The 2nd Amendment Lives! Shot Heard Round The World. FREEDOM WINS.

[sirs]

<<What expense to all the other members?  Be specific. What was the cost of Thomas's assimilation?>>

Wrong question.  You're assuming that a sell-out is only reprehensible if it accomplishes or helps to accomplish some nefarious end.  Thomas sold out to forces opposed to affirmative action. 

You mean he actually didn't support reverse discrimination??...reverse racism??  Doesn't support setting 1 race above another??  Thats the big "crime"

The bastard


 

[Michael Tee]

<<You mean he actually didn't support reverse discrimination??...reverse racism??  Doesn't support setting 1 race above another??  Thats the big "crime"

<<The bastard>>

I take it from your sarcasm that you consider affirmative action to be "reverse racism" and "setting one race above another.>>

Would you agree with me that Thomas' attitude is very unpopular among blacks and that most of them in fact are in favour of affirmative action?

If so, do I take your remarks as quoted above to mean that a wide majority of American blacks are "bastards" for supporting "reverse racism" and for "setting one race above another?"

Just askin'.

[Plane]

Would you agree with me that Thomas' attitude is very unpopular among blacks and that most of them in fact are in favour of affirmative action?

How do we know this?

[sirs]

<<You mean he actually didn't support reverse discrimination??...reverse racism??  Doesn't support setting 1 race above another??  Thats the big "crime"...The bastard>>

I take it from your sarcasm that you consider affirmative action to be "reverse racism" and "setting one race above another.>>

Ummm, yes.  ANY, I repeat ANY actions that pushes 1 race over another, be it white over black, or black over white is by definition RACIST.  Any effort to justify 1 while condemning the other is sheer hypocrisy

If so, do I take your remarks as quoted above to mean that a wide majority of American blacks are "bastards" for supporting "reverse racism" and for "setting one race above another?"  Just askin'.

Sarcastically as referenced above, yep.  Which includes messers Condi Rice & Colin Powell, IIRC

[Michael Tee]

Well, affirmative action is kind of a gray area for a lot of people, myself included.  I've decided to support it with some reluctance and despite the obvious drawbacks and the unfairness of excluding better-qualified white students in favour of lesser-qualified blacks.  I support it on the "lesser of two evils" theory, the other evil being the perpetuation of racial inequality dating back to slavery but traceable in a direct parent to child line from those days forward.

If there were some other way to right the imbalance, that had less injustice built into it, and less "racial preference," then I would support it.  But since racism and slavery weren't colour-blind, I don't see how the rectification of their surviving after-effects can be colour-blind either.  And I really don't see any alternatives that wouldn't short-change an entire generation (THIS generation) of black students.

[Plane]

General Sherman wanted to hand over workable farms  , he even supported an abortive attempt to found a colony of sorts on a Georgia island.

The time was ripe to do something like that , but whether the result would have been greater independance for the Black people who would have become farmers for themselves ,or greater conflict between the former slaves and the Plantation owners who would have been asked to give up all that land is something we cannot know now.

But fourty acres and a mule is an idea whose time is really past, more modern and workable would be ideas that made good education more availible and usefull to the greatest number of Americans includeing all , if a mind is a terrible thing to waste , it is terrible when it is anyones mind not just the members of one race or another.

[Michael Tee]

The real key seems to be early childhood development because the kid is already hard-wired for life by the time he or she is five or six years old.  Our Premier here in Ontario has undertaken a very serious initiative to reduce poverty by twenty-five per cent in I don't know how many years and the project is still in its initial information-gathering phase, but already it seems that one of the major elements of the project is going to have to be early childhood development because that's where the kids are lost.

[sirs]

The "other way" to right the so-called imbalance is to treat everyone EQUALLY, to look at the content of his/her character and abilities, not his skin pigment.  By definition that's balance, and ironically, precisely what MLK Jr advocated and tragically lost his life in the pursuit of such.  Now we have those completely mutating his message 180degrees, in order to justify discriminative policies, he'd be condemning, if he could

[Plane]

The real key seems to be early childhood development because the kid is already hard-wired for life by the time he or she is five or six years old.  Our Premier here in Ontario has undertaken a very serious initiative to reduce poverty by twenty-five per cent in I don't know how many years and the project is still in its initial information-gathering phase, but already it seems that one of the major elements of the project is going to have to be early childhood development because that's where the kids are lost.

Well the USA has reduced poverty twenty five percent in fourty years , and gripeing has not decreased at all.

Don't get your hopes up.

[BT]

That his white racist benefactors were not able, even with his sold-out assistance to roll back affirmative action doesn't make his sellout any more palatable.

Thomas was appointed by George H W Bush. What evidence do you have of his racism?

[Plane]

That his white racist benefactors were not able, even with his sold-out assistance to roll back affirmative action doesn't make his sellout any more palatable.

Thomas was appointed by George H W Bush. What evidence do you have of his racism?

