Posted on 02/11/2014 2:29:45 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
In 2009, I attended the NAACP’s 100th annual convention at the Midtown Hilton in New York. Not just the centenary celebration for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, this was also the group’s first convention under our newly inaugurated black president. The theme of the week’s events was to pay homage to the great civil rights victories of the past while at the same time defining a new mission for the next century. But on the night NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous took the stage for his big speech, when the subject turned to affirmative action, he didn’t sound like he was charting a new course so much as doubling down on the orthodoxy of the past. “The only question about affirmative action,” Jealous declared, “isn’t whether or not we need the hammer. The only question is whether or not the hammer is big enough!”
The line was met with thunderous applause. At the time, this didn’t really stand out to me, because, like a lot of well-intentioned but minimally informed white liberals, I believed in affirmative action. I didn’t have terribly strong convictions about it, but given America’s history it generally seemed like “the right thing to do.” That was five years ago. Then, in the course of writing a book about the history of the color line and our efforts to erase it, I took a closer look at the origins of affirmative action, and its results. Having done so, I’m a believer no more.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I wanted to know why integration—actual,genuine integration—had failed so spectacularly. The result....was Some of My Best Friends Are Black:The Strange Story of Integration in America, which traced the history of the color line back through all the places I have lived and chronicled the various efforts to erase it:school busing, affirmative action, air housing, etc....
...after eight miserable years of George W. Bush and the euphoria of the Yes We Can crusade,I’d been driven pretty far left on the political spectrum. Taking on the issue of race, you’d think I’d have kept heading in that direction. But the more I read and researched,the more I went out and talked to people,I found that a funny thing was happening: I was becoming more conservative.
Which is not to say I was becoming a Republican. Because how could I? At this point,the GOP’s rap sheet of racial offenses is almost too long to recount.....
...The left has been ceded a monopoly on caring about black people, and monopolies are dangerous. They create ossified institutions, paralyzed by groupthink and incapable of self-reflection. To the extent that liberals are willing to be self-critical, it’s generally to flagellate themselves for not being liberal enough, for failing to stand fast with the old, accepted orthodoxies. Monopolies also lead to arrogance and entitlement, and the left is nothing if not arrogant when it comes to constantly and loudly asserting its place as the One True Friend of Black America. And yet, as good as liberal policies on race sound in speeches, many of them don’t hold up in the real world........"
We may not be doing it right but we are better than the GOP
Tiresome drivel
He ties himself up like a pretzel to hang this on whites and Republicans - but the bottom line is Democrats started this, Republicans tried to make it work (if you can get past all his Nixon and Reagan were racists crap).
I believe his third installment (signalling to Barack and the Dems that they need to move on this now to "get it right" - you know...the pen and the phone) will have something to do with neighborhood quotas. Just a guess. We'll see.
Thank you for posting this article.
One of the MANY money quotes is:
“Did millions of people do well under affirmative action? Yes. A bribe only works if you actually give somebody something. But the benefits that accrued to black America under affirmative action could almost be considered a byproduct of the program’s actual endgame: to give black people just enough to stop rioting and leave the white establishment to go about its business.”
I don’t even need to expound on it, it’s pretty well self-evident.
I was discussing this topic with my father and he told me that he was tired, very tired of being called a racist simply because he was white and not for anything he had ever done.
He also told me of an incident several years ago where a black man was bitterly complaining about a job he hadn’t been given an offer for. Since dad was the only other person in the waiting room at the time, (A Dr’s office), he asked if the man was speaking to him.
After a bit of hemming and hawing the Black man finally said that yes he was sort of speaking to my father.
My father said well since you are speaking to me and you have basically called me a racist just because I am white and privileged let me tell you a few things.
I was born in a small town in Oklahoma, we lived in a two bedroom house. My four brothers and my parents. For most of my childhood and teen years I had one pair of coveralls and a pair of boots that my parents would scrape up the money to buy each of us. WHen wash day came each week, the five of us boys would stay in bed while my mother would wash and dry our clothes.
That wasn’t out of laziness either, I literally had no other clothes to wear and there were no hand me downs because we wore out the bib overalls so bad that we couldn’t pass them on to our younger brothers.
He then went on to explain that as a teenager he would pick cotton at fifty cents a hundred pound bag. He asked the black man if he had ever picked cotton,to which he replied ‘no’. Dad told him it was a dirty miserable job, but he did it every year he could until he had graduated from the school, (Class of twenty eight students I believe), and then joined the Navy.
It was a long conversation my dad said and then he finished it up by saying. I never met a black person until I joined the Navy and they were like any other people I met, some were good and some were not so good. But he treated everyone the way he wanted to be treated in return.
He then said to the black man, because I worked my way up from a boy with literally nothing but the clothes on my back and the shoes on my feet to where I am today I am called a racist by people who want to do nothing more than stick their hands in my pockets and take the money out of my wallet, then I can say I am a racist because they made me that way.
60 years after the civil rights act and we are still kowtowing to the sin of segregation. People have done less time for double murder. End affirmative action.
Left = failure. Miserable losers.
As the economic plight of most whites worsens under the socialism of Obama, expect to see “white guilt” die and opposition to the affirmative actions freebies (jobs, promotions, diplomas/degrees) disappear.
Great post. Thank you. I loved reading it.
I think this series of articles is being written because “Massive Liberal Failure” is obvious and now the cat is out of the bag [and after 8 years of a black, liberal president] blacks, browns and whites might be getting the idea that it’s way past time to leave the liberal plantation.
