Are you for real?

Get ready for some righteous anger folks. I found a link to this article at Black Electorate.com. It's about one of those things that make me go grrr.

Slaves' descendants seek landmark reparations
The article opens,

"By the time Andrew Jackson Hurdle penned his life story in 1919, the former slave had become an ordained minister, helped found a religious college and referred to himself as a 'self-made man.'"

It then goes on to describe the efforts of Mr. Hurdle's daughter (he, apparently, is long since dead) to sue certain US companies for reparations based on the claim that they profited from her father's enslavement.

I can not believe that people actually consider reparations as a viable option to cure the ills that plague the "Black community" (as if we are a homogeneous group). This is the most ignorant, wrong headed, and backwards thing that I have ever heard of! I really am embarrassed by/for the people who really think that reparations for the descendants of American slaves are warranted or that they will do anything to change the status of Black Americans.

Proponents of the reparations movement like to point to the fact that Japanese Americans who survived interment during WWII and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were given reparations. But they miss some very important facts about these two situations. First, reparations were made to the people who were actually wronged not to their descendants several generations later. Second, these people weren't sitting around bemoaning the fact that they had been wronged and waiting for someone to apologize and give them some money so they could "build their communities." They built communities on their own without being bribed to do so.

The article gives this telling bit of information about Mr. Hurdle,

"'I am a self-made man, have never gone to school a day in my life; got what little education I have by studying at night by a pine torch light a great many times. I myself have never been arrested or paid a fine for a misdemeanor,' wrote Hurdle, who had 25 children with two wives, in a letter collected in a 1978 family book. 'I was sold off from my parents. I consider that God has blessed me in raising my children.'"

This from a man who had been a slave. If he could make so much of himself with so little and having actually suffered the effects of slavery first hand then what is the excuse of all of those people in the Black community that we are supposed to believe is totally destitute?

One false assumption that reparations supporters apparently make is that all Black folk are too poor and stupid to be expected to make anything of themselves on their own. If this is true then where did all of those Black families in the ubiquitous and ever expanding suburbs come form? There are so many Black folk buying and building their own homes these days that we even have our own upscale neighbourhoods. And where are all of those Black kids in college coming from?

The article quotes a second plaintiff in this case as saying,

"I would like to see the sting of racism dealt with because there has been no honest, open dialogue."

Here's some honest open dialogue for you, the sting of racism is in your mind. As a Black woman I can shop anywhere I want to, eat anywhere I want to, or stay anywhere I want to, provided I have enough money to foot the bill. And I have very good prospects for having enough money to live my life as I choose. I can vote for whoever I want to (even though Democrats seem to think that Blacks should only vote for them), I have access to all the same services that White folks do (examples, I have email, cable TV, and my own blog). I even married a White guy and no one, no one, so much as batted an eyelash. So what you ask? I am not unique. The same kinds of things can be said for millions of Black Americans. What sting of racism is this person talking about?

We are not some feeble minded race that is incapable of building a better lives for ourselves without hand outs from our rich White masters. Insisting on arguing for things like reparations for descendants of American slaves only serves to perpetuate such myths. Blacks, former slaves like Mr. Andrew Jackson Hurdle, built thriving businesses and accrued great wealth for themselves less than one generation after slavery. They had intact families and strong communities. They had little or no help from any "great White saviour". They didn't need that 40 acres and a mule that the government had promised them.

So how did we end up with the urban ghettos that inspire people to think (wrongly) that Black people are all poor? Take a look at those urban ghettos, what do you see? Mothers raising children without fathers. Teenaged girls having children and raising them without fathers. Teenage boys fathering numerous children with many different girls and abandoning them. As my sister said to me once, the only man keeping the Black man down is the Black man.

One more quote from the article by one "Charles Ogletree, a Harvard University law professor and co-chairman of the national Reparations Coordinating Committee."

"'Race matters. It mattered then, when there was that peculiar institution of slavery, and it matters now,' Ogletree said. 'We have made a lot of progress, but we have a very long way to go. [Race] is the pink elephant that is in the room that no one wants to discuss, but it's not going to go away. It captures much of what we do.'"

The pink elephant in the room is not race it is the idiotic notion of reparations. It is the fact that continuing to argue for such a thing makes our "race" look like a bunch of lazy incompetent fools. Get a grip people!