Put simply: anyone who wants to claim that black people carry any responsibility for their own failures is a racist. Anyone who wants to make general claims that, say, the South Side of Chicago is a full scale clusterfuck is called a racist. Anyone who wants to make greater demands of black people is called a racist.
This claim does not to protect anyone, certainly not poor persons of African descent. No censorship of valid criticism does anything but keep it hidden, and solutions farther than ever.
I want to be clear: the black middle class was coming into being FASTER in the early 60’s, than after the race riots, Civil Rights Act, and War on Poverty. It was not enabled by all of that: it was RETARDED. You don’t teach people responsibility by teaching them to game a system. You don’t build respect by demanding special favors.
At all times I have multiple projects in terms of dealing substantively and in a mature way with various issues. I believe I am going to make my next one “The black experience in America: a white perspective.”
OF COURSE this title alone will make people mad. But not, I don’t think, anyone who ACTUALLY cares about black people.
Among other things, I want to point out that most black people ought properly to be understood the same way the rest of us are. For example, as Nigerian-Irish-Scottish, or Ivory Coast-English-French. You can readily recognize actual Africans, as their ancestors were not raped by white people. Whether we want this to be the case or not is irrelevant: it IS the case. For all I know, some of my ancestors came into being through violence also.
The overlay I want to put on this is the psychology of trauma. Nobody–certainly not me–wants to deny a history of massive injustice and related psychological reactions. What I want to point out is that if we treat the history of racism as a history of trauma, then the way black people and white people have gone about rectifying it has been psychologically stupid. The reality, in my view, is that while real people were hurt, that those wounds have been USED by power mongers for their own self aggrandizement.
I literally look at the election of Barack Obama as a REvictimization of black Americans. He not only never had any intention of paying them any but rhetorical attention, but further doesn’t CARE if his policies aggravate their already bad conditions. Was it the black President or the “racist” cop who helped Prof. Gates down the stairs? The cop, of course. He saw Gates as a person. Obama just sees people as cardboard cutouts, who are either allies or enemies.
And what does he want, anyway? A feeling. The feeling of power, which is the same need that drove racism in this country. Obama is no different, in his own way, from Bull Connor. If he could set fire hoses and dogs on Republicans and Fox News, he would. Likewise with any black people who dared defy him.