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When I was a graduate student at Ohio State, I was walking over to meet with my adviser. The time frame was about two weeks after the Kent State riots in the late '60's. As I approached the door, a rather large black male grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me down a flight of stairs. When I stopped rolling on the sidewalk at the bottom of the stairs, he screamed at me: "That's for holding me down for the past 100 years!"

I looked up and replied: "You don't look a day over 25." He started down the steps towards me, but backed off when several other students came over.

To this day, I am still puzzled by those who want to use race to explain away failure. While I know racism exists, it exists by blacks every bit as much as by whites. Jesse and Al have made a very nice life for themselves by keeping this lack of trust fueled over the years. If people just took responsibility for their own lives, I think much of these and similar problems would disappear. Alas, liberals have too much of a vested interest to ever let that happen.

I think it’s partly human nature - we all tend to invent rationalizations for why we abdicate PERSONAL responsibility. I also think that it’s the organized race lobby which would blame all its malfunctions on everything but itself - the environment, dysfunctional families, history, institutional racism, etc.,etc. Those factors are all very real but there reaches a point where they become a crutch and are inconsistent with the realities of 21st century American life. I can tell you about some personal experiences I’ve had as a teacher with affirmative action students - but that’s for another time!

While I know racism exists, it exists by blacks every bit as much as by whites.

Let me let you in on a little known secret. When those who say that the military was racists against blacks, etc., let me tell you that during the 1970s and 1980s I found by an extreme majority that blacks were more prejudice against whites than I found whites prejudice against blacks in the Army. If you were a white soldier, YOU DID NOT walk around alone on base at night. If you did, you were going to find your ass beaten by a group of black soldiers. However, a single black could walk around and not worry about a group of whites beating him up, because it rarely if ever happened. However, I am aware of many, many more cases of a group of black soldiers beating up a single white soldier they caught out after dark walking around. I also had more encounters with black soldiers over the years, each and every time, accusing me as a white of being prejudice against them. No matter the issue, if it were a black soldier involved, the race card was coming out to defend the black. Every time. It got better as the years went along. But the 70s and 80s were bad. Really bad.