What's so wrong about Wright?

[SweetPrettyAss]

Well, I agree with you that we need to move on -- but when someone like Wright holds up things a mirror that shows an image we are not so comfortable with -- aren't we too quick to brand him a radical, a bigot, a racist? I don't think he is calling for separation and never ending resentment, just pointing out that millions of black men are spending their lives in prison, millions of black women are spending their lives on welfare. Still, forty years aftter the death of Martin Luther King.

For me, the more striking part of Wright's message is his critique of America's role in world affairs. There are many Christians, of all races, who are in complete agreement with his condemnation of the hypocritical piety that has pervaded our rhetoric, while in secret we are supporting repression and torture.

Do you really mean to say that there are over 2,000,000 black men doing life sentences in prison. I absolutely do not believe that, although I will admit there are too many. Do you mean to say there are over 2,000,000 black women on welfare. I doubt that also but that would mostly be a matter of their choice.

There are too many people of all races in prison but that is mostly not a racial thing.

 

[Darkniciad]

Thing is, that "mirror" is a distorted one from a funhouse. Of course the reflection is ugly, because the person who made the mirror made it that way. Nobody goes on a diet because they looked fat in a funhouse mirror.

That's the difference.

The world ill-needs the likes of Wright spreading divisive, and in many cases completely false rhetoric to poison a new generation, thus perpetuating what he espouses to wish eliminated.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Do you really mean to say that there are over 2,000,000 black men doing life sentences in prison. I absolutely do not believe that, although I will admit there are too many. Do you mean to say there are over 2,000,000 black women on welfare. I doubt that also but that would mostly be a matter of their choice.

There are too many people of all races in prison but that is mostly not a racial thing.

Sweet - I don't have the numbers handy, but the number of black men enmeshed in various phases of the criminal justice system (not just in prison) is, well, criminal. Actually, it's immoral, and an outrage. I don't think it's coincidence that the current fad in legislatures is to slap criminal background check mandates on almost every kind of profession and occupation imaginable, from door-to-door salesman to contractor.

I also don't have the numbers on black women on "welfare," but if you include Medicaid and food stamps in that, 2 million is probably rather low.

Per my previous post, I believe the criminal thing is one of the two primary civil rights issues of the day (public education the other), and the welfare thing is mostly an underclass culture issue (as evidenced by the fact that a huge black middle class now exists), but there is no doubt that the criminal justice and education things are big factors in this phenomenon.

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

Sweet - I don't have the numbers handy, but the number of black men enmeshed in various phases of the criminal justice system (not just in prison) is, well, criminal. Actually, it's immoral, and an outrage. I don't think it's coincidence that the current fad in legislatures is to slap criminal background check mandates on almost every kind of profession and occupation imaginable, from door-to-door salesman to contractor.

I also don't have the numbers on black women on "welfare," but if you include Medicaid and food stamps in that, 2 million is probably rather low.

Per my previous post, I believe the criminal thing is one of the two primary civil rights issues of the day (public education the other), and the welfare thing is mostly an underclass culture issue (as evidenced by the fact that a huge black middle class now exists), but there is no doubt that the criminal justice and education things are big factors in this phenomenon.

I was responding to WRJames's reference to millions of black men spending their lives in prison. That is a long way from "being enmeshed in various phases of the criminal justice system." I don't see anything all that wrong on doing background checks on job applicants. I mean, I don't want a convicted pedophile working as a janitor in the elementary school, and I don't blame a bank for not wanting to hire a teller with a history of embezzling and there are many other jobs or professions where a person's background can be relevant.

I will say that there are way too many people in prison, mostly because of the penchant for locking up those who are convicted of victimless crimes, such as drug charges or prostitution or gambling or other vice related offenses.

 

[Pure]

wow!

As for "black women spending their lives on welfare," Bill Cosby has a lot more useful and constructive things to say about that than race hustlers like Wright, Sharpton, Jackson, and the leading "civil rights" orgs. Hint: The solution to the black underclass problem lies within the African American community, not the broader society. Another hint: Underclass dysfunctions are not limited to blacks (but are proportionally greater in the black population). A third hint: There is a black middle class to which many millions belong. That reality could not exist if the world were as Wright and his ilk describe it.

massive condescension: if only the underclass could lift themselves by their own bootstraps! the virtuous middle classes could serve as an example only; they owe nothing to those "under" them.

