Black life far more rags than riches

[chiburb]

A GREAT piece by Rick Telander in today's Chicago Sun-Times (sports section). Some snips:

The vast majority of the players you will watch in the Super Bowl on Sunday will be black. Maybe you won't talk about it, but it's a fact.
There are the white quarterbacks and kickers, the random pale-skinned offensive linemen and even a linebacker such as Tedy Bruschi.
But most of the starters and stars are African-American.
That's how it is in the NFL, where 40 of the 44 starters in the Pro Bowl this year will be black.

A study conducted last fall by Northeastern University for the Chicago Alternative Schools Network shows half the black men between the ages of 20 and 24 in our city are jobless and not in school.
In truth, U.S. schools are failing blacks at a painfully sad rate: According to the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank, only 20 percent of black high school students in the class of 2001 were college-ready.
The fact that the proportion of African-American men 20 to 34 who are incarcerated never has been higher than it is now (12 percent in recent surveys, compared with only 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group) is stunning.
That the Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin has estimated that black men in this country have more than a one-in-four chance of going to jail or prison during their lifetimes is horrific.

The Super Bowl, in its frenzy of glitz, hyperbole and cheery rhetoric, gives viewers a wildly skewed vision of the reality of being black in the United States.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

http://www.suntimes.com/output/telander/cst-spt-rick28.html

[Solomon]

1. Whoooeee boy! Put on your flack jacket right away.

Hope you got body armor. Don't you know that black people are automatically excluded from any talk of recompense? Jeeeez you must have thick skin. :eyes:

[chiburb]

2. That's why I posted this!

Telander is white, North Shore (tony), read by tens of thousands daily, and is arguing FOR recompense! Imagine my shock at reading this in the sports pages today. I'll be sending him an email of thanks for NOT wasting his Super Bowl press credentials this year...

[Solomon]

3. How much you wanna bet this thread drops

like a ton of bricks?

[BiggJawn]

8. It'll drop like a loose Third Rail.

What can I say? I don't have a horse in this race (Uh, "race" meaning a speed contest)

I'm gonna shut up now before somebody slings the "R" word my way.....

[Tomee450]

9. Right!!!

When it comes to black people, all kinds of excuses are offered as to why the past should be forgotten, no reparations made.

[izzie]

4. Used to be a whites mans world and now who ever does it cheap

In china and India. Now that they will be doing law work there and reading x-rays that is more jobs gone. What will people do? I will kill anyone that tells me we can open our own business.

[Tim4319]

5. This is ashame!

Hey, thanks for that report. It is crazy how our ancestors get treated they way they were treated, to get abused they way they were abused, and used they way they were used for such a long time, and say we are still not feeling the effects from that today is crazy! In my opinion, there should be no Statue of Limitations on reparations for descendants of slaves. And, as far as reparations, in my opinion, it doesn't have to be finanacial handouts. How about free education and healthcare of those who are descendants of slaves, paid for and financed by those corporations that have profited for years from blood, sweat, and tears of our ancestors.

Again, this is just my opinion.

[chiburb]

6. Good point re education or health care...

You're right, it doesn't have to be $$$.

Another snip from Telander's column:

Victims of the Holocaust have won compensation from various European institutions, and the Japanese Americans who were interned illegally in this country during World War II have been given cash payments under a 1988 law signed by President Reagan.

Whether it comes from corporations, the U.S. government or the wallets of all of us in this nation who unwittingly and innocently have profitted by the labor of those who were forced into degradation and deprived of the fruits of their labor, the repayment of wealth to slave ancestors is the right thing to do. And it could set many things right.

I remember an Urban League report from more than a decade ago in which social scientists determined that things that were done to U.S. slaves -- the forbidding of education or accumulation of wealth, the forced destruction of families, for instance -- could be eased only by some kind of redistribution of wealth. That is, giving something tangible for something that is untouchable.

How we would do such a thing is not the point just now, just that it should be done. Somehow.

[Solomon]

7. I'd be happy just not to get taxed for the next

400 years. Wonder how many people would own up to being "black" if that happened?

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

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[Moderator]

11. chiburb

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Thank you