreality; the idea that you can't move forward until everybody likes you is childish. The rest of the world isn't going to take racial sensitivity classes just because someone looked at you cross-eyed or a taxi didn't stop for you.
Reality can be harsh and cruel and it is often death itself. Who would want to sit down and make a list of vanquished and vanished cultures that were destroyed for no other reason that because of man's inhumanity to his fellow man. All the more reason to make the best of it, to not exaggerate one's ills when things as a whole are, relatively speaking, not all that bad. What are black Americans going to do if things get as bad in reality as people like Cornell West and Jim Cone profess in their juvenile and imaginary reality?
People like Wright believe that white Europeans rule and oppress this world and have had and continue to have all the cards in their favor. This is a racist view of reality that is crazy. If one believes that white caucasians are oppressors because they are white caucasians, then it is not difficult to make a leap of logic that black folks are lazy and inclined to be criminals. Judging people by their skin color in that way is a slippery sword that can twist in your grasp. " O, that way lies madness". The idea that only those on top can be racists is a fools game a black female radio commentator once tried to use to defend her racist comments, an attractive gambit to those who feel oppressed at first glance but ultimately a language of racism itself. I remember the television commentators who interviewed the woman at the time of the controversy just shaking their heads at the woman's ludicrous defense of her racist comments.
Nowhere in Wright's racist rhetoric is any thought given to white folks who came to the United States long after slavery was over; that would be inconvenient. They share the blame by skin color - the very idea that Wright claims to be against. Crazy. My own people came to central Minnesota from northern Germany and never had any interaction whatsoever with black folks throughout their entire history. Nice to know they bear the burden of every ill that has ever befallen black Americans.
Black American culture, and it is simply a culture unless you believe that Maasai tribesman use the Buffalo Stance, if it is ever to be a success, must reject such blatantly racist leaders like Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farakhan, Jim Cone and, unfortunately, so many others that the list is staggering to contemplate. Black Americans must steel themselves to only accept as leaders people with strong, positive values and not leadership by skin color. People like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Rev. Wright are an absolute disaster for black America. Complaints and excuses are not the types of things that successful adults indulge in. It's time to take back John Wayne as a hero in a larger sense. There is an awfully lot of good stuff in this world to learn and experience that originates from people who are not black. Why limit oneself? Black Americans do so at their own peril because things aren't exactly working out as is. Rejecting white role models just because they're white is stupid if you think it through. That is part of the very definition of racism. Imagine how black Americans would howl if it has ever become apparent that white people rejected Michael Jordan as a role model because he was black?
In this life their are winners and losers: winners work and look to the future, losers blame and live in the past. Small wonder and no coincidence that the Palestinians look to past wrongs and refuse to move forward until, in their minds, these wrongs are put to right. They never will be. Palestinians who, in listening to their political rhetoric I am sure believe themselves to be the ultimate pragmatists, do not know the meaning of the word. Black America, which seems even less pragmatic, can look to the Palestinian Arabs' plight to see what good it does to blame others and to act on that philosophy instead of accepting part of the responsibility for that plight and moving forward.I think it is important to look to the past for lessons but not to live in it. One lesson that can be learned is to look at the path the leadership of the South took after the American Civil War. The post Civil War Reconstruction was a mini civil war but how worse would it have been had the South had a man like Yasir Arafat as a leader. Had a man like Yasir Arafat been in a position of power in the South, he would have fought on and on and on until the South was ground into dirt; and then the South would have complained about Northern oppression. The Palestinian Arabs played and If you play you must pay and if you lose accept it like a mature adult and not a whining child. If you don't want to accept the realities that come with losing then don't play. Unfortunately ordinary folks just trying to live their lives get put into harm's way by their leaders and they play and they pay. It's called "collateral damage" and it happened in Dresden, it happened in Hiroshima, it's happening to the Palestinians, it's happening in Iraq.
The question of how much responsiblity citizens bear for the conduct of their leadership was never scrutinized more closely than after WWII when the conduct of the German and Japanese peoples was called into question. There has never been a satisfactory answer. Should the German and Japanese people have been held responsible for supporting regimes that waged terrible wars of naked aggression, did they in fact have a choice? I think at least one conclusion was that the people of Japan and Germany had suffered enough and that this suffering in itself would act as a lesson for the future.
Rev. Wright and Ward Churchill believe that the people who died during 9/11 did so as righteous karmic collateral damage brought about by the misguided and long term policies of the United States government, chickens coming home to roost. This is a de facto support for the terrible fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear devices used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII if they would only think it through. The foolish statements Rev. Wright made about Americans bombing Japan with atomic bombs without "batting an eye" and then defending 9/11 are hilariously stupid from a conceptual viewpoint. The fact of the matter is that Wright and Churchill are not capable of thinking things through, both because of their hopeless bias but also because of their childish and uninformed views of how they think history has occurred in which they conveniently ignore anything that gets in the way of their views. Were they capable of thinking these things through Rev. Wright will find that the plight of black America today is a type of collateral damage. In this instance however, it is not the conduct of the followers that is in question but that of black leadership. Rev. Wright, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte are the Yasir Arafats' of their generation. Black folks in gang infested neighborhoods throughout the United States are being ground into dirt and are looking for a way out. The philosophies of Jim Cone and Rev. Wright will insure this never happens as their wrong headed philosophies advance to the rear, seeking redemption in an empty cup; and that empty cup is the theme of white racial superiority. The Rev. Wright in particular will never have to worry about a way out as he retires to a million dollar house in a Chicago suburb where 2% of the people are black. A chicken coming home to roost indeed.
I put the credibility of the black American leadership on the same level as Roswell U.F.O. enthusiasts because they are both dedicated to believing in something that does not exist in their willful penchant for maximizing the unlikely as if it is a path to heaven. The cruel irony is this: that thing that does not exist, part of what fills the empty cup, is the ability to predict what the actions of a human being will be based on their skin color and this is ostensibly what their lives as racial advocates have been lived to fight against and yet they unknowingly have come to occupy the very place of the people they say they hate and who are fundamentally wrong headed. What worse place to be in than that type of perceptual hell? It makes you you're own worst enemy. Let's face it, the main reason Jesse Jackson for example, wants black people to follow him is because he himself is black. Black Americans blindly follow leaders first and foremost on the basis of skin color in a way that reveals more about how black Americans think about skin color than white people. Black Americans seem to assume that everyone thinks the same way in a manner that is very revealing. That was already obvious but is it right? How about choosing a plumber or doctor by skin color?
It truly and unfortunately shows the lengths to which we as human beings can delude ourselves and at the same time somehow stay out of an insane asylum.
"We have supported State terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." This quote is attributed to Wright by Jodi Kantor in a 3/15/08 online N.Y. Times article.
By "state terrorism" does Wright mean we have been friends to the regimes that have oppressed people in South Africa & Israel? And who is "we'? You and I? Does it include black Americans. Did we want to play - are we going to pay? The government in general? The CIA? What exactly constitutes support? These are serious charges and I would like to hear the specifics but rest assured that none will be forthcoming. One thing is for sure: Wright is no historian despite his smug claims otherwise. No one who has a grasp of history's real and complex events could ever make a statement about the United States dropping nuclear weapons on Japan without "never batting an eye"; it's an absolutely meaningless statement in that event's historical context. It was a statement that at once defines Wright's ignorance of history as well as his willingness to apply his own bigoted notions to the history of the world of which he understands so little; Wright's willingness to describe himself as a biblical scholar surely must be regarded as a joke in true academic circles.
Here are some more quotes by Wright: “U.S. of K.K.K.A", “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run,” and Miss Kantor goes on to credit Wright with "accusing the United States of importing drugs, exporting guns and training murderers.
The United States was not founded on racism. If ethnocentrism, a relatively normal and harmless human foible, is so appalling to minorities, then how much worse to practice ethnocentrism to the point where black Americans seem to think the history of the United States revolves around black people, to suggest that the history of the world revolves around white racism. To say that a culture is racist because it overcomes another culture numerically and technologically is comic bookish. It's not nice but wars of conquest have rarely been fought purely because of race; pirates don't want to inconvenience those of a different skin color, they want money and don't care who they rob. Wright's own ethnocentrism is obssessive and logos including a graphic of the African continent pervasive around Trinity Church. It reminds me of the illegal Mexican immigrants who marched in America's streets while brandishing Mexican flags, the flags of a country they did not want to live in. In a similar manner, those black Americans who brandish a map of Africa in reality feel it's a nice place to visit but they will never live there. While so-called white ethnocentrism may ignore swaths of history, Wright's brand actually transforms history. Usually it's gold, rape and land that armies kill for. Anyway, does anyone truly believe the Aztecs would not have come to Europe and conquered it had they the capacity to do so? Does anyone in their right mind think that war or slavery didn't exist in the new world before Columbus? Does anyone seriously believe that there was not incessant warfare, slavery and murder in Africa at the time whites entered the picture and for hundreds of generations before; were they less than human? At the time the United States began to come into existence and indeed for the entire history of the human race, man warred against man. It isn't pretty but it is reality. In a relative context, the U.S. and it's "flawed" Constitution has done more to help put and end to inhumanity to man than any other single entity that has ever existed, the Christian church notwithstanding and certainly more than the NAACP. For all it's flaws and exclusion of women and minorities the Rev. Wright complains of, the United States Constitution remains an important and relevant document while organizations like the NAACP, that truly exists to help people based on skin color limp toward and uncertain future. Funny how the NAACP criticizes the U.S. Constitution for it's exclusion of blacks and then continues to follow that exact philosophical roadmap. The U.S. Constitution is flexible enough to include those originally disenfranchised; the by-laws of the NAACP are incapable of inclusiveness or real change.
