[DonnerT]

decontexturalizing events and using ahistoricism

Huh????

[liberallarry]

The author's quite a woman.

[Lil'freeper]

bookmarked. thanks

[freebacon]

Although I think this issue may be occupying the minds of some blacks to the point of obsession. I think it's beneficial to understand the reasoning of a black person who to some degree is able to transcend cultural tradition in the black community..i.e the idea of oppressive racism ect..

[cyborg]

This should be read carefully by every freeper.

[cyborg]

FP: You also make some criticisms of whites. Could you outline a few of them?

Dickerson: Basically, it’s obfuscation, subject-changing, and denial. Whites, being human, cannot neither accept their inheritance of privilege or give it up... Whites want to keep the lion’s share of the goodies as well as their superior status without having to feel badly about themselves, which produces certain types of stupefying, to black people, behaviours.

*** She's really generalizing, and if this her daily experience of white people that's pretty sad. A person's experiences are personal and I can't say I've met too many people with that attitude, not anyone American anyway. I suppose that I can see why she would say that, given the way some threads in FR get.

[annyokie]

ping for a good article

[mhking]

Black conservative ping

If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)

Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.

[mhking]

From my own site (http://mhking.blogspot.com/) on Dickerson's book this afternoon:

The End of Blackness? We Can All At The Least Hope For Enlightenment

Debra Dickerson's new book, The End of Blackness, must be worth the read, if only to see for yourself if the negative comments from the crab-in-the-barrel black folks on the Amazon.com reader review section of her book entry are upset because of seeing themselves in the mirror the book provides or if the book is poorly written.

I'd be inclined toward the former, simply due to the type of rhetoric there -- the same type of brow-beating and carping that I see regularly in my own hatemail.

"Look at Dickerson's white fan club below! Including the one from Los Angeles POSING as a black person (January 19). And TWENTY-ONE white friends in his white club really LOVED it too! (Don't you guys think that you made yourself a little too heavy-handed and obvious, spamming positive book review votes for Dickerson? And, negatively, counterspamming book review votes against black reveiwers, some very well written or incisively pithy.)"

"Dickerson (and her supporters here) would have us drop "counterproductive" liberal efforts that "haven't worked." Like what? The resoundingly successful Head Start, breakfast programs, health screening, and the like? They also oppose "counterintuitive" liberal ideas -- quality schools with resources equal to the best white public schools, small classrooms with well-paid teachers, urban neighborhoods as well-maintained by cities as white neighborhoods, and police who actually live in and care about the urban communities they serve in. Why? All of those things (which have never been properly tried, thanks to opposition by conservatives) would cost money, when it's obvious that our national priority is funneling all of our resources into war and military spending -- and enriching the few and the well-connected. Better to blame Blacks for their own plight, then, and offer more "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" solutions that haven't led anywhere."

"Do we really need another black neo-conservative to tell us how hypocritical black America is?"

Anybody notice that in the minds of many of the Soul Patrol that all conservative blacks are coded "neo-cons" in order to dehumanize us and make it easier to make personal insults?

And to answer that last person's question, obviously, America does. The hypocrites in black America continue to blame everyone outside themselves for their problems. They continue to insist (as the whining scribe just before notes) that self-empowerment doesn't work.

Dickerson's earlier book, An American Story, engendered similar accusations of self-hatred and selling out. It too, is one that I'm going to see about looking at. I'd rather read the reasoned thoughts of someone who has taken the time for self-examination as opposed to attacking others simply for having views that are outside of the mainstream.

---

This review also published on Blogcritics.org at: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/20/155353.php.

[Rytwyng]

She's got a lot of wisdom on how blacks ought to behave, but her own thinking is still warped...She makes a number of cracks along these lines --

the racism still seems so obvious yet white people walk around free and unrepentant

It ain't obvious to us. Every white with a conscience, has at some point heard the endless black accusations of "continuting covert racism", and taken a very long, hard, soul-searching look at ourselves first, and secondly our culture at large. Most of us HONESTLY don't see it, even when we've looked for it very diligently. (I don't deny that blacks suffer a lot of unpleasantness but I as an outsider can plainly see that other causes for these problems exist, which so far overshadow the lingering ghosts of racism - if any -- that to blame the white man for the problems is simply ludicrous. I've heard nonwhite foreign immigrants make the same assesment, so this is not just a "white" view).

Anyway... if a white person is convinced that this terrible specter of ongoing racism, doesn't exist, then to "walk around free and unrepentant" seems to us to be the exercise of our God-given human birthright -- it's just too bad that blacks interpret it as an offense against them.

In a way, buying into the black ideology on this subject would actually relieve a substantial psychic burden that many whites carry -- it's psychologically easier to "confess and be forgiven", than it is to constantly stare an apparently sincere accuser in the eye and tell him a thousand times over, that you just aren't guilty -- especially when the accuser seems to get more violently furious with each denial. Accepting the "guilt" would be easier, and would make race relations easier at least in the short term. But it would require a lie, and I (along with legions of other whites) just can't stomach the concept of living a lie, not even for the sake of racial peace.

And so I must live with black hatred, and arm myself against it. Such is the price of truth.

[Rose in RoseBear]

Pingpingping!

[Map Kernow]

Saw this lady on C-Span---she makes a hell of a lot of sense. Remember first hearing of her through John McWhorter, the Berkeley linguistics professor who wrote "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," another eminently worthwhile book.

[azhenfud]

Fantastic interview and author. America needs more men and women of all races with as much clarity of thought as is shown here...