“Do you know that Negroes are 10% of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We’ve got to face that. And we’ve got to do something about our moral standards.
“We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves,” King said.
King’s vision of a society where a man is judged by the content of his character died with the rise of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the other race baiters of today. It also died with the teachings of Sol Alinsky, who taught these post-King leaders that creating enemies and boogeymen was the way to organize communities. Vision and aspiration are a poor substitute for anger when you need quick motivation for disruptive action.
MLK was a man from a previous age, the age before the age of nihilism, when academics and intellectuals discovered that ‘utopia is a place where moral accountability is no more’. Such ideas led to the breakdown of the family.
The family is the root of civilization and always has been. It is no longer politically correct to discipline children, or to give them bad grades if they fail to learn.
Unfortunately, the will to succeed has disappeared, replaced by a culture with no personal responsibility for one’s behavior. It isn’t just the black community, but everyone in the western welfare states, that are losing civilization. Children with no fathers to provide guidance and with mothers who have substituted sex for love and commitment. Yet the intellectuals, like Marx, have no penalty for the failure of their ideas, or for the epic tragedies that result.
We all need King’s voice of reason. His dream was for a colorblind society. Such candor from MLK was why he attracted attention, then support, to bring about the civil rights changes in the mid 60′s.
Every time the government insists a person’s racial identity to be significant, it foments a malign form of racism. Some say we cannot give up affirmative action because we have not yet achieved a colorblind society. Affirmative action itself demands acute awareness of color, and, so, in a circular fashion, perpetuates its own justification and never will allow us to approach color blindness.
Being color-blind is exactly what we should be seeking. We should not judge a person by the color of their skin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, etc, but simply accept them as individuals.
Nowhere is affirmative action more virulent than in higher education. Almost every college and university now has a “chief diversity officer” pulling down a large salary and backed by a large staff. They contribute nothing to education of any student, but thrive, even when budgets are being cut elsewhere, because they are a sacrifice to the gods of political correctness.
The mania for “diversity” simply shuffles a small number of students around. Some students who happen to have the preferred ancestry get moved into supposedly elite colleges and university, while an equal number of students who don’t have the preferred ancestry get shuffled down into their backup schools. This doesn’t actually help the preferred students because the education at the “elite” schools is no better and is often markedly worse than at smaller schools where the faculty aren’t immersed in their research work. But it makes the diversity zealots feel good to claim that they have made society more just by getting selective colleges to establish admission quotas based on the educationally irrelevant factor of race.
Sadly, the diversity zealots are now pushing to expand the scope of preferences to include socio-economic diversity on the assumption that the poor are “underrepresented” in the student bodies at the top schools. The lunacy keeps growing.
Unfortunately the university staff members (academic and, especially, administrative) will nod their heads in sage agreement that their system of enlightened affirmative action is in the best interest of their school, their students and their country.
The fact that these supposedly well-educated elites can be so delusional is frightening, when you consider the influence they have over the young minds in their charge.
Enforcing inclusion implies that inclusion will only happen by force, and thus that inclusion will have nothing to do with whether the individual is qualified for. By enforcing inclusion, the authorities imply that the included person was less than qualified. That’s a very unfortunate message to send to anyone.
And it continues to get much worse than that. They are not simply complying with government directives, they are continuing to build and expand a network of bureaucrats whose sole function is to encourage and maintain a sense of victimization in both students and faculty.
Nearly all of today’s students, and quite a lot of today’s faculty members, were born after the Jim Crow era, and the assassinations of JFK and MLK. They were not watching TV news in the 50′s and 60′s.
In 1957 President Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas national guard and ordered them to stand down from their previous assignment to prevent the desegregation of Arkansas schools as ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Eisenhower then sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort a handful of black students to Little Rock’s Central High School in the face of the determined opposition of Governor Orval Faubus (a Democrat). Faubus was generally viewed as “progressive,” and later “moderated” his views. Faubus’ wife was subsequently the first woman to run for Governor of Arkansas.
Today’s students and many of today’s faculty and staff were not glued to the TV in 1963 when Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in “the school house door” in an effort to prevent two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. In his inaugural address earlier that year, Wallace said “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
Governor Wallace was a Democrat. He subsequently ran for President as an independent. His first wife Lurleen was the first female governor of Alabama, running when her husband was prevented by term limits to run again. Mr. Wallace also, so we have been told, moderated his views, and was forgiven by (at least according to polling data) an astonishing number of blacks for his determination to maintain segregation of Alabama schools and colleges and his overall racist views. Of course, though he ran for President in 1968 as an independent, Gov. Wallace remained a Democrat.
Conservative Democrats who left the Democratic Party in the 1960s, because the Democratic Party was moving way too far toward socialism and anti-Americanism, have been assumed to be racist. Racist Democrats who remained in the Democratic Party have been forgiven — Faubus, Wallace, Senator Robert Byrd (a KKK grand wizard) are always excused. Among other seriously racist senior Democrats, I mention President Woodrow Wilson and Senator William Fulbright.
For anyone who doesn’t have a clue, I offer this congressional datum. The only Republican Senator who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. He did not disagree with equal rights and access, but he believed that the issue was not the province of the federal government.