Defending Wright on the pretext of saying that White America is shocked by his comments because they are so frank has nothing to do with it. Wright's comments are a pack of despicable lies uttered by a despicable man. This is the source of people's anger at his comments and not the former which is a glib excuse for a moron who, unfortunately all too often, seems to represent black America's version of a think tank.
I am personally inviting Wright to leave this country that he hates so much and please go live in Libya with his friend Gaddafi. I am sure that any comments that Wright subsequently makes about God damning Libya will be an appropriate introduction to the true meaning of oppression. Wright's ability to make such Hitler-like speeches in such a public forum is a testament to the wonderful quality of American government and it's Constitution, not a condemnation of it. In this regard I have to say I love this quote by Wright, "We cannot see that what we are doing is the same as al-Qaeda, under a different color flag." Well, here's at least one difference: had Wright given a speech criticizing al-Qaeda in an al-Queda loving country, he probably would have disappeared. Last time I checked, Guantanamo is nowhere near the affluent suburbs of Chicago.
People like Wright and anyone who supports him do not deserve living in a country like the U.S., they don't deserve it and no man who has at one time considered such a fool as Wright as a mentor has any business being President. I love the fact that Obama defends Wright on the basis that Wright's critics are "cherry-picking" Wright's comments. An incredibly lame statement if true. The "cherry-picking statement came from a telephone interview with Tribune-Review reporter David. M. Brown.
If you see such hateful and despicable things as Wright does in public speeches and statements over and over again then it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with cherry-picking a person's statements. It's not the percentage of times one says hateful things that is the issue. Why would I even have to point this out? Nobody is "cherry-picking" through the "40 year career" of Wright. The comments to which everyone is referring to are not from some diary Wright kept when he was 17 years old. His delusional hate speech is more recent and very public and seem to be consistent throughout his career as a pastor and at the core of Wright's philosophies. Look at the Trinity bookstore on their site; the authors represented have an intense dislike for as well as terribly skewed vision of the country they live in. Those books are all black this and black that, white this and white that. How can one hope to live a decent life with such unhealthy obssessions? Talk about oppression - one need go no further than popular writers at Trinity such as Jim Cone to see a dirty, dark and shamefully childish view of life to feel the weighty oppression; an oppression from within. It's like a library where every book is a goofy version of "Mein Kampf".
I can easily see how awful it would be to feel that one is experiencing racism every single day of one's life; it would be like living in a mental concentration camp. If I were someone like Jim Cone I would fly to Africa so fast I would wonder if I ever was in America. But here is where the rhetoric belies the reality because that mental concentration camp is indeed in the mind and has no basis in reality outside that mind. The guard towers and barbed wire are constructed wholly in the imagination and so there is not the slightest chance of ever escaping. That is a perceptual trap.
The real problem in this whole affair is the delusional aspect of Wright's and Cone's diatribes. Wright's speeches do not occur in a vacuum but are unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how deep into American black culture such delusional thinking resides. Clearly, in the video tapes of Wright's sermons, one can see the congregation cheering enthusiastically in response to some of Wright's most foolish comments which logically leads one to believe that the entire church was full of fools only too willing to embrace any thought which makes black folks look good and white folks look bad.
You can find the crux of it in the many statements by people like Wright about Jesus being black, the pyramid builders being black, Cleopatra and Hannibal being black. Race, race, race. The issue isn't whether these people were black or not but how intensely one wishes it were so. When people want to believe something so badly that truth is brushed out the door then you have a real problem. When someone wants to shed light on the truth of, say, whether Hannibal was black, one can do so in a dispassionate manner although I would question whether why anyone but a cultural anthropologist or historian would care. In any event, when someone wants to believe such a thing to the point that it is obvious they have some kind of stake in the issue and ignore reality then the only thing that is being revealed is not whether Hannibal was black but the fact the someone desperately wants to believe so. Now you have an issue that has nothing to do with Hannibal, because why do black folks want to believe so? If skin color doesn't matter than whatever accomplishments one ascribes to Hannibal are the accomplishments due to his being a human being or at best a product of his culture and nothing whatsoever to do with race.
What you in fact have is a group of people who want to portray black folks in general as bringing more to the table than truth would substantiate and conversely that white people bring less to the table than the truth would bear.
In the late Winter of 2006 a so-called racial incident at Cornell University galvanized minorities to call for mandatory classes for everyone at the school on racial diversity. I mention this for no particular reason other than how typical it is of self-satisfying political correctness gone mad, as if we actually needed more examples. How sad that such people apparently wish to involve the entire world with their own obssession with race, seemingly taking it for granted that everyone shares such an obssession but, unlike themselves, in an insensitive manner, naturally. How sad to listen to young people basically tell an entire university that they all need to get up to speed in being as moral and sensitive as themselves. Had I been a student at Cornell at that time I would have told the rally organizers to fuck off as quickly as possible. Whenever you see an anti-racism rally in such a situation it is taken for granted that the people holding the rally are themselves wholly innocent of racism while branding masses of people somewhere "out there", people they don't even know nor can describe and in this case, the rest of the entire university, as racists. Who in the hell do these people think they are? Check out your own backyard before you go rooting around in other peoples, branding them as insensitive racists. These types of people remind me of characters from "1984" and this type of smug morality leaves me cold. What these rallies tell me is that this is more about how much some people enjoy lording it over other people and taking the moral high ground than any concern on their part about racism. They love having power over people while at the same time they decry people who wield power unfairly. How can such people have such a dim view of people they don't even know? All things being equal, the likelihood that their fellow Americans are any more or less racist than themselves is unlikely. One of the rallies organizers was Justin Davis, President of Black Students United (BSU). How divisive is it to have an organization of students based on race and how welcome would it be if there were such an organization as White Students United? Once again the high handed smugness and monumental difference between the stated aims of these people and what they actually do leaves me breathless. When you belong to an organization such as Black Students United you are realizing a self-fufilling prophecy and you are for sure not promoting diversity, just preaching it to others without yourself practising it. How in the world do you think non-Black students feel about BSU and how much diversity is present within the BSU? It is "1984" with a vengeance.
I love the way liberal campus groups are so self assured that only conservative Republicans and whoever else they disagree with are capable of being caught in a perceptual trap, of hypocrisy, of double standards. It is simply assumed that the breadth of their outlook precludes the possiblility of their being wrong to the point where they are all too ready to preach to others, smug in their certainty that they no longer have to question their own judgement. This is the fascism of the left and it happens all too readily when people stop looking at themselves with a critical eye. We are talking about the very definition of political correctness.
Even from such a distance in space and time from this incident at Cornell, my own judgement tells me that if a minority person stands up at a forum held because of a single questionably racial incident and if this person really wanted to promote racial harmony then they would not have done so by labeling every white person at Cornell as needing special classes because of their lack of racial understanding. How many friends among the white majority did this person think they were making? Did they, by this single demand, increase or decrease racial harmony at Cornell? That a person could make such a singularly racist demand and accusation and be totally oblivious to it points up the danger from people like Rev. Wright and his ilk who are so complacent in their own racial views and so accusatory towards others that you have to question what is going on in their own heads. I understand the totally smug Rev. Wright and many other black Americans like to preach down to white America in the sorry belief that whites are blissfully unaware of their own racist attitudes and so do need preaching to and such things as racial diversity classes. What would be taught in such a class: not to use the term "black hole" in a racially diverse setting?
The common denometer in this seems to be the harm that having race on ones mind does to oneself and to the society around you. People that have race on their minds on a daily basis are out there accusing others of racism, organizing the Black Society of Mayors, Police Chief, Farmers and on and on ad nauseum and generally doing absolutely nothing to promote racial harmony which is their erstwhile goal but what they are attaining is quite to the contrary. I love the way these people create little organizations based on race but then insist on color blindness during the evidently distasteful moments when they have to come in contact with white society and insist all organizations other than theirs do not practice what they themselves do in one of the amazing displays of hypocrisy to be found in the modern world; you want to talk about being tangled in one's own web then go no further. I cannot for the life of me imagine the reaction in the black community if there were organizations of white farmers, white mayors, white police chiefs, etc. It seems as if most of the racism is coming from those who steep themselves in the very idea of race in the first place, all the while pointing the fingers at others.
