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Black Protest Has Lost Its Power
Wall Street Journal ^ | January 12, 2018 | Shelby Steele

Posted on 01/16/2018 12:03:43 PM PST by lowbridge

The NFL protests were not really about injustice. Instead such protests are usually genuflections to today’s victim-focused black identity. Protest is the action arm of this identity. It is not seeking a new and better world; it merely wants documentation that the old racist world still exists. It wants an excuse.

For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present. This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many protests of groups like Black Lives Matter. The near-hysteria around the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others is also a hunger for the excuse of racial victimization, a determination to keep it alive. To a degree, black America’s self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live under a cloud of continuing injustice.

When you don’t know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth around which your character is formed. Watching the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.

But the NFL protests may be a harbinger of change. They elicited considerable resentment. 

(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: blacks; blm; football; mlkday; nfl; shelbysteele; sports
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1 posted on 01/16/2018 12:03:43 PM PST by lowbridge
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To: lowbridge

Played that race card so much they’ve worn the tits off the Queen!


2 posted on 01/16/2018 12:04:40 PM PST by Cats Pajamas
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To: lowbridge
For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present.

It's certainly a way of avoiding any responsibility for a staggering number of children born and raised without father figures, a lack of value in education, and the fact that the leading killer of young black men is other young black men.

3 posted on 01/16/2018 12:06:28 PM PST by henkster
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To: lowbridge

“...To a degree, black America’s self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live under a cloud of continuing injustice....”

90% of Black politics and voting patterns revolve around racial grievances.


4 posted on 01/16/2018 12:08:20 PM PST by Anti-Bubba182
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To: lowbridge

This link might get you past the WSJ “pay-wall”:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjSv63hpN3YAhUCZawKHYaNCs4QFggxMAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fblack-protest-has-lost-its-power-1515800438&usg=AOvVaw3D_IlxChuMp8boKJCNI-Ik


5 posted on 01/16/2018 12:10:20 PM PST by jonno (Having an opinion is not the same as having the answer...)
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To: lowbridge

“an era in which protest has been the primary means of black advancement in American life.”

We’ve had the pretense of black advancement, as affirmative action has destroyed the credibility of any credential earned by a black.

And even that pretense involves only a portion of the black population.


6 posted on 01/16/2018 12:10:40 PM PST by dsc (Any attempt to move a government to the left is a crime against humanity.)
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To: lowbridge
These "protests" in addition to too much else of liberalism begs the question:

What precisely DO these people want?

What is their goal, their motivation? What is the end result they hope to accomplish.

A protest action without something to protest is a pretty boring thing.

7 posted on 01/16/2018 12:14:25 PM PST by Ciaphas Cain (Liberalism, as with all else evil, can never create. It can only corrupt.)
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To: Ciaphas Cain

They’ve used protest, riot and violence as a way to blackmail the establishment into doing things and passing legislation that ordinarily would not be passed for 40 plus years. Baltimore burned over the death of Freddie Grey despite: A Black Mayor and Police Chief, 3 of the 6 officers charged being Black and City Council where 9 of the 15 members are Black. But it was Institutional Racism that caused it. The Flint water crisis lays entirely at the feet of the white liberals and Black members of the City Administration, but somehow it was the Republicans and White Governor who got all the heat. Eventually we (white conservatives) will get tired of the constant demands. We’ve already voted with out feet, see Detroit. Hopefully we can vote with our wallets. Strip these communities of their ill gotten gains and let them wither on the vine.


8 posted on 01/16/2018 12:20:16 PM PST by TallahasseeConservative
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To: lowbridge

What they really want is “reparations” (free income for life). That is a bridge too far for most people, especially given all the special treatment and set asides they already get.


9 posted on 01/16/2018 12:20:52 PM PST by rbg81 (Truth is stranger than fiction)
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To: Ciaphas Cain

What is their goal, their motivation? What is the end result they hope to accomplish?

In a word: Reparations.


10 posted on 01/16/2018 12:21:31 PM PST by rbg81 (Truth is stranger than fiction)
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To: lowbridge

The country’s first and foremost government-certified victim group should thank their lucky stars that they live in this country and stop blaming Whitey for their self-inflicted failures.


11 posted on 01/16/2018 12:22:46 PM PST by I want the USA back (Lying Media: completely irresponsible. Complicit in the destruction of this country.)
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To: lowbridge

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2018/01/15/black_protest_has_lost_its_power_431505.html

At above link click READ FULL ARTICLE and it’s goes to unblocked WSJ page.


12 posted on 01/16/2018 12:23:11 PM PST by avenir ("But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine."--Paul to Titus)
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To: dsc
as affirmative action has destroyed the credibility of any credential earned by a black.

Exactly. Any achievement by a black person is immediately suspect, now, because of AA. Didn't used to be that way.

13 posted on 01/16/2018 12:23:18 PM PST by Lizavetta
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To: dsc

They were underdeveloped as people due to 400 years of being held as chattel.


14 posted on 01/16/2018 12:31:53 PM PST by ichabod1 (People don't want to believe it be what it is but it do.)
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To: rbg81

If they were able to hold all white people in chattel slavery for 400 years they MIGHT consider that to be interest due on the debt we owe them.


15 posted on 01/16/2018 12:33:14 PM PST by ichabod1 (People don't want to believe it be what it is but it do.)
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To: ichabod1

It goes back a lot longer than that to the jungles and plains of their ancestral homelands from where they were taken.


16 posted on 01/16/2018 12:34:06 PM PST by VietVet876
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To: jonno

That backdoor trick was shut down several months ago, unfortunately. To read a WSJ article today, you have to be lucky enough to find it reposted on another site...which doesn’t happen very often.


17 posted on 01/16/2018 12:34:24 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
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To: ichabod1

“They were underdeveloped as people due to 400 years of being held as chattel.”

Would that be the 400 years between 1776 and 1865?


18 posted on 01/16/2018 12:35:45 PM PST by dsc (Any attempt to move a government to the left is a crime against humanity.)
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To: Ciaphas Cain

I do t think they’ve ever coherently articulated a problem other than “it is police open season on blacks” (thoroughly disproven) or a remedy other than “kill all pigs” and “pay us trillions of dollars for what happened to great-great-great-great-granpappy.”


19 posted on 01/16/2018 12:38:12 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
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To: dsc

1619 - 1865 = 336 years. (First slave ship landed in Virginia)
1866 - 2018 = 152 years.

What will it take to get that behind us? 1:1 free:slave years ratio? 2:1? 3:1?

152years,is an awfully long time, but DEMOCRATS horribly abused blacks in the south during Reconstruction and then throughout the land until the 1960s.


20 posted on 01/16/2018 12:45:59 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
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