It occurred to me that one of the reasons that other minorities--from Hispanics, Asian-Americans to gays and lesbians--side with African-Americans on so many issues, to the point of imitating their culture and swagger/persona is that they subliminally see the advantages that have accrued to blacks.
So you see (and hear) them on the street on television, just like their white counterparts, aping African-Americans, with their tough, loud, hip, cool, urban talk and gait and gestures.
This, of course, is terribly politically incorrect, to say this, but the victim mentality and moral superiority (slavery, oppression, discrimination) combined with the superman* heroism that all but political conservatives associate with African-Americans make for a heady potion.
African-Americans are everywhere and numerically superior to their actual proportion of the U.S. population (only one in 8 Americans is black), nowhere better illustrated in professional sports.
And in terms of Hollywood movies, national news, or pop music, one would think that America were something along the lines of 50% white, 40% black, with the rest split up among not very noticed "other" minorities.
Liberal whites champion first and foremost African-Americans, and the two-term presidency of Obama have given blacks a visibility envied and a model to be copied by other groups. Some of this is positive, some of it is not. The model of "we are an oppressed group" can lead to a militancy ("Society owes us something," "we are always a victim," and "we can do no wrong") and a way of seeing things situations as either all-black or all-white ("You are an oppressor" and "I am a victim of your oppression").
So even though, for instance, Asian-Americans may have a much higher average family income or much lower crime rate, or Hispanic-Americans actually are the largest minority in the U.S., it is African-Americans who bask in the admiration and "celebrity" imagination of Americans.
What other minority has such an array of superstars: an Oprah, a Michael Jordan, Mohammed Ali, Beyonce, Stevie Wonder, Denzel, Aretha, Will Smith, Michael Jackson, Toni Morrison, or the late Martin Luther King, Jr., John Coltrane, Maya Angelou or has such powerful champions as the New York Times, the Democratic Party (Clinton, Carter, del Blasio...) and other political royalty (Colin Powell), the NAACP, and so on?
No other minority has won such widespread acceptance and adulation. So it is no wonder then that African-Americans as a group certainly have the highest standing--this is apart from questions of economic or educational parity--and greatest sympathy in this country so that even staggeringly high rates of urban crime have been turned into evidence that they have been wronged and bear little or no responsibility.
It's as if Americans now want African-Americans to be the majority or dominant culture, dislodging the so-called "white" (or, erroneously, "European") culture from its position.
The problem is that such an America, with African-Americans holding, given proportionally equal or greater weight than whites, would not look like America as it actually is. That would mean ignoring other racial/ethnic groups as well as reject the notion of "one man, one vote" or parity in terms of actual demographics.
I am all for shifting power to underrepresented groups, but not at the expense of some minorities or in a disproportionate fashion that would simply, effectively disenfranchise the majority.
But only in conservative circles will you hear such opinions openly voiced, because in liberal and in most mainstream circles, they are taboo.
And certain taboos are not supposed to be broken, on pain of intense social censure and ostracizing.
(So much for diversity).
Do we need to be clones of either Anglo-Saxons or, now, African-Americans?
* America has always worshiped Superman, Batman...down to Paul Bunyan, over-sized figures.
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