Fred Reed on the Zimmerman Trial

[Ad Orientem]

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Zim.shtml

Caution: Those afflicted with politically correct sensibilities may want to just skip this one.

[MediumTex]

That seemed like pretty honest piece to me, though many would find it inflammatory.

The non-black racists I have seen in this case have mostly been in the comments section of news reports, while most of the black racists I have seen in this case have been on discussion panels on cable news channels.

Please let me know if anyone has had different racist sighting experiences.

[MediumTex]

One simple thing that the black community could do to help itself move forward would be to stop calling one another by the N word at the same time that they freak out when a non-black person uses the same word to refer to black people.

I have no desire to use the N word, but I do enjoy listening to hip hop and rap music and I find myself hearing the word a lot and I have to remind myself of the current ridiculous rules when it comes to the use of that word--i.e., it is a term of endearment when black people use it to refer to one another, but it is a word expressing pure hatred when used by a non-black person.  That's confusing.

[Benko]

Fred is often right--which is why he makes many people's head explode.  He says truths (haven't yet read link, just speaking of him in general) that no one is allowed to say because it is unPC.

Your experience is typical.  We live in a very "interesting" society "progressives" have created for us.

[Pointedstick]

What has happened to the black community just breaks my heart. Rates of divorce, single parenthood, and dropping out of school that are off the charts, illiteracy, innumeracy, a toxic culture of thuggery, lack of positive male role models, you name it. I'd love to hear from any of the older folks here: was it like this back during Dr. King's era? Or are these signs of an unraveling society relatively new? Regardless, I have no idea what anyone can do about any of them and I just feel so sad when I think about it.

[RuralEngineer]

I got a chuckle out of this quote:

In California, someone called Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party, is indeed calling for a race war against whites. The strategic brilliance of declaring war on those who grow your food and sign you checks might be lost on Sun Tzu. Oh well.

[MediumTex]

What has happened to the black community just breaks my heart. Rates of divorce, single parenthood, and dropping out of school that are off the charts, illiteracy, innumeracy, a toxic culture of thuggery, lack of positive male role models, you name it. I'd love to hear from any of the older folks here: was it like this back during Dr. King's era? Or are these signs of an unraveling society relatively new? Regardless, I have no idea what anyone can do about any of them and I just feel so sad when I think about it.

+1

I don't know what to say about it except that if I was a civil rights activist from the 1960s, I would be PISSED that all of my work and sacrifice had been so that some ghetto thug (or faux-ghetto thug) could sell millions of records singing about shooting people, slinging dope, and banging hos (especially when much of this stuff isn't even true) as he wears his pants around his knees and his underwear on his head.

There are obviously lots of great success stories in the black community, including Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and obviously Barack Obama.  There is this troubling attitude, though, that some of these success stories are actually the result of "selling out."  As Tool noted in "Hooker With a Penis", though, anyone who sells anything has, by definition, "sold out."  That's the purpose of selling things--i.e., to sell them, and if things go well, to sell out.  Anyone who is famous and is able to persuade people that he hasn't "sold out" has simply mastered the art of selling out--he has sold out while appearing not to have sold out.  Will Smith, Ice T and Ice Cube have performed this maneuver brilliantly for years.

Bill Cosby had a great idea in the 1980s to create a new kind of narrative about what it means to be black and successful in the U.S.  Unfortunately, this aspirational message seemed to trigger a backlash in the early 1990s that caused a glamorization of ghetto life with a mostly fantasy-based narrative that played out in gangster rap.  What happened next was bizarre to the extreme as this fantasy world of violence began to take the form of rap artists actually attacking and killing one another.  When I heard these stories, I always imagined a Star Trek convention where a guy dressed up as a member of Kirk's crew and a guy dressed up as a Klingon got into a fight in the parking lot with one of them killing the other and then requesting to be beamed up.

But yes, the state of the black community in the U.S. today is heartbreaking.  It's like a huge part of this population simply took a wrong turn on the way to the promised land and wound up in a ditch.

