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Article by Fred Reed- people are getting tired of this liberal insanity

robEERt

All-Conference
Nov 12, 2003
5,774
36
168
Black Power: A Done Deal
by Fred Reed

It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can't do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified, where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple or illegal voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Jim, or did Conrad write The Jim of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven't read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States? We cannot. It would offend blacks.

We must never, ever say or do anything that might upset them - as virtually everything does. It is positively astonishing. One expects the rich and smart to have disproportionate power. But America is dominated from the slums. One might think that a single set of laws should and would apply to all citizens, and that things should be done without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, and that all should have the same rights and responsibilities. It is, sadly, not so. The dominance of the media by blacks is impressive.

If a white shoots a black to defend himself, it becomes national news for weeks, or months, and riots follow. But when blacks engage in their unending racial attacks on whites, the media demurely look the other way. The attackers are never black. They are "teens." Reporters who say otherwise are likely to be fired. In effect, the thirteen percent censor the national press.
Much of their mastery has become so deeply engrained as no longer to be noticed. There is the DC Hesitation. In the bars and restaurants of Washington, a man weary of an incompetent affirmative-action hire in his office will, before commenting to a friend, lean forward, lower his voice, and look furtively over both shoulders to see whether anyone might overhear: The DC Hesitation. People don't even know that they are doing this.

Defensive behavior by whites has become nearly universal. A sort of Masonic recognition-ritual occurs among white people recently introduced in social gatherings. Is the other person, for want of better terms, a liberal or a realist? Dare one speak? One of them will say something mildly skeptical about, say, Jesse Jackson. The other rolls his eyes in shared disgust. The secret handshake. Or, if the listener is politically correct, the bait is not taken. In either case, blacks dominate political conversation.

So extreme is the power to control speech and even thought, that politicians have to avoid mentioning watermelons, or that neighborhoods of high crime must delicately be called "sketchy" instead of "black," though all understand who lives there and what is meant. The avoidance of racial reference is not an even-handed if despotic attempt to oppose racism since, as we all know, blacks freely apply any derogatory wording they choose to whites. In short, they rule. Which is amazing.

The dominance extends to children. When in junior high one of my daughters brought home a science handout with common chemical terms badly misspelled in a way which suggested a particular speech pattern. "Is your teacher black?" I said without thinking. "Daaaaaaady!" she said in anguish, having made the connection but knowing that she shouldn't have. Blacks control what you can say to your own children in your own home. And of course if I had gone to the school and demanded that the teacher be fired, it would have been evidence of my depravity and probable KKK membership.

The word "unbelievable" has lost all force. Things that ought to be unbelievable, and once were, have become routine. Still, there it was: Don't expect a junior-high teacher to have the level of literacy I had in the fourth grade. Instead, make it dangerous to notice their stupidity. This is not new, and it hasn't changed.

In 1981, in a piece for Harper's, I wrote: "The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers' colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida, cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.'s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places."

Nothing has changed. Blacks now control the presidency and thus, most importantly, the Attorney Generalship. In this the staggering political power of blacks is most evident. Obama was elected because he was black: an equally unqualified and negligible white politician would have had no chance. He is now fiercely pushing the most profound transformation of America ever attempted, by opening the floodgates to immigration from the south. To effect this end, he apparently will simply ignore Congress and the Constitution. The people will not be consulted. Laws will be ignored.

It is hard to imagine why he does it except from racism, from a desire to get even with whites by enrolling their country in the Third World. A short-sighted policy, yes, since Hispanics do not like blacks and will soon be more powerful-but that will come a bit later.

Note that self-inflicted problems of blacks consume inordinate amounts of public and governmental attention, even though only blacks can solve them. I might say, "should solve them," since they never have and we all know they seem to have no desire to do so. Yet we hear about them endlessly.

Are blacks in Chicago killing each other in large numbers? The solution might be to stop doing it, might it not? While I do not wish these young dead, I can do nothing to stop them, and it is not a problem I can solve.

Are black children growing up illiterate? This gives me no pleasure, and I have various reasons both selfish and moral to wish it were not so. But perhaps the solution is for their parents, or parent, to see that they do their homework, or even to teach them. I cannot do this for them, and again it isn't my problem to resolve.

Why do I have to hear, endlessly, about the "achievement gap?" Whether of genetic or cultural origin, it seems as immutable as Avogadro's number, and I can do nothing about it. I raise my children. They need to raise theirs. They rule. It is astonishing
 
I'm not sure what's worse. The article or the fact that you actually believe what is in it.
 
