Friday, March 24, 2006

Did you get your race card? Part 1


(You know you played Magic, don't lie.)

It seems like this ridiculous show "Black/White" on FX has prompted a flood of racial shit all over the place.

Most of the reports that have been released around the time this show debuted showed how irrelevant this shows' simple premise of dress like whitey/darkie and feel like whitey/darkie is.

The NY Times dropped a bomb on Monday when they showed exactly why black men are fucked in America as well as how fucked they are. Thanks to the 23,454 people who e-mailed me this article in case I somehow missed it.

Here is a quick fact sheet
  • In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

  • The high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.
  • Another problem is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.

    About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.

I see this shit on my block, the dudes who barely make it out of high school after 5 or 6 years disconnect from mainstream society altogether. I went to Michigan for four years to come home and they look at me like I went on an exploratory mission to Venus.

Stories about Mid-Western life and white girls might as well be tales about Martian invasions.
The hopeless myopia that is all too common in the urban black outlook on life need the same focus that bullshit non-issues like gay marriage and flag-burning get.

Now compare that type of invisible racism, with another recent announcement in the NY Times that shows how college aid programs that were exclusively for women and minorities have been completely opened to white people.

Perhaps the overwhelming success women have had in college erases some of their need for an intensive support system, but most minorities (espy. Blacks) are getting flushed out of life before they even get an college application. And now all the aid they could have gotten if they made it to college is going to white folk?

Peep the quote from Whitey McWhiteWhite of the Bullshit Euphemism Club,

"Our concern is that the law be followed and that nobody be denied participation in a program on account of skin color or what country their ancestors came from."

-- Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity

Where the fuck do these people come from?

One of the most successful things the Bush administration did was to keep all of their racist views intangible. Bush hasn't done anything overtly ridiculous, like pronouncing Niger as nigger in public speeches, but his policies are as damaging and more dangerous than the good old open racism of the 1950 and 60's.

Bush sent out Condi Rice to tap dance about affirmative action when the case was in public eye, in order to show that smart nigros don't like AA (affirmative action) while Colin Powell said he was all for the AA.

Guess which black person no longer works for the Bush administration?

Following the confusing 2003 legal decision by the Supreme Court on University of Michigan's affirmative action policy, hundreds of spineless schools have been washing out all traces of race from their aid programs in an effort to pre-empt any legal challenges.

Dumb-asses like Sandra O' Connor, said that the need for race-based programs should be gone in a generation when she explained her vote on the Michigan case.

Whereas she will be dead in a generation, racism, institutional and otherwise, will not be dead in the 20-30 year period that she vaguely assumed all racism would end in.

Supreme Court Justices, for all their ivory tower wisdom and encyclopedic legal knowledge, don't know shit about the real world.

Peep the real world,

  • Last year, in response to a legal threat from the Education Department, Washington University in St. Louis modified the standards for an undergraduate scholarship that had been open just to minorities and was named for the first African-American dean at the university. This year, the first since the change, 12 of the 42 first-year recipients are white.
That shit makes me sick.

One of the negro lawyers fighting for minority scholarships said "How is it that they conclude that the great evil in this country is discrimination against white people?'' Mr. Shaw asked. ''Can I put that question any more pointedly? I struggle to find the words to do it because it's so stunning.''

Schools, only concerned with their bottom line are caving in before the government can sue them.

With racism becoming increasingly invisible, from the fact that if you live in the hood you will never see how isolated you are, to the reality that most white people will not notice their college is 100% white, FX's new show Black/White seems like its time has passed about 40 years ago.

I'm going follow up more on Black/White in an upcoming post after I see the 3rd episode of this show.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for shining some light on this. This has been on my mind since I saw it Monday. My experience is similar to yours, specialized high school(the one that with the principal who just caught gaming the board of Ed) going away to school(Pennsylvania in my case) and coming back to NYC and seeing all the dudes your age still in the same exact spot they were in when you left. This is straight up scary. I ride the 4/5 train to work now I am back in town in the morning, barely a black male in the 22-30 range to be found during rush hour going to work? How is that possible in city with thousands of black men in that age group? Only negro male in my whole office (45 people), none our sister companies office either (75 people). This is an unbelievable disaster for future of black people in America. Worse, I gotta see 2% negros like Ken Blackwell and Condy Rice carrying water for stupid issues like gay marriage, and figuring out how to waste more money fighting a silly war in the Middle East. I was telling my lady the other day, it seems like we really don't have peers anymore.

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  2. Thanks for the comment.

    I totally zoned out the whole rush hour demographic.
    All you see is black women getting on the train for the most part, I just got used to it.

    Its truly bizarre.

    I was telling my friends that black women are screwed because they are fighting for the same, what 4 black guys?
    They really don't have a wide pool of equals.

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  3. Yeah it really is sad. My girl's sister has basically declared, they aren't any black guys for me to date, so I am not looking for any, and basically dating white dudes. Being around town I think a lot of other black females have reached the same conclusion. I am starting to think that by the time I'm 60, people are gonna be looking at black folks like us like how we look American Indians, as a museum exhibit. The only young black male face you see in the paper is accused of going Ted Bundy on a grad student. How is it 40 years after MLK, Malcolm, et al, are things this bad.

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