A friend had pointed me to a Pat Buchanan screed entitled “A Brief for Whitey”, where Buchanan speaks from his inner bigot.
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I’ll ignore Buchanan’s opening and focus on his “convictions, grievances, and demands” of the Silent Majority [note, this is quite the flexible metaphor for Buchanan, especially since he wrote it]:
First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Relatively speaking, the godless, primitive savages certainly are enjoying a better ‘quality of life’ than their African Safari or Carribean kinfolk. Of course, that would be by comparison of a variety of statistics. As to whether they are sharing equally in the promise of the American dream, either through those ‘inalienable rights’ or their own self-determination towards ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”
Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.
These items have benefited Americans as a collective whole. Buchanan may be stuck in a big-city welfare-queen model of African Americans, but these programs have benefited the citizens of Appalachia (and my own family) just as much as an African-American. I suppose the implied argument is that the African-American community has been unable to leverage the opportunities presented by these programs into the expected outcomes.
Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.
By elevating African Americans to equality, we’ve diminished the comparative advantage the white American, particularly the white-male, have had in business, academic, and if Rush Limbaugh is to be believed, football. This is true, but when you examine the fact that an African-American non-felon job applicant has the same likelihood of gaining employment as a felon Caucasian, how do you account for that? Could you realistically take away the advantage of whites? Or is it easier (pragmatically or politically) to stack the deck for African Americans?
We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?
I understand Buchanan’s frustration, but what gratitude is required as repayment for the opportunity for full participation in the American dream?
Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.
Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.
Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?
Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
The short answer is yes, to both hypothesis. Again, we have a false binary choice. This is the equivalent of supply-side social economics. Crime and incarceration rates are systemic, from redlining to crime-fighting tactics to legislation authoring and sentencing requirements. Illegitimacy comes from the first point, as well as insufficient responsibility and ownership of some of the black community towards their obligations. See anything “Dr.” Bill Cosby has to say. As to the dropout rate, it’s a chicken-and-egg argument with unemployment – which drives which?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
There’s something very strange about conservatives – the fear of the black man. Black man gonna rape you. Black man gonna steal your car. Black man gonna have sex with your wife and daughters. There’s also a prevalent strain of conservative victimhood. I don’t understand it. I saw a little bit of “John Adams”, where a Southern delegate during the authorship of the Declaration of Independence stated that slavery couldn’t be an issue because negroes would rise up and slaughter their white owners. As much as slavery is ingrained into black culture, so victimhood is in some aspects of white culture.
Also, to paraphrase Dillinger, criminals tend to go where the money is. Hence the black-on-white crime. Why would you rob someone with nothing of value.
We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.
I blame the press (as usual). And I likewise suspect that the ‘newsworthiness’ of these stories is the exact opposite of what Buchanan expects. I believe the press things that black on white crime is so commonplace, that these white-on-black crimes are the equivalent of man-bites-dog, hence the disproportional coverage.
Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.
I guess he thinks America hasn’t gotten a sufficient return on investment. I wonder if anyone looked at the cost of slaves, adjusted for inflation, as an ‘investment’, coupled with the cost of the Civil War and various social and legislative efforts, and than examined the affect on tax revenues and GDP. Do the additional supply of labor drop the cost of doing business for non-Southern businesses? Did the fruits of their labor drive self-supporting commerce? Did all of the above increase GDP and tax revenue? Was it all worth it? Or in Buchanan’s mind, should we just have returned everyone to Africa and the Caribbean? (Admittedly, this should have been a remedy for making them whole).
Buchanan is no different than the Rev. Wright – a reactionary stuck in the tit-for-tat transactions of the past, ignoring the invitation to have an open and honest conversation on race, choosing instead to get stuck in the gooey-glitch of back and forth transaction of race-relations instead of the greater conversation of the context of race in America. As someone who has been coddled in the Beltway within the system of Wingnut Welfare, has has very little moral ground on which to stand.
Related posts:
- Obama and Appalachia: Not Just Race, Income, or Education
- Did Obama ‘Sister Souljah’ Kanye West?
- Race and ethnicity: Philadelphia
- Obama was right, next question is how to save the ‘bitter’ from their ignorance (and should we)…
- Worst. Black. History. Month. Evar.
Tags: Africa, America, Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Caribbean, Caucasian, Dillinger, food stamps, football, Ivy League, Johnstown, legal services, Tawana Brawley
Did Pat Buchanan really write this garbage? I have been searching the Internet all night trying to find out if he is really the author. I don’t care for him but I didn’t think even he could be so hateful. I thought this was one of those fake emails like one supposedly written by Andy Rooney against liberals that turned out to be a phoney.
In one page you have proven yourself to be a (grammatically deficient) reverse bigot.
While Buchanan may be old with ideas that are outdated, most of points in his article were spot-on. You distort the facts he presents to allow for excuses (incidentally, I notice you neglected to address the black on white rape statistic. I suppose since robbery of whites is done only because it is more lucrative, then the rape of whites statistic must be disproportionate because it is just easier to catch a white girl – being as they are athletically inferior and all [ie: white men can't jump]).
And, to ‘Nancy V’… there was nothing in Buchanan’s article that displayed “hate” or showed him to be “hateful” as you put it. He stated facts. Admittedly, some of the points he made were hard to read, but they were facts just the same. I don’t believe any of it was ‘hate’ motivated regardless of what Akkam would have us believe.
Since this country’s-african american population is only 12%, it is evidenced by the last presidential election that the majority of whites are not bigots. On the contrary, a recent poll showed that less than 1% of blacks voted for John McCain. Reverse racism maybe?
Bottom line, there are far more black racist/bigots in America than there are white racist/bigots. The problem is that the guilt trip has been laid upon the white population for so long that if a white person ever feels racism directed toward them from a black person, they say nothing. Until we have an ‘honest’ dialog, nothing is ever going to change.
I know, I know, by disagreeing with you I am a ‘hateful bigot’. Well, that is fine for you to call me that, if it makes you sleep better at night and feel better about yourself!