Okay, Health Care Reform Has Passed---

[Warph]

One point of view......

We do not speak of the black underclass. We need to begin.

For over five years now I have gone as a reporter with the police, into the cities and the suburbs, into Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver. I have visited prisons and jails, spent night shifts in the precincts where whites don't go. What I have seen of the vast festering hordes of the black forgotten is grim. White America doesn't grasp the magnitude of the underclass, its isolation, its hopelessness, its resistance to change. Or its anger.

Go into the sprawling necrotic wastelands of the urban conglomerations. As you cross the racial divide, the world turns black, English changes, people walk differently, body language alters. In eight hours in a police car you will never see a white face. Broken windows in abandoned buildings gape at the night, home to crackheads and derelicts. Lean young men gaze at police cars with blank hostile eyes.

Go, say, to South Chicago (actually, don't: you wouldn't last an hour) where the city warehouses unwanted blacks in huge high-rise projects, ugly megaliths erupting from bleak concrete, with their own police stations and terrible schools with dropout rates of seventy-five percent. Go into homes where in mid-afternoon a half-dozen men sit listlessly before the television, along streets where they sit for hours on stoops, doing nothing. There is nothing for them to do.

The isolation of these people from the surrounding country, from anything at all except the ghetto, is near absolute. For months on end black kids here never see a white face, except on television. Nothing connects them emotionally with the greater society. They have nothing in common with the European heritage of the United States, know little of it. These are people who don't know that the English Channel separates England and France, can't tell you within a hundred years when World War I was fought or who fought it, aren't aware of ever having heard of the Bill of Rights, have never read an entire book. About anything. Ever.

If you think I'm exaggerating, think again.

Not European, not American in the usual sense, neither are they African, though they sometimes grasp at African-ness so as to have a sense of belonging. They can't name two African countries, or find Africa on an outline map of the world. They aren't African. They are urban blacks of the deep city.

The underclass does not change. Nice suburban whites hear of the growth of the black middle class, marvel at the sight of black men dating blonde Anglo women, and think that the country moves toward interracial amity. Don't kid yourself. The center of gravity of black America is the ghetto. It doesn't shrink as some few of its residents pull themselves into the middle class and leave. Maybe it grows.

The underclass is so large, so insular, that the slight mixing around the edges can't diminish it. The ghetto is self-sustaining, a world unto itself. The United States has become a first-world European nation with Kenya distributed throughout it.

The cultural gap probably widens. White America races ahead, measuring its advance in megahertz and the colonization of cyberspace. The black middle class largely keeps pace. The underclass barely knows how to read. Welfare and television, our latter-day bread and circuses, keep the lid on. Explosions come, as witness the riots in Los Angeles, but they are few. In the short term they will likely remain few. We have learned how to sedate the ghetto.

We have not learned what to do about it.

The newspapers, seldom much aware of what happens around them, speak of prejudice and oppression. Blacks of the huge, rotting, unseen downtown do not suffer from discrimination or oppression. Rather they suffer from abandonment. Nobody needs or wants them. They cannot do anything that anyone wants done. Whites feed them, talk solicitously when they remember the city at all, and live elsewhere.

If whites can do nothing about the underclass, neither can the underclass. The culture of the ghetto resists change. Many whites think of black culture as meaning an embarrassing incompetence that needs only to learn the superiority of advanced European ways. No. Black culture exists. It is rich, warm, vibrant, classy, pungent, and it is the same from Philadelphia to San Diego. Blacks like it. They don't want to be white. They don't speak the bastardized English of downtown because they couldn't learn to say, "He is" instead of, "He be." Even to white eyes there is a certain gelded quality to a black executive speaking precise white English.

We have become two nations sharing a country.

Economics works against change. No academic urge is found in the ghetto, no entrepreneurial vitality, none of the traits that make for success in a techno-industrial society. The ghetto is permanent. Hispanics seem to be pulling themselves up the ladder in the long tradition of America's immigrants, Asians do it readily, but the forgotten blacks of the ghetto don't.

What now? Do we expect things to remain stable forever? Have we, as seems to be the case, decided that no solution exists, and therefore we might as well ignore the problem? I think so. The enthusiasms of the era of civil rights have waned. Whites have moved on to other things. My circle of acquaintances, sophisticated in the ways of politics, seldom mention the chasm and, when they do, it is to concede its utter intractability.

People don't say it, not often, but they think it: There is nothing we can do. Meanwhile hatred gathers in the urban blasted heath. The riots of Los Angeles could have happened anywhere. The people of the ghetto believe that whites are the cause of their misery, and they are, just under the surface, very angry. One day this is going to come back and bite us.

.......So who's to blame for this?  The federal, state or city governments.... people like Jesse Jackson & Al Sharpton.... The Civil Rights Groups ie: ACORN, NAACP, CORE, NBJC, SNCC, SCLC....  White America....  Who is ever to blame, one thing is for sure, we as a nation, both black and white, need to come up with a 100% solution because, like the article said, "One day this is going to come back and bite us."