[Libertarian666]

What has happened to the black community just breaks my heart. Rates of divorce, single parenthood, and dropping out of school that are off the charts, illiteracy, innumeracy, a toxic culture of thuggery, lack of positive male role models, you name it. I'd love to hear from any of the older folks here: was it like this back during Dr. King's era? Or are these signs of an unraveling society relatively new? Regardless, I have no idea what anyone can do about any of them and I just feel so sad when I think about it.

In my opinion, you can blame two things: the "War on Poverty" and the "War on Drugs". The combination of these has destroyed the ability of most black men to integrate into society, and thus have destroyed the black family.

[moda0306]

Slavery destroyed the black family. Not the war on poverty, which was mostly focused on the elderly in the form if

Beyond that, there were food stamp and educational initiatives that filled in most of the rest. Hardly things one would imagine are responsible for gross negligence on behalf of black parents.

I think there's more to the decline, if there really is a decline at all. Crime has gone down significantly since 1980.

[Xan]

Slavery destroyed the black family. Not the war on poverty

Bunk.

Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren't permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. "The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do," Mr. Williams says. "And that is to destroy the black family."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 61598.html

In 1950, 17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but not their father. By 2010 that had increased to 50 percent. In 1965, only eight percent of childbirths in the Black community occurred out-of-wedlock. In 2010 that figure was 41 percent; and today, the out-of-wedlock childbirth in the Black community sits at an astonishing 72 percent. The number of African-American women married and living with their spouse was recorded as 53 percent in 1950. By 2010, it had dropped to 25 percent.

these types of decline are happening across all racial groups but seem to be worse in the black community, somehow i don't think declines taking place after the 1950s can be blamed on slavery.

[moda0306]

Slavery brought people here on boats and off to wherever the owners felt most profitable.  That, by definition, destroyed families.  They then reformed families in spite of being pieces of property to the fascists in the South. Good for them. Really.  That's their own achievement.  The breakdown of those families they built very likely could have to do with various cultural factors as well as dependence, though I see no reason why a black father wouldn't have been muh better off financially leaving his family before welfare than after it was enacted.

And most of the war on poverty was to help the elderly... I don't see any direct disgusting benefit to black families.

Here is the outline of the Economic Opportunity Act, which, aside from (gasp) food stamps, was the major piece of the "War on Poverty" that wasn't mostly for the elderly. 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Econ ... ct_of_1964

Here are the major initiatives within it...

Major features
The act included eleven major programs:

1. The Job Corps provides work, basic education, and training in separate residential centers for young men and young women, from ages sixteen to twenty-one.

2. Neighborhood Youth Corps provides work and training for young men and women, ages sixteen to twenty-one, from impoverished families and neighborhoods.

3. Work Study provides grants to colleges and universities for part-time employment of students from low-income families who need to earn money to pursue their education.

4. Urban and Rural Community Action provides financial and technical assistance to public and private nonprofit agencies for community action programs developed with "maximum feasible participation" of the poor and giving "promise of progress toward elimination of poverty."

5. Adult Basic Education provides grants to state educational agencies for programs of instruction for persons eighteen years and older whose inability to read and write English is an impediment to employment.

6. Voluntary Assistance for Needy Children establishes an information and coordination center to encourage voluntary assistance for deserving and needy children.

7. Loans to Rural Families provides loans not exceeding $2,500 that assist low income rural families in permanently increasing their income.

8. Assistance for Migrant Agricultural Employees provides assistance to state and local governments, public and private nonprofit agencies or individuals in operating programs to assist migratory workers and their families with basic needs.

9. Employment and Investment Incentives provides loans and guarantees, not in excess of $25,000 to a single borrower, for the benefit of very small businesses.

10. Work Experience provides payments for experimental, pilot, and demonstration projects to expand opportunities for work experience and needed training of persons who are unable to support or care for themselves or their families, including persons receiving public assistance.

11. Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) recruits, selects, trains, and refers volunteers to state or local agencies or private nonprofit organizations to perform duties to combat poverty.[13]

The legislation also authorized the Economic Opportunity Council, which led to the launch of smaller independent groups that worked with communities to establish better economic climates.[14][15] Government took charge for providing a means to provide basic literacy to adults.[16] The idea was not wealth distribution, but to provide poor families with a means to provide for their family to a decent standard of living.[17]

One of the main provisions of the act was the federal government's authority to bypass states in sending funds directly to local governments. This was one of the ways the federal government was able to bypass the southern states that did not cooperate with federal law.[18][19][20]

Look at the major initiatives within that?  While these things may not be a capitalists wet dream, there hardly appears to be much in there that would tear apart families.

Maybe some of the drug/hippie/free-love stuff played a role, but I just don't see how this stuff had much to do with fathers abandoning their responsibilities.

[Xan]

Add up enough rewards for being poor, and it just doesn't make sense for a wage-earner to stick around.

[MediumTex]

moda,

To what do you attribute the large number of single parent households in the black community?

Why do you think that the black community has so much crime, poor performance on standardized educational tests, high rates of teen pregnancy, high incarceration rates and seems to produce leaders who are more interested in grandstanding and playing politics rather than actually working for meaningful change?

I don't know the answers to any of the questions above, but I think that past racism provides a frustratingly incomplete and unsatisfactory answer.  I think that the answer a few decades ago was perceived to be that if enough of society's resources were redistributed to the black community it would lead to the desired change, but instead it seems to have created this modern welfare entitlement mentality that creates little incentive for achievement for a large portion of the black community.  As usual, a big government effort to change a community had more or less the opposite effect to the one that was desired.

A big part of the problem is, of course, economic, and poor people will always struggle in any society, but the problems in the black community seem to me to be especially stubborn, especially the difficulty in changing the cultural attitudes toward education as a means of upward economic and social mobility.

While we are talking about the black community, though, I've got to also mention the Native American community as well, which in many cases is simply pathetic and incredibly sad.  The closest I have ever felt in the U.S. to being in a third world country was when I traveled through a few reservations in rural Arizona and Utah.  The living conditions are just shockingly poor, and the people just seemed to all have that "this sucks" look about everything.  While I applaud the entrepreneurial spirit that certain tribes have exhibited toward gaming as a way of pulling some much needed wealth into reservations, I don't know if simply building casino after casino is going to actually give any of those Native American populations a sense of wholeness and belonging in this country.  I mean, imagine you are a 9 year old member of one of these tribes and your career opportunities consist of being a valet at a casino, a maid at a casino, a cook at a casino, a card dealer at a casino, a security guard at a casino, etc.  While better than being homeless and unemployed, over time I would think that an entire community spending all of its time in a casino would generate a higher end version of that same "this sucks" look.

[dualstow]

Billy Cosby, mentioned above, had the right message in the 80s, but I guess he was already considered irrelevant.
The same message needs to come from an overwhelming amount of black musicians and other African-American public figures to drown out the overwhelming hateful messages coming from Zulu Shabazz and other...jackazzes. How many young black kids had a poster of Tupac on their wall in the nineties? And how many have Neil Degrasse Tyson? To replace Cosby, I vote for a nationwide speaking tour by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Public Enemy's Chuck D. But maybe they're already too old as well. Terrence Howard and Pharrell?

Posted by: RuralEngineer

I got a chuckle out of this quote:
In California, someone called Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party, is indeed calling for a race war against whites. The strategic brilliance of declaring war on those who grow your food and sign you checks might be lost on Sun Tzu. Oh well.

That got a laugh out of me as well. I read and thought, what is the goal of people like that who don't want to work within the system? Liberia? 'Cause that worked out really well.


Comment from Medium Tex's fourth grade teacher on his report card:

Dear Mrs Tex

While I find it troubling that Medium is referencing songs with such titles as "Hooker with a Penis", I have to concede that he does so with a relevant, valid point in mind. He is a bright young man and as long as we keep an eye on him he has a bright future
...

[moda0306]

there are undoubtedly variations from reservation to reservation, unfortunately the casino tribes that i have had contact with seem to have just adopted the same model as the us government and hand out money from casinos like welfare.. now tribe members wait for a government check and a tribal check, they may have more spending money but the going nowhere sense of hopelessness seems barely altered..