Not sure but this may be racist.
Yes. No way in hell it could be factual. How many times have we seen the request for "source". Could we believe our lying eyes if a source were offered? Could stats from NCLB be offered and substantiated? Hell of a lot of money spent on that program to refuse to offer the results for public consumption. I saw some very ugly suggestions from earlier tests, but rules and testing methods were changed so as to make progress comparisons less than accurate. Some work may have been done with the raw data, but PC would not allow it to be utilized as an indicator of future outcomes.
 
Keep your heads in the sand "boys". What you won't believe and accept won't hurt you. Truth sometimes is very hard to accept. The facts are in your face everyday,
 
Keep your heads in the sand "boys". What you won't believe and accept won't hurt you. Truth sometimes is very hard to accept. The facts are in your face everyday,
The problem with your facts is that even though the percentage is in favor of your argument, the total number is still less than white people, guessing by half. I just find it odd that some sister fvcking hillbilly can't recognize that with a simple glance around your trailer park that you fit the same statistical data set.
 
Yes. No way in hell it could be factual. How many times have we seen the request for "source". Could we believe our lying eyes if a source were offered? Could stats from NCLB be offered and substantiated? Hell of a lot of money spent on that program to refuse to offer the results for public consumption. I saw some very ugly suggestions from earlier tests, but rules and testing methods were changed so as to make progress comparisons less than accurate. Some work may have been done with the raw data, but PC would not allow it to be utilized as an indicator of future outcomes.

I have no idea what you are going on about.
 
I have no idea what you are going on about.
The test results were broken down by subject area and further by male/ female, black/white/Hispanic. Results were broken down to identify any subculture that was distinguishable. Reports did not identify any group that could be distinguished by the reported numbers. Subsequent tests could report level of improvement by group. Individualized results were sent home with explanation of results - caused many questions and reporting on individuals ma not have carried forward. Administration felt the general public was not qualified to look at test results and make proper analysis.

South Carolina had a report that utilized the test results and also showed how money was spent. This also came under a lot of criticism - mainly in public attempt to compare different schools in cost per student and integrate the NCLB test results. Public was warned not to make those comparisons because of inability to compare cost of large and small schools. Some schools with special project costs that are not applicable to all schools. I think those cost report cards were discontinued too because of added confusion when ill advised comparison was continued.
 
The test results were broken down by subject area and further by male/ female, black/white/Hispanic. Results were broken down to identify any subculture that was distinguishable. Reports did not identify any group that could be distinguished by the reported numbers. Subsequent tests could report level of improvement by group. Individualized results were sent home with explanation of results - caused many questions and reporting on individuals ma not have carried forward. Administration felt the general public was not qualified to look at test results and make proper analysis.

South Carolina had a report that utilized the test results and also showed how money was spent. This also came under a lot of criticism - mainly in public attempt to compare different schools in cost per student and integrate the NCLB test results. Public was warned not to make those comparisons because of inability to compare cost of large and small schools. Some schools with special project costs that are not applicable to all schools. I think those cost report cards were discontinued too because of added confusion when ill advised comparison was continued.
Still not sure what this had to do with the OP.
 
A racist piece of shit wrote this. And another posted it. Well done! Vote GOP!

Black Power: A Done Deal
by Fred Reed

It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can't do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified, where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple or illegal voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Jim, or did Conrad write The Jim of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven't read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States? We cannot. It would offend blacks.

We must never, ever say or do anything that might upset them - as virtually everything does. It is positively astonishing. One expects the rich and smart to have disproportionate power. But America is dominated from the slums. One might think that a single set of laws should and would apply to all citizens, and that things should be done without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, and that all should have the same rights and responsibilities. It is, sadly, not so. The dominance of the media by blacks is impressive.

If a white shoots a black to defend himself, it becomes national news for weeks, or months, and riots follow. But when blacks engage in their unending racial attacks on whites, the media demurely look the other way. The attackers are never black. They are "teens." Reporters who say otherwise are likely to be fired. In effect, the thirteen percent censor the national press.
Much of their mastery has become so deeply engrained as no longer to be noticed. There is the DC Hesitation. In the bars and restaurants of Washington, a man weary of an incompetent affirmative-action hire in his office will, before commenting to a friend, lean forward, lower his voice, and look furtively over both shoulders to see whether anyone might overhear: The DC Hesitation. People don't even know that they are doing this.

