One thing we now know for certain: the American list of state sponsors of terrorism has no moral authority. It is merely a tool with which to pressure countries into accepting deals with the U.S. Case in point: North Korea is no less “sponsor of terrorism” today than it was two days ago. Still, the US has decided it will be removed from the list.
The new agreement between the U.S. and North Korea is a complicated one, and one can’t easily decide if it was the right call for the U.S. John McCain seems to be suspicious, Barack Obama more receptive–but this will not become a campaign issue because it really is too complicated. I tend to be on the wary side of this debate–maybe because I was recently briefed on the issue of North Korean involvement with dangerous regimes in the Middle East (Iran, Syria). Last week, Israel accused North Korea of providing weapons of mass destruction–or assisting in programs aimed at developing such weapons–to six countries in the Middle East.
But debate about the merit of the agreement aside, there’s also a problem with the eroding of the meaning of the “list.” There is a simple question one has to answer: Is North Korea still sponsoring terror? If it isn’t, why was the country still on the list last week? If it is, why will it not be there next week? Pyongyang was put on the U.S. list “based on the confession of a North Korean agent over the mid-air explosion of a South Korean passenger jet in 1987 which killed more than 100.” The nuclear deal has nothing to do with this case, it has nothing to do with the support of terror.
So, whatever one might think about the new understanding, one might conclude that the US is quite cynical when it comes to tagging countries as “sponsoring terror.” And since both presidential candidates tend to whine about the declining popularity of America and Americanism in the world, they both now consider supporting a measure that will only serve as yet further proof for American dishonesty.
And of course, only the most naïve still believe that the “list” is a moral cause rather than a political tool of diplomacy. Nevertheless, with North Korea, the moral case is stronger than in other cases and should be reclaimed. North Korea, as most experts will explain, is not going to gain a lot, practically speaking, from this move. Sanctions by the UN and by the U.S. will still be in place, and exporting from the U.S. to Pyongyang will not resume in the near future. It is true that for North Korea, one of the poorest countries in the world, even the smallest financial gain can be of some significance.
The North Koreans had been deeply upset that the U.S. had not dropped them from the terrorist list as a reward for their limited cooperation to date. U.S. officials emphasized that although North Korea’s excision from the list lifts a stigma, it will have little practical effect, because other U.S. laws still impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on the impoverished Stalinist regime.
So: it is lifting this stigma that makes it an important move, not the practical implications. That raises the question: was it a “stigma” or a fact-based categorization? And if it was fact-based, does it mean that the U.S. is now, bluntly speaking, just lying by deletion?
And by the way, this New York Times report on the North Korea issue is an illuminating example of a bad choice of words. Whether it has something to do with the political tendencies of the writer/editor I don’t know–but suspicions are justified. Look at the wording:
The 1994 accord collapsed in 2002 after the Bush administration accused North Korea of circumventing the agreement by pursuing a second path to a bomb, based on enriching uranium.
So: the Bush administration is the one responsible for the collapse of the Clinton agreement with North Korea? If you read the New York Times you’d be right to conclude that the agreement was not collapsing because North Korea pursued a bomb, secretly, but rather because the Bush administration has accused North Korea of pursuing a bomb.
I think its about time that the Jesse Jacksons of this country clean up their own houses before they lecture us. But I seem to remember that ol Jesse had a girlfriend on the side who gave birth to Jesse’s kid.
Guess he doesn’t have room to lecture does he?
If there is one truly magnificent thing Obama could do for both the black community and the whole country it would be to fight nonstop for four, or eight years for the restoration of the black family.
Google is your friend Linda. Obama has given many speeches on importance of fathers. I know because I sat through one.
Blacks were doomed to continued poverty, ignorance and crime by well-intentioned but destructive welfare policies imposed on them by the War on Poverty and other left-wing schemes. Now it seems the redistributionist agenda of the Obama administration has more of the same in mind.