I agree on a lot of these points and will comment later more on those, but regarding Casino income, wouldn't those be much more akin to dividends, not welfare?

yes from a economic or accounting perspective they probably are receiving dividends, but the way some of the money transfer systems seem to be set up they are handed out as assistance and tend to be viewed as an entitlement by the recipient, in many ways very much like a welfare check and having the same sociological implications and negative effects on incentive for achievement.

[jacob_h]

Big Daddy government has screwed-up the incentives for women to try make life work with a husband.  Why does the baby daddy need to stick around if the government can provide food, shelter, health care, etc.?  The increase in minority criminality happens because children raised without fathers tend to have all sorts of social maladjustments.

This situation is spreading through whites more slowly than through other minorities because many whites have traditionalist (patriarchal/christian/WASPy/etc.) culture that is resisting the government incentives a little more effectively (but not completely, as rates of divorce, and out of wedlock births are increasing for whites as well).

The reason why the government keeps giving out these poisonous free-bees to the people is that it gets politicians elected; even though any sane person can see that the free-bees exist because of theft/onerous taxation of the productive classes and that the free-bees ruin the lives of the people accepting them in the long-run.  This is the problem with democracies - to get the masses to elect you, you need to appeal to their basest desires.

A sane ruler would discontinue these free-bees, even though that would cause short-term hardships, for the betterment of society in the long-run.  Of course, this sane ruler would probably have a hard time getting elected.

[dualstow]

My Dad grew up poor in New Mexico state with a lot of Mexicans and Native Americans (off the res). His family was mostly despised by the latter. There are definitely some parallels with the racial divisions in white/african-american neighborhoods.

[moda0306]

Big Daddy government has screwed-up the incentives for women to try make life work with a husband.  Why does the baby daddy need to stick around if the government can provide food, shelter, health care, etc.?  The increase in minority criminality happens because children raised without fathers tend to have all sorts of social maladjustments.

This situation is spreading through whites more slowly than through other minorities because many whites have traditionalist (patriarchal/christian/WASPy/etc.) culture that is resisting the government incentives a little more effectively (but not completely, as rates of divorce, and out of wedlock births are increasing for whites as well).

The reason why the government keeps giving out these poisonous free-bees to the people is that it gets politicians elected; even though any sane person can see that the free-bees exist because of theft/onerous taxation of the productive classes and that the free-bees ruin the lives of the people accepting them in the long-run.  This is the problem with democracies - to get the masses to elect you, you need to appeal to their basest desires.

A sane ruler would discontinue these free-bees, even though that would cause short-term hardships, for the betterment of society in the long-run.  Of course, this sane ruler would probably have a hard time getting elected.

Why would a dad choose to be more of a deadbeat when there's less incentive to dodge the responsibilities of fatherhood... Said another way, if I had the choice to be an active father in a welfare household vs a no-welfare household, I would choose the one with the free income. The incentives to dodge responsibility were far, far higher before the welfare state, IMO.  If you chose the responsible route of being a good father, there was much more financial hardship in doing so.

the women get more money if there is no father present, the men have no control over the income if they do stay (unofficially), and no incentive to stay when family arguments happen, combined with low education, and drug convictions keeping the men from getting most jobs, the system encourages them to bounce around , living with (and sometimes impregnating) one girl then moving on to the next whenever the grass looks greener... i doubt there are many men who could live with any sense of self worth by mooching off a woman who is mooching off a government check, or who would feel much responsibility for the family that the government feeds because he is not there. combined with the other discouragements pointedstick describes plus education failures, drug laws/convictions it becomes a way of life..

...responsibility must be felt to be taken..

[Pointedstick]

Since this thread has turned into a discussion about welfare, let me share a story.

I have a co-worker (who is white, by the way) who hails from a poor family and is one of five children. Of them, he’s the only one who has a real job, while the others are all on various forms of welfare. It’s not like we talk about it a lot, but he occasionally brings up frustration with their behavior, which includes things like:

* having children with no thought for how to support them
* taking out loans they have no way to pay back
* eating terrible diets and getting Medicaid to pay for weight loss surgery
* going to college at age 35 at government expense to get degrees in worthless subjects (divinity, poetry, Native American studies, etc) despite no interest in the relevant career field, if there even is one

For these people, welfare is not their "leg up" while they get their lives together. It's a way of life. It's their means of support. It's how they live and it's what they anticipate being their source of income for the rest of their lives.

