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Edited on Tue Apr-29-08 06:29 PM by heliarc
So Pat Buchanan in his infinite wisdom, on March 21st chose to help the Reverend Wright make some of the arguments he's been making. Take a look and see what you think:
"First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
"Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent? Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
"As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse? We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago”
-Pat Buchanan
Wow... He ignores the Jim Crow legislation that kept Black people from having the same jobs and opportunities as white people clear through the 70s... And he ignores the fact that Kerner commission recommendations that should have helped black people to rise up and succeed were ignored by the LBJ and subsequent administrations.
How insulting it is that a man like Reverend Wright, with a history like his in speaking truth to power, has to be demonized by the media and accused of the very thing that he is trying to point out. Certainly Wright has been inflammatory in the past. His statement about Romans and Italians while a bit metaphorical is very badly put and this is one example among quite a few that seems at least inappropriate. But nothing could be so offensive as this response by Pat Buchanan. The condescension and the gall it takes to tell Black people how they should feel about Slavery, and to be happy that they were introduced to a Christian God. How insulting!
The answer to Buchanan's second paragraph of questions is a resounding YES! White people are to blame for the way that Jim Crow laws killed the dreams of millions of black people across this nation. YES! White people who neglected the recommendations of the Kerner Commission are to blame for the poverty that Jim Crow laws made systemic and debilitating. If he can't see that and can't understand that the sort of racism that resulted in the lynching of thousands of Black Americans, than he is exactly the racism that Jeremiah Wright is so justifiably angry about.
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