[Floyd L.]

Each individual who voted for the Civil Rights Act was instrumental in its passage. But it would not have existed had legions of blacks not suffered and died for it. It certainly would not have passed if President Kennedy had not been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson not stepped up to bat. So Republicans should not be given credit for more than they deserved then, and they deserve credit for little or nothing since. The reason is that the party began to be appropriated or taken over maybe 30 to 35 years ago by the very Southern Democrats and their offspring who had been the most strident opponents of civil rights. It became basically the party of the Dixiecrats.

So it should not be difficult to understand why blacks vote the way they do. Most of us are not likely to vote for something or someone we take to be inimical to our self interests. Even when the choices are effectively choices between evils, we vote for the least noxious of the possibilities.

Indeed, that a person is a black politician, black military expert or a black jurist does not make him, in the eyes of blacks, the least of the evils. At issue is the degree to which that person’s views, interests and actions are seen as inimical to blacks. Blacks are at least as capable of deciding their own self interest as someone else is in deciding it for them. When one looks at the present-day Republican Party and all of the flotsam and jetsam collected there, one could conclude the party is rather ecumenical. Most blacks, however, remind themselves that ‘birds of a feather flock together’ and ‘you are known by the company you keep.’ Much of the company stamped “Republican” most blacks simply cannot abide, e.g. Jesse Helms, Strom Thurman, Jim Barr, Trent Lott, the NRA, the KKK, the religious right, the Florida elections, etc. What most blacks see when they look at this motley bunch are just too much that blacks judge to be noxious or just plain inimical to their self-interest. Even if their vote is for the least noxious of the possibilities, blacks will not typically see this as Republican. PS: If you prefer ‘black’ to African American, why do you label yourself color blind?

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

There is no way for you to know that the people you may have observed feel it is ‘perfectly safe and OK’ to cross traffic as you described, and it is certainly not unique to blacks in similar contexts (check out Istanbul or Rome). People develop a level of comfort in maneuvering in their home space that outsiders are unlikely to have or to appreciate. They live there, remember? The surbanite’s much less challenging environment allows him to simply walk out of his front door and across a cul de sac which becomes an extension of his home space. They are busy thorofares which are extensions of the urbanite’s home space. To negotiate this space as efficiently as the suburbanite negotiates his may require a boldness and acumen not required of and therefore stunning to surburban outsiders.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Let’s keep the record straight. Affirmative Action policies resulted from widespread, persistent and often virulent white resistance to civil rights laws and rulings between 1954 and 1970. These were intended to end the often legally sanctioned discrimination that had run rampant across many parts of this country for a full century after slavery. Nowhere was this more flagrant and devastating than in education and employment.

Some of the best examples of American creative genius could be seen in the degrees to which many whites (especially here in the South) went to ‘keep blacks in their place,’ out of the workplace, out of then all-white schools and to protect century-old traditions of white privilege and advantage. Civil rights policies were never welcomed by these people, and when implemented, were done grudgingly and often through the insulting practice of tokenism. Knowingly under-qualified minorities were chosen for showy (reception-like) positions where their under-qualifications were publicly apparent, thus providing fodder for the unscrupulous propagandizing of presumably ‘unqualified minorities.’ Indeed, the reasons whites gave to justify continued discrimination was that minorities (especially blacks) were not qualified. Affirmative Action policies said that was nonsense and that resisting institutions must consider qualified minorities or prove that none existed. There was no assumption that ‘a minority can’t make it on his or her own.’ It was a certainty that minorities were not going to get an opportunity to try without intervention. Affirmative Action was that intervention. Your argument (including your ‘preference by race’ buzz phrase) is just one of those disingenuous, conservative right wing spins created a decade ago as part of the arsenal to be used to undermine Affirmative Action.

It was massive and chronic white discrimination against blacks that led to the civil rights laws outlawing that abuse to begin with. It was then massive and often deadly white resistance to the implementation of those laws that led to Affirmative Action. The current resistance to Affirmative Action just continues the tradition among many whites who seem to view the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ as being preordained by their God for ‘whites only.’

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Anyone with so deep a need to think of black males in criminal terms is likely beyond salvation. Others may find the following from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention illuminating: White high school students are seven times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine, eight times more likely to have smoked crack, 10 times more likely to have used LSD and seven times more likely to have used heroin. More white high school students have used crystal methamphetamine (the most addictive drug on the streets) than there are black students who smoke cigarettes. Further, white youths ages 12-17 are 34 percent more likely to sell drugs than their black counterparts. White youths are twice as likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk. And white males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to school as black males.

