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Wright is a race baiter. Just like Sharpton. He is Obama's "mentor".
Blacks can blame whites for their ills all they want. It will help them never make it anywhere because bad things are always because "the man" did it. Smart blacks don't sit around wallowing in self pity. Just like smart whites don't. But there are those who enjoy it, and race baiters such as Wright easily draw huge crowds when they give regular rants to feed the fire.
I'm mostly white with a very small amount of Native American. Most of my "white" is Irish. My family was dirt poor rural white people for several generations. My dad grew up poor and my mom grew up just slightly above poor. I grew up above poor although we had 2 years where things went really rough and we barely kept a roof over our head and picked our meals from our garden because we had no grocery money.
With ALL due respect...and then some...as I have already attested to, my brother is black, I am not a racist...and on and on.
Sorry, but you get no brownie points for having a Black brother. Being Black genetically is not the same as being Black culturally. Do you think Zahara Pitt (the Ethiopian girl adopted by Angelina & Brad) will have any sort of similar life experience to Ethiopian or 95% of Black Americans for that matter? Is she going to go to an inner city school and be subject to inferior education and negative messages constant negative messages about her abilities? Probably not. But in America, money can compensate for race; you stop being "odd" and move into "exotic". Actually, Senator Obama addressed this in his speech (if you would have listened). He spoke about the passage of wealth from generation to generation.
You talk about immigrants coming over here and making it and blah, blah, blah. You obviously know little about Black American history; so let me enlighten you a bit with my own family story. My maternal side is Black American (my father is an immigrant so I'll leave his side of the family out) and her grandfather was a sharecropper. Left NC to work in the steel mills. Worked alone for 8 years until he could save up enough money to bring his family up here. Before that he was a sharecropper who was basically born in debt. My grandfather was the first of his brothers and sisters born in the north. He lied about his age to go work in the steel mills at age 16. He did not finish high school because he was in a car accident at age 14 and racked up a lot of debt for his family so he went to work. That was in the 1940s when many 1st generation White immigrants were his co-workers. Black workers got the hardest, lowest-paying jobs. The union was important but did not really fight for the change in this area. My mother finished high school in the 1980s and her parents did well enough to buy a house and car but did not have the nest egg to send her to college. She did do college for a year or so, but entered into the workforce instead. Back in the 1980s it was very hard to get loans and financing for college if you did not have collateral already (remember that recession?) Eventually, she had it a bit better than her parents in that she was able to upgrade her quality of life (nicer home and car) and finally her children (my sisters and I) are the first ones that can actually go to college and move to middle-class level.
So stop acting like all Black people are choosing to smoke crack and do crime and that's why they are not getting ahead. Most Black families have generations of law-abiding, hard-working ancestors. But the main issue that it was not until the late 1960s when the legal barriers were removed that Black people could even really be socially mobile. White immigrants had until they first came over here in the 1920s or whatever so they have a 2 generation running start.
I do not hate White people or blame them for my personal problems. But I do get very annoyed when White people try to act like everything is equal and all is good; because it's not. And back to the OP's brother; what you may see is that everything is fine. But I bet you he's seen either a white woman clutch her purse when he's around or had someone make some sort of ignorant, stereotypical statement to them (i.e. "Oh I'm sure you know how to dance/play basketball/rap/sing"). He might not tell you...but unless you are a Black person yourself...you will never know.
For a white america that keeps the black man down, Condi Rice, Obama and Colin Powell did pretty dang good.
You need to read their biographies. Condi Rice, Obama & Colin Powell came from backgrounds that are atypical in the Black community. The majority of Black Americans do not come from families such as theirs (middle-class, higher-education is the norm, lots of interaction with the majority society, etc.)
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I'm mostly white with a very small amount of Native American. Most of my "white" is Irish. My family was dirt poor rural white people for several generations. My dad grew up poor and my mom grew up just slightly above poor. I grew up above poor although we had 2 years where things went really rough and we barely kept a roof over our head and picked our meals from our garden because we had no grocery money.
Who am I supposed to blame?
You could blame the Irish potato famine actually. I'm not trying to be a smart a__, but you could (if your family came over here because of that).
However your family was not subjected to systematic racism that prevented social mobility. Believe me, I have a great-uncle who was one of the first Black school administrators back in the 1970s in Wichita, KS. He went through a lot personally as far as threats and everything else. His brother also went through similar experiences while working for Boeing as an engineer. Somehow I don't think Irish people were harassed on the job back in the 1970s.
And it's not just Black people; women too are lagging behind. I just read an article which examined that single women reaching retirement age are often times not able to take in on time because they do not have enough saved up to take care of themselves and be self-sufficient. The difference between women and Black people however is that most women have a man (hopefully a non-Black man) to supplement this economic disparity...where Black people don't have anything to supplement theirs.
Location: Jonquil City (aka Smyrna) Georgia- by Atlanta
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They are both right. Wright is right because he is old and he is looking at things through the eyes of a pre 70s black person. He remembers the US government injecting VD into black men to see how the disease would ravage them. He remembers the fire hoses, MLK, lynchings, fires, murders and the whole sordid crap that most white folks in the USA are not comfortable with and would like to forget.
On the other hand, Obama came of age post 60s. He sees a country that has embraced black people, accepts them as equals for the most part and where even my own parents would have never dreamed that a black man could even become a doctor- much less make a serious run for President of the United States.
My age of 50 gives me kind of unique perspective because I have seen both Americas. But people should not jump on Wright for venting. He speaks from his own experience and perspective. Do I think some of the things he said in the pulpit are proper? No I don't. In fact some of them are quite vile. But I understand his anger too.
How the heck do you figure this is still going on in 2008? You must be on crack. It's time to move forward people. Stop living in the past.
You see posts like this about living in the past, but then you see some of the same people talking about riot history and say 'you know that blacks have a history of rioting so it could happen again'
So my question is if blacks should stop living in the past, why do incidents such as riots keep coming up saying that it can happen again?
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