One would think, reading accounts of “white privilege” that all you have to do to succeed in America is be white. This ignores that most poor people in this country are white. It ignored the enormous amount of work and preparation it takes to succeed, work which is not done by the unsuccessful, in what I would hope is an obvious tautology. Those who do not succeed did not do what it takes to succeed, however they define it.
One gets the impression that ONLY blacks have experiences with unfairness, with being judged prejudicially, with dealing with stupid, abusive people. Only blacks have to deal with foreclosures and lost jobs, bad credit scores and banks that won’t lend to them. Only blacks have bosses who demand too much of them, or won’t hire you because they don’t like you. Only blacks deal with poverty. Only blacks get arrested and put in jail. Only blacks get shot unnecessarily by cops.
This is bullshit. Life is hard for nearly everyone, and it is often unfair. We do not make it more fair in general by redistributing rights from one group to another. To quote William Boetker, you cannot raise anyone up by tearing someone else down. What blacks need to do is copy white (and Asian, even more so) cultural models to succeed.
They are not doing this. Why is anyone’s guess, but one thing is obvious is that a whole INDUSTRY–and by industry I mean a for-profit business enterprise–exists almost entirely to tell them that nothing is under their direct control, their personal decisions don’t matter, and that whatever they do and say, it is OK.
This is a form of abuse. It is a form of cruelty. As I have said often, it is the mother who coddles her 600 pound son who finds it just too hard to get out of bed and function.
The idea of people going hungry and homeless is repugnant to me, but it needs to stated and emphasized that the FIRST LINE of defense against poverty is a JOB, and TWO PARENTS. It is not the government.
Democrats more or less literally toss little candy treats from their election parade floats and claim that thereby they “support” black people, and that opposing them is opposing black progress, justice, and the American Way. These floats start at one black tie cocktail party, and end at another. They might stop in high end ghettos and drop their g’s, and try to pretend to be “Barry on the Block”, but they don’t stay long. No campaign donations there.
EVERYTHING they do makes jobs more scarce. It makes them pay less, because in a down economy, there is downward pressure on wages, just as there is SUBSTANTIAL upward pressure in good times. [Minimum wages laws, obviously, when set above prevailing market wages, create downward pressure on employment outright.]
This would be true, of course, in conditions of fixed labor supply. If you add 5 million people to the labor pool, it pushes yet farther out any possible improvement in at least low skilled jobs, and increases poverty. It is no accident, or an unforeseeable outcome that black incomes have plunged under Obama.
It is significant and no accident that Democrat approval ratings have plunged among the working class, which is historically the people who voted Democrat, because they “looked out for the little guy”. I heard my grandfather say this often. It may have been true at one time–particularly when people like FDR looked out for the WHITE “little guy”, giving many contracts to unions who refused to hire blacks, but that has long ceased to be the case. They merely appeal rhetorically to every constituency who might be counted on to vote for something free (to them, and apparently, since that is money that was diverted from alternative, structurally better uses.)
As one recent book title put it: Please stop helping us.
And I will add one more thing: no blacks alive today were victims of slavery. No blacks endured/survived/transcended slavery. By my reckoning we only have one large group that has, within living memory, endured slavery: the survivors of Nazi work camps. We could add to that, I suppose, the many Vietnamese who survived Communist work camps.
The slavery meme is propaganda. I had said that many people find in fear a grounding principle, but I could add to that many others find in rage and hate equally vivifying principles.
I see a MLK, Jr. movie is on the way, to reconnect people with struggles that were DONE almost entirely by 1970, some 44 years ago. We just had “7 Years a Slave”, and Django, and who knows what else.
ALL of this detracts from a core reality: black people are capable of doing work THEY ARE NOT DOING. I see no point in beating around the bush. I see no reason to assume less of them, to consider them inferior, or to give than an on-going pass from adult responsibility simply because as a group they HISTORICALLY perhaps endured more than most whites (life on the frontier was no joke, though).
What they endure now, the conditions in their neighborhoods, are their own. Most poor people in this country are white. Nobody sheds any tears over them, nor should they. They make decisions consistent with poverty, in some places, generation after generation. That is their prerogative.