blacks

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. "White America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons.

The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power--and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.

Jews and Asians are only 7 percent of the total population, and between them they dominate in fields like medicine and engineering, not to mention entrepreneurship and academics. They rarely end up in prison or gangs (this is especially true of Jews). And while they are historically poor and persecuted, they have not allowed themselves to stay in that position. Take their story and compare it to black Americans and how can we explain the canyon that separates them? I__ sure the Jesse Jacksons of the world would sooner become Holocaust deniers than admit to the real answer: Family. Education. Ambition.Family.Education.Ambition.Whenever the plight of the minority in America is discussed, you__l notice that Jews and Asians are left out of the conversation. In fact, many school systems are now trying to figure out how to get LESS of them in advanced placement courses and prestigious colleges. They__e become too successful, apparently. But it__ not just their success that the race mongers hate, it__ HOW they accomplished it. Their men don__ father dozens of out-of-wedlock babies with dozens of women. Their households insist on discipline and academic success. They work hard, they are driven. Asians may now be at the point where they actually enjoy preferential bias. If I__ an employer and an Asian walks in to apply for a job, I__ going to assume he__ an achiever. That__ not a stereotype, that__ called a reputation. And they__e freaking earned it.Family. Education. Ambition. These three things really are a recipe for success. If you don__ believe me, ask the next Asian or Jew you meet. And then make sure to take care of your co-pay on the way out.

Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I__ seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental __irsts___irst black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor__lways presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can__ remember where I read it, or when__nly that I was already at Howard. __ho is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?_ Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was __hite,_ and so Tolstoy __attered,_ like everything else that was white __attered._ And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

Oh Maker, what did they really say about your black creation? I think you made a beautiful work of art on a canvass of rebellion. Hey, Maker! We are still selling out!

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.

Barack Obama__ victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing __ere_ about symbols.

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama__ star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded.

There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can__, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centred person. He was really racist and he'd talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

After all, it__ pretty hard to be prejudiced against blacks and gays when you__e a-okay with Klingons and the Green Men of Mars.

We are following the blacks ... And we will follow, entering, perhaps, the same time as women.

On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buying ourselves and families out of slavery, rape and plunder...but everyone else has monuments, special museums, and even movies. This is what America thinks of black people, so-called black president and all, who has been largely silent on this subject...we'll even celebrate Leprechauns, Easter Bunnies, and Secretary's Day before we acknowledge our history.