It’s obviously politically correct on FR to ridicule this article but I happen to believe that its essential point is true. I *think* even if you were to ask conservative blacks like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Alan Keyes, they would likely say that they have experienced racism. I also think that if you ask all sorts of blacks in America they would report the same thing. This is not the same thing as saying that there isn’t imagined or made up racism. There is. There is also real racism. To deny it is to deny reality.
I don’t go from there to then say we should have affirmative action. We shouldn’t. That’s just compounding the problem.
But come on people - racism isn’t something like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus - it’s alive and well. It’s not as pervasive as it once was, it’s not as accepted as it once was, it’s not an excuse for every failing.
But, to cite but one example, there *is* such a thing as Driving While Black. To pretend otherwise is foolishness.
And of course, just as there is white on black racism, there is surely black on white racism. They both exist - just like shoplifting exists, adultery exists, corruption exists and all the rest.
It's obviously acceptableto tell some truths which don't support the assumptions of the writer. Do you deny that getting a letter from a college listing essentially every ethnicity except white, and listing the female sex, as possible reasons why one might get favorable consideration in admissions &c happens? Don't bother to deny it, I have experienced that. Is that discrimination against white men? Yup. Open and shut case, if you have enough intelligence to even think about applying to college.if you were to ask conservative blacks like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Alan Keyes, they would likely say that they have experienced racism.
Oh, absolutely. Thomas Sowell will tell you that when he was young it would have been more than his life was worth to have been seen in Atlanta with a white woman. But he will also tell you that in more recent times he has publicly dined with a blonde woman in Atlanta without anyone batting an eye.So in historical terms, white racism has been suppressed. But that has not resulted in Nirvana but merely has established not the elimination but the reversal of the old racism.
In point of historical fact the possibility of that was precisely the final rallying cry of the Confederate Army at the end of the Civil War. And, for that matter, of white racists afterward as well.Ultimately blacks have the choice to either be heroes of patriotism like Thomas Sowell or to be cynics like Barak Obama and legions of others. That situation is unfair to blacks, but it is nothing that you or I can do a thing about.
The reality is that wire service journalism is the establishment in America, and journalism will crucify anyone who goes out in public and tells the particular truths I have just articulated. And you, I take it, will be happy to hold their coats while they are doing it.But, to cite but one example, there *is* such a thing as Driving While Black. To pretend otherwise is foolishness.
Again, that is a crying shame - but it is also, in some circumstances, pure logic. If Thomas Sowell were driving in a white neighborhood where there had been a rash of burglaries, he very well might be treated with suspicion. Utterly unfair to him. But also utterly rational, as he himself would point out, in the sense that blacks constitute about 10% of the population but commit about half the crime. And Sowell has pointed out that there are specific types of crime which are essentially exclusively committed by blacks, who otherwise are thin on the ground in the area where such crimes are committed - so that any black in the vicinity of such an incident is, ineluctably, a suspect.
Racism goes both ways. If you doubt it, have a white person, or an Asian person walk through certain neighborhoods in Detroit, Los Angels, Oakland, Philidelphia, etc, etc. Blaming other people for how my life turns out is ridicules. Rising above the fray, and taking care of your own is what people do who are successful. Ask all those people you mention, plus many others if that statement isn’t true.