Sunday, September 09, 2007

Racial Profiling

“The NAACP at a Crossroads” by Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil rights Coalition and a former assistant national director of the NAACP and published on 9/04/07 in the WSJ characterizes the problems with much of the leadership of people who call themselves African-Americans. He writes that “the NAACP should urge black Americans, at long last, to drop their hyphenated African roots. Blacks are several hundred years out of Africa and hyphenating is not only minimal but mostly pretence and posturing.” (Refer my blog of 8/02/06)

Meyers says “the NAACP is in dire straits, financial and otherwise. It is cutting 40% of its staff including youth coordinators, ect. He says to correct itself, “The organization must reclaim its mission as a racial healer, rebutting the crazed racial slandering of militants who want to keep our nation divided into racial camps. Recommit itself to inculculating solid middle class value and use intelligent efforts to persuade people to disband the moral rot of segregation.”

He says “the NAACP must make public education the civil-rights issue of our times. Everything else will fall in place if young blacks overcome illiteracy, stay in school, and are inculcated with a love for learning and for the pursuit of excellence instead of trained to accept mediocrity and quotas as a means of social advancement.” (Then again, our schools must offer more for those who want to be competent in a skill that does not require a college degree, but for certain they must graduate from high school with basic skills, such as reading, writing, computing and communicating)..

Continuing, he says “Holding school authorities accountable-even black teachers, board members and (other authorities), must be the priority. That means tutoring pupils and coaching teachers so that they pass standardized competentcy tests, and eschewing notions that such examinations are “culturally biased”.

The only practical way to integrate America is to personally defeat the habits and prejudices of communities and groups to live, work, marry and socialize with “their own kind”. I’ve personally noted that many meeting discussing community problems and events have not been represented by anywhere close to equal percentages of whites and people of color. Most interesting were the public hearings on the location of a new or expanded Glen Oak School.

Why not?

You may wish to read this Wall Street Journal article in its full context. Formal schooling, at least through high school, for better or worse, is still the best way to reach a lawful self or family supporting goal. In my blog of 6/20/07, I quoted an article about the attitude of black student Paul , “If you go to them (sic) white people, they congratulate their own color. I want to own my own business because I’ll be darned if I’m going to sit there and work for a white man all my life”. This attitude will most likely put him behind immigrants form Asia, India, Hispanics and Europeans and certainly behind any person of any color who depends on his or her efforts and attitude to make a meaningful success in life. Going thru live pretending to be victimized by the whites (and other blacks) helps keep our prisons system to continue expanding to warehouse peoples of all colors who feel they are victims of “the system”. (Sure there are people who don’t like people because of their color, some white people don’t like me. And a lot of black people don’t like Jesse and Don Jackson. So what??).

Some of these black “leaders” better be listening to what a lot of Latinos are saying about some of the misguided “victimized African-Americans”. Maybe read what a majority of Latinos surveyed are saying about misguided blacks who live in Durham, N.C. and were quoted in the news lately. (See my next blog today)

Also, read my blog, temporarily misfiled by myself, on hyphenated names where I say if “leaders” wish to use hyphens when talking about black people; then please call me a “Swiss-German-American.”

I’ll probably say “knock that crap off”. My dad fled Switzerland for what he heard was for a new better life. He became of citizen and never wished to return nor did he ever tell people he was from Switzerland unless asked. I believe that most people, who came from Africa one way or another, do not wish to return and live in any part of Africa even today. Many of you know that most of the world’s greatest slavers where not from this continent. And that some of the countries in these continents still practice slavery as I type this document.

When we start accepting people for who they are and having reasonable learned dialogue about our similarities and differences, all the while being prepared as an individual and a state, to defend ourselves from those who would do us bodily harm, will we live in a state of reasonable assimilation, integration and harmony.

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