This column states exactly
what my wife and I have been saying to one another about both race and
the President’s contributions since Trayvon.
Obama’s
Race Remarks Exacerbate Tensions
By
Kathleen Parker, Published: August 23,
Washington Post
Parker leaves out the
President’s statement from the White House that while he didn’t know all the facts
it was clear that the Cambridge police acted stupidly with his friend Gates. That time too he went on to explain how
racism continues in the country as evidenced by the actions of police and
little old ladies.
Parker also left out
candidate Obama’s defense of the awful Reverend Wright during which he threw
his grandmother under the bus. It's ok to cringe at the awful things Gates says because his gramma used to says things that made him cringe too. Please.
The racism grievance factory
is of course mostly aimed at gaining political advantage. And those folks are anxious
to replace the now disgraced Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson school of political gain
by guilt and extortion. The bigger
problem is that too much of the farther left – the progressives – cling to the
notion that the black underclass are victims;
they believe this stuff. We can’t
have otherwise intelligent citizens drinking this kool-aide and expect to make
progress.
Genesis for this school of
thought goes as follows. After the civil war, slaves were free but their survival
depended upon working for wages for former slave owners in the south. They were not really free and were very poor. The result for some or maybe many ex-slaves
was segregated communities of black workers – and non-workers – who lived
without marriage and with no respect for the law. Black on black crime was often forgiven
because white farm owners would demand that the sheriff ignore the crime – the
worker could not be spared or replaced.
All this generated the culture we see today in underclass black
communities. Thus today’s circumstances
are a legacy of racism and the responsibility of the greater community and not
the responsibility of the “victims” living in poverty in black neighborhoods.
Even if you buy the argument
that slavery and Jim Crow ruined people;
that they had no choice back then but to ignore marriage, family,
morality and law; exactly when do people
become responsible for themselves? We
all know folks who live unhappy or semi-addicted lives who blame their parents
or their experiences and we know that at some point their condition is solely a
result of choices they themselves make. We have no
problem understanding that we can’t solve the problems those folks face. The same is true for those caught in a
culture of poverty; at some point, lack
of personal responsibility is the problem and people have to help themselves. Our “help” must be aimed at education and
opportunity, not handouts.
In my view, support programs
that involve only wealth transfer, simply make the problems worse. Ditto for rebranding personal responsibility as
blaming the victim. If we are to solve
these problems, we’ll at least need to base policy making on facts and plain
language. And we all should care. Nobody wants to see American neighborhoods
that look like those in Mexico, Haiti, Somalia, Palestine or wherever. What happens in one culture will soon spread
to more neighborhoods.
Our black skinned President,
raised by whites in white neighborhoods to be white, has chosen to be
black. Why would he do that if being
black is a daily hell of discrimination?
In any case, he’s not helping.
You might also appreciate Douthat’s
take:
A
Different Kind of Division
By Ross
Douthat
Published:
August 24, 2013, NYT
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