By John Hawkins
Friday, April 4, 2008
"People have been calling for national dialogues and conversations for decades. It usually works something like this: Liberals say we need a frank discussion about race (or class or gender) in this country, and then they proceed to bludgeon any conservative stupid enough to take them up on their offer." -- Jonah Goldberg
Everyone always says that they want a national dialogue about race, but what they really seem to want is a national lecture where a liberal mouths politically correct platitudes -- and everyone else is welcome to either nod along or shut up out of fear that they'll be called a racist for daring to have an opinion contrary to left-wing doctrine. But, that's the great thing about being a professional blogger: you can tell Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, the NAACP and the rest of the professional grievance hustlers to pre-emptively kiss your behind because you don't have a boss, you don't have shareholders, and you know that they think you're a racist any way just because you're a conservative. So, that being said, let me say a few things that people all across America have been thinking for a long time, but are afraid to say publicly.
Most white Americans are not racists: I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and I've had the opportunity to talk to everyone from business executives to redneck country boys and the honest-to-God truth is that most white Americans are not racists. They don't look down on black Americans, pre-judge black Americans because they're black, or even look at most issues through a racial lens. That's not to say that there aren't any racists out there, because unfortunately, there are people with those sort of backwards attitudes. But happily, they are in the minority and I'd even go so far as to say that they are a tiny minority amongst the people who came of age after the sixties.
Blacks are, on average, more racist than whites: As we've seen in the Democratic primary this year, black Americans are much more likely to vote for a person based on his skin color than white Americans. Also, most black Americans tend to think it's ok to belong to race-based organizations like the NAACP, while white Americans hold race-based groups like the KKK in disdain. Moreover, percentage wise, there are pretty clearly a lot more black Americans who dislike white Americans based on their skin color than vice-versa. Maybe that's understandable given the shameful treatment black Americans once had to endure in this country, but it's still the truth -- and don't even get me started on black Americans actually defending criminal scum like O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and the L.A. rioters because they're black.
It's not racist to be scared of young black men on the street: There's a reason people tend to be more nervous about young black men than young white men: it's that "blacks are nearly 13 times more likely to commit violent crimes than whites."
That's why even Jesse Jackson said, "There is nothing more painful to me...than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
Moreover, most Americans aren't even scared to walk by black men; they're scared to walk by black men who look like extras from a rap video. Even Barack Obama's poor, much maligned grandmother probably wouldn't think twice about walking up to a half dozen black guys standing on the street corner wearing suits.
Affirmative Action does enormous damage to black Americans: Ostensibly, Affirmative Action is supposed to be helpful to black Americans, but it's actually incredibly damaging. Sure, a few black Americans benefit from Affirmative Action, but there are three huge negatives to the program.
#1) It breeds enormous resentment amongst white Americans who, quite correctly, feel that they are being unconstitutionally discriminated against based on their skin color.
#2) It leads to some of the brightest and most talented black students flunking out of school. As Walter Williams once wrote,
"You find the same thing at MIT. Black students in the engineering department, they score in the top 5% nationally in the quantitative portion of the SAT. However, close to 50% are on academic probation or flunking out at MIT. What's the problem? Well, the rest of the students in the engineering department are in the top 1%, which puts the black students at MIT near the bottom of the student body. So those black students who are being turned into failures at MIT, if they'd gone to engineering school at the University of Pennsylvania or Cornell, they'd be on the Dean's list."
#3) Affirmative Action taints the accomplishments of every successful black American because there is always an unspoken question: did they make it on their own merits or did they get a little extra help because they're black?
Black Americans today sometimes benefit because of their race: Sure, black Americans may occasionally have to confront racism. But, black Americans can -- and often do -- benefit from their race as well. Everybody knows about government mandated Affirmative Action and racial set asides, but black Americans often get special treatment that goes beyond that in the workplace.
For example, I've had managers that have been honest enough to admit to me that they're much less likely to fire a poorly performing black worker because they feel the need to have a long paper trail to protect themselves from discrimination complaints. Along those same lines, I've had a higher-up in a major company tell me that he'd hire a talented black salesman over an equally talented white salesman just to make the company look diverse.
Moreover, black Americans get breaks in the public arena that white Americans don't. That's why a jerk like Don Imus can lose his job for calling a group of women "nappy headed hos" while a jerk like Jeremiah Wright can spend years preaching anti-white hate speech from the pulpit and still be embraced by a major presidential candidate.
Speaking of Obama, of course Geraldine Ferraro was right when she said Obama couldn't win the Democratic nomination if he wasn't black. Setting aside the fact that the man isn't even qualified to be President in the first place, more than half of his support appears to come from black Americans who are voting for him because he's black and liberals who are eaten up with white guilt. If Obama had been white, he would have been fighting it out with Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd at the bottom of the candidate reject pile.
Racism is no longer one of the three biggest problems that black Americans face: For much of American history, racism was THE problem that black Americans had to deal with.
However today, there are much bigger issues -- like, for example, the 70% illegitimacy rate amongst black Americans. Then there is the victimhood mentality pushed by people making a living off of racial grievances. How many black Americans have given up on their dreams because they've been convinced by race hucksters that the deck is stacked against them? You could also point to the extraordinary amount of crime in many black communities which is committed not by white racists, but by young black men. Even the fact that blacks vote so monolithically for the Democratic Party is a huge problem because it leads to Democrats ignoring black concerns because they figure they have a lock on their votes while simultaneously causing Republicans to write off the black vote.
That's why, quite frankly, if every last racist white person in America were to do the right thing and become color blind tomorrow, it probably wouldn't make a whit of difference in the lives of 99% of black Americans.
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