[Varmit]

Excuse me while I go throw up now, that is the biggest load of bullcrap I have ever heard.

[Diane Amberg]

 Sorry Varmit, in this case you are the minority.

[Warph]

WARPH,
O wise one---why do you think BHO did not allow cameras when he met with Neanyahu ?

One guess would be that In 2008, the United States approved an Israeli request for bunker-busters capable of destroying underground facilities, including Iranian nuclear weapons sites.  Military said delivery of the weapons was held up by Barack Obama
Also since taking office, Obama has refused to approve any major Israeli requests for U.S. weapons platforms or advanced systems. This included proposed Israeli procurement of AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, refueling systems, advanced munitions and data on a stealth variant of the F-15E.  Most of these weapons are stored at a military base in Diego Garcia.  I imagine if a fist fight broke out between Ben and Hussein, neither one wouldn't want it on video.  BTW... Ben is raving pissed at Hussein.  Hussein is afraid Benn will blow the nuclear sites.  That would put Israel up one on Hussein.

[Warph]

Excuse me while I go throw up now, that is the biggest load of bullcrap I have ever heard.

And your solution is???

[pamagain]

Excuse me while I go throw up now, that is the biggest load of bullcrap I have ever heard.

That isn't bull.....it's the truth. Go to Kansas City dude, downtown, after dark. Take a wrong turn in New Orleans and end up in the ninth ward back when it was still there. Hell go to friggin TULSA! Take the wrong exit off the interstate cause you are lost and see a gas station and decide to ask directions and the old black guy workin there comes out loaded for bear and asks you what the hell a white girl is doin in that part of town. But then explain whats happenin and he helps you out and apologizes but reminds you this ain't no place for a white girl and to get back on the highway and stay there till you get where you are goin.

It's not just black people either.

[Varmit]

And your solution is???

Hold on, because this is going to absolutely mind blowing...maybe, just maybe, instead of blaming others for their problems (crime, slum like enviroment, drugs, gangs, poor economic conditions) they should step up and take some responsibility for themselves.  Clean up their neighborhoods, control their children.  Afterall, black culture is "warm, vibrant, classy, pungent.."  Nothing says classy like pants worn around the knees or expressions like "he be my babies daddy" or perhaps my personal favorite "what up dog".  And lets not forget Vibrant, which we all know cannot be expressed more accurately than decorating your neighborhood with trash, empty beer and malt liquor bottles. 


Pam, I agree. There are areas in large cities that I wouldn't go.  But why is it that these areas, for the most part, consist of mostly minority races?  Not all, but mostly. 

[srkruzich]

So now my opinion is "wrong" once again. Of course there is a double standard.That's what we've been trying to change! But if it is constantly excused in one way or another, the next generation will copy the last and it never goes away.

You know what, the only ones that are "trying to change it" are the whites.  The black sure aren't concerned with it.  If they were they wouldn't be calling themselves nigga or us crackers.  Shrug..  I have never understood why anyone gets so upset over a name.  I"ve been called far worse than sambo or anything like that.  Shoot i used to work at Sambos years ago. Don't know why its now suddenly racist.   Names  aren't anything to get upset over.   Furthermore name calling isn't racist. Racism is the belief that one race is genetically superior to another race..

How is a committed southern confederate white man calling a black man Sambo, not a racist slur?

Because its not racism. Racism is the belief that one race is genetically superior to another race. 

If you were being bullied or harassed wouldn't you want someone to stand up for you?

No i have always handled my own battles, i'm not a wuss.   Taught all my kids to handle their own battles too,   Last bully i ran into was when i was in 4th grade and I cleaned his clock and he became docile and meek as a lamb afterwards.

You wouldn't tolerate that kind of thing in your schools...or would you? Ya can't just suck everything up as if it didn't happen. It isn't always the "other guy" who is always wrong or touchy or thin skinned. Some things that happen just aren't right! When you are on the receiving end you'll feel differently.

LOL Theres always going to be those that won't stand up for themselves, eventually they will if they get tired of it.   Rescuing them from their problems does nothing to help them. THey just end up dog food later on in life in the dog eat dog world.

[srkruzich]

Jar, I have no doubt Varmit didn't mean black people when he called "a spade a spade"...he's too young! But I'm sure not. In the south east coast it was indeed meant as a slur, if in fact a card game wasn't going on. It started out, "That darkie was as black as the ace of spades'' and eventually shortened to a "spade" being just another derogatory term, along with many others.

I don't know diane, i'm from the southeast and no it has never been a derogatory term.   I am quite sure that if you wanted to, you could turn any word into a derogatory word. But calling a spade a spade is not, and mighty white of ya is not either since it has nothing to do with blacks. 

[srkruzich]

WARPH,
O wise one---why do you think BHO did not allow cameras when he met with Neanyahu ?

I think its cause he is afraid that netenyahu is going to bitch slap him.