Posted on 05/19/2010 2:55:31 AM PDT by glide625
History is not a Hallmark card. Sometimes, history breaks your heart.
I know this because I have often recounted history in this space, tales of black men and women bought and sold, cheated and mistreated, maimed and lynched. And whenever I do this, I can be assured of e-mails and calls of chastisement.
I still remember one of the first, an earnest lady who pleaded with me to leave this history behind. Telling such tales, she said, could not help but make black people resent white ones..............I find the same value in recounting those stories that my former boss Bert used to find in remembering Holocaust brutalities and my friend John finds in recalling Irish suffering at British hands. Understanding the past provides context to understand the present and predict the future. Moreover, history is identity. These stories tell me who I am.
But there's a difference, isn't there? Bert's history indicts Germans in Europe; John's indicts Britons in the United Kingdom. Mine indicts white people, here..........Like the lady who called me, the governor seems to prefer that hard stories not be told, that doing so detracts from American unity. As one online observer put it, “We need to focus on America instead of promoting everyone else.” The problem with that reasoning is obvious: America is everyone else, a nation composed of other nations, a culture made of other cultures, a history built of other histories. And yes, sometimes, those histories will be hard to hear.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Totally ignoring the fact that those black men and women bought and sold were sold the very first time by other black men.
Also totally ignoring the fact that the sale and purchase of black men and women is going on THIS VERY DAY STILL in the Dark Continent.
This ass clown never lets up does he? He’s nothing short of a race hustling pity pusher who needs to join the 21st century.
Moreover, history is identity. These stories tell me who I am...
OK, so then, STFU when you see the Confederate flag snapping proudly in the wind...
Pitts treats these tales as if they are valuable heirlooms to be passed down from generation to generation. Or perhaps he thinks of them as being like large blocks of blue chip stocks, certain to return dividends year after year in the form of affirmative action quotas and set asides.
Affirmative action has done more to harm the black man than slavery ever did.
After slavery was abolished you could have a black man do something and the expectation was that it would be done well.
After affirmative action you're afraid to ask most black men to do anything because you don't know if they earned their degree or had it given to them because they were black.
AA sets up a hurdle that frankly most people can never leap. It takes years to establish themselves as being legitimately good.
BTW--what about the burning of heretics? the use of babies for fellatio in Roman brothels? the dissection of living people by Chinese anatomy students? the gang-rape of children by Indochinese pirates? the "harvesting" of the organs of children for sale on the black market--today? contemporary slavery in Asia and Africa? the death camps of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich?
History is a litany of horrors. Is Pitts just coming to grips with this?
BTW, note tagline.
Article is an enormous load of sanctimonious bullcrap.
bump
“...tales of black men and women... ...lynched.”
I’m still waiting for an apology or even a recognition of the truth about lynchings in the United States. The truth is that after the War Between the States, when lynchings got their start, it was not black men lynched by whites.
It was Republicans lynched by Democrats. Republicans, both black and white were regulalrly lynched by Democrats, who formed a terrorist organization to carry out these lynchings: the original Ku Klux Klan.
Let there be no mistake, the Democrats are a gaggle of putrefying worms and maggots who can’t even face the truth about who they are. Instead they project their prejudices and wormy identity onto the very people who are the decendants and heirs of their first victims.
May they all rot in hell.
Ditto for my Polish ancestors who were victims of the Kulturkampf in the 1800s.
Are you sure Laura Bush didn’t ghost write this for Pitts?
Slavery was worse, much worse.
To the individual, yes. Very much so. But to the race? No.
Slavery in the USA took a bunch of people out of Africa (sold by other black Africans no less) and established them here. The freed slave was tens or hundreds of times better off than his tribal relatives back on the continent. And the slaves descendants are thousands of times better off than his distant relatives. I'd call that a net gain for the blacks in America
Any black man in the USA can aspire to be whatever he wants and has a chance of getting there. Most blacks in Africa are still mired in generational poverty and are so busy trying to survive that they don't have time to better their situation.
Affirmative action slightly helps the indivisual receiving it (I say slightly because they are never really trusted as competent) but casts doubt on every black person of any education whatsoever. They start at an even worse disadvantage then they would have without AA in the first place.
Unfortunately, you have taken that as mitigating slavery. It does not.
The better sense of the matter is that at terrible cost, slavery was vanquished and, after generations of struggle, suffering, and effort, modern America is a functioning and successful multiracial society. We are decidedly imperfect at it, but far better than anyone else in the world.
If this is “functioning” I’d hate to see a dysfunctional society. I’ve spent a long time overseas; the U.S. scores at the low end of the spectrum as a “functioning” multi-racial society and each year it’s score worsens. Actually, considering the lack of cohesion and the rate of atomization, I’d question whether this can be categorized as a “society”; it’s more a collection of competing and hostile societies without any identifiable unifying theme that crosses through every component cultural/ethnic grouping with the possible lone ethos of profit.
No. I have not taken that viewpoint. Slavery was a great evil that was wiped out of this country.
My point is that affirmative action has done more harm to the black race than slavery did.
The better sense of the matter is that at terrible cost, slavery was vanquished and, after generations of struggle, suffering, and effort, modern America is a functioning and successful multiracial society. We are decidedly imperfect at it, but far better than anyone else in the world.
I agree.
"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 do not want to lose their jobs." - Booker T Washington (1911)
Booker T. Washington deserves to be better remembered. He and numerous other dedicated Black educators were responsible for creating an educated Black middle class.
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