Voronwë wrote:I am absolutely gobsmacked by this. How anyone could say that a few angry sermons are the same thing as centuries of slavery, lynching, discrimination and other forms of oppression just blows my mind.
Yeah, me too. And I don't really accept backpedalling on this issue. I am of that rare school which says we
are accountable for the sins of our fathers. We have, at the very least, to acknowledge that they happened, publicly disavow them, and make whatever reparations that we can. It is astounding to me that people believe we are born into this world free of obligation. We are not, imo. We are, rather, part of a long furrowing toward perfection and we have to take our place in the yoke, so to speak.
Allow me to relate a conversation I had with my half-sister about eighteen months ago. She complained that she was experiencing some pretty extreme reverse-discrimination at work because of her being White. (She works for the military.)
Sis: We have training weekends that the base pays for and the only person who is ever allowed to go on them is the Black girl in the office. She's gone to the last three down in Knoxville, and then she got a promotion for her extra training.
Me: You mean, you've asked to have your turn and they won't let you go?
Sis: Well no, not exactly. They would let me go, but I can't go.
Me: Why not?
Sis: You know what my life is like. I have to go with [husband] when it's his vacation time, and I have the dogs to take care of, and now all this [trouble with kids]. I can't leave for a weekend.
Me: So, she's actually the only one who
wants to go on the training weekends.
Sis: Yes, but she's Black.
Me: Therefore ...?
Sis: They shouldn't let it be a Black person who goes all the time. That's not fair. It's discrimination.
Me: So, you're saying that no Black person should be allowed to get extra training that a White person doesn't want ... just because they're Black?
Sis: When you put it that way it sounds racist.
Me: Yes, it does.
Sis: Well, I don't care how it sounds, it doesn't feel fair to me.
You see, my Sis is not racist by her own definition of racist. She thinks that Black people should be allowed to get ahead. She just doesn't think they should be allowed to get ahead of White people. If all the White people are lazy and shiftless, then by golly the Black people should have to be lazy and shiftless too. Otherwise they might get ahead of the White people and that would be unfair. That is not the correct order of the universe ... in her universe.
I am thinking that as this election proceeds, we will find out just how racist America really is, and how much of a 'pass' on prior atrocities is really being demanded by White people who may have been born too late to own slaves themselves but received plenty of benefit from the erstwhile existence of slavery in this country, along with all its later manifestations in the Jim Crow laws, the differential wages, the differential enforcement of the criminal code, the differential access to housing and to schools, and on and on down the list of 'polite' oppressions. I hear a lot of passes being handed around, and not to Black people.
The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson ... my first job out of college ... no, actually it was my second ... was stripping Welfare recipients of their life insurance policies. How many people realize, I wonder, that to receive the so-called social safety net, one must first surrender all of one's assets to the State? Wages and salaries are current income; assets are future income. If you think there's a Senator or Congressperson on the hill who doesn't know this, you were born yesterday. In exchange for a welfare payment equal to poverty level income, we strip these people of all their assets, all their 'future income' - their ability to leverage debt, their ability to earn interest on savings, equity in a home, and the right to be buried in a coffin and not a wooden box - and then we decry the fact that Welfare has become multi-generational. What else could it possibly be?
I understand the argument for doing it this way - you don't want to give people money until they have exhausted their own means of self-support, but even in bankruptcy you can't take a person's house away from them. If they apply for Welfare, we can.
Do I think that it is accidental that the net effect of Johnson's Great Society was to strip Black people of their assets and put them intergenerationally at the mercy of the State? No, I do not think that was an accident. But at my age I'm pretty cynical.
Black crime rates? The prison is the new plantation. I could write ten pages about the racial profiling I've seen with my own eyes in my own neighborhood, and about my experience visiting our max security prison in the Country of Philadelphia ... but this is why I don't get any work done when I visit HoF every day, lol.
Jn