When I was a student at college I would have detested the idea of having anything to do with any organization that defined itself by skin color. I had 3 black friends at college who for whatever reason decided to start having meetings as illustrators only for blacks. If you are an illustrator why in the world would you do such a thing? It's about painting and drawing. Does it make one comfortable? How does that prepare you for the real world? I dunno, I just didn't get it. As one of the few whites who saw these 3 guys outside of college that was 98% white I didn't feel like it was any kind of a compliment. I knew them for many years thereafter off and on. They always felt best when together as black guys it seemed but I never understood it. It's cutting yourself off from too much other stuff. One of the 3 was from Ghana and I always wondered why the hell he came to America if he was so anxious to hang around black folks.
Choosing your friends by skin tone seems wildly stupid and I don't buy into the idea that there is such a thing as being black in a certain way. A dangerous idea attributing characteristics by skin color since these characteristics could as easily be negative as positive. The idea that a given black American has more in common with an African living in a small village than with a white American is patently stupid.
It seems to me that some white kid at Cornell who may not think of race on any kind of a regular basis is less harmful than people organizing rallies that propose people they don't even know are racially insensitive, organizing themselves based on race and taking it for granted that others share their obssession with race simply because it is so natural to them they figure everyone must share this interest. If it is true that there are people who are racist without being aware of it then it is people like Rev. Wright and his congegration whose own remarks and subsequent cheering support of those remarks are demonstrably racist and the basis of the entire Trinity Church one of racial awareness. Here's the news: the rest of the country does not exist in a state of a hyper awareness and sensitivity to matters of race. We simply don't give a shit one way or another. I and the rest of the country have better things to do than to think about our skin color. I'm not taking classes in racial diversity just because you are "sure" I think like you say I do. I don't.
Again, such delusional obsession reminds me of the Nazi party, who were only too willing to rewrite history in such a way as to maximize the goodness of the German people while making up negative aspects of the Jewish people. Reality had nothing to do with it. The agenda of the Nazis was clear and so too is the agenda of black folks like Wright who constantly harp on such subject matter even though they are clearly not qualified to talk in any meaningful way about history despite the fact that he has been spoken of as a biblical scholar to contend with. Wright is a biblical scholar to contend with in the same way that Cornell West is an intellectual. In what world is Cornell West any kind of an intellectual? Not the one I live in but then I don't restrict myself to listening to 12% of the population.
In connection with this it is no surprise to find that Spike Lee believes Cleopatra was black. You can revise that to say, Spike Lee wants to believe that Cleopatra was black. Ask yourself why? Amongst unenlightened, Spike Lee passes for an intellectual. It does discredit on him and his skewed view of history.
The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of history books that will give you guidance about Hannibal, Cleopatra and the Egyptians for example. You just have to look at them dispassionately, know how to read a map and know what the Sahara desert represents and what the term sub-Saharan implies, where Egyptians lived, and where the slaves that are the ancestors of African-Americans came from. You have to know what place Greek history held in the place of the Roman psyche and about Alexander the Great. Read Plutarch, Tacitus, read history. And when you're going through all those pages of information about the fantastic, brilliant and complex civilizations of the Mediterranean basin, ask yourself why you're reducing all that wonder to the question of skin color? It's stupidity with a capital S.
The intriguing point again however is, why would anyone care? Isn't it a dangerous kind of dialogue to involve oneself in if one wants to battle racism? The whole thing is this, okay, let's say Egyptians were black; I don't have a problem with that. I am not a historian and don't care anyway. The point is however, that many black Americans do. Why? Does that mean black folks can then take credit for the brilliance of Egyptian civilization because of association by skin color? If a black person can take credit for something that black folks did thousands of years ago then doesn't that now leave black folks in a position where they have to take credit for all the black gangs plaguing the U.S. today, not 2 thousand years ago? It's a slippery slope and a double edged sword all rolled into one and is the main reason why talk of skin color makes me so uncomfortable because far from instilling pride or being liberating or fulfilling it is just racism. It just hasn't been thought through enough but it is racism. To me it is staggering how little these racists views are thought through and it amounts to a person pointing a gun at themselves.
Rev. Wright is a racist and every person who was in that church and didn't walk out during the video taped sermons in question is a racist. Anyone who wasn't would have walked out. Ku Klux Klan meetings differ from Wright's sermons only in the color of the people present. In Wright's view and apparently in the view of his congregation, racism is okay as long as it is not pointed at black folks or is used to uplift the self esteem of black America.
Wright is a sad example of the state of Black intellectualism and leadership in the U.S. today. Wright's sermons are pitiful examples of truth and logic. If one can't see the truth of a matter then one will never implement the proper means to solve a problem. If the "logic" of such people as Wright, Farrakhan, Lee, Hill, Jackson, Sharpton Belafonte and Glover and so many, many others are examples of where black americans are looking to to solve the answers to their problems then black Americans are in for a very long road. One thing's for sure: you can't get there from here.
Blaming people for your own shortcomings is not an adult thing to do. Idiots like Wright will go to the media and complain about the lack of opportunity in film and television for example and how black folks are not represented in terms of their numbers in this country. Not a word from Wright or Jesse Jackson about too many blacks in the NBA or NFL. That's because black leadership in this country by and large is not concerned about justice, just justice as it relates to black folks and that is no form of justice at all.
They're nuts to bring up such things in the first place. Maybe black folks like pursuing a career in the NBA more than white folks, maybe white folks like working in film and television more than black folks. It's nuts. It's so nuts I don't even know how to address such a naive view of how the world works. You're never going to see a segment of the population represented in a given field percentage-wise no matter what.
The Larry King show that aired the day after the 2008 elections was a sorry sight to behold. Magic Johnson talked about how he cried and I thought about how many black TV personalities cried over Obama being elected and my own thought was that those tears were in reality a tribute to black America's obssession with race to the tune of 95% of blacks voting for Obama. Magic Johnson said that he was so happy that white America had chosen to set aside skin color to vote for Obama and I was saying to myself, come on Larry King, this is the time to say, too bad black Americans couldn't have done the same thing. But that isn't in the cards. The show featured Michael Moore and Bill Maher, being ungracious towards the Republicans even in victory. I am no Republican but I know fairness when I see it.
Martin Luther King III was on that Larry King show and he said the election of Obama was a monumental moment for America and the world. If that is not a perfect example of ethnocentrism and one's own exaggerated view of the role of black people in this world I don't know what is. I guess he never heard the phrase, 'it's not about you'.
My own version of reality is this: when the day arrives when black Americans are no longer capable of blindly voting to the tune of 95% for a black political candidate and keep it more in the 50-50 range is the day black Americans will be the people they need to be in order to fully participate in the story that is America; that day is obviously a long way off.
But for now, you have a situation where people of color are under-represented in colleges and the first thought of all too many black Americans is that it's basically because white folks have been and are such racist jerks to put it in it's simplest terms. Or people like Jesse Jackson will say that affirmative action levels a playing field that is out of whack because of the lingering effects of generations of racism. Exactly when do those lingering effects end and exactly how do these effects manifest themselves in preventing a black man from attending university? Give me a date for the lingering effects to end and I'll go along with it. Remember those Jews who set themselves free from the world in only 3 years with the whole world either against them or standing on the sidelines, relegated to a cheering section as was the case with the U.S. despite Arab mistruths about U.S. military support in 1948? Needless to say, they needed no Affirmative Action. The whole thing about the lingering effects of racism is in itself racist and one of the greatest boondoggles ever perpetrated on the American people. How in the world it's considered legal to discriminate against white kids born in 1990 is totally beyond my ability to understand.
Down in Brazil the federal government is going down that slippery slope in regards to admission to Federally funded schools. The problem in Brazil is that who is black and not black is a much more complicated issue than in the United States. In Brazil there has been far more intermarriage between people of all colors than in the United States. A light skinned, blonde and blue-eyed young person with a black mother is common enough to present enormous problems of reverse discrimination. It is just a very, very stupid thing to do. Will the Brazilian government eventually hand out ID's with a person's exact racial status as once did the regimes in South Africa? The answer is yes and that is exactly what they have done, given every student who wishes to apply to a Federal University a specific racial status. A very, very slippery slope. You become the thing you don't want to be.
The very concept of affirmative action in itself is the idea that white people are responsible not only for what other white people do but for what other now deceased white people do. How in the world can that be understood and believed unless you in fact believe that skin color does make a difference? The back end of the message that black folks who love affirmative action have not thought through is that affirmative action is a philosophy that states as it basic tenet that skin color makes you responsible for the deeds of other people who share your skin color. People like Jesse Jackson ignore it however because now it works in his favor. Some justice. I dunno - if I were black that is the last philosophy in the world that I would like to see set as a precedent in the Federal court system. Under the basic tenets behind Affirmative Action which is that of guilt by skin color, white folks should be able to ask for reparations for the actions of black gangs throughout the U.S. and white rape victims would easily have a compelling case against Afro-American men.
What do people like Wright and Jackson care as long as it benefits black Americans? Justice would seem to have nothing to do with it and your ability to put something over on someone else the trump card.
