Letters to the Editor
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Well yourself, Silenced
"Whatever you want to call it -- why is this acceptable?"
What syllable in my post gave the impression I think these things are "acceptable"? Go looking for someone else to be your "progressive" straw man.
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Where Does One Begin?
1.) Mr. Kamiya, read Ashley Montagu. There are no separate "RACES" there is one race, the human race, and within it various ethnic divisions. If some African Americans understand they are NOT a 'separate' race, perhaps it actually shows they understand genetics better than you and the survey takers do.
2.) There is a black 'working class' not just poor blacks and middle class blacks. You disappeared them. Most black people are in the working class, hung between the very poor and the doctors/lawyers/educators of the 'talented' 10th or 20th now...
3.) Class has been an issue among blacks since Harold Cruse's 'Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.' (and actually before...) Any black Marxist could have told you that years ago. And any ordinary black working person could have told you that too. They have intimate contact with drugged-up thugs. They don't need Bill Freakin' Cosby to tell them.
4.) Hispanics have become America's largest minority in the meantime, and, from Lou Dobbs on down, they are the new target of respectable discrimination and hatred. Thank God black people did not come across the border recently... Prejudice isn't going anywhere, it is just being transferred. The black (and white) poor have been long forgotten, as you point out. Isn't that institutionalized racism?
5.) In slavery, if you had a drop of black blood, you were 'black.' In the real world, ethnic intermarriage means that there are all kind of transitions, and that 'color' and ethnic background are variable. I think the survey shows some 'black' people understand this scientific fact. It doesn't necessarily mean that black consciousness is dead. Jumping to that conclusion says more about you than anything else.
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Tis a good season to remember ....
it was more than 10 years ago ... way back before 09/11, back when Clinton was still in the White House, that holidays in the black community must be touched indelibly by the 1 in 9 black men involved in the judicial prison industrial complex ... that as extended families gather together, the missing, the injustices of public defender justice, sentencing inequalities, not to mention third-strike laws, must cast a shadow ... those alive but not present ... not likely to be present any time soon. Those dead as collateral damage of crime, those dead of drugs and thug life, those holed up someplace, unreachable, those waiting for a place in rehab ...
I don't know anyone in prison ... I used to "know" 2 younger males, one a kid I babysat for, the other a friend of my younger brother who were doing time for repeated drug arrests/dealing.... Still, they had moved out of my sphere long before they ran out of luck and second chances.
After a decade of neglect, of course, the healthy families are going to protect themselves, shun their "dead weight" ... employ "tough love" etc. etc. etc. ... just like their "white" counterparts. As others have said, this appears to be more a matter of economics and suvival ... race, not so much.
There, but for fortune, go you and I.
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Brightstar! Arrrrrgh!!!
Your theory about African Loser-Tribes is kooky abstract silliness. Do you know any actual person from another race, now? Did your own ancestors come from some tribe which had difficulty distinguishing real life from nutty fantasy?
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And For God's Sake
Just give it a rest with the California prison system. What, you think these problems don't exist in every prison system on the planet?
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Is race dying?
How does one get from "More than a third of black Americans no longer believe that blacks are a single race." to "Is race dying?" The filler about poor blacks in the inner city conveniently forgets that there are poor whites and Hispanics and orientals as well. It also conveniently neglects that there are inter-group(if you don't like the term racial) strife and economic disparity between these groups as well.
The author of the Op-Ed piece seems to be able to disregard the evidence that for all time the major separators of groups of people seems has been economics and religion. It seems that largely in America was someone's physical appearance -- mainly the color of their skin developed into a significant marker of economic class.
Why it should be shocking that wealthy people of any ancestry identify with wealthy people of other ancestry rather than their "own Kind" boggles the mind.
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This essay reminds me of yesterday's essay on Israeli "disengagement" ...
eventually ... you "give up" ... you disengage ... you compartmentalize ... you let go.
does that work? Not entirely, not really ... it's more often like a "bargaining" stage in Kubler-Ross than like some "acceptance" (reality intrudes, a child is born, heart strings plucked, a work of art reunites, reengages) ...
Is this "progress" ... I'm doubtful
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In the rest of America, where the yacht owners don't live...
...there was an epidemic of noose hangings in the NE--perhaps in solidarity with the folks who started the trouble that led to the Jena 6? The FBI reported that the number of hate crimes rose 8% in one year. In West Virginia, a black woman was kidnapped, held captive in a shed, forced to eat dog and rat feces, raped and tortured for a week. In Chicago, two men burst into a party held by gay black men and shot the place up, injuring six. Radio jocks in Minnesota had to apologize to two American Indian tribes for saying that the high suicide rates on the rez were "genetic" and due to "incest." Oh, and there was some more hand wringing about white college kids dressing up in blackface and then saying they didn't know people would be offended at Halloween. We all remember the media highlights: Bill O'Reilly being pleasantly surprised that no one at Sylvia's, Harlem's signature soul food hangout, was "running around screaming Motherf***r, I want more ice tea!" "Kramer." Imus. Oh, and in case you think I'm being hard on America: A Nobel Prize winner got disinvited from a lecture at the British museum for saying that "blacks" (and in England, this includes Asians) were not as intelligent as whites and "anyone who had to work with black employees knows" that this is true.In Australia, the prime minister--thankfully defeated in the late election--has sent the military to move aboriginal communities off their ancestral lands--something to do with preventing child abuse? or something to do with valuable minerals underground? who's to say. Arab youths are rioting again in Paris. Oh, and all of that happened this year.
Yeah, race is dying. Things are just dandy among those who own yachts.