When You Condemn One Black Man as a ‘Thug’ You Condemn Us All

Time ^ | 12-5-2014 | Victor Luckerson

[Citizen Zed]

A divergence in African American culture has made it easy for people to categorize "good" and "bad" blacks separately—and that's a huge problem

My parents sent me to an all-white elementary school when I was 4. I speak and think differently than them because of it. This is a small, common tragedy of black life that we don’t talk about: the best way for me to find success in my own country was to be immersed in a culture entirely different from my parents’ and adopt it as my own. But that experience taught me lessons that I now find intuitive–how to find common ground with different people, how to come off as non-threatening to others, how to chalk up racist statements to a misunderstanding. You could probably label me clean and articulate, like my President.

There are a lot of black people like me now who grew up straddling two different racial worlds. Blackish, the only comedy on broadcast TV featuring a prominent African American cast, is centered on this increasingly prevalent concept of black identity. I don’t want to paint my experience as some painful upbringing. I had a big, loving family and, eventually, great friends of all races. But I fear some people are learning the wrong lessons when they meet black people like me–that I am somehow more acceptable or less problematic than other black folks. That Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin should have behaved exactly like me to avoid being killed.

[Steve_Seattle]

"When you condemn one black man as a thug, you condemn us all."

So if I'm walking down the street and I see a black man steal an old lady's purse, knock her down, kick her in the face, and run away, and I call him a "thug," I am somehow calling ALL black men thugs? This is insanity.

[Steve_Seattle]

This article is a classic example of how white liberals dumb-down blacks, accept nonsense as truth, and steer blacks into patterns of paranoia and self-destructive thinking and behavior. It HAS to be deliberate.

[NorthMountain]

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

- Booker T. Washington (1911)

[Salamander]

LOL!

I was gonna send that to *you*.

:D

[clintonh8r]

Blacks have become obsessed with race. It seems to occupy their every waking moment....and the liberals and mediots spend all their time convincing blacks, that, yes, you're all victims of non-liberal whites and The Man. Maybe they should think more like Americans, and less like black Americans. If they think they're winning over white sympathy, respect, concern, support, or solidarity with this current tsunami of fake outrage, I think they're wrong.

As for me, I'm over it. I don't care any more.

[Albion Wilde]

a small, common tragedy of black life...: the best way for me to find success in my own country was to be immersed in a culture entirely different from my parents’ and adopt it as my own.

Newsflash: this is exactly how white people leave the struggling class and achieve an education and financial security. Many times in mid-life, when meeting the parents of friends from professional work, I got a "class surprise." Good for those families for boosting their kids out of the trailer park. Quit complaining.

[Steve_Seattle]

I am sorry for posting so many comments on this article, but it is one of the most maddening things I have ever read.

[Swordmaker]

Let me see. . . This author was presented with a model of a culture that shows him a pathway that leads to success, prosperity, family, and contentment via education, career, acceptance, participation, and cooperation in society. in the other model, there is a pathway that leads to failure, disruption, poverty, endless unemployment, unhappiness, with no family life, through crime, potential revolving door prison sentences, via peer-pressure, gang affiliation, drug use, tribalistic affiliation and resistance to societal norms. Yet somehow he see an equivalency between these models, these cultures, and is torn between choosing which to follow? He is deluded.

He thinks that others paint all black men as "Thugs" because of the actions of his fellow skin color brothers. . . He is deluded by his warped Liberal mindset.

[Sergio]

bkmk

[ICE-FLYER]

Bully tactic trash meant to shut people up about holding anyone responsible for their actions.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Blacks have become obsessed with race. It seems to occupy their every waking moment....and the liberals and mediots spend all their time convincing blacks, that, yes, you're all victims of non-liberal whites and The Man."

That is exactly it, and as a result probably 50% or more of blacks have now been driven to - led to - a point of what is basically a mild form of clinical insanity.

[william clark]

And here I always thought that a key component of racism was seeing/treating everyone in a particular ethnic group in a single way as opposed to regarding them individually based on their character, accomplishments, etc.

[Hugin]

As Dennis Prager likes to say, there is only one division of people of any race that matters, the decent and indecent. If the author chooses to self-identify with the latter because to him race is more important than character, I’ll take him at his word. But he doesn’t speak for all the decent black people out there.

[publius911]

When I call someone - of any race, creed, or color - a “thug”, it’s because they are or act like a thug. Don’t be or act like a thug, and I won’t call you one.
How hard is this to understand?

It has gotten infinitely harder to understand in the last 36 years, judging exclusively by the results.

I have told this story many times. It occurred in San Francisco in a neighborhood inhabited almost exclusively by Amish. And the incident involved a young non-black minority woman in her mid-twenties, when she went to the neighborhood cleaners to pick up her clothes.

An individual blocked her access to the establishment and hassled her for money, cigarettes etc. She ignored him.
As she emerged with her burden he resumed the aggressive panhandling, blocking her way. The following conversation ensued...

"Stop ignoring me! Why are you ignoring me? When will you stop treating me like a n*****?

Her classic response : "When you stop acting like one."

End of story.

Update for 2014: She survived the incident unscathed. If a similar confrontation occurred today, she would be extremely lucky to avoid death or serious injury, often lifelong physical handicap and impairment.

And she would be prosecuted for "racism."

The new reality. The perverted version of Martin Luther King's dream.

[MeshugeMikey]

the same can be said for the PINWHEELS amongst us...like "our" "author" here

[BlueLancer]

Are we not men, we are DEVO!

[MeshugeMikey]

Indeedo!

[publius911]

Forget a thug is a thug. Obama is a thug, so all blacks are thugs too if we take that reasoning in effect. Thanks for letting me know that the collective is in place a all thugs are black

It's the new reality skippy, and Obama and the race baiters "legitimized" the meme.

All cops are out looking for a black baby to kill.
All whites are racist.

You better check your personal main logic processor...

[bkopto]

This navel gazing dope has himself all tied up in knots.

He needs to man-up and get over his overbearing, castrated feminist side.

[mc5cents]

A rose is a rose is a rose. Gertrude Stein 1913

A thing is what it is no matter what name we put on it. The first law of identity. Shakespeare put it: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."