 

[WRJames]

I was responding to WRJames's reference to millions of black men spending their lives in prison. That is a long way from "being enmeshed in various phases of the criminal justice system."

I wasn't implying that they were serving life sentences -- rather, that they wind up spending their adult lives in and out of prison

 

[S-Des]

massive condescension: if only the underclass could lift themselves by their own bootstraps! the virtuous middle classes could serve as an example only; they owe nothing to those "under" them.

No, it's massive condescension to assume that you are going to walk into a poor neighborhood and "fix" them. They are people and the answer to making their lives better is for them to stand up and do it. People rise above their circumstances and make a successful life (either morally or monetarily) all the time, and I think they'd find it pretty arrogant for someone to assume that they are poor helpless victims who need to be saved. We've had almost straight Democratic representation for all of my life here (and then some), yet have some of the worst schools, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, and worst economic opportunities in those neighborhoods. I just shake my head in disbelief when Liberals blame all those problems on the Right. Nothing will change until people become determined to change it from within (funny how the Dems see that in Iraq, but completely miss it here).

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

As for "black women spending their lives on welfare," Bill Cosby has a lot more useful and constructive things to say about that than race hustlers like Wright, Sharpton, Jackson, and the leading "civil rights" orgs. Hint: The solution to the black underclass problem lies within the African American community, not the broader society. Another hint: Underclass dysfunctions are not limited to blacks (but are proportionally greater in the black population). A third hint: There is a black middle class to which many millions belong. That reality could not exist if the world were as Wright and his ilk describe it.

massive condescension: if only the underclass could lift themselves by their own bootstraps! the virtuous middle classes could serve as an example only; they owe nothing to those "under" them.

They don't need to lift themselves by their bootstraps. They need to stop getting knocked up as teenagers, and to go to school and study and to stop shooting and smoking dope and to stop doing all the other self-destructive things that so many do. In other words, get their shit together, like everybody else has to do.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

massive condescension: if only the underclass could lift themselves by their own bootstraps! the virtuous middle classes could serve as an example only; they owe nothing to those "under" them.

Uh-huh - more wealth redistribution will solve all. Maybe even cure the common cold. After all, we're just as clueless about that as we are about how to cure underclass dysfunctions.

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

I wasn't implying that they were serving life sentences -- rather, that they wind up spending their adult lives in and out of prison

Is this for committing crimes and violating probation and parole, or is it because they are wrongly convicted and singled out because of their race. It is some of the latter, but I would bet it is mostly the former.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

They don't need to lift themselves by their bootstraps. They need to stop getting knocked up as teenagers, and to go to school and study and to stop shooting and smoking dope and to stop doing all the other self-destructive things that so many do. In other words, get their shit together, like everybody else has to do.

How condescending.

(Just kidding. You're absolutely right.)

It's very sad: If you grow up seeing nothing but people around you engaged in self-destructive behavior then you perceive that as "normal," and worse, you don't really know what the alternative even looks like. We don't know how to "fix" that. Even wealth redistribution - which might cure the common cold - can't fix it.

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

How condescending.

(Just kidding. You're absolutely right.)

It's very sad: If you grow up seeing nothing but people around you engaged in self-destructive behavior then you perceive that as "normal," and worse, you don't really know what the alternative even looks like. We don't know how to "fix" that. Even wealth redistribution - which might cure the common cold - can't fix it.

That's true, but there are also thousands of people like Bill Cosby and teachers and social workers and more successful relatives and TV spokesmen telling them that such behavior is not the way to spend their lives. And they see drug addicts and winos and worn out hookers and a lot of other people that should give them a hint that they might be on the wrong path.

 

[Pure]

some material on black people as related to imprisonment and middle class status

http://www.theroot.com/id/45595

"What would King say about the Black gulag" by Lawrence Bobo

In response to a report released by the Pew Center, newspapers around the country recently carried the headline that 1 in 100 Americans is now in jail or prison. The New York Times story noted that we are now the world's leading jailer of its own people The story rightfully raised the question of whether we're getting what we really want by jailing so many people.


Of course, the implication is that the American public should be concerned. As is so often the case, at the point when white America has noticed it may be catching a cold, black America has already caught pneumonia. Among the many statistics reported by the Times, for example, is that the black male incarceration rate is not 1 in 100, but rather 1 in 15 as compared to 1 in 36 for Hispanic men (in contrast to 1 in 106 for nonHispanic white men)! Black America should be outraged and demanding reform. I am confident Dr. King would be speaking, passionately, on this issue.


