Melissa Harris-Perry had Ta-Nehsei Coates on her show a while back. This is a seemingly intelligent writer for The Atlantic, who had recently revived the old argument for reparations for the black community for their enforced slavery. It’s an argument that I thought had died a merciful death back in the 1960’s but like the GOP attacks on the ACA it seems that some ridiculous ideas will never die. But that’s how race relations in the USA are.
Then yesterday billionaire Mark Cuban in the midst of castigating Donald Sterling, the Clippers owner who made some odious remarks that appeared on social media, himself, made some remarks that have for some reason stirred up a hornets nest of negative commentary.
Basically what Cuban said was that if he is walking down a dark street and he is approached by a black man wearing a hoody, he crosses the street but then if he is approached on the other side of the street by a white man with many tattoos and a shaven head he crosses back. A lot of dim bulbs have tried to make this into a bigoted position but all it really says about Cuban is that he is a cautious man.
I saw a poll the other day that said 78% of people aged 14-24 in this country rejected bigotry or prejudice. I think that’s great and maybe in 50 years that will mean that we have almost no prejudice in the country, but right now that poll leaves a hell of a lot of the population unaccounted for and you have to live on another planet to think that racism, bigotry and prejudice don’t exist just because we have a black president.
I called Mr. Coates article ludicrous mainly because I find the idea of reparations in general ludicrous. To ask people of one era to pay for the sins of people of another era is simply to multiply the injustice. Most of the people in the United States today don’t have a family tree in this country that goes back even to the end of slavery let alone to the beginning.
I won’t go into the facts that slavery has existed since the dawn of man and still does across a good portion of the planet, or that there would be no point in winning a war or taking prisoners (slaves) if you had to pay for them later. Sensible people accept that slavery is a bad thing and many among us continue to fight it on many fronts but the idea of holding a 21st Century individual responsible for the acts of an18th century person who was no relation to him, is to hold the entire human race responsible for the acts of all their forbearers. It is truly ludicrous. It’s hard enough to hold the current members of the human race responsible for their own acts. But worse than that, it provides the bigoted individual in search of backup for his prejudices a cudgel with which to beat his opponents into submission.
It supports all the previously rejected arguments that the black man is lazy and just looking for a handout or a free ride. It denigrates the many successes of thousands of black men and women who made it without a handout and many thousands more who made it with a legitimate assist. You can’t fight prejudice by being what the bigot contends you are.
We also shouldn’t fight prejudice that isn’t there. There’s more than enough that is. What do I mean by that? What I mean is the current tendency to overkill in the realm of political correctness.
I was witness recently, to someone who sternly corrected another person for the use of the word negro. Negro may not be very hip or au currant, but it is certainly not a pejorative. I heard Martin Luther King use the word on many occasions and it would appear that one would have to be pretty buried in hubris to think that he or she was entitled to use censorship on Doctor King.
Look, there are reasons for prejudice, bigotry and racism. I say reasons not excuses. There is no excuse for the practice of any of those loathsome extremes but there are reasons why they exist. Fear is one of the greatest reasons, closely followed by envy and interestingly enough greed is a close follower,
Don’t forget all racism is not based on skin color though that is our current cause of choice. You don’t believe that, you can check with almost any Jew. I am of Italian descent and I grew up in a school that was about 90% Irish. I learned to fight at a very early age. It’s just the way the world was and to a great extent still is. Hopefully it will continue to change as the poll above indicates.
What’s interesting about prejudice is that it tends to break down with exposure. When I was a kid, growing up in Englewood, NJ, the only black people in my neighborhood were a little old lady and her middle-aged daughter who lived in a small house around the corner. Not many people in the neighborhood were friends with them but to my knowledge no one was nasty either. They were the only black people I knew because there were no blacks in my Catholic school.
When I got into high school I started playing sports against black kids and that led me and a couple of my friends to go down to the park in the black neighborhood, the only good outdoor basketball courts in town, to play basketball with black kids. Turned out they were pretty much the same as us. They’d push if you let them, the same as we did and they were pretty square as long as we were. None of us ever became close friends but we were always friendly even when we played against each other in high school. The exposure of those pick-up basketball games kind of drained the prejudice out of us.
The public high school in Englewood was full of prejudice but it came from the adults in town more than from the kids. They had a world class Olympic swimming pool at Dwight Morrow High School, that they never used. In fact, they kept it piled high with unused desks because the white adults didn’t want their kids swimming with the black kids. Even n 1950 that seemed kind of ridiculous to most of my friends. I’ve often wondered if they ever took the desks out and used it.
Prejudice is really dumb but to expect people of this era to take responsibility for people of another era is just as dumb and all it accomplishes is to put more roadblocks in the way of progress.