I haven’t any time for this. I’m in a rush to get to my Calculus class this morning. My prof. is going to sing us some linear regression analysis this morning. “It takes a village to learn this shit” I believe is the heading on the syllabus.

Gag me with a spoon.

““When black people came to America, they had to create a way to live within the system. You have to create a culture in order to survive,” she said.

How profound. I believe the same can be said for any number of other ethnic groups who wound up in racist America. (or other lands for that matter)

Read more …

I agree, Jose Vasconcelos, I really liked that quote as well, but to your question. Blacks are unique because they live in a nation in denial of the fact that they were first enslaved for a couple hundred years, then oppressed by society through laws and regulations that made being a slave a minimum wage job, and only began to get a legal guarantee of protection from discrimination in the last 50-60 years, which still didn’t address the whole “my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents were never able to accumulate any kind of wealth to pass onto me” thing. Not that I think reparations are the answer (they aren’t) or progress hasn’t been made (yes, yes, Obama), but I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to imagine why a people’s culture, which developed in an ongoing environment of violence and oppression by the majority, would be in such contradiction to the culture of the people that created that environment. I guess some would call this explanation “white guilt”, but I don’t think you have to go one extreme (over-the-top political correctness, affirmative action for all, crack was invented by the Fed to imprison blacks) or another (full-blown denial that our country had anything to do with the difficulties of black people) to accept the notion that a significant historical context exists to explain the present culture of blacks in the United States.

@Mystic— Slaves weren’t freed in Brazil until about 1885 (without a war killing 600,000 Brazilians and scorching the earth by the way) and only about 8% of Africans transported across the Middle Passage during the Age of New World Slavery wound up in U.S./C.S.A. territory. The remainder wound up in Latin America and the Caribbean under Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French masters. Very few (even of those with memories of Africa) volunteered to go back to Africa after emancipation. Haiti is the oldest independent republic in Latin America/Caribbean and the oldest Black governed Republic in the world. It was a tropical breadbasket when the slaves slaughtered and ejected their French masters in 1804. What is it now? A recent poll was conducted of the Jamaican electorate. Over 60% of those polled waxed nostalgic for British Colonial rule.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110628/lead/lead1.html

Read more …

@Mystic, in what way are we in denial of the past? Everyone knows what happened, and everyone accepts things like slavery as morally reprehensible, as well as damaging in practical terms. And yes, there are certainly well-established white families that have been able to pass on wealth to their descendants. However, the cases in which such a rollover of wealth occurs are few and far between. On the whole, personal wealth is not accumulated by a generational compounding of some central family fortune. The idea of a systematic handing down of inherited money among a privileged white America is nothing more than a myth.

On a practical level, it does nothing towards the end goal of advancing blacks in America to dwell on the past and rationalize their position of struggle. It’s not right, just as the world is not right, but every largely successful group on Earth has had to overcome struggles in order to establish and maintain a level of success. The black position is unique only in that society often finds itself more preoccupied with reiterating past injustices as reasons for underperformance than promoting new avenues of advancement for blacks in general, which can only be realized by the elimination of attitudes about the historical roots and roles of different races within society. In this sense, what you mention as “white guilt” is holding back the black community. It reinforces the mentality that blacks in America are owed something which whites will give them, and this sort of mentality is neither logically sound nor practically possible. It’s time for us to stop apologizing for the atrocities committed by our ancestors, and instead begin to treat people truly equally. Prejudice is a double edged sword, and prejudicial bias towards a policy of continual apology for awful things in history that we had no control over is just as damaging, if not moreso, than prejudice which advocates misguided notions of racial superiority. It’s instilling a false mindset that is crippling the full integration of the black community into the true mainstream of American society.

@breal I’m not saying everyone. Jose seemed to be in denial of why Black culture may have arisen the way in which it has.

@Jose
Okay, but Jamaica is Jamaica, Haiti is Haiti, and the United States is the United States. I’m not talking about analogs with other countries, and I’m not even really talking about the failure of government programs to bring about positive change in black communities. I’m talking about the reality that black culture in the United States did not appear in a vacuum, but instead came from a history of discrimination and oppression in this country. And, you see this sort of cultural difficulty in plenty of other ethnic groups in this country. While the Italians, in general, may have broken through similar cultural barriers during the first half of this century to enter the mainstream, including the crime and drugs, you still can go to Long Island or New Jersey to see the “guidos” that still live in a culture containing all of the negative characteristics of black culture. I know because I’m related to some of them. And the common trait they have? Both groups feel an “us vs. them” mentality when it comes to society because neither has been able to get past the historical roots of their culture, nor receive acceptance of their culture by society (beyond acceptance for the sake of amusement as seen with the Jersey Shore or the desire of every suburbanite to rap in the late 90s). Hell, you can see the same thing in the distinction made between Southerners (the acceptable person to society) and the Redneck (the unacceptable person to society). Now, just as I didn’t do in my last post, nor do I want to do here, I’m not trying to justify this inertia or inability to get past the negative parts of your culture. I agree that it is utterly stupid to place higher value on looking good and having a nice truck than on getting an education and a job, but I’m not going to say that these values just came from a deficiency in the genetics of these people. They came from a history of poverty and discrimination that continues to permeate their culture in a way that viciously cycles around on a small-scale in Guido communities up North being seen as violent and obnoxious, in Redneck communities here in the South being seen as violent and stupid, and on a large-scale in Black communities across the country being seen as violent, stupid, and lazy.

