I hope you are still checking this thread, because i just got back to it to read this. Man you are a seriously deluded human being. I am probably considered middle class and that is a stretch. All of the things you mentioned are in the past and there is the source of the problem. I dont know where you live but every day i see African Americans with chips on their shoulders to the point of not wanting me to help them pick their groceries up that they dropped. I understand that is just one instance but there has been no forgiveness what so ever. I treat people based on the person not the color, but damn man seriously get the chip off you shoulder. When we start school be it black white green or pink we are all on equal ground. I didnt have any prior knowledge of history at the age of five so really to say the black man learns the white mans history is unfair. Its not like we have an unfair advantage there. How many programs are there for you to get money for school? Also being a person that hires and fires it becomes apparent that most people in my position are afraid to not hire blacks, and they sure as hell are afraid to fire them. Never have I seen a person discriminated against for having braids. Come on its 2011. Little white kids have braids. Thats not even relevant. Its conversations like this that make me want to close my mind. And for the record I never said i was oppressed, but if my boss screws me over i deal with it, if a black persons boss screws them over there must be some kind of racism involved. Everything leads back to racism. My original question that was not answered is when will you get over it
Black people remain crowded into the lowest rungs of the ladder - that is, if they can find work at all. While many of the basic industries that once employed Black people have closed down. I can provide you with a study that shows employers to be more likely to hire a white person with a criminal record than a Black person without one, and 50% more likely to follow up on a resume with a white-sounding name than an identical resume with a Black-sounding 2 name.
Black people face the highest levels of racial residential segregation in the worldshunted into neglected neighborhoods lacking decent parks and grocery stores and often with no hospitals at all. Black people, as well as Latinos, who had achieved home ownership had their roofs snatched from them. They were the ones hit hardest by the subprime mortgage crisis after having been targeted disproportionately by predatory lenders resulting in the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history.
Black infants face mortality rates comparable to those in the 3rd world country of Malaysia, and African-Americans generally are infected by HIV at rates that rival those in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall the disparities in healthcare are so great that I once read had disparities been eliminated in health in the last century, there would have been 85,000 fewer black deaths overall in 2000.
Schools are more segregated than they have been since the 1960s 6 with urban, predominantly Black and Latino schools receiving fewer resources and set up to fail. These schools more and more resemble prisons with metal detectors and kids getting stopped and frisked on their way to class by uniformed police who patrol their halls. Often these schools spend around half as much per pupil as those in the well-to-do suburbs.
On top of all that, and reinforcing it, is an endlessly spouting sewer of racism in the media, culture and politics of this societyracism that takes deadly aim at the dreams and spirit of every black child. And who can forget the wave of nooses that sprung up around the country, south and north, in the wake of the 2007 struggle in Jena, Louisiana against the prosecution (and persecution) of six Black youth who had fought back against a noose being hung to intimidate them from sitting under a whites only tree at school?
All this lay beneath the criminal government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For reasons directly related to the oppression of Black people throughout the history of this country, and continuing today, blacks were disproportionately the ones without the resources to get out of the way of that storm, as well as the ones concentrated in the neighborhoods whose levees had gone unrepaired for years. Far from mere incompetence, the government responded with a combination of gun-in-your-face repression and wanton, murderous neglect. People were stuck on rooftops in scorching temperatures for days, with nothing to eat or drink. Prisoners were left locked in cells as waters rose to their necks. The protection of private property and social control was placed above human life. The governor of the state ordered cops and soldiers to shoot on sightootersthat is, people trying to survive and to help others. On at least one occasion, people trying to escape the worst-hit areas were stopped by police at gunpoint from crossing over to a safer area. When evacuations finally were carried out, they were done with the heartlessness of a cruel plantation owner. Families were separated, with children ripped away from parents. Tens of thousands were scattered all over the country with one-way tickets, sometimes not even told their destinations. Back home, bodies were left floating in water, or lying on sidewalks, underneath debris, decomposing and mangled, for months.
Through it all, politicians and commentators spewed out unrelenting racism. Who can forget Barbara Bush herself, the presidents mother, and her remark in a shelter for refugees from Katrina some separated from their families and having lost everything, including dear ones that So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.
Since then, 6 years since Katrina has passed with many parts of New Orleans still uninhabitable ghost towns. In the mostly Black 9th Ward, blocks of devastated houses have been razed a vast wasteland now dotted with occasional concrete steps going nowhere. When Black people have fought to stay in the projects which are still habitable, they have been driven out and when they have protested at City Council, they have been pepper sprayed and beaten. 12 Oil rigs and tourist areas are long since back up and humming, while rebuilding schools, hospitals, and childcare centers are pushed off the list. Through it all, cops and national guards continue to occupy poor neighborhoods like enemy territory.
But you're saying its not that bad and its 2011 and how you want to close your mind to these conversations. Well open your eyes because this is reality and that there above explains why there are so many black people with a chip on their shoulder.