The magnitude of this "phenomenon" is so great that sociologists have coined a new term for it: mass incarceration. According to legal scholar David Garland mass incarceration occurs when imprisonment reaches such a scale and focuses so narrowly that it "ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population." In this case, it is black America being swept into the new carceral state, especially low-income, poorly educated black Americans. I call it "racialized mass incarceration," or the creation of the Black Gulag.


How severe is the problem? Between 1980 and 1999, the black incarceration rate nearly tripled. Blacks are more than 8 times as likely as whites to be incarcerated. In some jurisdictions 50 percent or more of black males in their twenties are under some form of supervision by the criminal justice system, (i.e., on parole, probation, or in jail or prison). It is estimated that a black male born in the 1990s has an almost 1 in 3 chance of spending some time in jail or prison as compared to less than a 1 in 10 chance for non-Hispanic whites. The most recent federal statistics show that nearly 1 million blacks currently in federal, state, or local jails.
[...]
King's legacy is all the more important here. At the time that King was launching his "poor people's movement," the Republican Party was just honing it's "law and order" strategy and tough on crime rhetoric. Politically, it was the growing success of the latter over the ensuing years that set the policy-making tilt of the times, especially in the wake of Ronald Reagan's declaration of a "War on Drugs."

As a society we could have addressed fundamental problems of urban poverty and the hard, ineluctable structural transformations in the economy that have reduced wages and increased unemployment and joblessness for low-skill workers. Instead, social policy in the U.S. did just the opposite: we took federal dollars out of the cities and steadily took a turn toward building an ever larger, more costly, and more punitive prison complex.

The end result is that the U.S. now leads the world in jailing its own citizens. We jail anywhere from 5 times as many (United Kingdom) to 12 times as many (Japan) of our own people as any other major industrial democracy. And shockingly overrepresented in that new Gulag are African Americans.

http://www.richardminiter.com/pdf/articles/19981100-art-ae.pdf

Why is America's Black Middle Class Strangely Fragile?
The American Enterprise
November 1998
By Richard Miniter



"The worst of times" is not an overstatement. Nearly 24 percent of black families live below the
poverty line, and the social life of inner cities is often appalling. "We know that the root cause of much of our poverty is the alienation of black males from the work force," says Fraser.
More than 40 percent of black men between 2029 are either in prison or on parole. And these aren’t all the products of loneparent, low income homes. Several government researchers contend that the sheer size of the black criminal population suggests that many come from middleclass
households.

A series of interviews with black professionals across the country, many of whom say they have had relatives behind bars, provides anecdotal evidence that even many
middleclass black families have personal brushes with the law.
Illegitimacy is another pathology that, while concentrated in the underclasses, also spills into the black middle class, damping security and life prospects. An eyepopping 45 percent of black women managers or professionals have had an illegitimate child, compared to 3 percent of managerial or professional whites. (See indicators, p. 19.)


Why does being "middle class" not mean the same thing for blacks
as for similarly salaried whites? The answer is part economics, part family experience.
In an important sense, blacks only have one foot in the middle class. They have professional and management jobs that generate solidly middle class incomes. But, for a confluence of reasons,
they typically have fewer assets (savings, stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses) than whites with the same income.

Call it the investment gap. Nearly twothirds of black households have zero savings or more debt
than savings. At every income level, blacks save and invest less than whites do. And, at every ncome level, blacks have a smaller net worth, on average, than whites. Fiftyseven percent of black households with annual incomes greater than $50,000 invest in the stock market, compared to 81 percent of whites in the same income bracket, according to a 1998 Yankelovich
Partners survey.


Properly understood, the black middle class is only partly middle class. Their relative lack of asset
accumulation explains why they often feel so insecure about their financial futures—they have ittle to fall back on if a job disappears.

The American middleclass
sensibility stresses a certain patient gradualism, a moral stance in favor of the future over the present. It works against all forms of instant gratification, as Harvard professor Edwin Banfield argued in his book The Unheavenly City Revisited. Without assets, economic patience, and a preference for future over current gain, the middleclass sensibility is less deeply rooted.

With this in mind, the family experiences of black professionals become important. Stable twoparent families (even if divorced and remarried) are the hallmark of middleclass
America. The family experiences of a number of black professionals from across the country indicate that the racial challenge of the coming century may be reconstruction of the black family into a more reliable shelter from life’s storms.

