Here is the second excerpt from a book called The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, written in 2000 by a black man named Larry Elder. (And yes, his race is relevant here.) I strongly encourage liberals and conservatives alike to buy the book from Amazon.
The titles of the ten chapters represent the titular “ten things” that are considered taboo to say in America. Below is section 2 of chapter 1. I will post sections 3 through 14 of chapter 1 in subsequent posts so as not to cram it in all in at once.
Section 1, “Racism Is Racism,” can be read here.
CHAPTER 1: BLACKS ARE MORE RACIST THAN WHITES
[Section 2] Black Racism and Black Myopia
When Julian Bond became NAACP chairman, he declared his intention to wage war on the number one problem facing blacks: “the new racists.”
The new racists? Care to name names, Mr. Bond?
Examine Bond’s mind-set. America is a battlefield. Good versus evil. Us versus them.
During the Second World War, Japanese fighers in Burma continued fighting long after the warring parties negotiated peace. Their remote location prevented them from learning the news, so they continued fighting. Similarly, many blacks continue “fighting the struggle” long after the declaration of peace. By nearly any measure—the right to vote, to use public accommodations, to attend a state college or university if qualified—the “civil rights” struggle, thank God, is over. The black leadership should stick the pole in the ground, raise the flag, salute, and convert the troops to civilian duty. Instead, they continue fighting a war long since won while ignoring far more pressing issues. The black leadership is in Burma.
In 1977, I accepted a job as an associate attorney with an old-line, silk-stocking Cleveland law firm. The firm, now more than a hundred years old, had, in its history, hired just a handful of blacks. My uncle, a thirty-year auto machinist with General Motors, sat me down to “caution” me about white treachery. “Larry, let me tell you something. You know I grew up on a farm in Alabama. My brothers and sisters and neighbors and I would walk, barefoot, five miles to the nearby schoolhouse. The white kids got bused to a school three miles away. And, as the bus drove by us black kids walking in single file, the white kids would curse at us, call us niggers, spit at us, and throw eggs and tomatoes. And this is how white folks can be, and I want you to—”
I cut him off. “Thurman,” I said, “you know I love you. But, what h appened to you has never happened to me. Nor will it. Today is today.”
The real danger lies with the NAACP, not the KKK. Racism exists, and treachery always lurks. But the vision my uncle painted—however burnished in his own mind—bears little resemblance to contemporary America.
Hard memories. Tough, quite understandable, hard memories. In Florida, the public school system, with the support of the NAACP, seeks to end decades-long court-ordered desegregation. But one of the original litigants, Charles Rutledge, now 75 years old, denounces the proposed end to forced desegregation. Never mind that the lifting of the court order is supported by the NAACP, an organization whose chairman declared as his number one agenda to go after “the new racist.” Say what you will about the NAACP, they are not soft on racism.
But Rutledge says, “If the court order is rescinded, they’ll do what they want. America is still a racist nation. Hearts of men haven’t changed that much.”
Hard memories. But these memories do not reflect the memories of today’s America. No one says forget, but we should recognize obvious progress, and maintain perspective.
My mother also grew up in the South, on a farm near Huntsville, Alabama. When my grandfather took my mom and her sister to the department store downtown, they entered through a separate door. And when my mom put on a dress, once the garment touched her skin, she owned it. The store made my grandfather purchase the item, no matter how ill fitting or unattractive. Black skin tainted the garments.
When my mom finished that story, I turned to my father. “Dad, was it like that with you, too?” My father, a man of few words, “simply said, “Hats, too.”
In the early 1950s, my mom took a plane ride. While pregnant with me, she carried my infant brother in her arms. Few blacks, in those days, traveled by air. So, no separate facilities—waiting rooms, bathrooms—yet existed in airports for blacks. So where was my mother to sit in the airport?
My mom said a sheepish airport worker asked her to stand to the side, and he brought her coffee. My mom said she felt almost sorry for this young white man, who saw the absurdity in forcing a paying customer to stand apart because of her skin color.
My parents told us these stories to show how far America was come, not to create anger, to divide, or to poison us. That America, my mom and dad told my brothers and me, no longer exists. So work hard, they said, and success follows.
We need historical perspective. Yes, slavery is America’s horror and shame. But slavery, unfortunately, appears throughout the whole of human history. Europeans enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians, Those we refer to as Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans. Black Africans enslaved other black Africans. Slave traders brought more African slaves to the Middle East and to South America than to Colonial America. Yet this country fought a civil war that resulted in the eradication of slavery. No other nation can say that.
But the black leadership in the United States remains dreary and pessimistic. Members of the Black Congressional Caucus introduced legislation for reparations for slavery.
Do wealthy blacks get a check? Should descendants of those who came to America after slavery pay up? Should descendants of those who fought and died on the Union side pay up? Should we make deductions for the trillions of dollars spent by the government on social programs form which blacks have benefited? What about people of mixed race? Should the payment correspond only to the percentage of a given citizen’s “black blood”? Should we get a contribution from the African nations? After all, some black Africans assisted in the slave trade. And what about another question? Suppose the slave trade never happened, and today’s thirty million American blacks instead live in Africa? Would they be better off?
Reparations, indeed! What a waste of time and energy. For all a country can be is just in its own time.
Illegitimacy, poor schools, drug abuse, crime—you name it—get blamed on white racism. This insults generations of black men and women who worked, survived, and thrived under unimaginably inhumane conditions. Today, many blacks ignore the meteoric progress of blacks, a success under way well before anyone heard of the expression “affirmative action.”
