"There are things that don’t—or can’t—get said when we talk about race in most venues in America."
Until that changes, nothing will happen. Change is impossible without discomfort and confronting reality, no matter how uncomfortable, is necessary toward creating change. I grew up during the dawn of integration in the Deep South, going to school with kids whose parents lived the "colored only" experience. To pretend nothing has changed since them is a gross insult to those parents, their parents, and so forth, but that's the central problem to "discussions" about race. Few people want actual discussions; they want to lecture, hector, and insult, and often, the people doing that are whites eager to profit from the cash cow of grievance. We're at the absurd point in human development in which people who look like people who did bad things long ago are treated as if they themselves did those things. This cannot possibly end well.
The roots of most white Americans were not planted here until AFTER the Civil War; they came during the great immigration waves of the 20th century. How in the world are they responsible for a past they have no connection to? I hate to break it to people but someone like me gains nothing when black American struggles and suffers. If anything, I - we - lose a great deal in terms of human potential plus the attendant costs of remedial efforts that appear designed to fail. When people talk of the black family being torn apart, the same discussion could apply to white families. The bulk of mass shooters are white and almost each one comes from a dysfunctional home. People overlook this among white families because 1) their proportion of the white & overall populations is lower and 2) there is neither political gain nor personal enrichment to be had from peddling white grievance. The problems of the majority do not make for breathless news coverage or spawn legislation or generate much conversation in the mainstream.
A person who is black and even marginally capable has the world at his/her feet. A person who is black and truly capable is golden. Such folks are not aberrations; they are more common than the knuckleheads who suck so much oxygen from the room. I've known professionals who happen to be black my entire life and that's just it: they are professionals who happen to be black, not black professionals. Did they face some obstacles? Maybe. Was their journey more difficult than a white person's? In a time of affirmative action, that's hard to say but let's assume it was. They succeeded anyway. Was the secret recipe for this success only available to them?
I recall an old 60 Minutes interview in which Mike Wallace was asking Morgan Freeman about race and what to do about it. Freeman's response was as brief as it was eloquent - "stop talking about it." The topic itself has a way of reducing everyone involved to no more than skin color, to what we hear from the CRT dogma as a oppressors and the oppressed. Freeman's contention was that black history month insulting, that black history is American history and just as valid in October or April as it is in February. What's happened since then? Every other grievance group has come forward to claim its special month and the fallout of treating everything as special is that eventually, nothing is special. Special has become the new ordinary.
Most change happens without any regard to the conversations of intellectuals. "The owl of Minerva flies at twilight" - it is only when something is ending that we start to intellectually understand it.
"There are things that don’t—or can’t—get said when we talk about race in most venues in America."
Until that changes, nothing will happen. Change is impossible without discomfort and confronting reality, no matter how uncomfortable, is necessary toward creating change. I grew up during the dawn of integration in the Deep South, going to school with kids whose parents lived the "colored only" experience. To pretend nothing has changed since them is a gross insult to those parents, their parents, and so forth, but that's the central problem to "discussions" about race. Few people want actual discussions; they want to lecture, hector, and insult, and often, the people doing that are whites eager to profit from the cash cow of grievance. We're at the absurd point in human development in which people who look like people who did bad things long ago are treated as if they themselves did those things. This cannot possibly end well.
The roots of most white Americans were not planted here until AFTER the Civil War; they came during the great immigration waves of the 20th century. How in the world are they responsible for a past they have no connection to? I hate to break it to people but someone like me gains nothing when black American struggles and suffers. If anything, I - we - lose a great deal in terms of human potential plus the attendant costs of remedial efforts that appear designed to fail. When people talk of the black family being torn apart, the same discussion could apply to white families. The bulk of mass shooters are white and almost each one comes from a dysfunctional home. People overlook this among white families because 1) their proportion of the white & overall populations is lower and 2) there is neither political gain nor personal enrichment to be had from peddling white grievance. The problems of the majority do not make for breathless news coverage or spawn legislation or generate much conversation in the mainstream.
A person who is black and even marginally capable has the world at his/her feet. A person who is black and truly capable is golden. Such folks are not aberrations; they are more common than the knuckleheads who suck so much oxygen from the room. I've known professionals who happen to be black my entire life and that's just it: they are professionals who happen to be black, not black professionals. Did they face some obstacles? Maybe. Was their journey more difficult than a white person's? In a time of affirmative action, that's hard to say but let's assume it was. They succeeded anyway. Was the secret recipe for this success only available to them?
I recall an old 60 Minutes interview in which Mike Wallace was asking Morgan Freeman about race and what to do about it. Freeman's response was as brief as it was eloquent - "stop talking about it." The topic itself has a way of reducing everyone involved to no more than skin color, to what we hear from the CRT dogma as a oppressors and the oppressed. Freeman's contention was that black history month insulting, that black history is American history and just as valid in October or April as it is in February. What's happened since then? Every other grievance group has come forward to claim its special month and the fallout of treating everything as special is that eventually, nothing is special. Special has become the new ordinary.
Most change happens without any regard to the conversations of intellectuals. "The owl of Minerva flies at twilight" - it is only when something is ending that we start to intellectually understand it.