Another datum. Congressional Republicans, during the Eisenhower administration, tried to pass a civil rights act. More than once. Those efforts were blocked by Democrats. Lyndon Johnson, who is usually given credit for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, could have had a big head start in the ’50s. But Majority Leader LBJ planned to run for President in 1960, so he was not about to spend any political capital on the problems of segregation in those years! Oh, no, not a chance!
So, now, here we are. “Persons of color” believe that Democrats have always been their allies, and that it is better to press for “diversity” rather than to compete on competence and experience. In any case, the diversity personnel in universities, protecting their individual fiefdoms rather than students or faculty members, will go on culling out (well, no, in!) and combing the anointed members of protected groups.
I believe that America is a lot more divided by ideology than it actually is by race. Personally, I think “encouraging inclusion” is a better plan, and “being color-blind” should absolutely be the ultimate goal.
It is time to deal with the fact that the black community has been victimized by the liberal progressive big government agenda of entitlements. We must also recognize that affirmative action falsely emphasizes the inferiority of blacks.
Since MLK, the liberal progressives have used the momentum of the civil rights movement to pile on excesses of government largess harmful to the black community. In a similar manner, the far left in 2013 uses racism to politically profit from the black outrage. generated.
Thankfully, blacks of a more conservative and rational viewpoint are speaking up against their demagogues.
The fault for the perpetuation of stereotypes, though, lies squarely at the feet of those who claim to be the champions of blacks and minority rights. And, as Clarence Thomas has ably and repeatedly pointed out, things like affirmative action do inculcate us with the tendency to factor skin color in on our visceral judgments, fairly or not.
Using the term “white privilege” is drawing the “normal” line at a different place than noting prejudice against black people, and it’s also inflammatory, disparaging and a debating tactic intended to put the recipient of the label on the defensive, but the underlying phenomenon does exist. Still, if someone threw the label at me, I’d go at him guns blazing and demonstrate that it is he and his who deserve the blame and should pay whatever “penance” is demanded for the current state of things.
American society is comprised of many racial and ethic groups–whites, blacks, Asians, and many “people of color” from various latin communities. And yet, what we constantly hear is that whites are privileged and blacks are held down by the man despite the fact that for the majority of my life time, and I’m 44, blacks have been the beneficiaries of reverse discrimination for decades yet their never-ending cry is for more–despite their continuing race to the bottom regarding behavior that leads to success or failure. Enough.
The first step in solving whatever race relations problems that still exist is for the black community to get its stuff together and solve their own problems. My suggestion is start rebuilding around the family and rejoin the larger community of whites, Asians, Latinos, etc whose community values serve themselves and their fellows more effectively. If you can’t connect the dots it certainly isn’t the fault of others.
I’ve painted with a pretty big brush here. There are any number of blacks who understand the value of family, hard work and merit, just not enough. Our problem is that as a nation we seem to have embraced multiculturalism over the past several decades rather than embracing a national culture that works and insisting that citizens com port to societies norms, rather than making excuses for why they don’t and blaming others for their failure.
Since the nation embraced multiculturalism all members of the group are often stigmatised by the failings of the larger group. It is the perceived behavior of the group based on the actions of bad actors that create this stigmatization, and it is the responsibility of the group to bring these individuals into line if they want to be accepted.
The values of many in the black community do not line up with the values of the larger society and until they do, blacks should not expect to be welcome into it. Once they get your own house in order a conversation about race won’t be necessary.
Given this unfortunate truth the best and perhaps only way to overcome the stigma is to change the perception of the group as a whole. We will all be better off when this occurs.
However, the point I was making only involves government to the extent that government puts in place policies that exacerbate rather than help a particular situation.
That said, the point I was making is that this problem has more to do with the behavioral self-selection of the black community that are at variance to the larger norms of society than to government policy . The behavioral variance is not a variance to the values of white american society, but most of american society other than the black community.
It is this non-conforming behavior that creates the stigmatization of members of the black community from the rest of society and is the basis of mistrust. Simply put, the majority of the rest of America rejects the values they see coming from the black community.
I also pointed out that it isn’t the responsibility of the larger group to accept the values of the minority community, it is the responsibility of the minority community to com port themselves in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole.
The black community is failing here, and they are doing so with an attitude of righteous indignation. Correcting this misbehavior isn’t the responsibility of the majority of society, they are already doing all they can by shunning and rejecting such behavior, rather it is the responsibility of the black community itself to bring the miscreant elements of their culture to heal and behave in a civilized manner.
Government has added to the problem by its action which were designed to mollify the black community and these policies should be changed. Through Congress we allowed a perverse sense of both entitlement and dependency to developed in the black community and these policy failures need to be acknowledged and rescinded–they have already metastasized in the black community and are beginning to spread their disease to society as a whole.
Character is what counts in all people. Dr. King famously stated this and the first four words of that statement are the title of his epic speech in 1963. He said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
One cannot display a deficient character, then blame other’s reactions to you as racist. Blaming others and then demanding that they assume guilt for your depravity of character is in itself, a deficiency of character.
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