Posted on 02/02/2004 2:05:07 PM PST by gdogdaily
About eight months ago, a student of mine guiltily asserted in one of his papers that the majority of black Americans live in extreme poverty. I emailed him government Census figures from 2002 revealing that most blacks are not poor and that only 24 percent lived below the poverty line (which is still too many people, of course). Ironically, the poverty rate for white Americans was shown to be slightly lower than that of Asians, but I have yet to witness any students writing essays about "Asian privilege."
The fact that this young person was unaware of current living conditions common among black Americans is due, in my opinion, to his receiving an undergraduate education that focused more on leftist theory than on facts.
When a friend sent me a Chicago Sun-Times column the other day written by Rick Telander, called "Black life far more rags than riches," it was clear to me that the writer, like the student’s former professors, was more interested in entrenching himself within the temple of political correctness than with uncovering truth.
One would automatically assume nowadays that any discussion of blacks and squalor would center geographically on Tanzania, Ethiopia, or Somalia, where the average citizen survives on less than six hundred dollars a year. Yet Telander chose instead to examine blacks in America, who are citizens of the second richest nation on the planet. Black Americans average 29,470 dollars annually in household income. Many whites, whom radical academics categorically define as privileged, scratch by on far less.
Telander, a sports columnist who has published in national magazines, begins his piece by discussing the demographic breakdown of players in the Super Bowl:
The vast majority of the players you will watch in the Super Bowl on Sunday will be black. Maybe you won’t talk about it, but it’s a fact. There are the white quarterbacks and kickers, the random pale-skinned offensive linemen and even a linebacker such as Tedy Bruschi. But most of the starters and stars are African-American.
This is a promising beginning. If not for his column’s title, one might infer that he was about to take up the contrarian position that de facto discrimination against whites should end in the National Football League. Telander could argue that affirmative action for Caucasians and Asians is an economic and cultural imperative given the amount of people who watch the Super Bowl. Such a stance could be justified in the name of diversity. A court could order that 75 percent of the players in the league must be white to correspond to the number of "pale-skinned" members of our population.
Alas, Telander does no such thing. He chooses instead to robotically emulate nearly every other mainstream journalist and descend into the wailing world of conformist PC. His arguments begin with the platitude, "African Americans as a group still have far more than their share of societal problems in this country." Well, that’s undoubtedly true, but Telander resolutely avoids imparting any original thoughts on the topic. No, ultimatly he blames current-day blacks’ problems solely on slavery and racism.
Telander has several "I have recently purchased a condominium on Mars" moments in this diatribe. Few are more perplexing than this doozy: "The Super Bowl, in its frenzy of glitz, hyperbole and cheery rhetoric, gives viewers a wildly skewed vision of the reality of being black in the United States."
Wuh? What kind of mind would confuse a contest between a hundred or so of our land’s most genetically gifted individuals with a representative sampling of racial characteristics among our general population? Is there a person on God’s earth who thinks that the average American, regardless of race, possesses 8 percent body fat and earns a weekly paycheck ranging from $3,000 to $175,000? None that I have ever met.
Such patronizing observations tell us far more about the writer than they do about the United States. The logical conclusion is that Telander, in fine liberal tradition, views the mass of Americans as being his inferiors and sees it as is his job to describe our perceptions to us, as we’re too stupid to know what we think. In just a couple of paragraphs, however, it becomes perfectly clear that it is Telander who is clueless regarding racial realities.
His next sentence will undoubtedly appear in a future logic textbook as an example of non sequitur argumentation:
I bring this up because colorblindness—extolled by knee-jerk do-gooders and status-quo lovers alike as the way to guarantee equality—does not work when it comes to real-world solutions to old and intractable problems.
That utterly fatuous statement has absolutely nothing to do with anything that proceeded it. How does Telander know colorblindness doesn’t work? Is it because most people aren’t built like linebackers? Because most of us don’t have lucrative endorsement contracts? It’s impossible to know, because Telander refuses to explain how he came to this utterly unfounded conclusion. In my case, and I won’t speak for the reader, my lack of NFL employment has more to do with a bad pizza habit and the fact that I run a 6.5 in the forty than with anything that happened to my ancestors in Ireland or Russia.
Next, our sports columnist drunkenly meanders hair-mousse-deep into politics, and that is pathetically where he chooses to stay until the column finishes.
On Monday, a federal judge in Chicago, Charles Norgle Sr., dismissed a historic class-action lawsuit brought by descendants of African-American slaves seeking reparations from 19 corporations for profiting financially from slave labor. The suit was tossed because the judge -- a white man, by the way -- wrote in a 75-page opinion that the suit was brought in the wrong venue, didn’t make proper connections to the accused businesses and came too long after the Civil War. His points might have been legally correct, but the issue certainly is not dying with Norgle’s decision -- amended complaints are apparently already in the works -- and the descendants of slaves should, must, win some form of recompense for their ancestors’ abuse.
Let’s first discuss, "a white man, by the way." This is an absolutely sickening thing to say about a judge. Telander is implying that the judge has been corrupted by his skin pigmentation. If the judge had been black and ruled in favor of reparations, do you think that Telander would have cited his race to imply that it affected his decision? Of course not. That would make him a racist by the bylaws of political correctness.