Defensive behavior by whites has become nearly universal. A sort of Masonic recognition-ritual occurs among white people recently introduced in social gatherings. Is the other person, for want of better terms, a liberal or a realist? Dare one speak? One of them will say something mildly skeptical about, say, Jesse Jackson. The other rolls his eyes in shared disgust. The secret handshake. Or, if the listener is politically correct, the bait is not taken. In either case, blacks dominate political conversation.

So extreme is the power to control speech and even thought, that politicians have to avoid mentioning watermelons, or that neighborhoods of high crime must delicately be called "sketchy" instead of "black," though all understand who lives there and what is meant. The avoidance of racial reference is not an even-handed if despotic attempt to oppose racism since, as we all know, blacks freely apply any derogatory wording they choose to whites. In short, they rule. Which is amazing.

The dominance extends to children. When in junior high one of my daughters brought home a science handout with common chemical terms badly misspelled in a way which suggested a particular speech pattern. "Is your teacher black?" I said without thinking. "Daaaaaaady!" she said in anguish, having made the connection but knowing that she shouldn't have. Blacks control what you can say to your own children in your own home. And of course if I had gone to the school and demanded that the teacher be fired, it would have been evidence of my depravity and probable KKK membership.

The word "unbelievable" has lost all force. Things that ought to be unbelievable, and once were, have become routine. Still, there it was: Don't expect a junior-high teacher to have the level of literacy I had in the fourth grade. Instead, make it dangerous to notice their stupidity. This is not new, and it hasn't changed.

In 1981, in a piece for Harper's, I wrote: "The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers' colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida, cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.'s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places."

Nothing has changed. Blacks now control the presidency and thus, most importantly, the Attorney Generalship. In this the staggering political power of blacks is most evident. Obama was elected because he was black: an equally unqualified and negligible white politician would have had no chance. He is now fiercely pushing the most profound transformation of America ever attempted, by opening the floodgates to immigration from the south. To effect this end, he apparently will simply ignore Congress and the Constitution. The people will not be consulted. Laws will be ignored.

It is hard to imagine why he does it except from racism, from a desire to get even with whites by enrolling their country in the Third World. A short-sighted policy, yes, since Hispanics do not like blacks and will soon be more powerful-but that will come a bit later.

Note that self-inflicted problems of blacks consume inordinate amounts of public and governmental attention, even though only blacks can solve them. I might say, "should solve them," since they never have and we all know they seem to have no desire to do so. Yet we hear about them endlessly.

Are blacks in Chicago killing each other in large numbers? The solution might be to stop doing it, might it not? While I do not wish these young dead, I can do nothing to stop them, and it is not a problem I can solve.

Are black children growing up illiterate? This gives me no pleasure, and I have various reasons both selfish and moral to wish it were not so. But perhaps the solution is for their parents, or parent, to see that they do their homework, or even to teach them. I cannot do this for them, and again it isn't my problem to resolve.

Why do I have to hear, endlessly, about the "achievement gap?" Whether of genetic or cultural origin, it seems as immutable as Avogadro's number, and I can do nothing about it. I raise my children. They need to raise theirs. They rule. It is astonishing
 
Reads like the kind of crap that flowed from opponents of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which was the same crap that flowed from their grandfathers who opposed to emancipation and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments -- which was, if we allow Blacks to progress, it will somehow set back the rest of us.
 
Reads like the kind of crap that flowed from opponents of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which was the same crap that flowed from their grandfathers who opposed to emancipation and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments -- which was, if we allow Blacks to progress, it will somehow set back the rest of us.
Your memory is better than mine. 1963-64 I can remember, but not really up on any crap. 1863 is just beyond memory.
 
Reads like the kind of crap that flowed from opponents of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which was the same crap that flowed from their grandfathers who opposed to emancipation and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments -- which was, if we allow Blacks to progress, it will somehow set back the rest of us.
Only our property values.
 
The test results were broken down by subject area and further by male/ female, black/white/Hispanic. Results were broken down to identify any subculture that was distinguishable. Reports did not identify any group that could be distinguished by the reported numbers. Subsequent tests could report level of improvement by group. Individualized results were sent home with explanation of results - caused many questions and reporting on individuals ma not have carried forward. Administration felt the general public was not qualified to look at test results and make proper analysis.

