Posted by
Gene on Saturday, May 03, 2008 2:46:26 AM
WHITE GUILT OR NATIONAL SUICIDE? YOU DECIDE!
Some things are best left unsaid, especially in politically-correct America in 2008 and a prime subject non grata at our PC table today is the issue of race. It seems that you’re damned if you do talk about it and you’re damned if you do talk about it.
Being an elder, a seasoned-American-citizen, and a non-candidate for public office, I can talk about it with a measure of impunity, if not immunity. What follows is a not a racist screed but does address serious omissions in our national dialogue, the touchy issues of racism and of White Guilt, and how that guilt may influence the upcoming election. If honest commentary and reasoned understandings are considered racism, then so be it.
First, let’s concede the obvious: Most White Americans, on the whole, have it better than most Black Americans, on the whole. To deny that is to deny the reality of life in America today. There are always exceptions to such sweeping statements, as Ben Stein points out in this month's edition of Newsmax, writingthat in the last fifty years Blacks have made advances in our society that are "simply unprecedented in human history in such a short time." ("Daylight in America," May 2008, p. 24).
I fully agree with that assessment although I can't subscribe to Stein's endorsement in that same article of Michelle Obama's statement that "she was never proud of America until now." He went on to say that, "The life of a black person in this country has never been easy and is still not." I’ll go on to say to that few people live easy lives, here or anywhere and that no one ever said life should be easy. JFK was equally correct when he famously said that life isn't fair either. Easy and fair are relative terms but if any two Americans ever led lives that could be described as pretty easy and eminently fair, Michelle and Barack Obama would have to be sitting on the top of the list.
Born into a middle class family in Chicago, Michelle Robinson Obama enjoyed multiple perks in life, including admission to a Chicago Magnet School, Princeton University, and Harvard Law School. Not too shabby a vita, at all. Barack Obama was equally blessed, or more so, and attended an elite boarding school in Hawaii from which he moved on to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law as well. (Barack and Hillary would both have us believe they were brought up in tatters in a log cabin where roadkill was Sunday dinner—after, of course, attending church, downing a few boilermakers and bowling a few frames with the hoi polloi.)
The point of that biographical smidgen is that both Michelle and Barack have been privileged to lead singularly comfortable lives. For Mrs. Obama to wait until she reached the relatively ripe age of forty-four to finally appreciate and feel proud of her country is bewildering at best. Senator Obama hasn't articulated his lack of pride in America in that same precise terminology but it wouldn't be much of a stretch to believe he has a comparable view.
As for life's fairness, both Obamas seem to have enjoyed that boon as well, she because of her good fortune and success, he because he has risen into the political stratosphere from undistinguished Illinois State Senator to viable candidate for presidency of the United States in a scant four years. If anything is unfair in their lives, it might be the amazing rapidity of his ascendancy. Silly comparisons with Jack Kennedy, who served in World War II, served six years in the House, and served eight years in the Senate before he made a run for the White House are just that, silly—and presumptuous.
One valid similarity with Kennedy is that the Obamas are quite rich, albeit on a lesser scale. Michelle has attributed that prosperity to Barack’s two bestselling books but it’s also due in part because they don’t tend to share much of their largesse, according to their tax returns. It should also be noted that, for some reason, they contributed more to charities in 2007 than in the previous nine years combined.
This brings us back to the issues of White-Black equality and inequality. It’s a given that there's a long way for the 12.9% of Americans classified as Black to go to gain 100% parity with Whites and whether that will ever happen is questionable, due to a number of factors. But Black accomplishments in the last fifty years have indeed been unprecedented. In politics, sports, academia, the workforce, corporate America, advertising, the entertainment industry, in every field of human activity, African Americans have achieved and have succeeded far beyond anything Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could ever have envisioned. To be honest, let’s concede that at least some of those achievements are the results of affirmative action programs but, still, success is a good thing, a very good thing, for Blacks, for Whites, and for the United States.
So, what’s the catch?
The catch, the rub, is that far too many American Blacks think along the lines of Michelle Obama and are waiting for their moment in the sun when they too can finally feel pride in America. Very few of us can expect to have that enlightenment as a result of a spouse’s candidacy for president. For that matter, a lucrative career in the NBA, rap music stardom, CEO of Merrill Lynch or Managing Editor of the New York Times are beyond the expectations of the vast majority of Americans of any color. In the vernacular of our times, chances are, It ain’t gonna happen, Baby!