In my opinion, the day that black America stands up and vilifies affirmative action is the day when you can say that black Americans have truly arrived; that day also seems a long way off. America is a big country and not everyone can have it all their own way; there has got to be give and take. if your goal is to see that justice is handed out by skin color then you have no interest in justice at all. Affirmative action is wrong and even an idiot can see that.
Should Germans and Poles take a page from the Rev. Wright and demand reparations from the Italians for the Romans enslaving people from Germany and Poland? Are present day Italians even actual decendants of the Romans? At the time of Julius Caesar the Roman army was 65% Roman; 300 years later it was 1%. So much for Wright's sophisticated views of biblical history. When does a right to reparations and affirmative action end? 100 years, 200 years, a thousand years? Should such blame by skin color ever even be considered in the first place? It should not.
Jewish holocaust survivors asked for and eventually received a form of reparations from West Germany but these reparations were asked for in 1945, immediately after World War II and the guilty party's were very much in evidence. The reparations were more in the nature of a timely civil law suit. There were documented Jewish lives, property and land stolen and destroyed only months in the past in some cases and several years at the most. To their credit, some Jews considered the whole concept a form of "bloodmoney" and did not want it. Paying an injured people who are still alive is one thing, paying descendants across generations is a more abstract consideration. One consideration might be 600,000 dead Americans in the Civil War - isn't that reparation enough?
No one can deny or forget 250 years of black slavery in America followed by another century of Jim Crow and some vicious inequality. Where I part ways with many Americans is the concept of psychic damage, a type of generational low self esteem that continues to affect black America even to 2008. To suggest that some black kid in high school cut classes 3 times a week because of institutional racism or events 50 years in the past has a clear attraction for black Americans because it let's them off the hook but to those with no such interests it's just a stupid idea, a con game. Instead of grumbling over injustices committed in the past the answer would seem to be to make the most of the present and to look to the future. What real good will an apology and millions if not billions of dollars do to help black America in any real sense? Certainly the answer cannot be to blame and reward by skin color.
The harm that happened to Africans brought to the New World in chains seems to be looked at by many black Americans as having happened in a vacuum while the rest of the world went on it's merry way. Pick up some history books and the last 2,000 years alone is a non stop compendium of warfare involving the suffering, slavery and deaths of untold millions of people. This type of historical misery was so hot and heavy that only the highlights are taught in school history books. The Mediterranean Basin alone was a non stop series of invasions and counter invasions as different cultures came to have the higher hand, each in their turn.
During this 2,000 years and for untold centuries before that, slavery was endemic, recognizing no skin color. Realizing that slavery was wrong is a relatively recent development for this world we live in. What is there to do now however, bring litigation against the Roman Senate? Would it do any good to exume the bodies of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace and hang them in effigy? Should the present day Turkish government be taken to task for the muslim Ottoman Turks stealing white Christian children in the Balkans and forcing them to serve in the Jannissaries for a few hundred years? What about cultures who did similar things but have escaped attention because of the backwater they occupy in history books? Black Americans complain that their heritage and culture was stolen from them as if this never happened to anyone else when in fact whole cultures were uprooted and destroyed on a regular basis in history. That sure as hell doesn't make it more palatable to black Americans but to act as if it never happened to anyone else is misleading.
Do most people even know about Norman Sicily, Frankish Greece, the Catalan Company, the revenge of the Fatimid Caliph on present day Tunisia in 1052 and hundreds of other now forgotten erstwhile empire builders? It went on and on and on ad nauseum, terrible events obscured only by the even more terrible events of that age. What happened to Africans brought to the New World to serve in slavery was a horrendous crime, there is no doubt about that, but it was part of a historical current of endemic warfare, slavery and misery and not an unusual or seminal event in world history in terms of man's inhumanity to man. The misery of African slavery continues to ring down through the years like a stricken bell but so do all the events of which I write and they cannot be undone. In fact, the reality that blacks are enslaving tens of thousands of other blacks in Africa in 2008 speaks to the truth of which I write.
Carthage is gone forever and Istanbul will never be Constantinople again and the 1200 year Byzantine Empire is a dream made of smoke. Mexico City will never again be Tenochtitlan, brilliant capital of a proud and aggressive Aztec Empire. The ruins of Ephesus whisper to themselves at dusk of visions of forgotten glory. Achaemenian kings who once proudly strode through the palaces of Persepolis now have voices that sound exactly like sand blown against itself across the desert, as distant as the lights in the sky at night from the now empty cradle of our civilization. Frankish helmets that once shone and served the Kings of Jerusalem under the bright sun of Outremer rusted away into blood colored stains centuries ago.
Forgotten and destroyed civilizations infuse the very ground we walk on with their blood and ruins and it is our legacy as human beings simply because it is so and no culture snuffed out is truly any more important than another except to their own ghosts that one can hear when the wind shakes tree leaves at night. They will never again return and it can not be undone. We can only affect the future.
Unfortunately some people don't see it that way, lost in dreams of themselves and their own importance and exaggerated suffering in terms of where the spotlight falls on world history's stage. For people like Jesse Jackson and his ilk who at once decry European ethnocentrism while themselves seeming to look at every act in the world through the eyes of black people rather that just people, it will go on and on forever. In listening to many black leaders in America it seems easy to believe that the imagined debt the rest of the world owes black people will never be paid. If you believe you are a victim then you will be a victim and if you believe you were the only victim then you will believe that as well.
Belief and belief patterns can be very powerful. When I used to travel around the world some years ago on backpacking trips that lasted months at a time I had friends who would frequently comment on how lucky I was or how they would like to do the same. Luck had nothing to do with it; deciding to do it did. When I would start listing ways in which my friends could do the same type of travel some few would often shoot down my ideas as fast as I could bring them up. They would cite reasons why they could not travel as I did one by one and that was where they lost the game - right there. Without even consciously thinking about it my friends were preventing themselves from going on long and wonderful travels by thinking about how they could not do it instead of concentrating on how they could do it and it is as simple as that. The way one thinks about the world is a very powerful influence on how you interact with that world and there is the positive and there is the negative. If you think you cannot accomplish a thing then you probably will not accomplish it. One has to find ways to do a thing, not ways in which to not do a thing; this is self defeating, a losing proposition. When you dream, you have to dream hard and well.
There is a way out of the perceptual trap of which I write and in fact, black Americans who feel so very slighted now have a brilliant opportunity to start looking at themselves as citizens of the world, inheritors of a legacy we all share in it's sorrow and glory, rather than diminishing themselves by narrowly defining themselves first and foremost by skin color. Why worry about Hannibal, Cleopatra or the Egyptian pyramid builders being black when in fact the legacy of black people the world over is the legacy of Tikal, Borobudur and Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, the Parthenon and the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, all of which black folks can take credit for as part of their legacy as human beings.
Why limit oneself to poets who have dark skin but with 5 fingers when you also own Ozymandius, Sita and Uncle Einar? Why have only Nelson Mandela, Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King when you can pick from Saladin, Plato and Jaguar Paw. Why dream only of Africa when you can dream of Agung, which is the navel of the world, Sugarloaf and the harbor of Valetta at dusk?
Instead it's "Damn the United States" for it's once and future oppression of black people. Does that quote sound familiar? It's not Rev. Wright, it's a quote from "The Man Without a Country" and eerily and appropriately similar to Wright's statement that perhaps God himself should damn the United States.
What would be truly appropriate in my opinion was if Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Lauryn Hill, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Farakhan and others who in their rhetoric denounce this country would be made to leave America just as was the case in the imagined scenario in "The Man Without A Country". Of course I would never want to live in a country where a person couldn't speak their mind about their own government. The scenario of "The Man Without A Country" is just a wish. No one wants such things to actually happen but it represents what the author hoped for. An only to be imagined place where people who shunned opportunity in place of endless grumbling and who didn't realize how good they had it were made to pay for their lack of perception and their small mindedness as well as their lack of grace toward other people they shared their country with. Of course the author, Edward Everett Hale, had more of a specific agenda than wish fulfillment but that is at the heart of it. Who wouldn't like, in their imagination, to see an unfair boss break his leg or a bully get beat up; a wish fulfillment wherein people who spit on their own society are made to see how good they actually have it.
In this context I can imagine a rewriting of "A Christmas Carol" where, instead of Scrooge it is black leaders in the United States of the 21st century who bitterly complain about life in America who are taken in hand by the ghosts of the future and past to witness true oppression; walked through Nazi death camps, or made to ride on those slave ships that loom so large in their collective memory, and then walked through a future that shows what could happen when one throws away opportunity that is here today but maybe not tomorrow, doesn't seize the day, make the best of things and realize how good things are in the 21st century in America. Even as I write this, in Guatemala City people are digging through mountains of garbage to survive, in Indonesia men climb volcanos 5 days a week in back breaking labor to carry down chunks of sulpher for pennies and they don't even necessarily consider themselves targeted for oppression. I have seen this and much more of the same with my own eyes. Far from being an oppressed minority in the United States in 2008, black Americans are, relatively speaking, living a life full of opportunity that millions of people around the world dream of living. No Afro-American alive today has been through slavery and they have no right to behave on a day to day basis as if they have, just as I have no right to behave as if I've just come back from being a slave in a Roman galley.