Here we see that it is Telander who should be judged racist, by the bylaws of human nature. When he identifies the judge’s race, he unwittingly acknowledges his contempt for people of a certain skin color (his own) and his perfectly asinine and unfounded assumption that most Caucasians harbor racism in their hearts. That is not true about white Americans, but it is most obviously true of Rick Telander.
His defense of reparations is incorrect in every way. The descendants of slaves (which by no means includes all dark-skinned people living within U.S. borders today) do not deserve recompense from the other people who dwell here now. The fact that blacks living here today have personally experienced no slavery at all is the most obvious reason why reparations is a pernicious suggestion.
When we flesh the position out—and another writer came up with this analysis before I did—it is obvious that reparations are wrong. They force D (all Americans) to pay damages to C (black Americans) for offenses done by B (slaveholders who have been dead for a hundred years) even though B wronged A (former slaves no longer living) and not C.
Justice requires that the person who committed an offense should suffer the penalty for it—and no one else. In the proposed racial reparations schemes, by contrast, the innocent pay off the unharmed. It is a ludicrous notion, but in an America ruled by activist judges, it may well come to fruition. My hope is that the majority of us will come to think clearly about reparations and visualize the foolishness of amnestied immigrants from Mexico paying tribute to Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan.
Telander justifies his case by mentioning past payments to Holocaust survivors and the Japanese Americans who were interned during the second world war, but, his examples do not apply to the current reparations case because, with pre-Civil War slavery, there are no living survivors to repay.
Moreover, if we are going to assign responsibility for slavery to particular "races," there are people other than the pale-skinned variety we must include. The economist
Walter Williams effectively captured the sheer absurdity of the reparations debate in the following:
There is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. Should [Congressman] Conyers haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Muslim states before Congress and demand they pay reparations? By the way, is there anyone prepared to make the argument that blacks in America today would be better off if they were in Africa? If blacks wouldn’t be better off, then why the reparations?
If we could organize tours of Africa, a tragically underdeveloped continent, for all American citizens, patriotism would spread like influenza and talk of reparations would cease. Perhaps then we would realize just how fortunate we all are to be living between these shores regardless of the conditions of our ancestors’ arrival, as Booker T. Washington argued so brilliantly.
Utterly ignorant of these truths, Telander concludes that "the repayment of wealth to slave ancestors is the right thing to do. And it could set many things right." It is truly hard not laugh at such benightedness. Reparations would embitter millions by instituting a legally enforced racial caste system which placed blacks on a higher moral plane than everyone else.
Racism cannot be eradicated by extortion. If such a scheme were enacted, then after the end of the scheduled payments, race panderers and shysters would immediately claim any remaining disparity in income as requiring that payments should continue. Thus reparations would only exacerbate racial tensions.
Telander also wrongly assumes that slavery is the cause of black social problems. This notion, however, defies all known statistics concerning the black family. Social disintegration of the black family and society began not during Reconstruction but with the rise of the welfare state. Larry Elder documented this tragic process as follows:
We now see the damage done by LBJ’s War on Poverty, during which time the black illegitimacy rate grew from 25 percent to today’s nearly 70 percent. Evidence shows the existence of a growing, thriving, black middle class well before the advent of affirmative action. Nor does history support the hysterical, emotional view that affirmative action accelerated the black middle class growth.
Why would Telander overlook such truths? The most charitable interpretation is to hold it being largely due to an irrational sense of racial guilt, which he shares with many other liberals. In fact, it is Caucasian apologists like Telander who keep fanning the flames of the reparations debate. Thomas Sowell explains:
This demand also mobilizes a certain amount of support or sympathy among whites, especially those in the media and in academia, where such support or sympathy costs nothing, and allows those who give it to relieve their own sense of guilt, while risking other people’s money—and national cohesion. Some white politicians can also benefit at little or no cost to themselves by expressing sympathy with the reparations cause or even voting for meaningless apologies for what others did centuries ago.
Given what we know about Mr. Telander, there may be good reason for his guilt. He wants to indict his own people for crimes they have not committed, and he treats blacks like inferior pawns who could not survive without his condescension and largesse. Rick Telander should not ask for whom the bell of racism tolls: it tolls for him. Bernard Chapin writes from Chicago. He can be reached at bchapafl@hotmail.com.
No, reparations are retarded.
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Classic Poe for the closing.
Correct. Reparations for slavery are absurd. I would, OTOH, not object to reparations to elderly blacks (and any similar groups) who can document a lack of protection for their civil rights up through the 1950s or so.
Watching BET Nightly News probably had some influence as well.
i was thinking of a poe...book
(bad case of the d*mbarse)
So that would be the blacks in America who are citizens of Japan. Mmm, don't think there are too many of them.
It is ironic that blaming blacks' present-day problems on slavery and [white] racism becomes a major part of their difficulty, in that it allows them, and society at large, to avoid the actual reasons for, and solutions to, the problems (real and perceived).
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