Posted on 08/17/2002 10:10:29 PM PDT by ArcLight
I dropped by the DC reparations rally. A few quick impressions:
Julianne Malveaux was on hand. Fast talker, funny, and rather pretty in an offbeat sort of way. She told a funny story about her visit to the Elmina slave castle in Ghana, where slaves were housed before being shipped over to the New World. She spoke of how some other tourist, wandering the dungeons, looked about her and said, "gee, this doesn't seem so bad." Malveaux says she had to be pulled off the silly woman as she set about throttling her. I've been to Elmina--a horrific place--and I understand her reaction. Kind of like visiting Auschwitz and asking, "what's all the fuss about?"
Anyway, we spoke a bit and exchanged cards. Despite her TV pit bull demeanor, I kinda like her.
In other news...The New Black Panther Party was on hand, and drew a crowd with a display of photos taken at lynchings. Truly hellish stuff. One woman began to sob as she looked at them.
A leader of the group harangued the crowd through a bullhorn, railing against white people in general as devils. An interracial couple, strolling by, came in for a measure of abuse as well.
To be sure, there were a few white supporters on hand, mostly representing a variety of far-left organizations. One of them told me that America's whites, as well as blacks, will never be completely healed of their guilt until they make full restitution for the crime of slavery.
But when I asked several people whether a reparation payment would settle the matter, they said that it would be just the beginning; that still more restitution would be needed. Hmmm...
Lessee here...excuse the jumble, but I'm just banging out impressions as they leap to mind...
Hardly anybody I talked to really see reparations happening in the near future. They see the movement as a long-term campaign that could last for decades, but will eventually be crowned with success.
Lots of anti-Semitism here. There were tapes and posters featuring Khalil Muhammad, the notorious Jew-baiter who gave a speech so nasty, even Louis Farahkhan gave him the boot.
(By the way, Louie was here--but no rambling speeches about the Number 19. In fact, he didn't say much of interest, except that we shouldn't attack Iraq and that he was off to campaign for Cynthia McKinney.)
Anyway, there were plenty of examples of the anti-Semitic thread that has become such a bizarre and pervasive feature of radical black politics. Even the most sensible of messages were tainted by it.
I was attracted by the sight of two young men wearing t-shirts with a thoroughly admirable slogan. The front read "100% conscious;" the back read, "0% thug." Beneath was a URL: anti-thug.com.
I've long been horrified by the way black and white popular culture celebrate the image of black men as violent hoodlums. These two guys were equally disgusted. At first I was impressed, until one of them began to talk about how virtually all the people who made the decisions in the music business are Jews, how it was Jews who hype the image of black people as thugs. It was appalling and depressing. Even when these guys had something sensible to say, they'd gone completely nuts.
I don't know how the crowd looked on C-Span, but I can tell you that the mall was mostly empty space. I asked a Park Police guy for his best guess as to number. He chuckled and said no way, that they'd gotten out of the crowd counting business, sick of being denounced for bias by every outfit holding a rally in the Mall. Then he asked me to guess. I said, 8, maybe 9 thousand. He smiled and said he'd go lower. He was probably right.
At one point, someone got on the mike and urged people to come out from under the shade trees lining the edges of the mall and gather in the center, where the TV cameras could see them. The speaker said that the news reports were underestimating the size of the crowd and that they needed to be more visible. I didn't see too many people rushing to comply with her request.
There were the usual hangers-on you get at any demo. The white socialists with their volumes of Marx and Lenin, of course. One of them had a booth with T-shirts. One had Dubya's picture captioned, International Terrorist. Another, though, was the sort a Freeper might cheerfully wear. It showed an American plane dropping bombs, and read, "Democracy. We Deliver."
Further down the mall stood a couple of Falun Gongers. They didn't last long. Maybe the cops shooed them away. That's what they did with a team of white Christians carrying absolutely gigantic signs that must have reached 25 feet in the air. They supported the signs with leather belts that had little pockets in them for the sign posts. One of the belts also had a sort of holster with a Bible in it, apparently rigged for a quick draw. Wyatt Earp evangelism, we'll call it.
The signs called on the assembled crowd to come to Jesus. One said that blacks were still enslaved to drugs and welfare. Such diplomatically expressed sentiments won them no converts, as far as I could see. Instead, the park cops, with utter courtesy, marched them to the other side of the street. One of them grumbled to the cops, who were black, about how only Christians were forbidden from expressing their views on the Mall. The cop replied, with far less heat than I'd have shown, that they weren't being booted for being Christian; they were being booted for not having a permit, while another group with a permit was holding a rally. How they'd have liked it if ACT UP had popped in at one of their prayer meetings can be left to the imagination. Anyway, they shut up and left, and that was that.
One last thing. Lots of you like to mock the arguments for reparation, and they do leave something to be desired. But I talked to a fair number of people here and it's clear to me that there's something going on here. There are a lot of black people in a state of psychological trauma that just hasn't gone away, no matter how many civil rights laws have been passed. The fact that reparations resonate with so many folk is an illustration that something is deeply wrong with the state of race relations in America, and all the right-wing sneering on earth won't make the problems go away.
But then, neither will reparations.
What's deeply wrong with race relations is that so amany people are trying to convince my black friends that I want, at best, to keep them from succeeding economically and, at worst, to see them lynched.
Maybe the Christians were right? Accept Christ and move on...
So the message is one of non-responsibility - the jews made us do it - typical of thugs.
It also just pisses me off. Jews give to the NAACP, marched down south in all the civil rights protests, lent their legal talent to civil rights organizations, etc., - and are still the #1 demon is black racist conspiracy thoeries.
Also reparations must be paid to all relatives of Civil War vets who gave their lives or were wounded in the War......as it was slavery that was the cause of the war, the federal government is liable for nurturing the ill that caused the war itself.
But I talked to a fair number of people here and it's clear to me that there's something going on here. There are a lot of black people in a state of psychological trauma that just hasn't gone away,
ap photo by steve mitchell
psychological trauma inducer.
It's not innate psychological trauma. They weren't born with it. They have been weaned and spoon fed poisonous, filthy hate by the likes of Farrakann, Jackson, Flap-jaw Maxine Waters, et al, since birth. Those black extreme racists are the ones who have traumatized their own people.
And I'll be damned if one of them ever accuse me of treating them unfairly or unjustly, and owe them money. And still, it won't be enough. My ancestors weren't even slave owners. I only judge them by the color of their content (aka attitude), not their skin.
If it "resonates with so many folk" why was the turn out so miserable?
DC alone has a black population well over 100,000 yet the vast majority who live close by didn't seem too motivated or inspired to show up.
I have suspected that all along. This only proves it. Time to but an end to this nutty idea.
Lots of anti-Semitism here.
Crazy. With out Jewish support in the sixties they would be still be marching on Selma. That's right p*ssoff the Jews and see how much media support you get.
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