South Carolina had a report that utilized the test results and also showed how money was spent. This also came under a lot of criticism - mainly in public attempt to compare different schools in cost per student and integrate the NCLB test results. Public was warned not to make those comparisons because of inability to compare cost of large and small schools. Some schools with special project costs that are not applicable to all schools. I think those cost report cards were discontinued too because of added confusion when ill advised comparison was continued.


lmao. I think it's hilarious that you still try to maintain a ruse on this board of not being a racist.
 
lmao. I think it's hilarious that you still try to maintain a ruse on this board of not being a racist.
Do you want to explain? Are you saying that No Child Left Behind is/was racist? What part makes it so? Reading test results and subsequent analysis makes me a racist? Is that reserved for me or do you suggest that it was everyone associated?

I cannot read between the lines of your offering and consider myself a racist. No intent to see it as such. Are you one of those that only see the world as black or white? People still live in my world and I do not view things in the same light as you obviously do. Ain't gonna start now.
 
http://www.fredoneverything.net/

Fred is... from #485

It resonates with me somehow. I was born in Crumpler, an unincorporated coal camp up the holler from North Fork, in McDowell County, but McDowell and Boone are the same place, or were—ugly poor, beaten down by ruthless coal companies that don't care about anybody or anything, awful schools, no future, black lung, men crushed by slate falls. It's better now than it was, though. Some better.
 
Last edited:
here's another one... by Fred

I believe that if I hear one more black politician hollering about how the United States is no damn good, and nobody in it is any damn good, and everyone discriminates against blacks, and denies them opportunity, and represses them, and doesn't do everything they want, and expects them to behave, I'm going to start bellowing.

It won't do any good. But I'll feel better.

Now, I don't want to associate promiscuously with facts, or state what we all know to be true. I'm a journalist, and I respect the traditions of my trade. But if I didn't, I think I might wonder why, if there is no opportunity in this country, everyone else has managed to flourish like kudzu on a Georgia road cut. No opportunity? A rock could succeed in America. Half the earth wants to come here because there's opportunity. Why do you think Mexicans swim the Rio Grande every night with their lives contained in plastic bags? ("Eet ees because we want to be repressed and have no opportunity.")

Gimme a break.

Remember the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the Twenties? I guess they came because they were tired of all that opportunity in Poland. Anyway, they had it rough. The times were ugly and so was the place. There were fewer violins and more crime than is generally recognized now. They, and for that matter the Italians and Irish, didn't have the advantages blacks now have: the welfare, or subsidized housing, or free breakfasts for the kids, or Medicaid. Nor did they have a vast array of laws aimed at letting them advance regardless of merit. Most places wanted to keep Jews (and the Irish and Italians) out.

But they worked like sled dogs, went to school at night, saved pennies to put the oldest boy through school. Then he sent money back from the law practice and put the other kids through. It worked. People moved up. They did it the hard way, because that was the only way available, but they did it.

The opportunity was there, and they took it.

Opportunity has grown since then, grown mightily. Success has gotten steadily easier in America. In 1975 the Vietnamese appeared. The predictions were that they would go to the slums to be pickpockets and prostitutes. I guess their English wasn't too good at first, so they didn't get the word. They went to the suburbs instead and started restaurants. The closest they got to sweatshops was McDonald's which, by world standards in sweatshops, is pretty lame. Soon they were spitting out valedictorians and showing up in droves in the better universities. (You've heard the joke about Asian SATs? Yeah, 800 math and 200 verbal.)

One year, so help me, a Viet kid was valedictorian at the Naval Academy. That's discrimination, no doubt about it. What better way to oppress a kid than to give him a free education and command of an aircraft carrier? I do it all the time.

We're a racist country? U. Cal Berkely is heavily Asian. The United States is 1% Asian. Man, ain't that some ineffectual, didn't-work, pathetic, just plain sorry-ass discrimination? I could discriminate better than that, any morning before breakfast, and I'm from West Virginia.

Why do the Viets succeed? Because they are smart, courteous, ambitious, studious, and have a work ethic that would frighten Calvin. Their parents tell them to come home with As or don't come home. They never miss supper.

Last year I went to a favorite restaurant in Little Saigon, here in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. When it opened in the mid-Seventies, the kids in the family waited tables, keeping labor costs down, and the parents cooked. Some of the same kids, now women, still wait tables. I asked one of them what she did in the daytime.

"I'm an electrical engineer," she said. "I do wide-area networks."

Oh.

