Truth or dare II

“I Cannot and Will Not Cut My Conscience to Fit This Year’s Fashions”

Truth or dare.

I did not lie.



I was hoping within my lifetime that some of what I have observed and concluded about race relations in America would eventually come to light and be openly discussed.  But this is not to be be. But years to come, a both broader and more nuanced picture that includes opinions from a wider range of people and peoples will emerge, perhaps.


*****


Liberals often and usually decry the treat the ostensibly terrible treatment that African-Americans receive in the United States.

They rarely take note of the fierce love and admiration bordering on religious that is also so widespread, from Hollywood to academia to professional sports to the media.

Speaking of the latter, one has no more than to read The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, or listen to NPR or watch MSNBC or CNN, to know this.

In my experience and based on my observations, Asian-Americans, and possibly Hispanic Americans, receive far less respect and are discriminated against much more than blacks, and, in fact, are subject to much worse treatment from whites and blacks.

It would be truly edifying, as well as ground-breaking, for a mainstream media to do a story on how minorities (including whites) are treated in majority-black cities and communities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, etc.

One side of the picture is Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The other side is much darker and has not been exposed to the day.

I don't even think that Dr. King could have predicted that in the half century after his death that the civil rights movement's legacy could have known that the hymn of "we shall overcome (we endured slavery and discrimination") would be sacralized into "Look at what white people did to us" and then generalized onward into

 "Look at what Hispanics are doing it to us" (taking our jobs away from us  

"Look at what Jews are doing this to us" (controlling the banks)

"Look at what Asians are doing this to us" (unfairly jumping ahead of us and squeezing places in education as well) and 

"Look at what gays are doing" (appropriating the civil rights legacy to justify their immorality), all of which leads them into conflict with many groups.

"Look at what the police do to us" (murdering our young men)

"Look at what the government is doing to us" (inventing AIDS to kill us, using Hurricane Katrina to drive us out of New Orleans, depriving us of the right to vote...)

A religion, truly, of [a belief in] oppression

to the exclusion, it seems of an ability to forcefully and clearly educate so many members of its community to discern right from wrong.

But no one dares speak to these issues.  Or cares, so it seems.

There are plenty of soapboxes, it seems to me, for African-Americans to take America to task, among them:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/acting-french/375743/






Prejudice or intuition?

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/S-F-man-beaten-in-Oakland-dies-suspects-held-3266940.php
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/2014/09/11/two-teenagers-arrested-after-assaulting-boy-in-rainier-valley/


That beating as well as numerous others--including the assault of former Seattle mayor Paul Schell, who was struck in the head with a microphone, or the stomping of people in the Mardi Gras Pioneer Square riots (in Seattle as well) of 2001--were not anomalies or isolated incidents.   Variations--albeit less "serious" but still grave--occur every day, even if they do not receive the scrutiny of the media..

Yet no one in the media or elsewhere will decry the violence endemic in African-American culture, with its emphasis on machismo and tacit acceptance of violence in its many forms.

No amount of rationalization--based on historical "evidence"--can justify the savagery and immorality of such actions.




We'll see how the future plays out.   I am not hopeful unless the present ideological trajectory changes course.