===

http://www.theroot.com/id/45625/page/1

How the Talented Tenth Got Over
By Sam Fulwood III | TheRoot.com

I have spent a career considering the term as it relates to black people. In 1968 only roughly one in eight black households could have been defined as middle class. But a decade later, thanks in large measure to affirmative action -- the real and empirical legacy of the King Dream -- that number soared to about one in four households.

As sociologist Bart Landry noted in his landmark book The New Black Middle Class, the number of affluent black folks grew during the second half of the '60s by a number greater than the total increase during the previous 50 years. [...]

No society prospers without a strong middle class that assumes responsibility for lifting those from the bottom of the well. Today's black middle class function often as nomads, estranged from the brothers and sisters of lesser means. They have ceded the authority of their considerable affluence to trade on the money-making stereotypes of what it means to be black and American.

Of course you wouldn't know it from watching television, listening to pop music or, even reading magazines that black men don't all covet blonde models. Or that all black women aren't booty-shaking harlots willing to do anything for a brief moment in television's glaring lights. Apart from the few, easily ridiculed critics like Bill Cosby, where is the outrage from those who know better? Or ought to know better?

The overlooked truth is that in the 40 years since King died, black America's middle class has become a forceful mainstream rushing upward, onward and over the people who were once their neighbors. And in the midst of progress, the middle class has granted the pseudo-credibility of silence to a nihilistic street culture that has risen simultaneously--denigrating all that King's death made possible.

 

[Pure]

Sweet Pretty finds agreement with Rox

Originally Posted by SweetPrettyAss

//They don't need to lift themselves by their bootstraps. They need to stop getting knocked up as teenagers, and to go to school and study and to stop shooting and smoking dope and to stop doing all the other self-destructive things that so many do. In other words, get their shit together, like everybody else has to do. //

rox

How condescending.

(Just kidding. You're absolutely right.)

It's very sad: If you grow up seeing nothing but people around you engaged in self-destructive behavior then you perceive that as "normal," and worse, you don't really know what the alternative even looks like. We don't know how to "fix" that. Even wealth redistribution - which might cure the common cold - can't fix it.

=====
two peas in a pod on this one. was just going to post as to the coincidence. if those damn black teen 'hoes would stop getting knocked up!

"wealth redistribution" is attributed to me out of thin air. the straw man of the far right. it's call mildly progressive taxation as has existed since FDR; the kind rox and GWB have been undoing.

no, in fact the solutions, so far as they are any, have to do with following king's example and efforts to create a just society.
as the articles i've just posted suggest: the results of king's efforts were an expansion of the black middle class: how? through giving fair opportunity and justice to aspiring black people.

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

Originally Posted by SweetPrettyAss

//They don't need to lift themselves by their bootstraps. They need to stop getting knocked up as teenagers, and to go to school and study and to stop shooting and smoking dope and to stop doing all the other self-destructive things that so many do. In other words, get their shit together, like everybody else has to do. //

rox

How condescending.

(Just kidding. You're absolutely right.)

It's very sad: If you grow up seeing nothing but people around you engaged in self-destructive behavior then you perceive that as "normal," and worse, you don't really know what the alternative even looks like. We don't know how to "fix" that. Even wealth redistribution - which might cure the common cold - can't fix it.

=====
two peas in a pod on this one. was just going to post as to the coincidence. if those damn black teen 'hoes would stop getting knocked up!

"wealth redistribution" is attributed to me out of thin air. the straw man of the far right. it's call mildly progressive taxation as has existed since FDR; the kind rox and GWB have been undoing.

no, in fact the solutions, so far as they are any, have to do with following king's example and efforts to create a just society.
as the articles i've just posted suggest: the results of king's efforts were an expansion of the black middle class: how? through giving fair opportunity and justice to aspiring black people.

I agree that a just society is necessary, and I believe we basically have one. I also believe that the 14 year old girl who gets knocked up and sees her boy friend skip town, or the 16 year old who drops out of school to sit around and use dope or the other people who do self destructive things are sabatoging themselves. That applies to people of all races. When I was in high school, I saw white kids doing that same kind of thing and they were not allowed to get away with it and were not seen as victims of society.

Out of all those people you cite as being in trouble with the law, how many are innocent victims and how many are violaters of the law who got caught? I know there are some of the former but I would bet anything that most of them are the latter. I will also repeat there are way too many people in prison or jail for victimless crimes.