To predicate one’s national pride on such eventualities is patently unfair to America and to any American who professes to believe in such a scenario. It sets the bar far too high, although some Blacks have gotten over all of those bars. More importantly, that attitude can breed racial disdain among many Whites and it feeds the stereotypical notion that Blacks are not full-fledged Americans.
Ironically, that stereotype can be traced back to the man who is—or was--an idol of the Black community, Abraham Lincoln, and to his signing of theEmancipation Proclamations (1862-1863) when he “freed the slaves.” In point of fact, those proclamations didn’t free many slaves, they weren’t altruistic as much as they were political instruments, Lincoln had a visceral fear of a bi-racial nation, and he strove tirelessly to re-locate former slaves outside our national boundaries.
According to one account in the Illinois Periodicals Online, "Lincoln is thought of as the Great Emancipator, but he thought of the African race as one that was inferior and unsuitable to live in a while [sic--white] society,”a critique which would be harsh coming from David Duke.
The flip side, over the previous three decades especially, is that now many African American leaders perceive White Americans as inferior and the prime obstacle to the advancement of their race in our society. Lincoln’s fears seem prescient.
Reverend Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, has long been the leader of the hate-Whitey pack. He has preached open rebellion and partition of the country. He’s unabashedly anti-White and has called Whites “unrighteous” and mere “potential humans — they haven't evolved yet." He also deems Jews to be members of “a dirty [or gutter] religion” as well as “wicked… false”.
No White American could utter such vile inanities without be pilloried in the national media and ostracized from all civil discourse. Those comments, as well as the equally-racist invective of the Reverends Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et al. are often accepted as truisms yet on their face are blatant examples of Black racism. The fatuous defense offered is that Blacks can’t be racist because they lack the “power” to be racist. My response? Baloney! If it quacks like a duck it damned well isn’t a turkey!
Fortunately or unfortunately, Farrakhan is on the precipice of losing his title of White Hater Numero Uno as Barack Obama’s pastor of twenty years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, scrambles to the top of that heap. More than enough has been written about this hatemonger’s hatemongering—including praising Calypso Louie Farrakhan--so I will only cite his assumed slip of the lip during his softball interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal, April 25th on PBS. In response to LBJ’s former chief of staff/press secretary’s question on “some hard things” Obama had said about Wright, the Reverend responded, “It went down very simply. He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bytes, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I'm a pastor. [Emphasis added]
The Reverend thereby undercut the Great (Semi) Black Hope as nothing more than just another run of the mill, lying politico who will say virtually anything, promise virtually everything, and do whatever’s needed to get votes.
Whether it’s all a devious ploy or a genuine rift caused by Obama’s badmouthing his mentor, both now are on a recrimination rampage. Obama headed for Damage Control Center to distance himself from Wright as the latter continued to diss Obama to the American Press Club as just another pol.
There’s a whole lotta distancing going on here, as Amos and Andy’s Kingfish might say. It’s all very disconcerting.
Lincoln could never have foreseen the extent of America’s situation today, or maybe he did? At this critical juncture in our history, we are experiencing a national racial schism when demands are being made for slavery reparations, a century and a half after the fact of slavery, when we are seeing astronomical rates of Black crime, mostly but hardly exclusively committed against other Blacks, when illicit sex and illicit use of drugs are rampant, when a new Black culture, in the form of disintegrated families, out of wedlock pregnancies, and a dependency cultivated by liberals are all infiltrating the general American culture.
Where does it end?
A century ago, Africa and Africans were regrettably labeled the “White Man’s Burden.” Today, an unseemly number of African Americans perceive White Americans as their burden, seeing discrimination and hatred at every turn, pleading victimhood at every opportunity, playing the blame game in lieu of facing the truth.
Those perceptions, if in fact they too are not part of a grand charade, are a large part of the problem and they militate against a solution of the Black-White divide in America. Sadly, they are a reflection of our times, most recently seen in the case of the shooting death of a Black man, Sean Bell in New York City. Three cops, two of whom were African Americans,, were indicted for manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and assault for doing what they felt had to be done to save their lives. They were acquitted.
