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The leadership that's failing them most is the leadership of the black community. They're laser focused on selling a victimhood narrative that reduces all probl

The leadership that's failing them most is the leadership of the black community. They're laser focused on selling a victimhood narrative that reduces all problems to racism and oppression by the white man. Meanwhile, black children are raised in single-parent homes in record numbers, are joining gangs due to poor parental supervision, and very often grow up in an environment that frowns upon success as some kind of racial betrayal ("acting white"). Blacks who speak out about the social and cultural problems within the black community are labeled Uncle Toms and ignored (see Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas, for example). Second to that is the leadership and elite of the country, that accepts this victimhood narrative out of misinformation, political correctness, and political expedience. There's no better way to get 90% of a population to vote for you than to convince them that the other side is the mortal enemy that hates them for the color of their skin and wants to keep them down.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago
It's much easier to sell such a narrative when the entire history of your country backs it up. When a close advisor of a previous President admits they started the war on drugs to target hippies and negroes, for example. Oh, that same president was strongly anti-abortion except in extreme circumstances. His example of such a case when abortion was warranted? Mixed-race babies. He also reset the fundamental strategy one of your political parties for the last few decades to appealing to racists with "the southern strategy". Which Trump, with his flirting with white supremacist groups continues to this day.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  Believe what you want. Even if everything you say is true, which I seriously doubt, it doesn't change the fact that victimhood politics is the road to continued ruin.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Unfortunately it is true: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105832640 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1058326... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy Why shouldn't a victim acknowledge the reality of being targeted? What other groups do you expect to follow this bizarre recommendation? Thus is a nice historical overview that ties a lot of this stuff together: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-america-repeating-the-mistakes-of-1968/490568/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-ameri...
    - marcoperaza 10y ago
      I don't buy that America is a substantially racist country today. I especially don't buy that racism is even in the top-ten list of problems facing black people. History sucks. It landed my grandparents in America, having fled Cuba, with the clothes on their backs. They had built lives for themselves and had it all pulled from under them. Somehow, the Cuban-American community has done phenomenally well for itself. Definitely not by blaming the past for their lot and demanding nebulous reparations.
      - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
        "In order to provide aid to recently arrived Cuban immigrants, the United States Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966. The Cuban Refugee Program provided more than $1.3 billion of direct financial assistance. They also were eligible for public assistance, Medicare, free English courses, scholarships, and low-interest college loans." says wikipedia. Seems like they were lucky to be on the right side of a political battle to me.
        marcoperaza 10y ago
        You realize that's all dwarfed by the welfare state that we now have for everyone, right? It's also not the root of the Cuban-American community's success. The earliest waves of migrants were almost all from the middle and upper class. They did correspondingly well in their new home. Wealth is not really a number in your bank account, it's the knowledge and virtues that guide of the process of producing value. If you took everyone in America's money away and started over, the resulting classes would look a lot like today's. Culture is almost everything.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

It's much easier to sell such a narrative when the entire history of your country backs it up. When a close advisor of a previous President admits they started the war on drugs to target hippies and negroes, for example. Oh, that same president was strongly anti-abortion except in extreme circumstances. His example of such a case when abortion was warranted? Mixed-race babies. He also reset the fundamental strategy one of your political parties for the last few decades to appealing to racists with "the southern strategy". Which Trump, with his flirting with white supremacist groups continues to this day.

marcoperaza 10y ago
Believe what you want. Even if everything you say is true, which I seriously doubt, it doesn't change the fact that victimhood politics is the road to continued ruin.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  Unfortunately it is true: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105832640 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1058326... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy Why shouldn't a victim acknowledge the reality of being targeted? What other groups do you expect to follow this bizarre recommendation? Thus is a nice historical overview that ties a lot of this stuff together: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-america-repeating-the-mistakes-of-1968/490568/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-ameri...
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    I don't buy that America is a substantially racist country today. I especially don't buy that racism is even in the top-ten list of problems facing black people. History sucks. It landed my grandparents in America, having fled Cuba, with the clothes on their backs. They had built lives for themselves and had it all pulled from under them. Somehow, the Cuban-American community has done phenomenally well for itself. Definitely not by blaming the past for their lot and demanding nebulous reparations.
    - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
      "In order to provide aid to recently arrived Cuban immigrants, the United States Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966. The Cuban Refugee Program provided more than $1.3 billion of direct financial assistance. They also were eligible for public assistance, Medicare, free English courses, scholarships, and low-interest college loans." says wikipedia. Seems like they were lucky to be on the right side of a political battle to me.
      - marcoperaza 10y ago
        You realize that's all dwarfed by the welfare state that we now have for everyone, right? It's also not the root of the Cuban-American community's success. The earliest waves of migrants were almost all from the middle and upper class. They did correspondingly well in their new home. Wealth is not really a number in your bank account, it's the knowledge and virtues that guide of the process of producing value. If you took everyone in America's money away and started over, the resulting classes would look a lot like today's. Culture is almost everything.