In high school, my class read a poem:
While riding through old Baltimore, so small and full of glee,
I saw a young Baltimorean keep a-lookin’ straight at me.
Now, I was young and very small, and he was no whit bigger
And so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue and called me ”nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until September,
Of all the things that happened there, that’s all that I remember.
The teacher talked about the permanent damage done to this little boy’s psyche. The permanent stain of racism. The denial of the little boy’s dignity. The boy, said the teacher, will never be the same. By the time the bell sounded, everybody left angry.
I went home and repeated the poem to my mom. When I came to the last stanza: “Of all the things that happened, there, that’s all that I remember,” she took a spoon out of the pot she was stirring, rapped it on the side, turned to me and said, “Larry, it’s too bad he let thatspoil his vacation.”
Pre-affirmative action, pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964, pre-Voting Rights Act of 1965, pre-Open Housing Act of 1968, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson wrote in an unpublished 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education draft concurrence, “Negro progress under segregation has been spectacular and, tested by the pace of history, his rise is one of the swiftest and most dramatic advances in the annals of man.” Hear, hear!
And today, taxpayers provide state-funded education. Black can rely, for the most part, on the police to do their jobs without violating human rights. The unemployment rate stands at a thirty-year low, with black unemployment falling faster than white joblessness. A black with the same years of experience and quality of education can expect to earn what a white man earns. America’s computer age rapidly increases productivity, and our nation’s standard of living rises at a pace unknown in all of human history.
Midtown Los Angeles is an area largely populated with Hispanics and Asians. At the corner of Olympic and Vermont there once stood a small, dingy library.
”Larry,” said my friend, Frank, who lives in midtown, “I want to show you something.” About 3:30 P.M., I met Frank in front of the library. “Look at this,” Frank said.
In front of the building, which stood on a slight incline, a half-dozen Hispanic kids rode skateboards. They did impressive tricks, including spins, flips, and other almost gravity-defying, Michael Jordan-esque movies.
”Now,” Frank said, “come on inside.”
We entered the library. Standing room only. Every chair and desk was occupied…by Korean-American kids and their mothers. Not a single Hispanic in the building.
Now, fast-forward ten or twenty years later. Which group will likely generate the senior vice president of sales and marketing at Merck, and which group will likely spawn lesser achievers?
Politicians can scream all they want about the “digital divide,” the allegation that the computer era leaves many behind through no fault of their own. But the bottom line, ground zero, remains the little library at the corner of Olympic and Vermont. The library shows that affirmative action remains alive and well in our country. Only some call it homework.
So, today’s challenge is not black versus white. It is prepared versus unprepared. This means making schools work, holding parents and students to high standards, and shaming those who irresponsibly breed and then abandon those children. The “black leaders’” almost pathological search for the Great White Bigot does not address these problems.
Black Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said, “The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations…is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa….”
The editor of the National Review, John O. Sullivan, put it this way, “White racism exists. But its social power is weak, the social power against it overwhelming.”
[All copyright and credit for this post goes to Larry Elder for St. Martin's Press, New York. My intention of posting it here is to spread the message.]
Leslie
July 4, 2010
Hear, hear! This is exactly what I meant when I said in a previous post that having a “Black History Month” really overdoes it. First it was a day, then a week I believe and now a month, where the U.S. relives and relives the injustices done to black people during slavery in the U.s. This just provides affirmation after affirmation that black people can’t help their own destiny because look at how the “white man” keeps them down. For some black people it serves as an “excuse” for not trying, or for being in the situation they are currently in. Stop this negative reminder of the “PAST” and look towards the “FUTURE”, which is so much brighter than their ancestors suffered under slavery. The ancestral slaves of the past would tell black people of today to “buck up” and “work hard” because of all the opportunities which are no longer held back from black people. And, like I’ve also said before, what about all the white people who fought in the Civil War to free the slaves, and the white people who supported freedom?! Should they not be celebrated too? AND, like Larry Elder says in the above excerpt from his book, black Africans kidnapped their own black people to transport into the slave trade! And into other nations. Slavery has been going on for ages. Yeah, it sucks, but suck it up, and move on! All of us! Dwelling on it just makes it loom bigger than it is. Focus on the future and on all the positive things that are afforded those living in America and soon Positive things will start looming bigger in your life. Get it??
I had a crappy childhood: verbally abusive and cruel mother, abandoned (unintentionally) by my father, then I was in an abusive relationship later on. It all affected me and my life for many years as a teen and in my adult years in terrible ways. But one day I consciously decided to DEAL with it through counseling, come to grips with it, understand it, and then moved on. It took years. But I take responsiblity for the quality of my life NOW, as an older adult. You can’t blame your past and other people forever for how you behave and what you do NOW. Well… yes, you CAN and some people choose to do so. But I don’t buy into it. MOVE ON, ALREADY. Like Larry Elder did. In fact, I think there is a problem with “reverse discrimination”. One example: when an under-qualified person gets promoted to a job instead of a much more qualified person, just because the under-qualified person is black and the company is afraid they will be called “racist” if they don’t promote him or her.
Anyway, Larry Elder is a great example and role model.. to black people and all people alike. Not black leaders who cry “racist” at every turn, when racism is CLEARLY not involved.
Okay, well, that’s all. Peace and God bless.
mct88
July 10, 2010
Hey Chris, I’ve skimmed through it and will be reading eventually. I have a few picture posts of Chicago if you care to check them out!