Case closed? Hardly. Arch agitator Reverend Al Sharpton, has sworn to closethe city in protest of the acquittal. No doubt the Rodney King riot-defense of “No justice, no peace!” will be trotted out once again.
Where does it end?
Many Blacks and Whites revered a man who at one time seemed positioned to end it, namely, “America’s dad/granddad,” Bill Cosby. Long gone are the imperturbable Ozzie Nelson and the paternalistic Robert Young who filled that role for many years and in its place we now had Cliff Huxtable. To his credit, Cosby and a few others have pointed out that Blacks cause their own burden and their own problems, views which have been met with ridicule from his own race, people who reject his very reasonable thesis that Blacks must take responsibility for their own lives.
What discomfiting about Bill Cosby is his hypocrisy, and it’s not just the paternity suit and separate sexual assault suit recently filed against him. Those peccadilloes pale in comparison to racism in the Cosby household.
Obama has his Michelle who felt no pride in America for forty-four years and Cosby has his wife, Camille Hanks Cosby, who apparently is in charge of overt family racial militancy. After the mindless murder of their son, Ennis, in 1997, she inexplicably went on a rant against racism in America even though the murderer, Mikhail Markhasev, was a Russian Zionist. To lose a child must be devastating but to then falsely blame that loss on White racists is clearly irrational.
Mrs. Cosby has never retracted nor apologized for her racial calumnies.
Bill Cosby could be a closet racial militant, based on the Atlantic article, “This Is How We Lost to the White Man,” (May 2008, pp. 52-62) That title alone—quoted from a Cosby speech--suggests he believes that America’s Blacks and America’s Whites are at war, not a thought that we could easily ascribe to Dr. Huxtable. It’s difficult to see a loss in a struggle between two races as anything other than a war or, at least a major conflict, certainly not on a par with a rugby match.
Perhaps his rhetoric was simply poorly chosen.
So, where does it end? And will it ever end?
Despite the Obamas, Wrights, Sharptons, Farrakhans, and the Cosbys, no one in his right mind would recommend today that American Blacks be banished from the land. Lincoln’s fears aside, it’s much too late and most Black American families were here before most of our White ancestors. Secondly, it’s immoral to even consider. Thirdly, it’s unfeasible, and who would want America to be denied future George Washington Carvers, Jackie Robinsons, or Thomas Sowells?
The issue isn’t repatriation anymore; the issue is finding a middle ground between Black resentment and White acceptance and that craves answers from the Black community. Many Whites are achieving reconciliation by cultivating a sense of White Guilt, guilt for the now-ancient sin of slavery, for lynchings, for Jim Crow Laws, for discrimination, for racism, regardless of whether those same Whites were in any way responsible for any of those societal evils. Most were not, yet that Guilt affords a degree of expiation.
However, White Guilt has major downsides. One significant negative is that denial is unhealthy. To deny the facts of Black on White crime, to deny the fact that many—not nearly all or most—Black Americans are unhappy and resentful, to deny the presence of Black separatists and anarchists in America isn’t just unhealthy, it’s downright dangerous. Another downside would be to elect anyone based on emotion—misguided or not—which is the essence of White Guilt.
It’s been reported that during the “Woodstock Era,” White suburban girls in droves conducted their own private and not so private effort at reparations by surrendering their bodies to Blacks, including Black militants/revolutionaries/terrorists. (See David Horowitz’ chilling 1999 expose’, Hating Whitey: and Other Progressive Causes, based on firsthand experience with Huey Newton and the Black Panthers.) No one to my knowledge has explored the personal repercussions of those acts of personal degradation.
White Guilt Syndrome is alive and well today and may very well help elect Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States, the ultimate, national self-flagellation. America may elect this man despite his glaring inexperience, his vague and undefined plans for change, his unfunded promises, and his unsettling associations with fanatical racist Jeremiah Wright and with admitted terrorist William Ayers.
The Founders understood Plato and his views on the perils of a democracy and therefore established this nation as a democratic republic. As America has devolved into adiverse democracy, can Plato’s predicted mob rule and tyranny be far behind?
In November, instead of giving their bodies, millions of Whites are intent on delivering their votes to Obama as recompense. Future historians will determine the results,. of that national degradation.