Despite what many idealistic liberals believe about the possibility of welfare being a transitory aid to people who fall on hard times, my co-worker who has grown up around welfare cases--who, by the way, is very liberal and fully supports welfare and cheerfully voted for Obama and reads the Huffington Post--basically takes the attitude of "welfare is what society gives to its losers so they don’t die in a ditch." He has no illusions that they're going to get their lives together one day.

He tells me that given that there are losers who need welfare to avoid dying in a ditch, you need welfare. But the catch-22 is that the existence of welfare causes people on the margins of society to become losers who would die in a ditch without it, and who will never leave the welfare world due to the way the programs are set up: caps on income and assets to prevent use by the non-impoverished mean that if they actually try to turn their lives around and save some money, the payments abruptly stop, eliminating a large part of the incentive to try. I mean, if you're currently earning $0 and having most of your expenses paid for, the prospect of earning $30,000 (about the cut-off point for many welfare services) might as well seem like a 5,000 foot cliff face you have to scale.

[jacob_h]

Big Daddy government has screwed-up the incentives for women to try make life work with a husband.  Why does the baby daddy need to stick around if the government can provide food, shelter, health care, etc.?  The increase in minority criminality happens because children raised without fathers tend to have all sorts of social maladjustments.

This situation is spreading through whites more slowly than through other minorities because many whites have traditionalist (patriarchal/christian/WASPy/etc.) culture that is resisting the government incentives a little more effectively (but not completely, as rates of divorce, and out of wedlock births are increasing for whites as well).

The reason why the government keeps giving out these poisonous free-bees to the people is that it gets politicians elected; even though any sane person can see that the free-bees exist because of theft/onerous taxation of the productive classes and that the free-bees ruin the lives of the people accepting them in the long-run.  This is the problem with democracies - to get the masses to elect you, you need to appeal to their basest desires.

A sane ruler would discontinue these free-bees, even though that would cause short-term hardships, for the betterment of society in the long-run.  Of course, this sane ruler would probably have a hard time getting elected.

Why would a dad choose to be more of a deadbeat when there's less incentive to dodge the responsibilities of fatherhood... Said another way, if I had the choice to be an active father in a welfare household vs a no-welfare household, I would choose the one with the free income. The incentives to dodge responsibility were far, far higher before the welfare state, IMO.  If you chose the responsible route of being a good father, there was much more financial hardship in doing so.

I agree that being an active father in a welfare state makes the most logical sense - from the viewpoint of an ivory tower perch. 

But it doesn't often play-out that way in the real-world in America because the hand-in-hand societal changes of the sexual revolution and the implementation of the welfare state results in freeing women to keep searching for the next "better" man, aka ride the c*ck carousal like the Sex in the City girls on TV.

I don't know if the welfare state or birth control or the sexual revolution or liberal socialism are individually to blame.  I think they are all interlinked in the ever-advancing power acquisition of Progressivism. 

On the surface, all of these initiatives initially sound like good ideas, but the effects are societal decay (increases in crime are an example of evidence of this) and more political and social power to those espousing progressive ideas.

Pre-welfare state, the financial hardships may[1] have been greater.  But, it probably meant that people were forced to make more responsible choices.  I think this is true because a greater proportion of society's members were properly adjusted to living a civil life; for example, the crime rates in London have increased approx 50 times since the Victorian age - representing a decay in the proportion of civil, responsible members of society.

[1] Pre-welfare, people relied upon family, friends, and religious charity when they encountered hardships; and, all of these sources of help promoted the civilization-building traditional Western cultural values like civility, law-abidance, and marriage.  Whereas, the progressive welfare-state says, "Whatevs, here's your Obama-phone."