These criminally experienced white youths are absorbed into an adult society adept at scapegoating blacks and vilifying them for behaviors largely ignored when engaged in by whites – like the mindboggling drug-dealing among whites to support their appetite for drugs.

This crudest form of bigotry is deathly to good judgment. The young blacks there in Halifax who through cunning and sheer smarts finance $50,000 cars on welfare checks sound like very enterprising marvels Murray should get to know.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Natasha, while you seem not to have understood much that I said, you do seem close to falling into the trap that claims many immigrants: come to America with little knowledge of its history, get a job, make quick, uninformed assessments of black Americans, conclude that you are more virtuous than they are and wonder why they all can’t be like you. Such self-righteousness normally ill-equips one to shoulder the weight of American reality when it comes crushing down, as it does sooner or later on almost every black here (like Jocelyn Elders, another black surgeon general, or Louima, or Diallo). Furthering your education on the subject may be helpful.

Two centuries of evidence demonstrate that blacks of Caribbean heritage often do better here than many black Americans and are disproportionately well-represented among black notables here – Du Bois, Garvey, Chisholm, Powell, etc. The reasons lie in the diverging experiences of blacks in their respective subcultures here in the Western Hemisphere and not the simplistic and false notion that blacks Americans are just trifling. Black Americans were intentionally robbed of their self-confidence, entrepreneurial spirits and drive to a degree well beyond that experienced by Caribbean blacks because whites were invested in the States quite differently than their counterparts were in the Caribbean. The controls exercised by whites over blacks in the two places differed markedly, with long-term consequences. Understand this and mostly everything else falls in place.

Books like The White Man’s Burden will give you needed history, Documents of American Prejudice will inform in their own words how whites have viewed you for 200 years, while Black and White on Wall Street and The Good Black should dispel any delusions of what it is really like when blacks here go seriously digging for gold.

If you got your technical school training in this country, you owe much to my generation, and perhaps even me, for making it possible. You would have been summarily turned away from a technical school in Capital Heights 36 years ago, just as I was denied housing there in Greenbelt. Yet my offspring (your peer) has completed graduate studies at the University of Maryland there, and you are there, freely exploiting the American ‘gold mine’ you so proudly tout. The ball is now in your courts. Deprecating other black Americans instead of helping them as you have been helped is an interesting twist on repaying your indebtedness.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

First generation West Indians and Africans in this country come as immigrants to a place that ostensibly offers them more than what they are leaving behind. They bring a psychology of hope, sense of fresh opportunity and levels of expectation that are incompatible with the centuries of experiences of blacks already here. The immigrants are leaving behind the very types of debilitating memories, circumstances and conditionings that black Americans, in America, are unable to escape. Black Americans immigrating to other countries (as many black artists had to do in our lifetimes), progress there comparably to first generation West Indian and Africans here. Higher achievement levels are sustained among first generation black immigrants commensurate with their residuals of hope, self-confidence and high expectations. These are typically dissipated after one generation, as subsequent generations are seen and treated by America as just black. My father told me once of a black family that was building a home just outside of Memphis during the 1930s when several local white males came by and told the blacks ‘it would be a shame if the house burned down.’ The blacks, understanding what this meant, never put another nail in the house, which eventually fell down 20 years later. Other blacks ‘knew,’ as they would say, from this and so many other similar experiences, that ‘whites never wanted blacks to have anything’ and would do great harm to those blacks who ‘tried to go too far’ or who ‘got out of their places.’

The long-term consequences of such experiences and conditionings are profound. Black Americans were robbed of their self-confidence, intimidated out of their entrepreneurial spirits and chronically induced to lowered self expectations to degrees far beyond that of West Indians or Africans. Two hundred and fifty years of slavery were immediately followed by another 120 years of Jim Crow no less debilitating as the enslavement itself. Jim Crow has been dying a slow death, as some of its laws may still be on the books in rabid holdout states like South Carolina. It is a painful reminder to black Americans that they were never welcomed here, nor ever thought kindly of since being here. While each immigrant can get a rush of prideful emotions from the welcoming Statue of Liberty, black Americans have never seen themselves as objects of her welcome.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

