Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers
Here’s Obama quoted in the New York Times in 1990 in an article titled “First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review” by Fox Butterfield:
”The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ”It’s encouraging.
”But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment.
After becoming the president of what should be the most prestigious law journal in the country, Obama claimed that “there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent” to him.
Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say” comes to mind.
If an individual cannot take responsibility for his failures then how can he feel any real satisfaction in his successes? What a dark world one would live in where everything comes down to chance, save for the instances where bold progressives can implement social justice. Is that what Barack Obama thinks deep down? That he just got lucky and that now it’s his job to spread the “luck” around?
Bell, like Obama, seems to believe that employers arbitrarily chose whether and whom to hire. Economic conditions, the necessities of the marketplace, and the qualifications of the individuals seem to play no role. The reality is that if a position is open, and a black youth (much less a black female) is even remotely qualified, they have first pick. The EEOC has seen to that. However, black youth today seem to think – in a fashion disturbingly similar to that seen among Arabs – that they are naturally entitled to high positions regardless of their dress, history, character, or education.
It’s a documented and interesting, if disturbing, trend that few blacks go into technical fields (Science, Math, Engineering). The vast majority of those that do pursue college educations go into marketing or management. Some of this may be due to some obscure genetic predisposition, the vast majority seems to be due to cultural pressure: if you’re smart and like the sciences you’re a race traitor. The classical analogy is to a pot of crabs: if one tries to climb out and escape, the rest pull it back in.
Black college students do try to major in math, science and engineering.
But they soon find that those fields are much harder than their high school education prepared them for. And that they are not the geniuses that liberals told them they were.
Grade inflation and affirmative action can only take a black person so far in life. Eventually–either in college or in his career–he actually has to start achieving something on his own without these crutches.
We’ll never know how many young black people of talent could go on to successful careers in advanced fields, if they weren’t abandoned by indifferent or incompetent public school teachers.
Unlike the medical profession: If your kids are screwed by an incompetent teacher, you can’t sue that teacher for malpractice.
“placed one-third of young men — denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and skills —”
Um, Mr Bell, perhaps you’d get a more cooperative audience if you didn’t shoot down your own position.
No education=lack of basic reading/writing/communication skills. If one of your wanton “young men” needs to have instructions read to him, and things explained at a third grade level, can you possibly see how this might affect the company he’s working for?
On the other hand, there were people who lacked significant education who did some pretty remarkable things but, they acknowledged that they still felt an education is a must.
The next part of the sentence, where “young men” are denied even menial jobs when they have no skills…well, let me say this, in my years in the military, there were people who were lazy who, when given a mop would slosh the dirt around. Those who had pride and understood what “clean” is, swept first, dumped the loose dirt in the trash, mopped and made the place look spotless.
So I submit it’s not the lack of education or lack of skills that are the problem…it’s the lack of wanting anything more than a handout that’s the problem. And it’s not race-specific. Nature is full of lazy people who don’t produce, even to maintain their own households or property or children, etc. No pride=no reason to be respected. And lack of accomplishment results in having no personal pride.
It’s simple, really. Been written about since the days of the Olde Testament in the Bible. Possibly longer.
What a sad puff of dirt Bell was. As if people exaggerate black crime cuz they’re simply racists. When black Americans get together and start making environment friendly green buildings, find Amelia Earhart and a million other things that have no racial dimension, this activity will promote itself. What chapter has the Loch Ness Monster?
When there is an (often unacknowledged) quota for minorities in some programs, I have wondered about the ability of many students in the program. I think many sre given opportunities but don’t use them…. for some reason.