 

[Pure]

note to sweet,

hi sweet,

you ask,

Out of all those people you cite as being in trouble with the law, how many are innocent victims and how many are violaters of the law who got caught? I know there are some of the former but I would bet anything that most of them are the latter.

that is not quite the issue, as the excerpt below indicates: "violators of the law" are not a discrete entity: they are a group selected--partly on a racial and/or economic basis-- by the police and criminal justice system for charging and punishing. the prison pop, its disproportion of poor and black, show us the basis of the selection process.

hence your advice (i suppose) to young black people, "stay in school and don't break the law" rings a little hollow.

i don't know if you're in bed with the far right, like rox is. don't know your positions. but on this issue, the company you're keeping is a bit dubious!



from article excerpted in my previous post:

http://www.theroot.com/id/45595

[Bobo on the Black gulag:]


Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this change is that illegal drug consumption by African Americans occurs at about the same rate as it does among whites. However, African Americans end up in jail in greatly disproportionate numbers. As Harvard sociologist Bruce Western reports in his book "Punishment and Inequality in America," by "the height of the drug war in 1989, arrest rates for blacks had climbed to 1,460 per hundred thousand compared to 365 for whites." This occurred even though in surveys whites reported slightly higher rates of illegal drug consumption than blacks and even though "harder" data, such as, drug-related emergency room visits to hospitals show a clear disproportion favoring whites.

---
NOTE: the excerpt above is the sort of fact that leads WR James to say, and i agree, that Wright is not always far off in his comments on American justice, continuing racism etc.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Jeramiah Wright is an anti-American racist pig. Obama approves of him. Is there really anything else to say?

After Obama screamed to force Clinton to throw a half dozen people under the bus for "racist" comments (which weren't) Obama tried to schmooz over the Wright comments saying, "I wasn't in the church when he said those things."

However - It seems like nobody mentions the news magazine Wright founded to spew his hate message - The Trumpet. http://news.yahoo.com/s/weeklystandard/20080512/cm_weeklystandard/jeremiahwrightstrumpet.

Joe Scarsboro of MSNBC noted Friday morning that he had gone through issues of The Turmpet for a year and found exactly the same hate message in every issue that Obama approved when he backed Wright.

I'll say it again - Jeramiah Wright is a racist anti-American pig. Everyone who backs him is in the same catagory.

 

[Pure]

i don't back Wright, i simply say that, trimmed of hyperbole, many of his statements about racism in US are correct. i would back Obama, whose manner of expression is calmer, more considered, and even elegant; and whose positions are liberal mainstream.

as far as 'hate' goes. fine, as long as you include Robertson, Falwell, Santorum, GWB, and consider the speeches of the far right and the 'family values' people.

 

[WRJames]

Thing is, that "mirror" is a distorted one from a funhouse. Of course the reflection is ugly, because the person who made the mirror made it that way. Nobody goes on a diet because they looked fat in a funhouse mirror.

That's the difference.

The world ill-needs the likes of Wright spreading divisive, and in many cases completely false rhetoric to poison a new generation, thus perpetuating what he espouses to wish eliminated.

Distorted -- not completely. He's showing us things we don't want to see, but a lot of them are the way things really are. Maybe not the history you learned in school, maybe not the world you see on the nightly news, but the world as if actually is.

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

hi sweet,

you ask,

Out of all those people you cite as being in trouble with the law, how many are innocent victims and how many are violaters of the law who got caught? I know there are some of the former but I would bet anything that most of them are the latter.

that is not quite the issue, as the excerpt below indicates: "violators of the law" are not a discrete entity: they are a group selected--partly on a racial and/or economic basis-- by the police and criminal justice system for charging and punishing. the prison pop, its disproportion of poor and black, show us the basis of the selection process.

hence your advice (i suppose) to young black people, "stay in school and don't break the law" rings a little hollow.

i don't know if you're in bed with the far right, like rox is. don't know your positions. but on this issue, the company you're keeping is a bit dubious!



from article excerpted in my previous post:

http://www.theroot.com/id/45595

[Bobo on the Black gulag:]


Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this change is that illegal drug consumption by African Americans occurs at about the same rate as it does among whites. However, African Americans end up in jail in greatly disproportionate numbers. As Harvard sociologist Bruce Western reports in his book "Punishment and Inequality in America," by "the height of the drug war in 1989, arrest rates for blacks had climbed to 1,460 per hundred thousand compared to 365 for whites." This occurred even though in surveys whites reported slightly higher rates of illegal drug consumption than blacks and even though "harder" data, such as, drug-related emergency room visits to hospitals show a clear disproportion favoring whites.