“The elephant in the room in discussions of race isn’t white prejudice; it’s the breakdown of the black family and all the attendant social pathologies that emanate from it. When 7-out-of-10 black babies are born to single women and more than half of black children spend most of their childhood without a father at home, there are consequences: lower academic performance, more juvenile delinquency and adult crime, more dependence on government assistance, and a greater likelihood to repeat the cycle again by having more children born out of wedlock to the next generation. Yet virtually no one in the black community in any position of authority and responsibility is willing to talk about this issue.”
Soft bigotry of low expectations, indeed. Linda, you indeed pinpoint the issue. However, do not expect those in the black community – and in liberal intelligentsia in general – to recognize the root cause of all this (even though the Left is obsessed with finding the “root cause” of everything). To recognize that it is your policies and your values and mores that has contributed the most to the downfall of your favored constituent is to recognize that you have been wrong and the Left can never admit that it has been wrong.
“Google is your friend Linda. Obama has given many speeches on importance of fathers. I know because I sat through one.”
Giving a speech and being a leader are entirely different things, Teresa. Of course, this is what we have come to expect from Obama.
Talk is cheap, Teresa. The only thing which will restore black families is the end of entitlement programs and that will NEVER happen under 0bama. It will only get worse.
Spot on Linda, it is Holder and his fellow race baiters that won’t allow a discussion of this because it might place some responsibility in their victim’s court.
Mr. Holder, from where I sit you are a despicable coward. Your actions of pardoning terrorists and fugitives because you were too afraid to disappoint Slick shows your moral fortitude to be nonexistent.
Anyone who would paint an entire nation with one broad brush is a fool!
It’s really an awful shame that this is what the first black AG appointed by the first black President has to say. It’s been 40 years since Pat Moynihan IDd out-of-wedlock birth and dependency as the primary cause of continued black poverty, and the proportion of children raised in such homes has only gone up.
The fact the huge numbers of black people have succeeded anyway — reaching the top in an increasing number of instances — is a striking testimony to America’s opportunity and their own striving. Yet, black leaders still cannot get themselves to talk seriously about the swamp of immorality, crime and drugs that they left behind in hundreds of communities. No doubt, they would be dismissed as uncle toms or worse by the Sharptons and the Jacksons. So speaking up would take courage. Maybe Holder was talking about himself?
young black men aged 14-24 represent only 1 percent of the U.S. population but committed almost 28 percent of the nation’s homicides in 2005, according to his own department’s statistics.
Wow.
Holder is a coward who cannot even discuss the issues — only express anger at problems in his victim role. Shame on you Mr. Holder. The US deserves better than you.
Moynihan also advised us to give the issue of race a little benign neglect.
I work in Personnel. I refuse to call it HR because it makes me think of cattle and sheep and other animals you herd.
A black Mom came in one afternoon when I was filling in for our receptionist. The Mom asked me what employment opportunities we had for her son. I was working with another customer so I asked her to wait for me and then I would help her as best I could. I knew she was distressed; I could se it in her face.
When I was finally able to sit down with her she just broke down in tears and said that her 22 year old son had just been released from prison for the second time. IIRC, she told me he’d been arrested for trafficking. She said he was doing well for a short while after being sprung the first time, but then fell in again with the old crowd and so what progress he made he lost.
She was wracked with grief because she knew that baby boy she could recall was headed for even more trouble, and there was nothing she could do about it.
I felt so badly for her. I don’t know for sure if the father of this young man was anywhere to be found, but I doubt he was part of their life.
Shelby Steele said that the black community will rid itself of its greatest problems when it becomes exhausted and government will have little if anything to do with it.
I’ve thought this many times myself, but Thomas Sowell once noted that no group of people are less fit for hyphenation than black Americans. Going back so many centuries before chattel slavery replaced indentured servitude you know exactly what he means. Remember the movie with Rock Hudson, titled This Earth Is Mine?
Would that a Black aritist take this theme and give to the Black soul what is already his.