They don’t need this man’s advice to do that. They just need to walk away from the chains of Big Government.
>>Which is not to say I was becoming a Republican. Because how could I? At this point,the GOP’s rap sheet of racial offenses is almost too long to recount.<<
Right!.
1) It was the Democrats who freed the slaves and the evil Republicans who wanted slavery. WRONG
2) It was the Democrats who fought the KKK which the Republicans founded. WRONG
3) It was the Republicans who staged a coup in Wilmington, NC and drove the Democrats and blacks out of town. WRONG
4) It was all the Southern states dominated by Republicans that passed Jim Crow laws. WRONG
5) It was the Democrats who fought those awful Republicans (Harry Byrd, Al Gore, Robert Byrd) on Voting Rights legislation. WRONG
I defy ANY Democrat to name ONE thing that they have done that benefited the black people. No fair on raising minimum wage; it’s not a benefit when you have to pay higher prices.
This author can’t see it [because he really is stuck in liberal-think] but he is awash in the bigotry of low expectations for minorities [especially blacks] - with the arrogance of liberal elites, the belief that they just haven’t gotten socialism right, yet - but no matter how many lives they’ve destroyed in their journey to prove the validity of their belief that the masses need to be guided by their hand, they will give it another go and any failures along the way - well, they’ll just blame it on conservatives.
———it’s way past time to leave the liberal plantation.———
But, there in is the problem. To leave implies going somewhere. Aside from the fact that those involved can see nowhere to go, they can find no means of getting there.
The plantation provides all they need but a life that is worth a damn. That means status quo
But there is a place to go and black conservatives are waving people to it — and to shut down that knowledge, to see role models who have made the transition from failure to freedom — the left plants seeds of hate to discredited and malign them. They are despised and feared by liberal elites and race-baiting professionals
In theory, conservative theory, what you posted is true. In reality there is no chance of it happening.
There can be no palatable transition
Liberals have destroyed the black family and they’re working on all family units now. The destruction of the black family worked “so well” for the socialist power grab that it is now daily touted and advanced by academics, pop-culture and the Democratic Party elite.
Marriage and family must be restored.
For awhile now, the left’s agenda has been to restructure the debate from white vs black to rich vs poor - income equality is their “vehicle” - Obamacare is one of the vehicles in the socialist caravan taking us to a glorious “equality.”
bttt
Avenues of transition are being closed or destroyed by the Left: a good education, intact family units, religion, a strong middle class, thriving small businesses, jobs, a strong economy, a strong military, energy independence.
Leftist elites are shrinking American stability at home and influence abroad so that a global socialism can flourish.
srbfl
Obama’s 2nd biggest lie:
_____________________________________________
“I don’t want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be President of the United States of America.”
“There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
“Our goal is to have a country that’s not divided by race.”
_____________________________________________
This administration has done nothing but sow hate and division.
And this author needs to see how this administration has “managed groups” to keep the pot from boiling over (as he accuses Republicans of doing in his essay).
Environmentalists - EPA’s war on coal; stymie Keystone pipeline; subsidies for green programs
Mexicans - don’t enforce deportation laws; don’t police the border; build welfare dependency as quickly as possible
Libertarians - pot legalization; cut back our military
Blacks - drug sentencing rules revised, harp on keeping 1964 Civil Rights Act in southern states [to combat push for voter ID and redistricting]; don’t prosecute black defendants; Obama and Holder make the occasional comment to stir up racial feelings
Feminists - War on women mantra
This post from a black man:
I remember reading part 1 of his rant, figuring he had to beat up on republicans to make the article worthy of Slate. In this episode, there was only so much white-bashing I can take. This has been the problem with black folks for decades. Most of the victimization comes from black people, and I’m pretty sure that was mentioned NO WHERE in the article. In fact, I can cite one statistic that blows the writer’s (and the white liberal’s) argument away:
Immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa & the Caribbean on average do better academically and economically in America than native-born black folks. (Explain that one, Mr. Harvard Professor)
So long as black person look to left-winger’s to solve their problems, they will only get worse. After all, look at what we ended up with in the oval office. Survivors from the American ghetto’s will confirm that blacks have suffered worse under the current president than the last 5, but don’t expect to see that story in the New York Times.
The political reality is that “dark-skinned pity party” of the last 60 years is rapidly being replaced by 5 institutions highly touted by this president and his cohorts:
1) The politicization of the Black Church (bedrock of the old black communities)
2) Break down of the Black family
3) Massive Illegal Immigration from Central America
4) Abortion
5) Sodomy (is now the new black)
Mixed this all in to the boiling cauldron, and throw in a few spices like hard drugs and a education system that doesn’t meet third-world standards, and you get what you have today: packs of wild-animals that are only human in appearance, lesser souls who trying to escape while being terrorize by the later, and most important: those lilly-white lefties who are more than happy to exploit it all.
If you are black in America, read this: The community is dying, and I’ll give the culture 25 years before the political convention will demand a solution that will make the world forget about the Holocaust. Maybe they’ll just mandate black women have abortions a call it a ‘civil right’ - oh wait.
There will be survivors. There will be some (as there are now) who throw away to cultural shackles around there necks and live as an Un-Hyphenated American; seeking a better lives for themselves and their posterity by their own progress, and not on the guilt and shame of others. Someday the U.S. may actually follow the lead of other countries in dropping the types of polices that have led to the destruction of so many. I hope to live to see that day happen.
Just my $.02
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