When one thinks of women and children digging through heaps of garbage in many places around the world and contrasts that reality with millionaires like Kanye West, Louis Farrakhan and Danny Glover and their hateful rhetoric the gulf is bewilderingly wide and deep. The stark fact is that some people simply don't know when they have it good and it even sounds as if they don't want to.
In regards to "The Man Without A Country", it wouldn't be hard to imagine Rev. Wright, Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover and all their colleagues who hate America so much forced to live with Moamar Gaddafi for the rest of their lives; it would be hard to argue that justice was not being served.
It makes me think again of that press conference on C-Span, with Darfur the subject that had Farakhan and Lauryn Hill and others in a group talking about America and it was every bit as delusional and as full of hate as Wright's sermons; that press conference on the killings in Darfur was shameful to watch and I was so embarrassed for them that I squirmed in my seat.
No white person could get away with a tenth of what people like Farrakhan, Rev. Wright, Kanye West, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and so many other black celebrities do and survive publicly. Jesse Jackson's reference to New York City as "hymietown is something that no white polictician who referred to Atlanta as "niggertown" could ever survive for one second. The double standard is so great that I would think it inconceivable if I didn't see and hear it for myself. Don Imus, who I don't like anyway because I regard him as an untalented idiot, was booted off the air for a remark that though distasteful, was done in a comic context and did not seem to represent a coherent philosophy that was anti-black as do the anti-white remarks of too many black leaders in this country. Naturally, people like Sharpton ascribed the remark by Imus as indeed representing a coherent anti-black sentiment and who knows, maybe it was. But how could Sharpton know that? The answer is that Sharpton wanted to "know" that. When it comes to Rev. Wright, Sharpton, who wanted Don Imus fired said he actually supported Rev. Wright in an incredible display of utter hypocrisy and favoritism by skin color. I don't imagine Sharpton was equally critical of Obama's remarks about rural Pennsylvanians.
Katt Williams in his hilarious HBO comedy special to an almost entirely black audience uses the word nigger about a hundred times as well as "ho", "bitches" and the whole gamut. I don't think anyone's taking that special off the air anytime soon. What magic immunity does Williams have that Imus does not? If Imus' mother was black but he still looked white would that have made a difference? Would Imus suddenly have "rights". The logic behind his firing was nuts. Don't look for Katt Williams to stand up for Imus anytime soon although this would not be as crazy as it sounds. The reason; black Americans have all rights reserved when it comes to the "N" word and when you get down to it it was for this single reason more than any other that Imus was fired. Otherwise one could argue it would be one professional comedian sticking up for another and Imus' crime would be reduced to one of unfunniness. Just because Katt Williams is black does not make it obvious to me that he is not speaking a language of racism although couched in comedic terms and the same is true for Imus. When you look at it from a all rights reserved perspective the whole incident seems truely nuts.
Black Americans seem hopelessly hamstrung by their own rhetoric which is the tangled end to the path that all racism ends at. Imagine such an innocent thing as "White Christmas", a 1944 Bing Crosby song, being accused of advancing a white cultural perspective. First off let tell you, the song is about snow and yes, snow is white. Unfortunately so in the case of some black Americans I guess. Mohammed Ali , in a 1960's documentary film mentions the connotations of "White Christmas" as being disparaging to black people in some way comprehensible to only people like himself, Malcolm X, Spike Lee, etc. Look for Ali's appearences on The Mike Douglas Show in the 1970's for some lamentable generalizations about white society.
But here's how nuts it gotten: can you imagine a black person afraid to wish out loud in a sentence for snow on the ground for Christmas? Yes, a sentence where they actually say the words, "It would be nice to have a white Christmas". Can you imagine living in such a perceptual hell? Let me tell you this, if even the elements are against black folks then there is some kind of trouble ahead for Black America. George Orwell really has nothing to compare to this one; he keeps spinning and spinning.
It's nuts and that's all I can keep saying. In the film "Malcolm X", directed by Spike Lee, there is a moment where Malcolm X is in prison and is introduced to an idea that changes his life; an idea of a semantic bias that black folks have been subjected to in the way of how the words black and dark have come to have such negative connotations. In the film, this moment is considered an epiphany, an opening of the eyes, a profound moment when one tears away the layers of pseudo-reality to delve into what is real. Really, it was the exact opposite of that. I don't want my black hair growing white but that doesn't fit into an agenda so why mention it as a counter-weight.
An incident occurred during the 2nd week of July, 2008 during a county commissioners meeting outside of Dallas, TX that comes close to summing up not only the crux of much of this essay but also the real trouble that can come for semantically hypersensitive black Americans. During the meeting I refer to, a white commissioner, Kenneth Mayfield, mentioned that some paperwork or data had been lost, saying, "It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole". County Commissioner Wiley Price, a black man, immediately objected and mentioned a "white hole" and later, Judge Thomas Jones, also black, asked for an apology from Mayfield, citing that the term "black hole" was not an appropriate term to be used at a table of racial diversity. Mayfield naturally declined. Price later went on to angrily point out the implied insult to black people in the terms, "angel food" cake which is white, and "devil's food" cake, which is black. Shades of Spike Lee. You'd think Price would be emminently familiar with black holes since you'd need an incredibly powerful telescope to ferret out an insult to black people in any use of the term "black hole".
It's tough to figure out what to say about this one but it's certainly hard to believe that Jones is a judge. Even biting my tongue doesn't allow me to fail to point out that we are talking about unfathomable depths of ignorance and oversensitivity; seeing insults where there are none. Monumental stupidity is another term that comes to mind. If it had been one black guy that would have been one thing but sadly, and again, in the context of what much of this essay is about, it was no surprise that 2 out of 2 black men at the same table were on the same page on this matter. To say that the paperwork had been lost in a "singularity" or "frozen star" which is what Russian scientists call the "B" hole word, may have been more appropriate and in the future it might be better to refer to "devil's food" cake as "event horizon" cake. In the future it will also be proscribed in mixed company to use the terms "black Friday, "dark side of the moon", "red wine", "green with envy", "red-faced", "grey matter", "white dwarf", and a whole host of racially volatile terms intended to humiliate black Americans. Glow in the dark" could be changed to "Not glow in the photons". George Orwell is spinning in his grave faster than a neutron star without a doubt which is definitely double plus ungood. Hard to believe that being "scared of the dark" is such a loaded term in certain circles. A perceptual trap? There is no doubt about it. It's a regular "black hole of Calcutta". How do you get out? You just have to join the party; the "leave your skin color at the door" party.
White lies, cowboy heros and villains with white horses and black hats has all the fascination of codes embedded in the bible that predict future events and all the stupidity that come with it. Hard to believe that people have written entire books about the subject, stating that medieval Europe purposefully promoted the use of negative connotations in terms relating to darkness because of dark-skinned peoples. The fact is that such terms evolved in an entirely natural way devoid of any context to race. It is natural for people to be afraid of the dark and linking this to race is the height of stupidity. In China the color white is associated with death and every culture has it's own symbolism in regard to colors. For Afro-Americans to think of the entire history of the world as having some weird fascination with humiliating black folks in word, thought and deed verges on paranoia. Once again, the phrase, "it's not about you" is one that should be taken to heart in this matter.
The terms of which I speak are in fact racially charged in no way whatsoever; no more than "The whole nine yards", "A stitch in time..." or being at "Sixes and Sevens" is meant to insult numerologists in some fashion. It is simply that for a person obssessed with race these terms are very, very shiny objects that are hard to resist and it is nothing more than that.
For black folks to take onto themselves the idea that because, in Western culture, the idea of dark or black is generally associated with negatives thoughts and the color white that of positive thoughts is a tempting but entirely foolhardy notion in a racial context. The color white has an entirely different meaning in China than in the West. White wedding dresses and Black Plagues have nothing whatsoever to do with black people and never have. I can hardly stress the idiocy of thinking that so many people in the world for hundreds and hundreds of years have had dark skinned folks on their mind. It's no wonder that black people in America think everyone is a racist if this kind of linkage is associated with wholly innocent terms that have nothing to do with race. Jane Hill's book, "The Everyday Language of White Racism" is published by Blackwell Publishing. Why doesn't Hill write an essay about that shiny nickel? Conspiracy? Code? From what I've read about Hill's book which includes the terrors of mock-Spanish the "Blackwell Code" would be about as deep.
