Posted on 08/22/2011 4:15:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
Election of our nation's first black president is delivering an unexpected message to our black population.
Blacks are discovering that what a man or woman does -- their actions -- is what matters, not the color of their skin.
It seems ridiculous to point out that this was supposedly the point of the civil rights movement. Purge racism from America.
But blacks themselves have been the ones having the hardest time letting it go.
It is not hard to understand why black Americans were happy that a black man was elected president of the United States. It was kind of a final and most grand announcement that racism has finally been purged from America.
But for the highly politicized parts of black America this was certainly not the only message. Because for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics.
For black political culture that dominated after the civil rights movement, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law. Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off.
In other words, post-civil rights movement black political culture embraced an agenda exactly the opposite of what the civil rights movement was about. Its agenda was to get laws and policies that were not neutral but racially slanted and to put individuals in power based on their race and not on their character and capability.
So, according to the script of this political culture, election of a black man as president meant more than an end to racism. The conclusion had to be that if the man holding the highest political office in the nation was black, it must follow that blacks would be better off.
Now blacks have a dilemma. We have a black president and blacks are worse off. Not just a little, but a lot worse off.
In the words of longtime Congressional Black Caucus member Maxine Waters, D-Calif., "Our people are hurtin'.."
Blacks now grapple with two possible conclusions.
One, our black president is a traitor to his race. Our struggles put him in power and now he's not taking care of his folks. He's become, in the words of left wing professor and activist Cornel West, a "mascot" of Wall Street.
Or, two, that the man's performance reflects his views and his capability, not his race. He's not delivering for anyone. Blacks are hurting more because they were already in worse shape when Obama got elected. Bad policies hurt the weakest the most.
And it happens that the bad policies that have always failed are the big government liberalism that has defined modern black politics.
With further thought, blacks might realize it's this same flawed idea -- that growing government and electing black politicians would make blacks better off -- that explains why blacks have remained disproportionately "hurtin".
Take the Congressional Black Caucus itself. The average poverty rate in Black Caucus districts is almost 50 percent higher than the national average. Yet, these black politicians have 100 percent re-election rates.
Maybe a real bonus that will have come from electing a black president is that blacks will take seriously Dr. King's dream that we judge men by their character and not their color.
The Civil Rights Movement took blacks to the edge of the Promised Land. But political activism can only remove barriers to freedom.
It's up to the individual to embrace freedom and take on the personal responsibilities that go with it.
Maybe blacks will realize that they should blame Barack Obama. Not because he is black, but because he is a liberal. And because he has grown government to the point where the oxygen necessary for freedom and prosperity is being squeezed out of our nation.
Try this next time:
I blame his poor performance on his evil white socialist side that has made all the bad changes. His black side is the side the provides the hope.
No dilemma in their minds... it's whitey's fault that 0bama's policies haven't improved their lives.
But I suspect having a bad attitude towards life is the biggest impediment to success of any person. If you think you're going to fail, you probably will. The reality is many people fail at times. The trick after falling off the horse is to get back on and keep riding.
Not just “liberal”, but “whacked out Marxist”.
I’ve just been reading up on the Communist tenet of “dialectics”. They really don’t see these current problems as problems, but just another reversal on the road to complete communist domination.
The end goal is fixed and non-wavering. If some things have to appear to work against that goal in the short run, it’s no worry or bother to the true believing communist.
The apostrophe indicates that the dilemma belongs to "Blacks." If it were only ONE black, then "Black's" would be correct. Since it belongs to blacks - plural - the correct placement of the apostrophe is after the "s," thus indicating that all of them have a dilemma and not just one of them.
End of grammar lesson..... :)
Like the author said, MLK took them to the edge of the promised land, but after his assasination, race pimps like Jesse Jackson picked up the crozier and led them astray.
When I first saw the title I thought maybe it was about Louis Black.
Bravo! I for one love the grammar and spelling police!
Shame that you take a typo and make an arbitrary assessment. Especially when we do not even know who actually made the typo. What she had to say was not only valid but 100% accurate. Yet due to a typo you have missed a sliver of truth in a lying corrupt world. Are you sure you are not a liberal????
Just remind them he is half white!
“Maybe blacks will realize that they should blame Barack Obama. Not because he is black, but because he is a liberal.”
Are you new here?
Lately I’ve been hearing black Americans saying “we have to vote for Obama because if the Tea Party takes over, the white folks will send him up to prison like they do all the rest of our black men.” Any discussion of politics or policy is either ignored or immediately crosses into a shouting match where an opposing argument is labeled as enabling the great white conspiracy that has ‘always’ kept blacks out of work or in jail.
Trying to tell it like it is without crossing the line...
No big deal for Pres. Obama. He still has them locked up.
When blacks take over a city government, black residents usually end up worse off, but they keep voting blacks back into office over and over again.
Detroit, MI, is the penultimate example of this, of course.
This so-called “lesson” was learned under Coleman Young, David Dinkins, Harold Washington, Marion Barry, Kwame Kilpatrick, and Ray Nagin. The “lesson” sank in like water off a duck’s back.
My best girlfriend is a black professional woman. She was deeply worried about Obama before he was elected, and she held her nose and voted for McCain, trying as we all did to tell herself McCain wouldn’t be as awful as we all knew he would be. She says that some of the older black clients smelled a rat right away, since they’ve known charlatans before.
After the election she initially kept her mouth shut among black friends, relatives, and clients during the initial Obama hysteria, knowing that she’d get shouted down by their ardor for Obama; she contented herself by gently planting seeds of doubt.
Now she says that many black people in this very liberal area are saying “What the hell?” and expressing the most serious chagrin. I’m not saying they wouldn’t vote for him against Sarah, but they’re seriously unhappy and getting more unhappy with each passing day. Some are really outraged about him. Some of them could be turned. Star and my girlfriend are not the only ones by a long shot.
And not only that, he was raised by whites.
The implication is that just as there’s a conspiracy to keep black men out of work and put them in jail, there’s a conspiracy in Washington to oppose Obama and he’s been forced to break rules to try to get justice for “his” people. Therefore any failure of Obama’s or any criminal act of Obama’s is ascribed to “what’s a black man gonna do when Whitey makes the rules”. Victimization comes full circle and becomes a closed system. Why NOT join a flash mob and rip off a shopping mall, when the white conspiracy has already fixed it that you can’t afford anything in the store because of your skin color. Why SHOULDN’T I sell crack, when the conspiracy keeps a black man from having a decent job. It’s not my fault I stabbed my girlfriend, you’d go crazy too if you were a black man kept down by whites for two hundred years. Black Liberation Theology had the double layer cake handed to them, they just put a cherry on it.
There are a lot of silent black people who know that there’s not a thing keeping them down so much that they can’t take responsibility for their ascendance. The last time in my area that a black woman put a sign for a Republican candidate on her lawn, her car was torched and her house vandalized...and the constabulary seemed unusually reticient to pursue.
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