Posted on 02/12/2021 6:55:40 AM PST by karpov
This is the text of a lecture delivered by the author as part of the Benson Center Lecture Series at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on February 8th, 2021.
I am a black American intellectual living in an age of persistent racial inequality in my country. As a black man I feel compelled to represent the interests of “my people.” (But that reference is not unambiguous!) As an intellectual, I feel that I must seek out the truth and speak such truths as I am given to know. As an American, at this critical moment of “racial reckoning,” I feel that imperative all the more urgently. But, I ask, what are my responsibilities? Do they conflict with one another? I will explore this question tonight.
My conclusion: “My responsibilities as a black man, as an American, and as an intellectual are not in conflict.” I defend this position as best I can in what follows. I also try to illustrate the threat “cancel culture” poses to a rational discourse about racial inequality in America that our country now so desperately requires. Finally, I will try to model how an intellectual who truly loves “his people” should respond. I will do this by enunciating out loud what have increasingly become some unspeakable truths. So, brace yourselves!
I begin with a provocation: Consider this story from my hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, that ran on May 31st, 2016. (Things have only gotten worse since.) I ask you to bear with me here because these details matter.
(Excerpt) Read more at quillette.com ...
I can’t bring myself to click the link. My patience with being lectured to is worn out.
Good piece. He gets it.
Long but a good read and he happens to be Right!! But thi will likely get him in Big Trouble! :
If we blacks want to walk with dignity—if we want to be truly equal—then we must realize that white people cannot give us equality. We actually have to actually earn equal status.
As long as people keep division a priority there will be division.
“We actually have to actually earn equal status.”
You sound like John Wayne.
I like John Wayne.
To the extent that racial inequality is sustained on purpose by any group with a vested interest one need only look to the purveyors of race grievances, who keep people unhappier and angrier than they would otherwise be and who do so, and have collectively done so for more than a century now, to make a living.
Booker T. Washington called these people out long ago, more than a century in fact.
The amazing thing is that now we find white people, particularly in politics and academia, who are among the few who can make a good living pimping race grievances on “behalf” of non-whites, vicariously if you will, because it seems woke white people want to be unhappier and angrier than they would otherwise be too.
Aside: people for division often seem to be against multiplication and support things like Planned Parenthood.
Clever
Single mothers. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Single mothers have absolute power over their kids and too many of them like it that way.
I would be dead be if I had been raised by my mom alone.
It’s a very good article. He’ll probably get cancelled as a result.
R4L bump!
This can’t be chanted in 3 words, so it will not be heard.
Replacing rap music or hip hop or whatever they’re calling it these days with something reasonable would be a huge first step.
I had breakfast with Prof. Loury a long, long time ago. He was a courageous iconoclast even then.
Good article.
The simple truth is the self-evolved “American black culture” is self-poisonous to those in it. “If” the real problem “was” racism, immigrant blacks would have the same problems...which they do NOT.
Also, said “American black culture” evolved because it was itself racist, and universal cultural success factors common to ALL races were said to be “acting white” and rejected.
We, and they, are living with the results of that self-evolution.
I have not clicked the link either, though for a different reason.
My example of NON psyop communication on the subject he speaks on with the Real way he should have presented his opening.
“I am a black American intellectual living in an age of persistent racial inequality in my country”
I am a Citizen of These United States that may have more or less melanin in my skin than others and am living in an age of persistent racial inequality fostered upon us by those that desire to have human beings hating and fearing those who have different coloured skin which in turn allows those fermenting these divisions to focus our Countries Citizens on hate, anger, and self loathing.
This in turn is the Exact reaction they desire because ANY society that limits this form of Emotional Segregation then has the Citizens focus on those in power and No-one in power wants their curtain of secrecy pulled aside and made known.
That is what an Honest “intellectual” would start with, the truth, and not some constant subliminal messages of racism, my people, emotional segregation, and platitudes to hide the duality of his already segregated position by definition.
Blessings
You should probably read it. It’s long but good. And really, those mostly being lectured to are blacks.
Like Bill Cosby, he’ll probably be thrown under the bus for speaking the truth.
Here are his topics of “Unspeakable Truths” in our politically-correct society.
The first unspeakable truth: Downplaying behavioral disparities by race is actually a “bluff”
A second unspeakable truth: “Structural racism” isn’t an explanation, it’s an empty category
Another unspeakable truth: We must put the police killings of black Americans into perspective
Yet another unspeakable truth: There is a dark side to the “white fragility” blame game
On the unspeakable infantilization of “black fragility”
On achieving “true equality” for black Americans
Interesting - I posted the following on FB this morning:
“When a people dwell under the liberal distribution of favors from heaven, it behooves them carefully to inspect their ways, and consider the purposes for which those favors are bestowed, lest, through forgetfulness of God and misusing his gifts, they incur his heavy displeasure, whose judgments are just and equal, who evaluate and humbleth to the dust, as he seeth meet.“ - John Woolman, “The Journal of John Woolman
Woolman, a Quaker in pre-Revolutionary War New England, carried a heavy burden for what he termed “the keeping of negroes”. He spent much of his adult life trying (and often succeeding) to convince his fellow Quakers who had slaves that it was because they sought more stuff and leisure than they needed that they bought other humans to do the extra work required to get and keep both stuff and leisure, and that this was wrong for two reasons: blacks, as “the same species as ourselves”, deserved to live as freely as whites, and people coveted more worldly goods that they needed. That whites enjoyed “a higher station” than blacks in that society made them, not better than the slaves, but stewards of the God who had blessed them with this higher station and obliged to use it to help those less fortunate, rather than take advantage of them, for “All will be called to give an account to God.”
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