Ms. Hill also relates the following: "Administrators at Charter Oak High School in Covina are investigating how a student on the yearbook staff was able to get fake names for Black Student Union members, including “Tay Tay Shaniqua,” “Crisphy Nanos” and “Laquan White,” into the published yearbook." Let's lighten up a little; why start reacting like it's "Mein Kampf"? Even black stand-up comics make fun of the propensity in recent years of black folks to give unusual names to their children, evidently in some Malcom X-like response to distance themselves from white culture and embrace a closer tie to their African origins. No one has any real problem with this but I can say this: if a group of Polish-German Americans suddenly and conspicuously started naming their kids Archibald, Ervin and Brunhild and wearing lederhosen they would naturally take a certain amount of ribbing and could be said in that sense to be bringing it on themselves. If you want to blend in then blend in, if not, then be prepared to have fun poked at you. Just because politically correct morons in the media and educational system are hyper-sensitizing such issues doesn't mean we have to lap it up with a spoon. Life isn't a concentration camp and it's important to defuse these situations by having a certain amount of humor about it although unfortunately, the parents of the Black Student Union members in question at Covina High wanted punishments meted out. Perhaps being put in eternal orbit in the event horizon of a black hole would have been an appropriate punishment. My father's name and my middle name is Ervin and my uncle's name is Archibald although they didn't wear the lederhosen. I took a bit of ribbing for Ervin but so what; it hardly scarred me? It didn't affect my view of myself as a human being rather than a pollack.
Thicker skin, a more self deprecating sense of humor about oneself together with some common sense is what is needed here.
And now for the latest social crisis: mock-Spanish. Here is what a comiserating Cecelia Cutler said in regard to the above Jane Hill's views of mock-Spanish: "Jane Hill’s discussion of “Mock Spanish” or the purposeful misuse of Spanish (such as when Arnold Schwarzenegger says “No problemo” in the film “Terminator”) is a negative example of language crossing. “No problemo” not only reflects incorrect gender marking on the noun (it should be “problema”) but also is not an expression that native Spanish speakers would use. Hill claims that Anglos in the Southwest and California use Mock Spanish as a racist strategy to distance themselves from Latinos." Oh my God, not incorrect gender marking! Noooo! Christ, these people would be fun at a party. If I was Ms. Hill I would be more concerned with distancing myself from such a self-serving, uninsightful and completely idiotic read of human nature. Do you know anyone outside mentally challenged groups like the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis who ever had a "racial strategy"? Does Ms. Hill believe we are so stupid that we have racial strategies of which we are completely unaware? Naturally Ms. Hill suffers from no such unawareness. I know believing in unconscious racial strategies enables people to more easily see others as racist but give people a little credit. Can you say mock-Spanish Inquisition? How about rhetorical hallucinations? I speak Spanish and Portugese and have been to Mexico 5 times, Guatemala 7 times and Brazil 8 times (Wait, it's "Brasil"!) and "No problema" certainly is a term Latinos use. How about an essay on whether "Que Pasa" or "Que Paso" is the truly correct way to say, "What's Up" or "What's Happening", together with the psychic onslaught on Latinos due to unruly Americans vulgar ignorance as to the niceties of the Spanish language? One wonders whether Ms. Cutler and Ms. Hill ever leave the house, or should I say Plato's house?
What I love about commentators like Ms. Hill and Rev. Wright, including even popular films, is that white people in matters of race are frequently depicted as actually semi-conscious dullard white supremacists, unaware even of their own moral bankruptcy who conquered the world by some kind of dumb luck while non-whites are depicted as a naturally moral and spiritual people who know what is "really" going on. That's why you have so many white suburban kids hopping on the hip-hop bandwagon. That way, kids can turn away from their robot-like parents and glean the real truths in this world. That's why blues musicians can give you that nod and a wink I guess, while President Bush is depicted as semi-retarded. How's that for a stereotype? How's this for another: Whoopi Goldberg in the 2 "Sister Act" films potrayed with her natural rythym, soul and care free love of life showing the well meaning but incredibly square white nuns how to "let loose"? I guess that shows Tarzan a thing or two about what's really going on. It's like it was Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts who were actually in Apollo 11 who bumbled their way to that 1st moon landing, while a monkey they brought along accidentally scribbled out "the uncertainty principle" so that it was all circuits go. I just love that. I wonder if Massai tribesmen have measurably more soul and natural compassion than Cecil Rhodes? It could be a scientific formula: melanin=soul squared. Lack of melanin could measure one's cruelty factor.
It's all so hilariously stupid. People who claim to be against racism the most but who steep themselves in that very thing does not inspire confidence.
It is the views of people like Hill and Cutler which are creating problemos and not the types of people of which they write who apparently live in a much more fun loving world than the cob webby intellectual mock-dungeons Hill and Cutler occupy wherein people see cultural onslaughts in the most innocent remarks by those bad, evil white people with their miserable Euro-centrist white hats and black holes not to mention their conspicuous lack of melanin.
This is the latest of many attempts to hi-jack the English language and one that will fail miserably because of the miserable level of intelligence behind the idea of not using such terms as "black sheep" because of it's negative conotation. How coloquialisms that use a term for dark or black have been taken as having something to do with negros is pretty sad and would be something I wouldn't have believed any adult capable of had the idea not been so prevalent in recent years within the black community. Black folks aren't actually black any more than white people are white. In writing this essay it is almost impossible to not belabor the obvious so intellectually bankrupt are some of the ideas that come out of the mouths of black leadership and celebrities in the USA not to mention great white anthropologists like Jane Hill.
I heard a black commentator on television in July, '08 in response to this general idea of semantics negatively skewed against black people say that black puppies were sold less than others because there was a fear factor involved, begging the thought that white people are frightened of black people; remember Public Enemy's "Fear of A Black Planet"? Scaaaaary! I found it a wishful thinking type of title. It may have been more accurate to title it "Prof. Griff's Fear of A Jewish Planet". What in the world black puppies have to do with Afro-Americans is something that can only be understood by the monumentally unsophisticated people who spew such nonsense. It also speaks to the character of a person who continually whines about victimization, disrespect and disenfranchisement and draws examples from the color of their own very shadows they are so frightened of rather than any real thoughts on the part of white people; yes, those dark shadows whose very metaphorical invocation some black folks find so disheartening. But that is the whole point from black people who believe in such semantic assaults, that these assaults are unthinkingly woven into the fabric of our thinking and words in such a way that white folks unwittingly subject black people to a constant barrage of insults without having any conscious awareness of the fact. "La, la, nice lady". This twisted attempt to philosophise on a deeper level is in fact what is guilty of having no conscious awareness, no conscious awareness of how utterly stupid the whole idea is.
This is something I regard as the real gospel truth: if you're hanging with bated breath on the epiphanies of Spike Lee, the sociological statements of Flavor Flav, the sorry tirades of Jim Cone and Rev. Wright or are bewildered because that Texas county commissioner wouldn't apologize for using the term "black hole" at a racially mixed table then you are in a lot of trouble. Don't take my word for it but keep it in the back of your mind because it may just end up explaining an awful lot of things.
A summer 2008 study sponsored by media company Radio One stated that 72% of Afro-Americans feel it is important to teach their children to deal with predjudice. Gee, thanks. I personally believe this attitude is as out of whack with the realities of present day America as are the sermons of Rev. Wright and this gets to the heart of the problem of what I felt about the Trinity Church congregation cheering on Wright's inane comments about white society and America in general even before I heard about the Radio One study; namely that this Trinity congregation is apparently going home and teaching their children along lines that are entirely in stride with Wright's views. Children who grow up feeling disenfranchised from their own country are not going to have the motivation to do well at school or the values needed to not prey on their own community in a criminal manner. I always felt that this was the difference between the lack of looting one sees in the aftermath of past hurricanes in Florida or this summer's horrendous floods in the midwest in contrast to the looting one did see in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Simply put, it seemed to me that the looters in New Orleans just didn't feel they had a stake in the community. Why not loot it? Why not loot South Central L.A. for Rodney King? Why not loot Beverly Hills for O.J. Simpson getting away with murder? Oh, sorry - that one never happened.
This type of thinking on the part of black folks whom associate themselves with metaphorical darkness is apparently much more on the minds of black folks than any white person I have ever met. A black hole is indeed an appropriate term in regards to this issue of unconscious semantic assaults against black people but not in the way adherents of the idea may think. Rather the appropriate metaphor is that a black hole is an entity from which no light can escape and there is certainly no metaphorical light or merit to the whole notion. The response to the meandering reasoning behind not using the term "black hole" in racially mixed company or the strange tirades of Jim Cone or Rev. Wright is that the overwhelming majority of people are saying to themselves, "Who are these idiots?"
It is not hard to think that anyone who believes such nonsense is in real trouble. This notion of colloquial terms ever being used in a semantic sense in a way that casts black people in a bad light either intentionally or in a weird monumental conspiracy of white culture is absurd. Such childish "revelations" as appear in "Malcolm X" are not an epiphany but a closing of the eyes; it's taking the wrong path and it will lead to damage to any person who subscribes to such idiocy. Every time I have seen that aforementioned scene in Malcolm X I have shivered with embarrassment for Spike Lee and the epiphanies of the black power movement. How can one so willingly and so publicly show to the whole world how little you understand? Do these people understand how truly unsophisticated their ideas are? How many sleepless nights does Spike Lee spend pondering the term "film noir"? He could have a breakdown on that one.
