Over the past forty years Blacks have been transformed from the least to the most alien of all America's "minority" groups. And we're all the poorer (and in the greater danger) because of it.
I agree. I must admit, however, that today was the first time I ever heard of "Juneteenth" - but when I looked it up on Wikipedia I agreed with its premise.
We have violence, terrible violence, that has broken out in three US cities in the last 24 hours in the name of this event.
Is it the event itself, or the quality of the people it attracts? The news stories tell us drugs and alcohol are not involved. That is so ridiculous it is laughable.
It's a tragedy, and I blame liberals for it. What liberals have done to black America reminds me of what the Arab world has done to the Palestinians. They've created a politically useful hypervictim who is both pitiful and despicable. I'd love to see liberalism defeated just so that blacks can be freed from the self-pitying, self-destructive mentality that liberalism has cultivated in them. We'd all be much happier, that's for sure.
By the way, I saw a fascinating program on PBS not long ago in which a couple of linguists had studied the evolution of the American black dialect using, among other things, old recordings of black speakers. What they found was that in the early part of the 20th century the English spoken by blacks was remarkeably similar to that of whites. Rural southern blacks -- and back then most blacks were rural and southern -- in particular sounded a lot like rural southern whites.
It wasn't until the great migration of blacks into the northern cities in the forties and fifties that a really distinct accent began to emerge. The researchers attributed this to the radical separation from whites that blacks experienced in the city ghettos. Prior to this, in the South, they had lived lives that were fairly intermingled with whites. But in the North, the isolation in the ghettos was nearly complete, so the language kind of turned in on itself and began a separate evolution. The "othering" of black English was then of course reinforced by notions of black separatism which became popular during the civil rights era, in particular the later civil rights era, which I would add was the part of the civil rights era that was ruined by the liberal-Left.
I'm not sure where I was going with this other than to highlight the point that the transformation of blacks into an alienated group has in important ways -- like language -- definitely been a transformation and not a continuation as the libs would have us believe.