---
NOTE: the excerpt above is the sort of fact that leads WR James to say, and i agree, that Wright is not always far off in his comments on American justice, continuing racism etc.

I'm aware that "violators of the law" are not a discrete entity. The group is made up of people who have violated the law. I also know there are some people in prison who are innocent and some are there for doing things that should not even be illegal. I have always conceded that. I am also aware that poor people and black people and Hispanic people are in prison out of proportion to their numbers.

However, I absolutely do not believe that people are arrested and convicted for being black or poor or hispanic. The cops do not go out on the street and say something like: "Let's arrest every 50th n______ we see, or words to that effect. With few, if any exceptions, they arrest those they suspect, usually with good reason, of breaking the law.

As for the statistics on drug related crimes, I would need to know more details. Is this guy equating possession of a joint of MJ with selling heroin or crack? They are all drug offenses, but they are not comparable. If he is, his numbers are bogus.

I am not in bed with anybody except sometimes my boyfriend.

By the way, you did not answer my question. Are most of the people you mention in jail for violations of the law or are they innocent. I did say "most" not some of them.

 

[Darkniciad]

Distorted -- not completely. He's showing us things we don't want to see, but a lot of them are the way things really are. Maybe not the history you learned in school, maybe not the world you see on the nightly news, but the world as if actually is.

Bold mine. It's the idiotic tin-foil hat crap like claiming that the government passes out drugs to black people and inficted the black populace with AIDS to eliminate them that turn any relevant points he has into nothing. When you combine that with the same hateful, blown-out-of-proportion tone applied to anything that is based in reality and deserves dialogue, everything he says is a waste of time, and a detriment toward any progress.

Rev. Wright and his ilk are nothing more than the opposite side of the coin to the same people he condemns.

I'm done. If you believe his kind of hate-filled, reality-challenged ranting is the way to bring about healing of the racial divide, good luck with that.

 

[DeeZire]

However, I absolutely do not believe that people are arrested and convicted for being black or poor or hispanic.

My brother, who is white, was married to a black woman for a while. She was driving her old car through the foothills (rich white neighborhood) on the way to a seminar at one of the upscale resorts. (She worked for the county, crunching numbers.) A sheriff cruiser followed her for about fifteen minutes, finally stopping her for going five miles over the speed limit. His whole purpose was not driver safety, but to find out what she was doing in that particular neighborhood. She joked about it later, saying she was pulled over for DWB. (Driving While Black.)

The sad thing about Wright is, if it wasn't for the 'scandal', there would never have been a speech by Obama about race in this country. Racism is still a debilitating factor in American life, but, in the interest of everybody getting along, it gets ignored by politicians and the media - until someone like Wright comes along. It takes over-the-top to get on TV. Working within the system is great in theory, but if we worked within the system back in the 1770's, we'd be answering to the Queen of England right now.

The solution of the Right - to give up on the ghettos and let them figure out their own salvation - is not a solution at all, but rather part of the problem. As a society, we are all bound together, no matter where we live. Driving home to a gated community might be a nice escape from the real world, but it doesn't mean the real world doesn't exist.

If it takes a government program to get business opportunities into the ghetto - what are they called, empowerment zones or something? - I don't see a problem with that. I'm happy to pay a little more in taxes if it means a kid in the ghetto is going to have an alternative job opportunity besides dealing drugs. Of course, the Right wants the private sector to work it all out. Newsflash - the private sector is moving low-wage jobs out of the country.

In the case of Rev. Wright, we're shooting the messenger in order to ignore the message. Why am I not surprised? How many hundreds of years did this country justify slavery with Biblical quotes? Isn't it funny, after all these years, nothing's changed.

 

[S-Des]

My brother, who is white, was married to a black woman for a while. She was driving her old car through the foothills (rich white neighborhood) on the way to a seminar at one of the upscale resorts. (She worked for the county, crunching numbers.) A sheriff cruiser followed her for about fifteen minutes, finally stopping her for going five miles over the speed limit. His whole purpose was not driver safety, but to find out what she was doing in that particular neighborhood. She joked about it later, saying she was pulled over for DWB. (Driving While Black.)