I reckon if we racist Americans tried to oppress her, it didn't work.

How about the Hispanic hordes? They aren't doing as well as did the Vietnamese. Nonetheless, I notice Hispanic restaurants popping up everywhere, like ticks on a hound dog. Hereabouts, Hispanics have taken over the market for unskilled labor. Why? Because if you work hard, show up, and do a good job, people hire you. (The foregoing is a blinding insight. Copyright me. Patent applied for.) The young ones speak Standard English after a few years in the US, not Hisbonics after two centuries. They're rising.

I have to wonder where the dearth of opportunity hides. I can't find it.

Blacks today have advantages that would have turned the Irish and Italian immigrants bright purple with envy. Education is compulsory. Libraries abound. Welfare provides a breathing space for study. Blacks get affirmative action in just about everything. If American universities bent farther over backwards to accommodate blacks who didn't measure up, much less any who might, they'd be limbo dancers.

Are we Americans the cause of the ills of blacks? Think about this: In Washington we have a black mayor, a predominantly black city council, school board, teachers, parents, and students, and a very high per-pupil budget. (Now, when I want to discriminate against people, my first step is to give them political control of the national capital. Isn't that how you do it?) Oh, the heart-rending unfairness of it all. My soul curdles.

The schools are among the worst in the nation.

Oppression? Check to see what blacks need to get into universities, and what whites need. Oh yeah, we're discriminating out the gills. The United States regularly lowers its standards for blacks, offers special programs, recruits blacks who don't come close to qualifications required of whites, does everything but kidnap blacks and stuff them bodily into classrooms and jobs. Ask what proportion of black officers in the military would get in without special waivers.

If that's discrimination, I could use some of it.

Blacks, sez me, don't suffer from a lack of opportunity, but from an unwillingness, or inability, to take advantage of it. If the Vietnamese can rise from rice farmer to electrical engineer in a generation, then so can anyone who has the brains and chooses to work. This country is awash in opportunity. Fish or cut bait.
 
here's another one... by Fred

I believe that if I hear one more black politician hollering about how the United States is no damn good, and nobody in it is any damn good, and everyone discriminates against blacks, and denies them opportunity, and represses them, and doesn't do everything they want, and expects them to behave, I'm going to start bellowing.

It won't do any good. But I'll feel better.

Now, I don't want to associate promiscuously with facts, or state what we all know to be true. I'm a journalist, and I respect the traditions of my trade. But if I didn't, I think I might wonder why, if there is no opportunity in this country, everyone else has managed to flourish like kudzu on a Georgia road cut. No opportunity? A rock could succeed in America. Half the earth wants to come here because there's opportunity. Why do you think Mexicans swim the Rio Grande every night with their lives contained in plastic bags? ("Eet ees because we want to be repressed and have no opportunity.")

Gimme a break.

Remember the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the Twenties? I guess they came because they were tired of all that opportunity in Poland. Anyway, they had it rough. The times were ugly and so was the place. There were fewer violins and more crime than is generally recognized now. They, and for that matter the Italians and Irish, didn't have the advantages blacks now have: the welfare, or subsidized housing, or free breakfasts for the kids, or Medicaid. Nor did they have a vast array of laws aimed at letting them advance regardless of merit. Most places wanted to keep Jews (and the Irish and Italians) out.

But they worked like sled dogs, went to school at night, saved pennies to put the oldest boy through school. Then he sent money back from the law practice and put the other kids through. It worked. People moved up. They did it the hard way, because that was the only way available, but they did it.

The opportunity was there, and they took it.

Opportunity has grown since then, grown mightily. Success has gotten steadily easier in America. In 1975 the Vietnamese appeared. The predictions were that they would go to the slums to be pickpockets and prostitutes. I guess their English wasn't too good at first, so they didn't get the word. They went to the suburbs instead and started restaurants. The closest they got to sweatshops was McDonald's which, by world standards in sweatshops, is pretty lame. Soon they were spitting out valedictorians and showing up in droves in the better universities. (You've heard the joke about Asian SATs? Yeah, 800 math and 200 verbal.)

One year, so help me, a Viet kid was valedictorian at the Naval Academy. That's discrimination, no doubt about it. What better way to oppress a kid than to give him a free education and command of an aircraft carrier? I do it all the time.

We're a racist country? U. Cal Berkely is heavily Asian. The United States is 1% Asian. Man, ain't that some ineffectual, didn't-work, pathetic, just plain sorry-ass discrimination? I could discriminate better than that, any morning before breakfast, and I'm from West Virginia.