Holder is right. I agree with him. We are cowards. And we can’t use the appropriate words to respond to his sickness. The appropriate words are powerful and accurate and to the point. And the appropriate words are banned from use. So that we don’t offend those who live to offend us.
Most of us in the real world get up, take our kids to school, go to work, come home tired, do errands on the weekend, and now we have the US Attorney General telling us that we need to socialize more?!
Mr. Holder, please go do what US Attorney Generals are supposed to do!
RACIST!!!
Oops, sorry. That elephant in the room made me say it.
President Obama has so many opportunities to let the left see this country as a true beacon that it is but he’s a coward, too. All he’d have to do is articulate (oh, is that a bad word to be associated with a black man?) a clear position on what family means. How, because he came from a broken family and has a solid marriage with children, he knows the legacy that he can bestow upon his girls.
There are countless tens of thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of African Americans who look to him as the Messiah; he could do so much. But he won’t. He’ll continue to vote ‘present.’
*sigh*
Linda is “blaming the victim,” according to the Obama-Holder hymnal.
And as a former inner city teacher, I’ve always been suspicious of the statistic that blacks with a high school education read at the eighth grade level. I’ve known few black students who reached — or even aspired — to that level.
Perhaps Mexicans can perform a job better or want to work in order to make money and build a family life. Pehaps, Mexicans just happen to be smarter! Perhpas Mexicans do not gripe all day long about the hard life they had back home, but are grateful for having a chance to better themselves in the US. As do all my Oriental friends who are here first generation and have made something of themselves, without one penny of help from the government.
The elephant in the room is the real deal about family stability and crime. The statistics on black families do not reflect that they are black, but rather they were poor. During the sixties there was enough doubt of this to set in motion the shredding to the welfare state.
But we now know that blacks were simply leading indicators. Having been specifically excluded from the best jobs for decades they were entering at the low end of the job latter. While a high school diploma and a job meant at ticket the middle class in 1945, by the late sixties it was already becoming a ticket to poverty and even worse instability.
The flexible labour market Chavez always crows over shreds families. No one is a less attractive mate than an unemployed, even temporarily male. Now it is becoming clear that marriage is swiftly becoming an institution for those who have a college degree and a middle class income.
And, as one would expect the numbers are showing that. The correspondence is not between pigmentation and family stability, after all Mexicans are largely African-Americans themselves as much as the term has any meaning.
A Mexican is more likely to be employed for two reasons. He is willing to work in the black economy with no wage or labour rules, and he can do this in part because often his family is in Mexico where one can live on the wages of a laborer in the United States.
Chavez and her friends have got their wish. They broken the unions, and it looks as if we are in a period were wages will be in steady decline for the foreseeable future. But, this means of course there is going to be social instability.
So maybe you make mint investing in countries that have autocratic societies that can maintain stability on slave wages, and maybe you get shot in the head during a car jacking. Either way, thank Ms. Chavez and her friends. It’s the world they always dreamed of.l
It’s pretty amazing to encounter one post as full of nonsense and untruth as Mr. Hotchkiss, Jr’s. But I must stipulate at the outset that I agree wholeheartedly on one thing: those who are temporarily male are way less attractive than the permanently male.
Flexible labor markets shred families? Where is the evidence of this absurd statement? This is one of those emotive comments offered with no definitions and no proof.
The post is full of them, and I don’t have time to address them all. But this one stands out: “…after all Mexicans are largely African-Americans themselves as much as the term has any meaning.”
Earmuffs, kiddies. WTF??? OK, hands down. I am left in serious doubt as to which planet Mr. Hotchkiss, Jr inhabits, at least mentally. If the term “African-American” has any rational meaning, the people who are Mexicans today, who are almost entirely the descendants of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, and of Spanish colonialists, are not African-American in any way, “largely” or otherwise. I have to assume Mr. Hotchkiss, Jr lives in a part of the world where he never actually encounters either Mexicans, or Americans of Mexican descent. African ancestry is a very, very small demographic factor in Mexico.
Perhaps he is thinking of the Latino populations of the Caribbean, and parts of Central America? He cannot be thinking of Mexicans.