And around here, I can point out to you many neighborhoods that white people get stopped for driving around in. I've delivered in and out of the city for years and can attest to that first hand.

Racism is still a debilitating factor in American life,

Could you define debilitating, because I'm pretty sure that some black people manage to survive being black here.

The solution of the Right - to give up on the ghettos and let them figure out their own salvation - is not a solution at all, but rather part of the problem.

OK, provide me an example of a serious thinker or politician who has proposed "giving up" on the ghetto. Here in Chicago we've had decades of Democratic rule (with a large portion of our politicians being black), but the problem keeps getting worse. Luckily for them, they have an endless supply of goodwill from the downtrodden, who keep electing them year after year.

How many hundreds of years did this country justify slavery with Biblical quotes? Isn't it funny, after all these years, nothing's changed.

Really? Nothing has changed? We still have slavery? Black people can't succeed? There are no black millionaires, CEOs, movie stars, pro athletes, lawyers, judges, supreme court justices, state politicians, Congressman, Presidential candidates, doctors, medical researchers, or important intellectuals? Gee, it must suck to live in your part of the US. Here in Chicago we have the equivalent of the 16th largest economy in THE WORLD, and it's run by a black man (and was run by his father before him).

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Originally Posted by SweetPrettyAss

//They don't need to lift themselves by their bootstraps. They need to stop getting knocked up as teenagers, and to go to school and study and to stop shooting and smoking dope and to stop doing all the other self-destructive things that so many do. In other words, get their shit together, like everybody else has to do. //

rox

How condescending.

(Just kidding. You're absolutely right.)

It's very sad: If you grow up seeing nothing but people around you engaged in self-destructive behavior then you perceive that as "normal," and worse, you don't really know what the alternative even looks like. We don't know how to "fix" that. Even wealth redistribution - which might cure the common cold - can't fix it.

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two peas in a pod on this one. was just going to post as to the coincidence. if those damn black teen 'hoes would stop getting knocked up!

"wealth redistribution" is attributed to me out of thin air. the straw man of the far right. it's call mildly progressive taxation as has existed since FDR; the kind rox and GWB have been undoing.

no, in fact the solutions, so far as they are any, have to do with following king's example and efforts to create a just society.
as the articles i've just posted suggest: the results of king's efforts were an expansion of the black middle class: how? through giving fair opportunity and justice to aspiring black people.

Here's where your argument (was that an argument?) falls apart, Pure: BTDT. For 30+ years. I would quibble about the justice of minority preferences, but the fact is they've been in place, along with the rest of the policies you suggest. And while I may not agree with you that they are what's responsible for the expansion of the black middle class, the fact that this has happened demonstrates that the conditions are in place to allow advancement - but only if one is not consumed by self-destructive behavior. (BTW, isn't yours the condescending postion? "It wasn't your own efforts that caused you to succeed once legal barriers were lifted, but handouts and special treatment.")

 

[WRJames]

Bold mine. It's the idiotic tin-foil hat crap like claiming that the government passes out drugs to black people and inficted the black populace with AIDS to eliminate them that turn any relevant points he has into nothing. When you combine that with the same hateful, blown-out-of-proportion tone applied to anything that is based in reality and deserves dialogue, everything he says is a waste of time, and a detriment toward any progress.

Rev. Wright and his ilk are nothing more than the opposite side of the coin to the same people he condemns.

I'm done. If you believe his kind of hate-filled, reality-challenged ranting is the way to bring about healing of the racial divide, good luck with that.

Hey -- I agree that stuff seems far fetched and paranoid. However, who would ever have believed that the author of the Declaration of Independence was raping his slave children? Who would have believed that the CIA would murder the president of Chile IN WASHINGTON, DC and then set up a regime or rape and torture in that country. Who would have believed that an administration that avowed it would never deal with terrorists was meeting with Hezbollah, selling arms to Iran, and using the money to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua? If the Reverend Wright had made any of these claims, you would have thought he was a total nut case. But now, sadly, we know that they are all quite true.

So, given that, his paranoia may be understandable, if not justified. We have found enough horrors lurking in the shadows to suspect that there are a lot more out there. Just the other day, walking in my nice, white, middle class neighborhood, I heard a rumor that Lyme disease began on Long Island near a government biological research lab -- that it as experiment gone bad. Paranoia is everywhere -- and you know what -- some of it may turn out to be true.