I doubt seriously that 100 Escalades are owned in the entire city of Detroit, let alone hundreds among blacks in the ‘hood,’ as you say, all presumably cruising by where you work. And where would you have them live? I also doubt that Detroit’s pristine vanilla suburbs would welcome them, or that you would welcome them next door to you, wherever that may be. They are no less deserving to dabble with those feel-good things of life than the suburbanite, and they are in all likelihood no less honest in securing their Escalades than the white surubanites are in securing their BMWs. That aside, your priorities and value systems are yours and cannot realistically be expected to be embraced by everyone else just because they are your values and priorities. They are not necessarily universally preferable. Different strokes for different folks. If driving an Escalade makes you feel good, then drive on, for such moments are not often enough in our brief lives. And a person living in the hood is no less deserving of these moments than the greedy, slick cats in the suburbs with their mansions and Rolls, Mercedes, Jaguars or Bently’s and yachts on the lake. The guy in the hood has the right to live his life as he sees fit, as long as what he does brings harm to no one else. Cruising by in an Escalade is as harmless as doing so in a Mercedes, Dodge Ram or Ford Taurus. No difference, Bill, unless you want to make it so. The guy in the hood has as much a right to go cruising as the guy in the suburb. Let’s not envy him when he exercises that right. So lighten up, get a life, then live and let live.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

‘Sunshine’ is often used among blacks as a term of endearment for someone with a bright, ebullient and upbeat disposition. It is thus not seen as universally derogatory. ‘Shine’ in the mouths of whites here in the South is an insult. It derived from mocking the glossy, deeply darkened and sweating skin of a black who works outside. But it would be used by whites to insult in the same vain that such whites would use ‘nigger.’ It may occasionally be used by a black to label another black, but not as an overt insult. Blacks would be at best ambivalent about a white’s use of ‘sunshine’ becaue the white person may be just prettying up the onerous ‘shine.’

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

The tremendous range of shades of skin color among African Americans does not result from recent generation interracial encounters, but from the centuries of white males raping black females, extending across the 250 year duration of slavery and indeed for a time thereafter, as blacks came out of slavery with barely more real rights and hardly any security. The black female had no choices nor did she have any defenses. Her denying the white male’s advances meant physical brutalization and ofter death. Any black males coming to her defense risked almost certain death. So she and her black male counterparts stood helpless. With few exceptions the progeny of these encounters received no support from their biological fathers, and often became slaves themselves. It should strike us all as being strange that a father would enslave his own children, unless of course he saw them as being sub-human. That the white male could use the black female as just a vessel for his sexual release, while seeing her as incapable of producing an offspring which he could claim as human and his own, reduced her, the source of every black’s humanity, to something less than human. The fact that the white male so dehumanized the black female is, in the black psyche, one of the greatest evils of slavery. Black men have abused no women as the white male abused the black female, so you are not going to see the same attitude with black men and white women. Neither has the black female been so abused by anyone other then the white male, so her having relations with nonwhite males will not generate the same seminal negative reaction as one with a white male will generate. Until there is a perception that the white male has made amends for his misdeeds, the reactions to the relations you described will continue. ‘The evil that men do lives long after…’, noting Shakespeare. The white male’s behavior induced among blacks a microcosm of this country’s broader racial turmoil, with the strife of color and class distinctions among blacks mirroring that seen in the larger world. The result of a single sexual encounter can last for all human time. Seeing and enduring the consequences of actions several centuries old is not that much of a reach as you would claim. It happens all the time. Just think about it for a while.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

