Posted on 02/04/2014 2:16:04 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America’s first black president, I came to the realization that I didn’t actually know any black people....One,maybe two,was the norm....
I wanted to know why integration—actual,genuine integration—had failed so spectacularly. The result....was Some of My Best Friends Are Black:The Strange Story of Integration in America, which traced the history of the color line back through all the places I have lived and chronicled the various efforts to erase it:school busing, affirmative action, air housing, etc....
...after eight miserable years of George W. Bush and the euphoria of the Yes We Can crusade,I’d been driven pretty far left on the political spectrum. Taking on the issue of race, you’d think I’d have kept heading in that direction. But the more I read and researched,the more I went out and talked to people,I found that a funny thing was happening: I was becoming more conservative.
Which is not to say I was becoming a Republican. Because how could I? At this point,the GOP’s rap sheet of racial offenses is almost too long to recount.....
...The left has been ceded a monopoly on caring about black people, and monopolies are dangerous. They create ossified institutions, paralyzed by groupthink and incapable of self-reflection. To the extent that liberals are willing to be self-critical, it’s generally to flagellate themselves for not being liberal enough, for failing to stand fast with the old, accepted orthodoxies. Monopolies also lead to arrogance and entitlement, and the left is nothing if not arrogant when it comes to constantly and loudly asserting its place as the One True Friend of Black America. And yet, as good as liberal policies on race sound in speeches, many of them don’t hold up in the real world...
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Worth a full read.
There’s the expected “snarky” injection [they just can’t admit they’re responsible for creating this mess] about Republicans and racial politics, but these asides only serve as minor “speed bumps” to the author’s realization that Big Government doesn’t work.
“Worth a full read.”
I actually plowed through the whole thing, admittedly skipping the legalese.
I’ll give him his answers and save him the trouble of his part 2
Charter schools. School choice. Local control and ridding the system of the various teachers’ unions.
If that is not a racist statement, I don't know what it.
He’s trying to keep the liberal Slate reader along for the ride while he makes the case that liberals screwed up, big time.
Yes, his opening ripping of Republicans and conservatives is meant to suck the Slate libs into his following trashing of forced integration so loved by the libs who want to control everyone’s life.
Hang in there. Once you get past that opening salvo, he tells us all the things those of us who lived through that era already know. But coming from a Slate lib, the readers might actually start to see the truth in his arguments.
It’s like a knife through his ribs to “admit” that conservatives were right (so he couches all that “legalese” in a dark light).
Now that this liberal [trending conservative] sees the devastation Democrats brought on the black family, he thinks it’s time to reconsider those choices.
Gosh, what else could they possibly have gotten wrong?
Hmmmmmm?
Pushing undemocratic voter ID laws,. . . you can count on Republicans being wrong early and often.
The Left just loves democracy. It is the ruse that keeps on giving. It is so bad that most Americans equate freedom with democracy.
Absent the second democratic house in congress, the senate, there is no way the Left could have built its unconstitutional structures these past 80 years.
It is the second house of demagogues that threaten and may ultimately destroy our republic. The 17th must go.
Let’s face it, like everything else it was LIBERALISM that ruined racial integration.
The no consequences, if it feels good do it, soft on crime attitude of the left gave black people a license to commit crime. A license that they still hold to this day as even a cursory glance at this website shows.
This made, and continues to make, the idea of living in close proximity to blacks anathema to most non-black people.
Of course, the criminal underclass has now been expanded to include many Hispanics also, who are also given a get out of jail free card by liberal elites.
The sixties was pretty much the worst thing that ever happened to America. Without all that bogus “liberation” things might be very different today and we might have true integration.
But unless and until we get rid of the group-identity obsessed Left, or at least get their paws off the levers of power, we’ll all continue to muddle on. People, as my Irish grandmother used to say, set against one and other by those in power to serve the powerful’s own ends.
That's a ironic statement considering all this diversity and multicultural push of the last 50+ years is causing a balkanization from which untold damage is being done and we will never recover. Of course the preceding sentence is the heart of what is trying to be accomplished. They will force by law and gun integration at all levels from housing to schools to even churches and anything else that is deemed too white. I wouldn't be surprised at some point that they would try to force integration into families.
There is only one thing that can stop this destruction.
Great article. The author understands what integration is and isn’t. He makes the case against big-government regulation in the education system, but sadly, at the end, he suggests we look at housing, zoning, and property taxes. So while he admits that big-government regulation was a blight on public education and, ultimately, on the black community as a whole, he seems to think we should point the power of big-government regulation at the very fabric of society - the right to pay for better housing and better schools. In short, he wants property tax redistribution from the wealthy and middle class to the lower class. Did he learn nothing?
Indeed.
We both read the same sentence and realized what he’s really after. Failed through education? Try housing and taxes.
We’re supposed to ignore the rodents trotting out their unqualified affirmative action Presidential candidate.
Does this fella really want to go down that path and compare BOTH the parties on this account ? The Democrats will lose, and BIG time.
White Guilt, thy name is FOOL
When my daughters were in elementary school they had friends of all races and invited them to sleepovers. When listening to them they all sounded the same.
Somewhere around the 8th grade one of them came home crying. She said she had asked one of her black friends why she didn’t hang out with her any more. The girl replied with “You’re not black enough.”
By the time they graduated most blacks had self segregated themselves and they spoke the ghetto talk.
I couldn’t read the whole thing for once but I did see where he said that Republicans... Well here’s his own words.
“Even when Republicans have a legitimate point to make about the shortcomings of some government program, it’s almost as if they can’t help blowing their own argument. They’ll start off talking sensibly enough about educational outcome disparities and within seconds they’re rambling incoherently about how black men don’t take care of their babies. It’s really astonishing to watch.”
And how about this:
” At this point, the GOP’s rap sheet of racial offenses is almost too long to recount. Pushing undemocratic voter ID laws, trotting out candidates like Herman Cain, calling Barack Obama the “food stamp president” … if it has to do with race, you can count on Republicans being wrong early and often.”
Hmmm, Racial Offenses? The few he mentions don’t seem like offenses to me. Unless of course he means that the republican are wrong to try and stop vote fraud and that only democrats can have Black politicians.
And under Obama food stamp usage has increased and even there it’s in the white population because they are the ones most impacted by his economic policies. Sadly the black population was pretty much already saturated welfare and food stamp wise.
Other than the three he mentioned I would like to see his list of racial offenses.
Now I will give him credit that he’s trying to be fair and point the finger at both political parties but his earlier prejudices and near-automatic assumption of ‘If a Republican proposed it there must be something wrong with it’, is very irritating yet illuminating of his inner conflicts.
The so-called help provided by liberals has hamstrung multiple generations of blacks and stunted their economic growth.
Sadly, until blacks reject the baby bottle being shoved down their throats by gov they'll never progress.
I practice the outmoded and abhorrent habit of treating people as individuals, rather than as the embodiment of racial, ethnic, gender and class stereotypes. I know that it is wrong, but I can't help it, it's the way I was raised.
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