#18:
Your logic is as faulty as your grammar. Are you aware that certain of your sentences make no sense whatsoever?
For example, what does this mean? “During the sixties there was enough doubt of this to set in motion the shredding to the welfare state.” People might be able to follow your meaning if it didn’t require so much effort.
“But we now know that blacks were simply leading indicators.” Wrong. We don’t know that. Vietnamese who came to the United States in the 1970s, barely clothed, on rafts, are thriving while blacks are preying upon one another. What was their “ticket to the middle class,” exactly? Their racial difference from a majority of Americans? Their unusual religion? Their complete absence of knowledge of the English language? Their pennilessness?
Why is it that they don’t suffer from the social pathologies of American blacks? Why don’t Haitians, to the same degree?
Are you interested at all in facts, or just in whining?
Maybe we are cowards due to the fact that if we bring a complaint or an example of black failure we are branded as racist. Once you are tagged as a racist you have no standing in the PC world that we have had shoved down our throats.
I have worked with and lived among and have blacks friends over my 70 years. Most are wonderful hard working people, loving parents, considerate neighbors. Some are nasty, lazy, welfare families who may be on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th generation ofliving off the government, and my tax dollars. Many are white, hispanic or other ethinic groups who fit the above mold.
BUT if I criticize the black portion of these folks I am branded racist……
I’ve worked hard, raised a family and have been married to the same woman for 44 years. I don’t need to be called out as a racist or “insensitive” because Eric Holder, Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson decides to make a news story about me.
Mr. Holder my consience is clear. I’l admit that I don’t like all black people nor I do like all white, hispanic, polish or irish people. But I will not be called a racist unless I callout a black person. Ok, I’m a coward!
Where is Dr. King’s philosophy about a color blind society. I see it getting worse the older I get.
Jim O’C
Bolivia, NC
Mr. or Ms. Dyer, I am glad that you are proud of your super ability to spot misplaced comas. I am sure this is what will lead us to the economic promised land of milk and honey. There is plenty of evidence that labor flexibility does lead to family instability. The number one cause of divorce is financial reasons. As, I have stated the marriage rate among the poor of all races have been plummeting. Poverty alone, won’t do it. Or marriage would have never come into being in the first place. It is instability that breaks up relationships.
Race like Eye color is just a couple of genes here and there. Over even the brief time since the introduction of slavery till now racial characteristics such as skin pigmentation have largely freed themselves from any particular ancestry. Lighter skin babies married lighter skin babies and moved into the white world. Darker skin babies married darker skin babies and moved in to black world.
With the focus on racial equality in Mexico, that was limited by a high preference for an aboriginal European mix, the African elements in Mexican culture dispersed more quickly than in the United States. But the reality is that the Spanish where not like the British. They were much more focused on Europe than the British. They were much more likely to male and to have families on both sides of the pond. The European element in Mexico has always been smaller than self identification. Sure there are blond haired blue eyed Mexicans who don’t have a drop of native or African blood, but they are few. Many who identify as of European decent are significantly less European than I.
Mexico is no different from the rest of the Western hemisphere, the genetic information of the aboriginals was at a grave disadvantage in that they were had susceptibilities to Eastern diseases across various chromosomes. Thus the genetic information of African Mexicans was greatly amplified. Thus, one black ancestor back in the family tree contributed much more genetic information to his descendants than his aboriginal realitives.
In fact for all the years I lived in Mississippi the majority of Mexicans I met looked like light skinned African American blacks, who themselves had a large amount of Native American blood. Only, when I moved to San Diego that I saw Mexicans who looked almost exclusively Native American, which of course makes sense, as the concentration of Africans is much greater in the east.
Linda Chavez just showed some courage. Over to you, Mr. Coward…..
Mr Hotchkiss, Jr — technically, it was a missing comma, rather than a misplaced one, but we all have our moments. I can recommend a little self-effacing humor as a way to span those fat-finger glitches.