What is sad is that anyone would ever have to even sit down and explain why the whole idea of a world that has collectively ganged up on black people semantically or otherwise is a less than compelling idea? "It's not about you.", is a phrase that should be taken to heart here yet again. It's like telling a five year old why you shouldn't put your hand in fire or telling a hip hop artist why the sound a record makes being spun backwards isn't actually all that fascinating. It is very reminiscent of rhetoric coming out of the middle east wherein distressed muslims seem convinced the entire world seeks to humiliate them. I would reference this type of feeling with something my father once said to me: "You would be surprised at how little people think of you." The world doesn't have an agenda regarding muslims one way or the other nor black people for that matter. Most people just want to live in peace and they will have a good chance to do so if they don't have massively unreal expectations from the world in which they live. The "Let's Hate Black People" secret convention held in a subterranean cavern deep beneath Salt Lake City every 4 years is likewise a myth. Such a thing could never happen - there's a giant water table there.
Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Spike Lee, Lauryn Hill, Danny Glover, Kanye West and Harry Belafonte are die hard racists who firmly believe that they are in fact the exact opposite. Look at, for example the way that any writer or poet they quote is always black; is this simply a coincidence? How would you like to be in that fix yourself? How would you like to be reduced to literature by skin color? I'm a big fan of science fiction and I don't give two shits on about the skin color of the writer, rather, and here's a radical idea, I'm looking for quality. Unfortunately these people think they are doing black folks a big favor but they are in fact doing irreparable harm to themselves and especially a young and therefore impressionable black America. To put it simply, such people are mad and going down their path will lead others to madness. Harry Belafonte is certifiable but when you listen to him expound on any subject he comes off as if he thinks he is the grand old man of world class intellectualism.
What young black Americans have for leaders they look up to is dragging them into a bleak and uncompromising future; after all, John Wayne's not their hero anymore and so hip hop has seen to it that if it's white it is not to be aspired to. A shallow attitude towards values that after all have no skin color. Identify a value with white and it is to be shunted to the side of the road. This creates a future where young blacks who take this seriously will not be able to compete and all the blaming and all the affirmative action in the world will not help. For people who say that Hip Hop has no negative influence and simply reflects the community one should look at the fact that the vast majority of Hip Hop fans are in the 12 to 18 age range. These young fans are not the ones doing the influencing but rather are the influenced and Hip Hop is massively popular. Hip Hop does not celebrate a 9 to 5 job or literature, it does not celebrate high school diplomas or marriage. This is not to say that pop music since 1960 has done so but it certainly has never been at such a low point in terms of a coherent and cogent negative philosophy. There was plenty of other rock and roll to offset the dismal lyrics of Black Sabbath or Judas Priest and many other bands and in any event this type of music was looked at as much as a type of fantasy as otherwise, as inaccessable as the events in a science fiction story. In the 60's it was "Turn on, tune in and drop out". In Hip Hop it is just drop out and the fantasy it sells is all too easily mistaken for real life.
The response to the inevitable outcome is at once surprising and expected: blame. One can not look at drug use in one's community and dismiss it as the U.S. government importing the drugs to harm the black community. You may as well blame aliens. You have reality TV showing Snoop Dog smoking a joint in the back of a limo while obviously higher than hell. Unless these Hip Hop artists are working for the CIA you're going to have to do better than envisioning Air America importing blunts and cocaine.
You cannot regard the black prison population as political prisoners. Here is a rather radical and some will say, an overly pragmatic thought. The reason that the percentage of black men in the NBA is so high compared to the racial demographic in the U.S. is that black men are more enthusiastic about basketball than white men. The reason that the black population behind bars does not reflect that same demographic is that the black population is more enthusiastic about committing crimes than the white population. When one starts to put a spin on this in favor of black people what you end up with is a lot of excuses and little problem solving. A lot of blacks in prison start to actually believe that the number one reason they're in prison is because they're black. Good lord. This is why the rhetoric of men like Rev. Wright, Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are hurting blacks in America and shows how these same excuses demonstrate how the majority of black America is simply in a state of denial egged on by white apologists and black demagogues. This is a harsh reality to swallow but it is reality and what is at stake if this reality is ignored is the very future of black America. If Jesse Jackson wants to cut the nuts off of someone it should be the drug dealers operating right out in the open in the streets of every city of any size in this entire country and involving 10 and 12 year olds in the mix, all the while apparently blaming their presence on those street corners on the CIA.
Michael Eric Dyson, a University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and an author of 16 books had an 7/24/08 online article concurrent with CNN's multi part special "Black In America". Dyson describes the CNN special as "searing" when in fact the special was a less than compelling argument for racism in present day America. Dyson disagrees with my view of blacks in prison. In his CNN online article Dyson writes: "The temptation is to believe that individual choice alone accounts for such differences in destiny. Successful black family members did their work and played by the rules; suffering family members ran afoul of the law and were justly locked away. Of course, that is true in many cases, but in far too many cases, it's not the entire truth. There is a vicious prison system that hungers for young black and brown bodies. The more young black and brown folk are thrown in jail, the more cells are built, and the more money made. It has been well documented that we spend far more money on penitentiaries than university education for poor black and brown males. During the 1980s and 1990s, state spending for corrections grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education."
In speaking of his incarcerated brother Everett Dyson writes:
"Everett certainly made self-destructive, choices: He sold drugs and admitted he was a pariah to his community. But he is innocent of the charge of murder for which he is serving a life sentence in Michigan.And he is not alone. There are thousands of black men who are rotting in jail cells who have done nothing to merit incarceration. And even when they get in trouble, a great number of black men go to prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Often, crippling racial profiling and suspicion of black men put them on a path to prison, while white males who commit similar offenses are arrested and convicted in far smaller numbers."
I think Dyson's writing's largely speak for themselves but I can't help but comment on his saying that there are thousands of black men behind bars for reasons without merit. It seems a foolish thing to say on the face of it as well as saying that the U.S. prison system "hungers for black and brown bodies" for profit. It is no surprise that Dyson is down on America if he believes such fantasies which are themselves without merit. Even more fantastic, Dyson goes on to suggest that the reason for his success and his brother Everett's failure is because Dyson is light-skinned and his brother dark-skinned. Dyson also says: "Everett is a highly intelligent young man who made grievous errors in his life, but none that deserve the fate he presently suffers." , referring to his brother being in prison for a crime he did not commit. But that is exactly the point of self responsibility. His brother led a life of crime and is in prison for those choices. That fact that Dyson's brother Everett may not have committed the final crime for which he is now in prison, while lamentable, is the result of a life style choice and not institutional racism that plucked his strait and narrow brother out of his life to feed the prison system another black body. And, in the closing words for CNN's telecast that night, a voice over mentions the genius of blacks Americans being their ability to transform things that are meant to harm them into a thing that can uplift them. The fact is that America is doing nothing to black Americans that is meant to harm them. This hostility of white Americans and it's institutions against black Americans is taken for granted in some circles of black America but is a perception not based in fact in 2008 and is an attitude that does more to perpetuate failure and boost egos than anything else. His article, far from stating anything that could help black America, is simply a series of excuses that places the main blame exactly where it does the least good and, in the long run, hurts the very people of color for which Dyson has such special compassion. In passing I would like to say that I have no such "special" compassions.
Soledad O'brien's special, described by CNN itself as "groundbreaking", seems adept at buying into excuses and unreasoning fear than anything else and is a long way from being any kind of indictment of white America and it's institutions. The special shows an Arkansas District Attorney who suggests that the legal system in which he works is unfair to blacks but the most compelling thing he can come up with to illustrate this is a suspect turning to him and saying that drugs were planted on him by the police. Another young man admits to assaulting a police officer, striking him in the head, but is mystified by him being charged with a crime because of mitigating circumstances. White or black, you hit a policman and you will have problems. It should be noted that this young man was allowed to go to treatment rather than do time. Again, a less than compelling argument for institutional racism. D.L. Hughley's segment consists of the time his son was sent on an errand to a jewelry store that had unfortunately just been robbed by some black men. Is this circumstance an example of paranoia against blacks in a situation where that "unreasoning" paranoia had just been brought to reality? Should the people at that jewelry store been more aware of how the fact that they had just been robbed by blacks was a mere coincidence, or was it a reflection of life in the jewelry business? Hughley states that when it comes to the police that skin color is always part of the equation, suggesting that police in general are corrupt racists. I think crime statistics and the police themselves would portray a slightly different view. If Hughley wants to blame someone for circumstances such as this he has plenty of criminals to blame rather than cops. Political correctness says that skin color does not and should not enter into a person's perception of crime but almost anyone would rather encounter a group of Norwegian tourists in a dark alley than a group of young black men in gang colors.
In the introduction to one of the "Black In America" segments a black man states that in the black community the police are more "feared than revered". This is a revealing statement but not in the way the speaker meant it because in reality only criminals and those who have criminals in their lives fear the police. The idea that police officers across the United States are virtually stalking black Americans just to make their lives miserable is one that has credibility in the black community in America and many in the media also seem to take it for granted. A relative handful of high profile stories in the media do not constitute truth. The truth is that black Americans prey and terrorize on people within and without their own community to a degree that is simply not reported as such, but rather as individual and isolated incidents, devoid of racial connotations, although the lack of such connotations equably used in contrast to the mythology of the police as an occupying army in black American communities is very revealing.