Good point , let me add that one of Thomas's most enthusiastic backers was Sen. John Danforth, what evidence do you have of his racism?

[Michael Tee]

The presence of white racist elements in the Republican Party is well-known.  Men like George Allen, Trent Lott, the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, etc.  All of these racists have racist constituencies to please.  A black Uncle Tom, found by John Danforth and brought to the President's attention is a very cheap and easy way to undermine affirmative action, which is going to please a lot of the racist supporters of racist Republican leaders, whose support is obviously important to Bush.

The need for any Republican President for support from the most racist wing of his party is obvious.  Whether the Prez or Danforth are racists is not important.  The fact that their party contains a big racist wing is significant.  There alone is sufficient reason for the Prez or Danforth to undermine affirmative action and one way to do it is through the use of Toms like Thomas to "prove" that even the blacks don't want it.

[Michael Tee]

<<The "other way" to right the so-called imbalance is to treat everyone EQUALLY, to look at the content of his/her character and abilities, not his skin pigment. >>

Well that's just plain ridiculous considering that in many cases the black's character and abilities are directly traceable to the malignant effects of racism passed from one generation to the next.  As I calculated once before, using any college-age black, even assuming that his mother and grandmother were giving birth at age 20 each, you have a kid whose grandma, often a formative influence in his life, was a product of and someone who lived in the Age of Lynching in America.  The kind of inferiority and hopelessness and low sense of self-worth caused by institutionalized racism has a tremendous stultifying effect on parenting abilities and thus on the development of the child, not only the grandma but the mother of today's college-age black kid.

It's the height of social irresponsibility for white Americans to pull out all this "equality" bullshit when they're really asking blacks to compete in a footrace with whites on an equal basis with whites who have saddled them with thirty pounds of additional weight, just ignoring the burden that comes with the racial identity.  That's not equality, that's cheating.  What you really want is to do nothing to remove burdens which you yourself or your ancestors created and roped around this guy's neck and then compete with him, pretending the competition is equal in all respects.  And that is just bullshit.

[sirs]

<<The "other way" to right the so-called imbalance is to treat everyone EQUALLY, to look at the content of his/her character and abilities, not his skin pigment. >>

Well that's just plain ridiculous considering that in many cases the black's character and abilities are directly traceable to the malignant effects of racism passed from one generation to the next.

 

AND.......you're never gonna get pass that if one continues to perptuate discriminatory & racist policies.  Slavery is over.  Different drinking fountains are a thing of the past.  Yet, the left contiunes to try and convince the African American community that we're still in the Jim Crow era, and that' it's the Republican's fault.  AA is precisely the opposite of what MLK preached.  He'd want blacks to be seen for who they are and what they can do, and NOT get preferential treatment based on their skin color.  He'd want them to get preferential treatment if they performed better that someone else, REGARDLESS of skin color

[Michael Tee]

The argument that "slavery is over," "segregated drinking fountains are gone" is disingenuous.  I am not talking about the institutions, which can be created or abolished on the dot of midnight by the stroke of a pen.  I am talking about the EFFECTS of the institutions on real people - - if you dehumanize a human being in all the ways that a human being can be dehumanized by pernicious institutions like slavery and Jim Crow and Lynch Law, and then one day in one legislative act, those institutions are abolished, do you really think that the human being that those institutions shaped is also abolished from one day to the next, by the legislation, and a new human being magically appears in her place?

If generations of slavery, Jim Crow and lynching created a young girl who "knew her place," was convinced in her bones of her own inferiority, lacked all self-esteem and knew better than to try, because trying would always end in defeat and disappointment, do you really think that the passage of the Voting Rights Act radically changed her personality in any way?  It didn't, she and her family were not ideal parents for a huge complex of reasons and the children they raised had multiple problems that left them unfit to cope on many levels the way whites would cope, and their children had the same problems.

It's an intergenerational problem, and I want to be clear that the problem is not the presence or absence of the institutions of racism, it's the effect that those institutions had on the human sould.  Those are permanent scars and wounds, and that many, many blacks have been able to cope with them and triumph over them on their own, without affirmative action, in the worst days of segregation, lynching and Jim Crow, is a remarkable testament to the strength of the human spirit.  Just think of Rosa Parks as one woman who did NOT let Whitey rob her of her spirit or her self-respect.  But realism tells us that many did not and could not rise to that challenge, but fell back, wounded and scarred and raised children with little or no motivation to learn, no love of learning, no self-respect, no real hope of betterment.  And it's for those victims of white racism that affirmative action is a necessity, a moral necessity for the white racist Americans or their descendants to make some kind of amends and in more practical terms a necessity if the lingering effects of American racism are to be eliminated so that every American citizen is free of the psychological barriers or at least one of them, that kept him or her from reaching their fullest potential as individuals and contributing the maximum that they are potentially able to contribute to American society.