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 ...
The writer admitted to not knowing many black people. He/she obviously knows NO Republicans or conservatives.
No surprise , unavoidably most of my friends and acquaintances are Democrat Progressive/Liberal (I live near Albany NY) and, aside from politics, almost none of the these Democrats know or socialize with Blacks. These Democrats are fleeing Albany City for the suburbs where their children attend lily white schools with other children with like minded parents. If anyone should suggest bussing to end the “Segregation” the suburban Democrats would fight it tooth and nail, after all, that sort of self interest is understandable to them, (not like those “Southern school districts”)..... but they certainly don’t acknowledge it.
If they live in Albany City, they send their children to Upscale Private schools which “surprisingly” is generous with their athletic scholarships to Blacks.
Liberal policies certainly exacerbated things, but conservative ideas won't work with this group either. It's beyond help. If conservatives think free-market ideas and independence from gov. can appeal to a class of people who love to be victims and sponge off the gov. teat, they're dead wrong.
I started high school the first year of integration (1968). The black kids really resented having to come to our school (of the four white/hispanic high schools, all the blacks came to mine). Before that, the black kids loved their schools, and nearly all graduated. There was very little illigitimacy.
Saw my first riot that year. The liberals own this. If they had left well enough alone, no busing, the racial divide would have healed itself.
Tanner wants to talk about race? And blame Republicans?
Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Does Tanner know what Lincoln did?
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. Does Tanner know what King did?
Democrats started the KKK to frighten blacks away from voting booths. Does Tanner know what the KKK did?
Heeling itself leaves no room for liberals to feel self-righteous.
Silly article written by a superfluous person.
What liberals never get is that segregation itself is a result of big government. Jim Crow laws are the proof. Just the fact that governments in the South had to pass these laws proves that at many levels integration was happening organically. There would have been no need to pass these laws if people were not interacting in a voluntary manner. No government passes laws to prevent something that is not happening. As for today, big government has crippled such a vast number of minority people economically that only a few have the resources to move to more integrated situation.
The liberals own this. If they had left well enough alone, no busing, the racial divide would have healed itself.
I have a similar history to yours. I was in the Milwaukee public schools when busing started in 1978. We went from 64 blacks in a school of 2200 kids to 300 blacks.
Prior to busing we had no racial problems at all. Why? Because the black kids that were there were just like us. They (and their families) were already integrated into our school and our community.
Then they started busing and dropped 250 foreigners into our community. These kids were not us. They came from a totally different culture and they were on edge against us as we were on edge against them. We ended up with racial fights almost every day. There were "safe" restrooms for whites and places where you just didn't go unless you were in a large group. Our black kids didn't even like the newcomers.
Integration is not a racial thing. It's a cultural thing. And America in the late 50's was slowly integrating as the cultures of the blacks and the whites were becomming very much the same. My father's generation was more racist than my generation, and my children's generation would have been less racist than my generation.
Then busing happened and we were exposed to the bad part of black culture.
But there was still hope. Blacks were still integrating into white society and racial barriers were still falling. (and the greatest barrier is white perception of blacks as being "other" than us).
In my fraternity we had a handful of black brothers. They weren't thought of as "black" they were thought of as brothers. Just the same as the rest of us. It was in stark contrast to the residents of the neighborhood the house was in. Those people were blacks, they were not us as the culture was that different. And then obama happened and we saw that black inner city culture was against us and practiced violence towards us.
And now we are even more racist than our fathers were. (And our children will be even more racist. They recognize that they cannot trust people who attack them for merely being white)
I live in a small town. We have a small black community. But they are us. They are not "black" culturally so the color of their skin is no big deal. I have no problem at all with any black in my community. They're great people.
But I do not go into the big cities anymore. Those places are foreign war zones controlled by enemies. That culture is against me.
Integration will happen when the blacks once again become us. People want to live and be with people who are just like themselves. We self-segregate into cultural groups. Always have, always will. Until the blacks surrender their inner city culture and start acting like Americans they will be shunned into the ghettos. Integration will only happen when the blacks want to integrate. Because as long as they insist on practicing their inner city "culture" Whites will continue to flee from them.
(sorry for the rant)
What needs to be done is to cut off the government teat and let them learn in the school of hard knocks how to survive and even thrive.
I disagree. Racial barriers in the United States are put up mainly by the blacks themselves. They want to maintain their dysfunctional culture. Until they want to adopt white culture, the one that actually created and maintains the country, they won't progress, for there is no place to progress to in theirs, except maybe neighborhood warlord.
I speak, of course, in the general, not the specific. I know a lot of blacks, work with them in fact, that are fine individuals, and depend only on their own efforts, not the government's.
It’s not just the black family that was devastated, it was the cities. Nearly all of our major cities were turned into waste lands because of this.
The real moral of the story is that you cannot make people do something they don’t want to do. Its totally natural for people to congregate to their own kind. Nobody likes to admit it but its true. In Atlanta the govt has bussed the black kids into very upscale areas like Dunwoody so now the whites just put their kids in private school and 95% of the kids in the public school are black. Its ridiculous. You can’t change human nature. In 100 years journalists will still be trying to figure why can’t we get integration?
The author doesn’t go into detail on the subject, but I got something entirely different out of the statement about
“housing, zoning, and property taxes”
near the end.
I think the author means that if affordable housing is allowed to be built (by zoning that allows smaller homes to be built in an area) the property taxes would be affordable enough that integration will happen on it’s own naturally without the need for big government
you are exactly right.
It’s not about race it’s about culture.
Look at that little black girl being excorted into the school by those federal agents. Anyone can see she DESPERATELY wants to be a part of the white culture and should certainly be allowed into that school!
But just imagine that same picture with a black gang banger with his pants hanging down to his knees, ect. and your opinion completely changes.
This isn’t about race anymore, this is about culture and to a certain extent about class.
I agree with you. We are saying the same thing from different sides. What causes white’s perceptions of blacks? Black’s behavior.
And he won't list them.
I, for one, would like to see this so-called rap sheet. WE didn't create the KKK. WE didn't stand in the way of the Civil Rights Act. Who did all that? Guess which party!
As I remember ...
When the public accomodations law was proposed in Congress, which didn’t just outlaw the Jim Crow State laws in the South, but went the extra step to make it a federal crime for any business which served the public to “discriminate”.
Some farsighted Republicans said, “Wait a minute, that expands the scope of the Federal Government way beyond the limits set by the Constitution.”
Liberals responded with charges of racism, and black culture bought it. Republicans have been stuck with the “racism” label ever since.
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