baldilocks

Slaves

Some waste of skin and breath in Benton Harbor, Michigan runs from the police on a motorcycle, doing 100+ mph and, surprise, runs into a brick wall and kills himself.

But it just so happens that the idiot is black, the community is mostly black and the police are mostly white. Black community plus black perp plus white cops equals, what else, a riot.
Now I'm not one to burn down houses when I get mad--and, hey, I live in LA, Riot Central--but if I were that type, I definitely wouldn't burn down my own house, but that of the person(s) who pissed me off. It's a pretty simple piece of logic, that.
But that's just what the gentle people of Benton Harbor did. They burned down their own community. I saw picture of the aftermath that made Baghdad look like a playground.

And they burned it down for what? They went on a rampage because some fool on a motorcycle with a drug warrant and a suspended license is too stupid to realize that a) the cops will catch your ass eventually and b) buildings don't move when you run into them at 100 mph. But you do, in many different directions. Up, down and sideways.

The good people of Benton Harbor also burned their own community down for a more disturbing reason: they believe in their own inferiority. Because they are so "downtrodden" and "helpless," they believe that they are to be given everything and that others are supposed to build up their poor, welfare-ridden community. (Meanwhile, middle-class, mostly white St. Joseph, Michigan sits right across the river, scratching its collective head over the state of events.) In short, self-determination is not in their vocabulary and nothing they do wrong is ever their fault. They ought to change the name of the city to Palestine.

It's said that the jobless rate is very high in this community. (I'm very familiar with communities like this because I lived in one and I've had welfare recipients as tenants in the duplex I used to own and live in.) Many complain that they can't get jobs. I wonder what the high school graduation rate is there or what the percentage of persons with criminal records is. I'll bet the former is low and the latter is high. How the hell are you going to get a job with no high school diploma and a criminal record? Duh!

And I suppose all of that is the white man's fault.

What people like these don't get is that, by their every move of indolence, lawlessness and self-destructive behavior, they're telling those who believe in black inferiority, "yes, you're right.

"We need to be coddled like children; we can't do it for ourselves. We're not responsible for our own behavior. We're not responsible for feeding and educating our children. We're not responsible when we drive a motorcycle at 100 mph with no license and the laws of physics and Darwin make us one big splat on a building. You, white man, it's your responsibility." Sounds like something out of Gone with the Wind. Why don't they just sing Mammy?

My Black Day

September 11, 2001, being my day off, I woke up later than usual, around 6:30. I got my coffee, showered and was puttering around in my underwear when my eighty-year-old great-aunt called.

She was hysterical. “Turn on the TV! Someone ran a plane into the World Trade Center in New York!" Sure that she had, somehow, gotten it wrong (she was eighty, after all), I switched on the TV just in time to see a film of the second airplane hitting Tower number two. “Oh my God!" I said. “Arabs did this! I know they did it," I said to my aunt. Not long afterward, Tower number two crumbled to the ground. I was immediately in tears and I don’t cry easily. “It is ON! Those Arab bastards straight fucked-up this time." We stayed on the phone for about two hours more commenting, raging and consoling. Then I hung up. I stayed glued to the TV for a couple hours more. Then, though I was, somehow, exhausted, I got my clothes on and went outside.

I remember those moments when no one knew how many more hijacked aircraft were in the sky. I remember the report of two other crashed aircraft, one into the Pentagon and one somewhere in Pennsylvania--near Shanksville, as we now know. (I tried not to think of the friend that works in the Pentagon, to whom I had sent an e-mail as soon as I found out. Thankfully, it was his day off also.) Those moments were like the anticipation of the end of the world. One of the planes had been bound for Los Angeles and I lived ten miles from LAX, right under the air lanes. Did the terrorists have something more in store for us savage infidels, something worse, some grand nuclear finale? Who knew then?

With those unnerving thoughts in mind, I stepped out of my house and it was quiet. Now, I lived in the South Central LA ‘hood, where it’s never quiet, especially at midday. But this day was different. It was Dead Quiet. No planes in the sky (President Bush had grounded all aircraft hours before), no traffic on the street, nor did I hear any traffic from the highway two blocks away. No dogs barking, no children playing. Nothing but the eerie, booming echo of jet engines that were no longer making their way into LAX; like the aftermath of some gigantic explosive.

It seemed as if the whole world was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was like the stillness preceding a violent earthquake that most southern Californians recognize. Any minute I expected a rogue airplane to come barreling out of the sky and plunge into LAX. Or, worse yet, a blindingly bright flash, then no more.

I’ll never forget that day as long as I live and I hope those who perpetrated the attacks are burning in hell right now. My day, however, was nothing compared to those who died horrible, crushing, burning, falling deaths, or live with the resulting disfigurements, physical and emotional. My day was nothing compared to those that lost their parents, their children, their spouses. Even whole families died on some of the airplanes. Little children, taking their first airplane trips were murdered on some of the airplanes. Men who will never see their then yet unborn children, pregnant women (a twofer for the jihadis); fire-fighters—whose job it is to save lives—blown to bits and for what? My day was nothing compared to theirs.

Yet, there are still people, other jihadis that would like nothing better than to finish the job.

I think I’ll go to the range tomorrow and practice with my nine mil.

The Black Nerd's Lament

I’m right in the middle of reading John McWhorter’s Losing the Race. I stopped because it brought a lot of unpleasant memories to the fore, the type that, likely, any black person who’s “different" has.

Pretty much anyone who likes math, likes foreign languages, likes computers, likes Star Trek, likes Tolkien, etc., is going to be considered geeky, at best. But for a black person, such preferences will bring the gravest of charges from one’s fellow blacks: “wanting to be white," thinking that you’re better than others, being a "sell-out." (Let’s not even talk about being a Republican. Yet.) It seems that being black and being smart is a betrayal to “blackness." I have long wondered how that came to be.

Dr. McWhorter has pretty much articulated this reality and done me one better by tracing it to its origin. He weaves the facts of American slave trade into a causal narrative: the variety of tribes that were brought to the American shores, the suppression of the various cultures and languages and the prohibition of slave literacy. Whatever learning traditions that the many African tribes might have brought with them to America were stamped out, unlike such traditions among other cultures. This makes sense.

So, if, in a culture, the vast majority is illiterate or undereducated, and there is a bar to gaining literacy or there is an educational “glass-ceiling," as there was in the US for black people up until about 45 years ago, then no stigma will be attached to such deficiencies. To go further, anyone who, by some means manages to rise above such obstacles, whether by luck, kindness, or pure genius, is looked upon with suspicion, at best, and viewed as a “sell-out," at worst.

If all of the above is true, then it basically comes down to this: black Americans who view an intelligent black person with suspicion are perpetuating slave and Jim Crow culture. Somehow, I doubt that a hue and cry will be raised.

Dr. McWhorter really laid himself on the line by telling this unpleasant truth. As it usually is with most unpleasant truth-tellers, he’s catching hell for either allegedly lying or airing black people’s dirty laundry.

I, however, am in his debt. Thank you, sir.