It appears that your experience in Mississippi, where I will have to take your word for it that Mexicans look like light-skinned Africans, may have distorted your view of people of Mexican nationality. African-looking Mexicans are a phenomenon of the Yucatan area, understandable due to its proximity to the Caribbean. But African slavery was practiced little in Mexico. Its extent was nowhere near what it was in the US, the Caribbean, Central America, and Brazil.
Latinos with African ancestry are very common from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, even Costa Rica, Nicaragua, etc. They are simply not a major demographic factor in Mexico. The Mexicans you see in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California are the typical Mexicans. Go down to Mexico City, or any of the major cities across our southern border — starting with Nuevo Laredo; drive down the Baja peninsula; visit the northern and central states. Virtually all the people you will see look like the ones you see in San Diego, Yuma, El Paso, or Corpus Christi. Your statement that Mexicans are “largely African-American” is simply wrong.
CFB
The simple answer is education. The vast majority of immigrants are educated and middle class. The Vietnamese who made here may had nothing but the shirts on their backs. But they were non poor peasant farmers. Most of the immigrants where either solidly middle class or otherwise exceptional. This true for all immigrants.
It takes a lot to move across the Ocean and make in another country. I, know I’ve done it. But cross continent immigration, especially during war, selects the very best. Children of middle class or highly educated lower class people have a much larger vocabulary and their children perform considerably better than the same children born to poor parents.
If the USA goes down the tubes in a violent civil war, the African Americans who make it China will do very very well.
This is all well documented stuff, you can’t just go with a few pretty Horatio Alger stories and come social commentary.
“The number one cause of divorce is financial reasons.”
You have to be married before you can be divorced. The social disintegration in the black community has resulted in 70 per cent of the babies being born out of wedlock with all of the havoc that has resulted. There is no dancing around this hard fact, regardless of Mexico or Mexicans or other extraneous factors. Malehood in the ghettos is defined by how many ho’s have been impregnated.
“Most of the immigrants where either solidly middle class or otherwise exceptional. This true for all immigrants.”
Wrong again. There’s no such thing as a middle class in Haiti, and yet dirt poor Haitians come to Miami, work as dishwashers and live in shifts in tiny apartments stuffed to the rafters with other Haitians. And in 15 years they are buying homes. When they get here, they don’t speak English OR French, but a patois that is spoken nowhere but Haiti. Most of their kids — the ones that are not corrupted by American blacks — work their butts off in school and make good. I know. I taught them.
But cling to your counter-factual shopworn theories if you must. The fact is, American blacks are materialistic and morally degraded because that type of behavior is glorified in their culture, while showing respect, studying, saving, marrying and otherwise delaying gratification is considered “chump” or “white” behavior. And your kind of race fixation is a huge part of the problem.
Stop using it as an excuse. It’s not working anymore.
Mr. or Ms. Dyer,
I am a little wired today, I will try to take myself less seriously. We may be talking about two different things. You may be focusing on culture, but I was focusing on genetics.
Genetically African genetic information is much wider than you imply. This how it happened.
A black person married an Aboriginal, they had 12 children.
Several of the children died of Malaria, but not the ones sickle cell trait, and certainly not those with sickle cell anemia.
Then several of them died of measles, but much more with native American genes than with African .
And on and on through the various diseases.
So 5 children lived, as many as 3 had predominantly African genes., But they thought of themselves as half and half, very wrong genetically. Then as the continued in life the ones with African genes had higher bone density, and stronger muscles, which made them able to produce more in agricultural situations and to be more attractive to females through displays of the strength and what not. Repeat this over and over again the few black former slaves look like they are disappearing, but really it is the aboriginal genetic information that is falling out, regardless of what they look like.
