Virgil
In Response
by , 11-09-2008 at 01:07 AM (4273 Views)
I couldn't fit this response as a comment in my previous blog http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=6729, so I started another blog entry.
I won’t be able to respond to everything, but a response to two points is needed. First to the point from Petrarch on Bush as divisive. Well, it takes two sides for bipartanship and Bush certainly didn’t lack trying. I can enumerate number of policy initiatives (education reform for instance right at the very beginning, even the vote to go to war in Iraq had a significant number of Democrats along with it) that were intended to be bipartisan. But frankly your statement is rather politically unlearned. Are you saying that under Clinton it wasn’t divisive, or under GHW Bush or under Reagan or under Carter or under Ford or under Nixon? Come on, it’s the duty of the opposition to undermine the President. That has always been and will always be. Otherwise one has the potential of a dictatorship. I expect and will support from my political party the undermining and division of Obama’s policies: (1) because I don’t agree with them and (2) because it is my duty as the loyal opposition. Nor is it necessarily a positive value to not have unity. The most divisive presidency in the history of our country was Lincoln’s. Put that into perspective.
Second, I am serious. I stand by my statement. Institutionalized racism has been extirpated from this country by what I see as twenty-five years. What people have recounted in response here are personal prejudices. Everyone have personal prejudices. I have personal prejudices. You can probably find a number of prejudice statements I have made here on lit net, against people with piercings, tattoos, and general low class behavior. There are prejudice statements made against people who believe in religion almost every day here on lit net. There are people who are prejudiced against hunters or gun owners or pro-life advocates or southerners or northerners. Good lord, every time I go out with my elitist Liberal friends (who are supposed to be prejudice pure) I have to hear the word “redneck” thrown around with disdain. I bet if I probed each and every one of you I will find prejudices. Just look at the prejudices that poor Sarah Palin had to undergo these past few weeks. Why, because she’s a woman who hunts and shoots guns and doesn’t believe in abortion? What was the level of hatred towards her by a good portion of the country? It is normal and human to have prejudices, and in some cases a good thing. What’s different is that there is no victimization. Institutionalized racism harms or holds back someone. I fail to see that on any significant scale. Where I work management is filled with people of all ethnicities. I already mentioned the black accomplished people in one of my responses. Oprah is the biggest entertainer in the country, and her ratings are dependant on white viewers. The highest paid ethnic groups in this country are Asians and Indians (from India). Why hasn’t racism, if it exists, held them back? If people have prejudiced feelings against inner city blacks, well, perhaps there are good reasons why people have those feelings. Here’s something else to put into perspective, more people have died from violence in Obama’s inner city of Chicago than American soldiers in Iraq over the course of the war. No one can tell me that racial victimization is the cause of that. And the cry of racism to rationalize black problems is a crutch, an escapist argument to claim victimization. This escapist argument is self defeating because it is paralyzing. It tells young African Americans you can’t make it because you are held back. Frankly they are not held back and they should not be made to feel this way. People in this country are only held back by their self imposed restrictions. Period. Thomas Sowell, the Stanford economist and sociologist (a brilliant man in my opinion, and black) has said in a similar argument as this that if Jews had waited for the end of anti-Semitism to make it in America, they would still be waiting.
I agree with Rich. The election of Obama is the end of the argument that blacks are held back because of racism.
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