Why do the Viets succeed? Because they are smart, courteous, ambitious, studious, and have a work ethic that would frighten Calvin. Their parents tell them to come home with As or don't come home. They never miss supper.

Last year I went to a favorite restaurant in Little Saigon, here in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. When it opened in the mid-Seventies, the kids in the family waited tables, keeping labor costs down, and the parents cooked. Some of the same kids, now women, still wait tables. I asked one of them what she did in the daytime.

"I'm an electrical engineer," she said. "I do wide-area networks."

Oh.

I reckon if we racist Americans tried to oppress her, it didn't work.

How about the Hispanic hordes? They aren't doing as well as did the Vietnamese. Nonetheless, I notice Hispanic restaurants popping up everywhere, like ticks on a hound dog. Hereabouts, Hispanics have taken over the market for unskilled labor. Why? Because if you work hard, show up, and do a good job, people hire you. (The foregoing is a blinding insight. Copyright me. Patent applied for.) The young ones speak Standard English after a few years in the US, not Hisbonics after two centuries. They're rising.

I have to wonder where the dearth of opportunity hides. I can't find it.

Blacks today have advantages that would have turned the Irish and Italian immigrants bright purple with envy. Education is compulsory. Libraries abound. Welfare provides a breathing space for study. Blacks get affirmative action in just about everything. If American universities bent farther over backwards to accommodate blacks who didn't measure up, much less any who might, they'd be limbo dancers.

Are we Americans the cause of the ills of blacks? Think about this: In Washington we have a black mayor, a predominantly black city council, school board, teachers, parents, and students, and a very high per-pupil budget. (Now, when I want to discriminate against people, my first step is to give them political control of the national capital. Isn't that how you do it?) Oh, the heart-rending unfairness of it all. My soul curdles.

The schools are among the worst in the nation.

Oppression? Check to see what blacks need to get into universities, and what whites need. Oh yeah, we're discriminating out the gills. The United States regularly lowers its standards for blacks, offers special programs, recruits blacks who don't come close to qualifications required of whites, does everything but kidnap blacks and stuff them bodily into classrooms and jobs. Ask what proportion of black officers in the military would get in without special waivers.

If that's discrimination, I could use some of it.

Blacks, sez me, don't suffer from a lack of opportunity, but from an unwillingness, or inability, to take advantage of it. If the Vietnamese can rise from rice farmer to electrical engineer in a generation, then so can anyone who has the brains and chooses to work. This country is awash in opportunity. Fish or cut bait.
82, I don't know who you are nor do I know who anyone else is on the board. That is not important. But I have got to hail what you have just said rather emphatically. It has become so easy to say meaningless words that identify people, and we have seen the value of those words or phrases that become politically correct. What has value, words or action? Your summary of the situation of the Viets is a continuation of what has made this country what it is. You succeed by hard work and education with a little luck.

Those who settled and expanded the country were hard workers and had education of "hard knocks" and a little luck. This has been the formula that has made this country what it is. Now comes a group that relies more on gifts and someone taking care of their needs - blacks. The blacks who have recognized the secret to success have been equally successful. Then you have the others who rely on someone else to assist them in their lives. They allow a form of slavery to persist and even perpetuate it by listening to others pushing entitlements to those who allow themselves to be captivated by protection or enslavement by a form of government. A form of government that says you are entitled to a minimum standard of life.

Today you can select the life you want. You can invest in yourself with hard work and education and with a little luck, have the life you want. You can also do the minimum to get by and the government will assist via entitlements to have a minimum standard of life. Our life, in a free country, is filled with a continuous stream of free choices individuals must make. Better choices makes the world a better place to live for most.

I am called a racist on this board because I used the term blacks a few years back. The term has stuck and I have used more other terms to deserve the title. Right now there is an ad on TV by GAP of 4 young girls. The PC correct crowd demand that the ad be removed because of racial overtones. I missed the implications until it was later pointed out that one of the shorter girls was black and a taller white girl was leaning on the shorter black girl's head. The PC went world wide and GAP relented and said they understood why people were upset. Shortly thereafter someone pointed out that in a similar ad last year the taller girl was black leaning on the shorter girl. Nothing was inferred about the ad all last year. How can this be an issue in our free world?

Someone please explain the difference to me and what becomes racist in our PC society.
 
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