Banjo
Unstable males are also less likely to marry. Would you invite an unemployed male to live with you? Lets, not forget that a large percentage of African Americans are in the middle class and are doing quite well thank you. And alternatively, the majority of people on welfare, by definition single parents are white. I also knew quite a few Vietnamese single mothers who were living in trailers doing not very much in Mississippi too. Racial stereotypes really don’t paint an accurate picture of whats going on. You have to look at the actual numbers. You have group white poor, with black poor, and Asian poor etc, again multi-generational poor . Really the racial discrepancy quickly falls away.
Remember Jimmie Hendrix was a pretty lonely black hippie. The cultural norm in black communities is very pro marriage. You interview poor black women and they aren’t looking to be single, they just aren’t finding many good prospects.
But when you look a middle class blacks they may have waited to exhale, but in the end they often do.
CFB we can go around and around with this. But, again the Haitians who put the effort into building a raft out tires, or whatever it takes to make it over here are exceptional. Everyone else is still in Haiti.
Again if you took 100 African Americans and dropped them in Haiti with no money and no French, the ones who made it to New York would be winners. The losers would still be in Haiti.
See immigration is a process of selection, and it is on average very very selective.
You’re right about one thing. Numbers don’t lie. Young black males represent 1% of the American population, and 30% of murderers (and probably victims as well). 50 years ago, there were MORE blacks in the workforce than whites, percentage-wise. Now, I think you are aware that is not the case.
The black family was destroyed by leftists such as yourself. As has been the white family, to a great degree. Now your boy is intent on destroying the rest of the institution of marriage and the capitalist system that has sustained us all. God help us.
It’s the same thing with Holocaust. Where all Jew’s geniuses, no but the ones who made out of Europe where more adaptive than those that didn’t. Even before the Holocaust, the ones that escaped the Pogroms where the smart ones. You can find a lot of Jewish Ne’er do wells, their is a whole genre of fiction about Jewish Mobsters. But a lot of the losers just didn’t make it.
Not, to say that there isn’t something special about Jewish culture, but one would expect that the distance from the Holocaust widens, we will see more and more ordinary Jews and fewer and fewer great geniuses as a percentage of the population. Probably it will settle back to pre-Holocaust averages, well a little less for Americans who live much easier lives than pre-Holocaust European or non-European Jews who lived in Muslim ruled countries.
Again, you have to look at like with like. You have to look at multi-generation poor blacks, with multi-generation poor blacks, etc. A greater percentage of blacks at the end of institutional racism, which really should start in the late, seventies (I won’t argue this now, but its true), were poor. numbers can be slippery, but the key is you have to compare like to like.
And remember race is slippery itself, poorer light skinned blacks are much more likely to identify as black. People in black communities aren’t really cool with trying to go white. So a lot of those people who say their white are just as black as people who say their black.
Race simply becomes a less a less meaningful the further away you get from substantial interbreeding which occurred quite regularly during slavery. With the high rate of child birth mortality slave owners who were attached to their wives used black slave mistresses as well birth control after they had an heir and a spare or two.
This is not at all surprising. There is an entire different set of values that black people have that others do not. Given they have been bestowed special status in our society they feel they are allowed to have their own separate value set. Just like everything else the current administration has done, hard working American taxpayers, the forgotten man, can pay the bills.
Here is a simple value set which guarantees success in America. 1-Get an education. 2-Get a job, any job. 3- Don’t break the law. 4- If you are going to have children get married first and then stay married.
One of these might be ignored but more than one an failure is all but guaranteed.
These values are not race based. They apply to everyone. What is sad is they are rejected by the majority of blacks. The result of this rejection is what we all can witness in the black community. It is cycle without end.
What Joe said. With some notable exceptions, blacks and whites live in separate universes. No matter what the facts, a significant portion of blacks, enabled by Democrat white politicians, P.C. educational institutions and the entertainment culture, believe they are entitled because of the history of slavery and Jim Crow. “You are not acting responsibly.” “You are a racist.” End of conversation.
OR he could have talked about why the mob wanted to put him on the Illinois Gaming Commission so there would be no resistance to a mobbed-up casino. Didn’t do that, either, did he?
