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.
Nevertheless, your point is an excellent one, and worth repeating:
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.The sooner we recognize that any social state is "transformative" (such as riots) the closer we will be to a decent solution. But we must be careful not to see the historical southern black experience as in any way mutually-beneficial among the races. Transformative, yes, but from awful beginnings.
Did you see the NY Times magazine article on educator Ruby Payne ( The Class-Consciousness Raiser), who advocates teaching standard English and awareness of linguistic differences and their impact? Academics are infuriated by her. Meanwhile, she makes friends of real educators in the classrooms across the country.
Over the past forty years Blacks have been transformed from the least to the most alien of all America's "minority" groups.
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.
Your description of "both pitiful and despicable" is the clarification of the century. What is often forgotten is that all the patronizing of Blacks by liberals has led to a backlash of resentment that no one's supposed to talk about (not that I'm denying the vicious racism that existed prior to modern liberalism).
I have a theory that one reason Blacks vote so overwhelmingly liberal is that liberals make few demands on them to change their traditional beliefs. While white liberal churchgoers probably attend a Unitarian-Universalist or hyper-left Episcopal church with a lesbian priestess, Black leftists (if they can be truly classified as such) still attend fundamentalist churches and worship like West Virginia snake-handlers. Their religion has been untouched by liberalism. I have often wondered if Blacks would have the same affinity for the liberal left if it ever started making the same demands for dogmatic changes of them that it has so long made of whites.
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.
Well, Black English has always been transcribed in a unique way even before the modern era, but as a poor rural Southern white myself (though from the Upper South) I have long known that Blacks are just rednecks with melanin. We share the same everything, yet Blacks have been turned into the Ultimate Alien (quite a feat considering that they've been speaking Southern English and practicing Southern chr*stianity for almost four hundred years).
I would also posit, however, that the dialect of Southern Blacks is more similar to that of the upper class whites who used to own most of the slaves than it is to poor whites (just as Black ministers are more likely to wear vestments, which probably comes from Ole Massa's Episcopal or Catholic church). "Ax" is Chaucerian Middle English and the "ui" pronunciation of "er" is shared by upper class Southern whites and is related to the "oi" associated with Brooklyn (ie, upper class Deep Southern whites and poor Southern Blacks will say "chuich" instead of "church," as a Brooklynite would say "choich"; an Upper South poor white simply says "church").
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.
Again you are most correct. I think if the Republican party had finished the job of Reconstruction (not that Reconstruction itself wasn't full of excesses) then Blacks would have remained the Ultimate Americans instead of the Ultimate Un-/Anti-Americans. The blasted Democrats louse up everything they put their hands on.