Posted on 08/21/2002 5:32:42 AM PDT by SJackson
"Some days I get so frustrated I just want to go up to the closest black person and say, 'You can't understand this, it's a white thing,' and then slap him, just for my mental health"
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | "You know, some days I get so frustrated I just want to go up to the closest black person and say, 'You can't understand this, it's a white thing,' and then slap him, just for my mental health."
Outrageous, right? No one said it. But what I wrote, only with the races switched, is what a black New York City Council member, Charles Barron, did say.
Lest there be any confusion, here are Barron's exact words: "I want to go up to the closest white person and say, 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health."
Barron, whose mental health may indeed be in question, made his remark during a reparations rally in Washington, D.C., this past Sunday. He was joined by other black activists, Louis Farrakhan and U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who has been pursuing the slavery reparations issue in Congress. Conyers has introduced legislation HR 40 ("Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African-Americans Act"), which proposes studying the effects of slavery on black Americans and authorizes appropriations.
Farrakhan, temperate by Barron's standard, told the crowd of 2,000 to 3,000 protesters, "America owes the black people a lot for what they've endured." He didn't mention whether the $6 trillion spent on the War on Poverty since 1965 would be considered a down payment.
To chants of "Black power!" "Reparations!" and "Start the revolution!" Farrakhan called for "land for political independence, we need millions of acres. ... We need payment for 310 years of slavery, of destruction of our minds and the robbery of our culture."
When he alluded to "destruction of our minds," I'm guessing Farrakhan was referring to Barron's own mental health. Perhaps his issues are so severe, we should ignore Barron's need to slap white people. Indeed, when someone says something so blatantly inflammatory and patently offensive in a public forum, it's tempting to ignore him. But an elected representative in the nation's largest city can't be ignored. He is real, and his words matter.
Presumably, Barron meant that white people couldn't understand how blacks feel about reparations, about having been descended of slaves, about having suffered racial discrimination. And while this is true to the same degree that I can't understand what it's like to die until I do, whites and other non-blacks have proved by the laws we live under that they both understand the necessity of freedom and human dignity and are willing to fight and die for both.
Mr. Barron, your slap has been received and acknowledged.
As to reparations, one can reasonably argue against them without being racist or needing slap therapy. Although only the bravest blacks - JWR Walter Williams among them - would dare protest reparations, no doubt many see the illogic behind such demands.
First, when reparations activists insist that the U.S. government pay reparations, one has to wonder: whom would we pay and with whose money? No one living today has been either a slaveholder or a slave. If present governments - by which we mean, "we the people" - owe the descendants of long-dead victims for past wrongs, there's no end to the list or the payoff.
Second, it's not as though The Government is some independent entity with an infinite wallet. What the government has is what it takes from me. And you. So let's get this straight: We who have never owned a slave, who have never believed in or condoned slavery, who are not descended from anyone who ever owned a slave must pay people who have never been slaves?
The search for logic in the reparations argument is futile. What is not futile is our ongoing struggle for national unity, and these guys do not appear to be on our side. Urging racial disharmony and slinging segregationist rhetoric, which would never be tolerated from whites, is arrogant, self-serving and, frankly, ignorant.
Barbara Stanley: Reparations -- No Matter
Source: Toogood Reports; Published: August 21, 2002
Author: Barbara Stanley
Recently, the United Nations ok´d the idea of reparations for slavery in America´s history and a rally was held to trumpet that cause in DC. No matter that the United States Constitution protects those not proven guilty of a crime from paying penance; no matter many of today´s citizens are children of the waves of immigration that occurred in the early part of this century and never owned slaves; no matter slavery was begun in Africa by blacks selling blacks to Arabs. No, no matter that this notion, on its face, is illegal, unjust or ineffective to race relations today. And, no matter that America was the country which brought about the beginning of the end of slavery.
I guess, to be specific, since black Africans sold the first black African slaves, any reparations granted, though illegal, would be paid back by the very folks who lay claim to receive. Huh? Slavery, then, is a completely African black/Arab issue. Why am I in this mix? I never owned a slave; never would enslave another of any race, color or creed; am already taxed to the max by an oppressive confiscatory system and am somewhere between a serf, who gives two thirds of his labors and a slave who gives one-hundred percent as I pay a combined state and federal tax of 52¢ out of every dollar earned, myself............."
Then somebody owes my family compensation for 90,000 acres of plantation land stolen in Louisiana by the perpetrators of the Northern Aggression -- that is why my ancestors became refugees in Texas.
heh....good catch! Also, one might wonder what the difference is between "black" hyperbole and any other kind of hyperbole.
It's a lawyer thing.
The council is run by a white Uncle Tom named Gifford who has nothing but kind things to say about Charles Barron.
I don't give money for nothing.
It might even bring back such colorful 50's characters as Mad Man Muntz!
They usually rape or shoot them.
Heck, even Jesse Jackson knows this. Jesse don't like no black footsteps behind him...
Of course, this does not mean ALL blacks do these things, however violent crime is disproportionately (and politically incorrectly) the forte of statistically significant numbers of post-adolescent black males.
If so, wouldn't they be excluded from any such "reparations"?
What do you think?
Isn't that about the same thing that Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe right now? I am enough of a pessimist, to believe it could happen here too.
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