Mr. Hotchkiss at #28 — Even from the perspective of genetics, I am unable to find anything, at least online, that suggests Mexicans are “largely African-American.” What I have found indicates that, genetically, they are predominantly Native American, with Spanish European representing about the same percentage of the minority genetic admixture as African, in most of the country. (Of course, Spanish European also included some North African and Sephardic Jewish genetic material as well, during the colonial centuries.)
That admixture amount may be more than experts once thought, but it hardly makes Mexicans “largely African-American,” even from a genetic sense. I would certainly agree that some of them are, but it still appears to be a minoroty of them who are LARGELY African-American, even though there is more African genetic material in Mexico than was previously thought.
Of course, I never thought people of African ancestry were genetically (or pigmentally) disposed to poverty, crime, and broken families to begin with, so I’m not sure why we are talking about this. I may be out of date on this, but my understanding has been that we think the human genome originated in Africa anyway, although it hasn’t been conclusively proven. I would expect DNA markers to carry African genetic information in everyone on earth, if that is valid. From this vantage point, we can’t consider racial genetic factors to have much meaning at all. As a blue-eyed mutant, I know I’m related to Paul Newman — however distantly — but I figure I am also related to the Egyptian pharoahs; to the Queen of Sheba who won acclaim from Solomon; to Leopold Senghor; to Nelson Mandela, Djimon Hounsou, Iyaan Hirsi Ali, and even Robert Mugabe.
It seems to me the study of the human genome has only reinforced the truth that when we are talking about patterns like crime, broken families, and poverty, culture — and politics and law — are much more important than genetics. But that was already my position before we started talking about this. You don’t have to persuade me of what I already believe. Where I think we differ is in what aspects of culture, law, and politics have been most destructive for certain demographic groups among us.
J.E.,
Negroes did not yet exist when the human genome originated, whether it originated in Africa or not. The most ancient genetic populations located so far have all been African, but none of them were Negroes because the Negro race is the world’s youngest.
That’s not a racist observation, it just is what it is. Racists don’t like facts about population genetics, because they tend to think different means superior or inferior. That’s why discussions about IQ are summarily dismissed by the ignorant and the dishonest.
And no, I’m not lumping you in with the ignorant or the stupid.
Jeff Bargholz — I appreciate your non-lumping policy vis-a-vis moi. The fact that “negroid” genetic characteristics postdated the origin of the human genome was partly my point. Having “African” genetic markers isn’t the same thing as having the characteristics of the black-skinned sub-Saharan Africans of the modern human era. The last I saw, that genetic break occurred around 8000 to 10,000 years ago. Although we revise these estimates often, so who can keep up.
Anyway, saying “Mexicans are largely African-American,” in the context Mr. Hotchkiss, Jr spoke in, is a lot like saying “humans are largely female” because they all start their gestation as XXes. What possible actionability is there in either statement?
Linda, you have brought up several valid points. But what bothers me is that when you, and others, heard E. Holder said that we are a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race, you assumed that he was referring to the “white nation” and gleefully took up the banner to remind us of how the break down of the Black family is the main problem with the nation’s ills. Epic fail. I have no problem with acknowledging the truly disturbing statistics coming from the Black community. And as a child of a single parent, I am well aware of the strains that it places on educational achievement. But when he said that WE are a “nation of cowards” I assumed he meant WE and not just Whites. Everyone has either been too timid when it comes to discussing race, relied on prejudice or stereotypes to exclude others, or used race as a crutch or a shield to assail perceived enemies. Maybe you should keep that in mind when you climb off of your high horse.
And another thing I find interesting. You said that President Obama only discussed the absence of Black fathers “fleetingly”? You revealed either your intellectual dishonesty or lack of research skills right there. The President has made two high profile speeches about this very subject and has continually interwoven these themes in his stump speeches—you want to know how I know? Because he caught a lot of grief from those in the Black community who said that he was only taking up this banner to appease racist white beliefs. If you are going to write about a subject, maybe you should demonstrate more than shallow of knowledge of what you are talking about and stop being so defensive.