This is emphatically not a permissible and politically correct view but it is a reflection of reality as I see it. And this reality, in my view, is a more cogent reality than are the views of Dyson and the hungry maws of the United States prison system which is the exact same type of stereotyping black people loath,. Both views are based on a similar type of perception but which has more merit? Whatever the answer one cannot condemn stereotypes simply for being stereotypes when it comes to an individuals perceptions because this type of thing falls on both sides of the fence when it comes to the issues in this essay. Generalities can be true as far as they go and most adults understand what that means. Obviously one can say, as a generality, that young black men have little interest in hockey; the question is one of how far and in what circumstances one chooses to perpetuate such an argument. In the right circumstances it is absolutely valid and in unappropriate circumstances can be equally invalid. My argument is that perpetuating the urban myths that police officers unfairly target blacks is not valid and those same police officers own point of view that blacks are more likely in a given situation to be a source of interest for those police is valid, 7 times as likely according to Dept of Justice statistics and this is a reality that cops have to deal with. Having this the other way around may make a lot of black folks feel better but if I am correct, then it also leaves black folks in a state of denial from which there is no escape to a better place. Perception is a very, very important element in ones life. Urban myths have a great power of their own.
The idea that stereotypes have no basis in reality is an argument popular in the black community because it seemingly takes the onus off of black criminals and places it on white America. At the same time, one finds this type of stereotyping of white America rampant in the writings and speech of Rev. Wright, Jim Cone, Spike Lee, Cornell West and on and on. When one sees a group of Asians with cameras around their necks and craning their necks looking at everything than it's a pretty good bet they're Japanese tourists. When it comes to a point of law this type of stereotyping of course has no merit, but when it comes to an individual's perception of and response to their own reality it is completely real. The saying, "If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck...", is a legitimate tool for people to use to make judgements in everyday life though it should admittedly be used with caution.
While it seems as if this essay is down on black folks this is not the case at all. Rather, it is a defense against hypocrisy and apologists both black and white who are throwing a smokescreen of political correctness and excuses that obscures and obfuscates the problems affecting black Americans. This essay recognizes the right and potential of black America to stand up and be counted as a people as capable of being decent and productive as any other American citizens. Unfortunately, the amount of baggage coming from a history of first slavery and then Jim Crow must be dealt with but it must be dealt with correctly. This paragraph is the purest essence of the thrust of this essay than any other I can give.
Black Americans have got to stop talking about White Supremacy, profiling police officers and affirmative action which only delays solving the problems of black Americas. If I had a broken leg and was left with only one choice between taking a pain killer or having the leg set with a great deal of pain my choice would be clear. I liken this analogy to the situation black America finds itself in in regard to solving the many and varied problems afflicting blacks today. A pain killer, which is Jesse Jackson and Rev. Wright, makes one feel good but you still have a broken leg.
You cannot look at a lack of interest in education among young black folks in America today as the fault of decades of racism because it isn't so; life simply doesn't work like that. If there is a generational hangover involved then it isn't white culture handing it down but parents, endlessly complaining hip hop artists and black so-called leaders who appear in the media. It takes a two person household, a mother and a father, to financially afford to put their children through college no matter who you are but if black Americans are born out of wedlock how is this to take place?
You can not look at the high incidence of crime among black folks and blame it on an inability to involve black folks in the work place on the part of whites or the government. It is no one's responsibility to make a good life for yourself but yourself and your family. In the last 35 years black unemployment has stayed virtually the same, belying the idea of any real economic as opposed to social, progress for Afro-Americans in the United States yet positive change has undeniably happened. Who is to blame/credit for this?
Are we to believe that if black Americans were suddenly put in an environment like Africa where all stigma of being black was totally removed and with no white people to blame their ills on that black folks would suddenly start building astronomical observatories and architectural schools, or would centuries of oppression still continue to show it's onerous effect? With no white people to blame if things went to hell, black people could at least stand or fall on their own merits. Unfortunately, here in the reality of America, the spectre of white racism is not allowing black Americans to stand or fall on merit but to stagger towards an uncertain future totally confused by non-existant or marginal issues.
It seems to be taken on faith by black Americans that to be black in America is to already have one strike against you. I know what this could be like. One time I was playing in a softball game and hadn't in years. In the meantime the rules had been changed so that it was 2 strikes and you were out so as to speed up the game; the problem was that no one had bothered to tell me. So, I struck out in a situation where I was confident I had one more pitch coming. It was surprising and disheartening. The question is whether black folks truly have a strike against them in the first place. To me, such perceptions largely exist in ones mind and can be a truly self-fulfilling prophecy.
The problem among American black leadership is that they are pointing fingers in entirely the wrong direction and in so doing guaranteeing that the problems that black America faces will never be solved. This is a huge gamble with overtones of financial cynical reward on the part of black leadership in American for the simple fact that ones affairs can never be put right if one searches for solutions in entirely the wrong direction. Staking the future of over 30 million Americans on the idea that blacks will never fulfill themselves until white America turns from it's evil ways is an argument that is less than compelling. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and many other black leaders make their substantial livings entirely off of the idea that black Americans are oppressed; those leaders have no credibility. Nowadays, they come out of the woodwork like ambulance chasers at the slightest hint of disrespect towards the black community and doing their very best to continue to brand America as a racist country all the while portraying black Americans as innocent and powerless bystanders to the parade of their own lives.
Far too many young black Americans are putting an emphasis on entirely the wrong things and they will never succeed until there is a sea change. This is the fault of no one but individuals. In the end it is the individual who makes a difference in their own lives; it is an individual who struggles through years of education and discipline to become the proverbial "self-made man". When literature starts surpassing "cool" in the black community then you will start to see a positive change. When young blacks start to show the same enthusiasm upon arriving at school as they do upon leaving then you will indeed see a sea change. No community is this world can compete when book learning takes a back seat to gold 3 finger knuckle rings. This idea is so important that a love of books all by itself can make a huge positive impact on a person's life; a very simple idea, not rocket science - a clear road to a better future. Whoever you see in book stores across this country will show you who are successful.
One may believe that black Americans who commit crimes do so because of complex social-political currents that are bigger than the black community and before which they are helpless. A more realistic read would be that crimes are committed by individuals who do so because they have not been instilled with values that would prevent them from doing so but who nevertheless should bear the burden of their bad decisions. It is not the job of the rest of the world to ensure this happens but of the individual who is doing the jail time.
In closing, here is what Rev. Wright had to say about Hurricane Katrina: "Hurricane Katrina gave us some important images that are analogous to the future that our children have to learn how to navigate. When the levees in Louisiana broke alligators, crocodiles and piranha swam freely through what used to be the streets of New Orleans. That is an analogy that we need to drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed, all children!)."
Brilliant!
Here's a much more constructive and accurate image: how about the news video of the helicopters that rescued all those black folks trapped by high water on roof tops? I would love to know what those people think of Wright's speeches and Kanye West's assertion that President Bush or the U.S. government had an agenda to kill black Americans in New Orleans.
Right now white America is giving black folks a pass and black Americans feel they deserve it. You see many comments bandied about by black Americans in the media that white Americans simply cannot get away with. The reason for this is that white Americans tend to be a laid back people and are giving black rhetoric along these lines a pass for now in light of decades of injustice. This honeymoon will not last forever and black Americans, rather than indulging themselves to the hilt in reverse racism should be preparing themselves and indeed should want to prepare themselves to have their comments and conduct looked at like everyone else. The time will come when people will start saying, hold on now, what's good for the goose is good for the gander and black Americans will have exhausted the good will that allows black folks in the media to say things that white folks simply cannot say. Black Americans should welcome the time when they will be held to the same standards as everyone else in this regard. It would be smart to not overplay this. It is the 21st century and some of this stuff is kinda wearing thin.
What concerns me further about this is that black Americans are giving each other a pass as well. There must come a time when people like Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan and Kanye West are ostracized within the black community for their vicious racism instead of being supported merely because they are black people supporting black people; this is not in itself an excuse to for racism. Black Americans need to support such people like they need a hole in the head.
To me, the way that black folks in the media and on blogs supported Rev. Wright was deplorable and showed a clear bias simply because Rev Wright was speaking against white people which is not in itself a sport and because Wright is black. Why in the world more black Americans do not see this man for what he is is absolutely beyond me. "Garlic noses"? Come on.
If black Americans want to be treated like anyone else in this country then some bad comes along with the good and black folks who make racist comments in public should have their feet held to the fire like anyone else, especially by other black folks. Do black Americans want to be excused because they don't know any better or do they want to be held to the same standards as everyone else because this is what equality is really about; it's about responsibility, accepting responsibility and wanting responsibility.
Years will pass and things will stay the same. Jim Crow and white baseball leagues will recede ever further into the past. Eventually one runs out of people to blame.