This very good question points to how the poor and misinformed are ‘divided and conquered’ by the wealthy and powerful. Many such persons voted less for what they hoped a Bush would do for them than against what they feared a Gore would do for blacks and others. They have been led to believe that their true enemies are blacks who are robbing them of the lifestyles they desire and not the wealthy and powerful (mostly whites) who have claimed for themselves the whole pie except some small sliver left for the disadvantaged to fight over. These poor whites have been race-baited out of joining in with blacks and others so disadvantaged to demand a larger piece of the original pie. Their behavior feeds the concentration of more wealth and power and reinforces hostilities where good judgment says there should be none. The rich and powerful become even more so while the trailer parks just keep growing. But this is not new. The same attitude was cultivated among poor whites who supported slavery in the South, even though slavery was to their economic disadvantage, taking jobs these poor whites would otherwise be paid to do and filling them with the free labor of black slaves. Those poor Southern whites, who had little or no education, were hoodwinked by those very whites who owned everything (including the land, the slaves, the institutions and all of the power) into despising the slave instead of the institution of slavery, which debased both the slave and the poor white. They had been so brainwashed that they could not see that getting rid of slavery was to their benefit also.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Who really has the problem here? Blacks were robbed of their freedoms and severed from their true cultures by white kidnappers, thieves and other criminals leaving profound wounds. One was the blatant promiscuity of white males as evidenced by the legions of white, yellow, tan, light brown and brown ‘blacks’ who derived from the wholesale rape of black women by white men during slavery. Were white males suffering from dented ‘masculinity/ego’, or a lack of ‘true identity’, or trying to ‘prove they are real men’, even while holding life and death control over the very people they abused? And what mental illness impelled whites to force blacks to be ‘breeders’ like stallions or breed sows during slavery? It takes a man and a woman to make a baby, but her investment is bigger. While she can go to term once in roughly 270 days, her mate can impregnate up to maybe 800 times within that same period. The tremendous difference defines him to be a natural sexual opportunist, and bestows the responsibility of choice upon the female. Why blame him for her choices? The problem is not so much the black male as the hypocrisy with which we view his bahavior.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Well I presume you are talking about the symbol of intertwined equilateral triangles which is often referred to as the Star of David. The symbol is much older than Judaism, older even than history! It has long been acknowledged as the model for balance and wholeness. It is common in the Middle East and North Africa, and is thought to bring good luck. It appears occasionally in early Jewish artwork, but never as an exclusively Jewish symbol. As a model of balance and wholeness and a sign of good luck everybody should feel free to embrace it. It gained popularity as a symbol of Judaism when it was adopted by the Zionist movement in the late 19th century but continued to be controversial for many years afterward, with sometimes acrimonious debate over whether it would be used on the flag of present day Israel. While it is now recognized universally as a special symbol in Judiasm, it is not nor has it ever been unique to Judiasm. It truly taxes me to see how you could possibly deduce an inference of anti-semtism from the sale of this merchandise. It is as if you are saying it has to be anti-semitic if a black is having anything to do with it. That strikes me as being rather perverse.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

To blame such behavior on the boredom brought on by civilization demeans and limits the concept of civilization itself. There are other albeit non-white civilizations, some more long lived and certainly no less legitimate, where such behaviors are not so characterizing. And, as pointed out in the question, there are other non-white ethnic groups even within the white-male dominated western civilization that do not embrace such depraved behaviors. To suggest that these other systems or non-white groups are somehow less civilized because they are less boring or less bored shows the extent to which some whites will seemingly go to put a coat of decency on any white behavior, regardless to how aberrant or depraved it may be by he standards of almost anyone else. This outrageously self-serving attitude of exonerating white behavior, too often accompanied by equally excessive criticism of the behaviors of non-whites, seems to underly so much of the abuse and destructed wrecked on mankind by so many whites.

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Jerry, two points. Jewish suffering and how Jews have reacted to it are not necessarily the standards by which all others’ sufferings and responses should be judged. Jews have suffered as Jews, and blacks as blacks. These are unique sets of experiences and evolving chapters in history. They stand on their own merit and deserve to be seen as such. They can be compared, but only competently so, after they are understood. The notion, implicit in your argument, that since Jews have a bigger cause to gripe than blacks, blacks should keep quiet if Jews are not griping is both exceedingly dangerous and not one I would encourage blacks to embrace. Secondly, I always thought that it was Jewish anger, outrage, pain and hurt over aspects of their history which convinced them to conclude ‘never again’. If Jews can revisit their history for ostensibly laudable reason (study, celebration, direction, resolve, etc.) why is it so difficult to ascribe similar motives to blacks when they revisit their history?

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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

[Floyd L.]

Steve, we have all of those statistics, or the ‘truth’ as you call them, that we need. Missing is understanding and a will to act responsibly on it. That understanding would inform us that sensationalizing those statistics to camouflage the deep problems with the ‘psyche of the white male’ suggested in the question is one of the most dangerous of the stupid alternatives to which I alluded. Your statistics have been quoted and misused so often by those pursuing narrow-minded agendas as to discredit any other intended use of them. Blacks have been uniquely stressed here for 400 years, and your statistics are largely, if not mostly, symptomatic of that stress. But white males have endured no such stresses here. So what impels them, the most advantaged members of this society, to commit the most heinous crimes in this society begs to be understood. One cannot adequately gauge our problems through looking only at their impacts on our most disadvantaged members. One must rigorously scrutinize the aberrant behavior of our most advantaged members to understand how profound is our society’s sickness. When we match our enthusiasm for quoting old black crime statistics with an equal enthusiasm for understanding the sickness underlying those horrific examples of white mayhem, including whites males dragging blacks to death, bands of white cops shooting up black males like targets on a firing rang and white cops sodomizing black males, we’ll be much better equipped to ward off future Columbines, Conyers, etc. You’ve gotten the statistics, you’ve gotten the facts. Fine. But, quoting from the Bible, ‘…of all of thy getting, get an understanding.’

User Detail :  

Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States, 

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