How many stupid and lazy rednecks have you read about that riot and burn down their cities. How many stupid and lazy rednecks are accommodated by the plethora of goodies that has been showered upon Blacks over the past 60 years? How many stupid and lazy redneck have crossed the digital divide to flash mobs for NIKES and tatah chips? Is the stupid and lazy redneck out of wedlock birthrate about to hit 75%? Are stupid and lazy rednecks out targeting Black women for rape? Ever heard of the Red Panthers? How many stupid and lazy rednecks have elected their own stupid and lazy redneck politicians up to and including an ineligible president? Truth be known, most contemporary stupid and lazy redneck social pathologies today were learned by mimicry of Black “culture”.

Diana Ross and The Supremes, Martha Reeves and The Vandellas

Maya Angelou, Bernice Johnson Reagon

My point lay in not making the stereotype of rednecks as being violent or lazy, but in presenting the stereotype that others in this country have of poor southerners, just as poor northerners are stereotyped to be guidos and poor blacks are stereotyped to be violent drug dealers. Again, I’m not offering a value judgment about the present way society handles the difficulties of these groups; I just don’t agree with your implication that the negative features of these cultures come from some inherent deficiency of morals and ethics with the people themselves, instead of being a mechanism of an environment that continues to reinforce these stereotypes and to be perpetuated by poverty and lack of education in a vicious cycle that can be near impossible to escape. My main point in this entire discussion has been to suggest that the negative values you associate with blacks can be found in anyone, regardless of race, especially if you look at the poorest and most uneducated members of a particular group. To your questions though, black or trailer trash, I think either group can be shown to have pissed away welfare and educational reform opportunities as well as used them to better themselves. I think either group can be shown to have misused their internet access to spread ignorance and stupidity as well as knowledge and intelligence. I think either group has to worry about absentee fathers and teenage pregnancy, especially if you watch any of the Teen Mom shows that somehow focus on all white girls. I think either group could be shown to have its fair share of rapists and domestic abusers. I think for every Black Panther still alive, there’s someone from the KKK still around. For every Obama that has been elected, a W. Bush has been elected. For the bling-bling and spinners of blacks, rednecks have the Truck Nuts and chromed out lifted trucks. For every kid thinking that basketball is going to get him out of the ghetto, there’s a kid thinking football or baseball is going to get him out of the trailer. But, to me, none of this has anything to do with the fact one’s skin is black and the other has a drawl and has everything to do with displaced values from growing up poor and stupid and being told that’s all you’re ever going to be.

@mystic —You speak in outlier terms and in general terms without acknowledging statistical proportionality. Your race is, on a whole, dysfunctional and maladaptive in contemporary Western society.

Read the following as if you had a book report assignment and get back with us :

Read more …

I’m a white guy with a Russo-Italian background though, and nothing in your citations nor any of things that Jose has said were not also suggested about my relatives and ancestors back in the first half of this century when Italians and Russians invented organized crime in this country. I’m not denying your statistics, John Pershing. For the sake of argument, I’ll even say they are credible, but clearly we disagree in their interpretation and I’m afraid we reach an impasse at this point. You see “Blacks are seven times more likely to be in prison than whites” as evidence to demonstrate the dysfunction of blacks, while I look at that same statistic and see a system that perpetuates itself, especially when you consider how many mothers and fathers, who should have been raising their kids right, have been put in jail for non-violent drug offenses (a theme that can also be seen with Italian gangsters during Prohibition). I just don’t see the color. Violence, crime, and lack of education all accompany poverty, whether the person is an Italian immigrant in the 20s or a black person now.

Funny thing though Mystic, you don’t see ethnic Russians, Italians, Irishmen, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, or Hindus en masse making excuses for themselves based on how hateful racist Amerika has mistreated them. Every once in a while though you’ll run across a Russo-Italian making excuses for an Afro-American. All in all though if there’s a conversation about race/ethnicity going on among the aforementioned groups, the most likely theme of the conversation will be about Afro-American social pathologies. Even your gumba gangster ancestors in the 1930s had this conversation