Can I Tell This Story and Not be Racist?
posted on June 24, 2012 by Gary DeMar
I’ve been thinking a lot about race lately. There’s no way to escape the topic since nearly everybody and his brother are accusing conservatives of being racists.
Eric Holder said that Americans are cowards when it comes to race. Maybe we are. No one likes to be called a racist. I’m not a coward. I want to talk about race since many black neighborhoods and schools are disintegrating. Too many young blacks have succumbed to an ingrown black culture that is not healthy. Cultural integrity can be a good thing, but not when it’s manufactured in the name of a blame-game.
Blacks are going to have to save themselves. The place to start is where the disintegration is most visible.
Consider these statistics from The New Century Foundation’s The Color of Crime (2005), an American report on the differences in crime rates by race. It found the following:
■Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.
■Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate.
■Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
■Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
■Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.
■Only 10 percent of youth gang members are white.
■Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs. Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.
■Blacks are seven times more likely to be in prison than whites. Hispanics are three times more likely.
As difficult as blacks had it during the days of segregation, a distinctly black culture developed even in the prevalence of racist attitudes and restrictive laws. We forget, or have never been told, that Washington, D.C., from 1920 to 1960, “was a financial, spiritual, and cultural stronghold. Because Washington was a segregated city, blacks simply created their own metropolis. . . . The first black bank, the Industrial Savings Bank, was started here.” While “the black population of New York’s Harlem inherited many of its buildings from previous white owners, . . . many of the buildings in Shaw were paid for by black businessmen and built by black hands.”[1]
Families were intact, the divorce and unwed mother rates were no different from that of white communities.
Take a look photographs of the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Notice how everyone is dressed. Most of the men are wearing suits and ties. Many of the women are wearing hats, as are the men. There is a dignity about the crowd.
Blacks are not helped by the continued claim that all problems for them are racial. Some are, but most aren’t. Black on black crime is not the fault of white people. Sky-high out-of-wedlock births are not the fault of whites. High dropout rates among blacks are not the fault of whites. The solution is not to cry “racism” and blame everything on whites or hundreds of years of oppression. Blacks won’t find their problems solved by appealing to the State.
Welfare programs have done a lot to keep black families down by subsidizing family fragmentation and fostering multi-generational dependency. Black problems aren’t solved by naming streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. The same can be said for the King Holiday and Black History Month. These are liberal crumbs to appease the black community, but have any of these actions helped blacks?
Guilt-ridden whites vote for the advocates of government dependency, and anyone who does not will be labeled — you guessed it — a “racist.” It’s a cover for the bill of goods that so-called black leaders sold to their people in the name of “social justice.”
Subsidies have led to the immobility of the poor, the breakup of the black family, and dependency on government programs. My message to blacks: Do the right thing and work to fix it. Cast aside those who have been leading down the real road to recovery. Will the task be hard? Herculean. Are there people who will pitch in to help? Lots! But we won’t do it if the answer is going to be more government, guilt, and charges of ‘racism’ every time you don’t like what’s being offered as real solutions.
Blacks of America unite . . . the only thing you have to lose are your chains of dependency and victimhood.