[Xan]

caps on income and assets to prevent use by the non-impoverished mean that if they actually try to turn their lives around and save some money, the payments abruptly stop, eliminating a large part of the incentive to try. I mean, if you're currently earning $0 and having most of your expenses paid for, the prospect of earning $30,000 (about the cut-off point for many welfare services) might as well seem like a 5,000 foot cliff face you have to scale.

This is one of the most depressing things I've seen in a while:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitl ... family-mak

You can do as well working one week a month at minimum wage as you can working $60,000-a-year, full-time, high-stress job.

[jacob_h]

Since this thread has turned into a discussion about welfare, let me share a story.

I have a co-worker (who is white, by the way) who hails from a poor family and is one of five children. Of them, he’s the only one who has a real job, while the others are all on various forms of welfare. It’s not like we talk about it a lot, but he occasionally brings up frustration with their behavior, which includes things like:

* having children with no thought for how to support them
* taking out loans they have no way to pay back
* eating terrible diets and getting Medicaid to pay for weight loss surgery
* going to college at age 35 at government expense to get degrees in worthless subjects (divinity, poetry, Native American studies, etc) despite no interest in the relevant career field, if there even is one

For these people, welfare is not their "leg up" while they get their lives together. It's a way of life. It's their means of support. It's how they live and it's what they anticipate being their source of income for the rest of their lives.

Despite what many idealistic liberals believe about the possibility of welfare being a transitory aid to people who fall on hard times, my co-worker who has grown up around welfare cases--who, by the way, is very liberal and fully supports welfare and cheerfully voted for Obama and reads the Huffington Post--basically takes the attitude of "welfare is what society gives to its losers so they don’t die in a ditch." He has no illusions that they're going to get their lives together one day.

He tells me that given that there are losers who need welfare to avoid dying in a ditch, you need welfare. But the catch-22 is that the existence of welfare causes people on the margins of society to become losers who would die in a ditch without it, and who will never leave the welfare world due to the way the programs are set up: caps on income and assets to prevent use by the non-impoverished mean that if they actually try to turn their lives around and save some money, the payments abruptly stop, eliminating a large part of the incentive to try. I mean, if you're currently earning $0 and having most of your expenses paid for, the prospect of earning $30,000 (about the cut-off point for many welfare services) might as well seem like a 5,000 foot cliff face you have to scale.

It is in instances like this that I wonder if some kind of old-style patronage/indentured servitude/Babylonian bondage/apprenticeship system shouldn't be restored.  It would be a lot more personally useful to me to clothe/feed/care (in accordance to some prescribed humane standard) for a temporary servant instead of having my tax dollars siphoned off to the welfare state so that someone can sit at home eating cheetos all day.  I would get useful labor and the servant would acquire skills and have a minimum standard of living.  For example, I currently have a large garden that needs tended and a small field of felled trees that needs to be chopped into firewood.  I would much rather teach someone how to do that while giving them room and board than support Welfare and the societal decay it causes.

[notsheigetz]

Fred on reparations for slavery.

Guaranteed reprehensible, as Fred likes to say....

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Reparations.shtml

[MediumTex]

Fred on reparations for slavery.

Guaranteed reprehensible, as Fred likes to say....

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Reparations.shtml

That's pretty tight and well-reasoned, and I don't disagree with what he is saying.

One area, however, that I think black people have a legitimate complaint (especially black males) is the way they are treated by the police.  It would be incredibly annoying to me to know that if I was simply driving my car around doing nothing wrong I would be FAR more likely to be stopped and questioned by the police than if I had been white.

I happen to have had a somewhat similar experience to what black people might feel about the police when I wore my hair long and in a sort of crazy style when I was a teenager.  Although I chose to look that way (as opposed to black people, who can't stop being black), almost everywhere I went the police harassed me, especially through random stops when I was driving to investigate things like "failing to maintain a lane while crossing a bridge" when the bridge had no stripes (this was before police cars had cameras in them).

On one occasion I was out late looking for an auto parts store that was open and as I pulled into the parking lot of an auto parts store that looked like it MIGHT be open (it wasn't), I saw a police officer parked nearby doing some paperwork.  I drove over to where he was sitting in a non-threatening way without getting too close and in a friendly way asked him if he knew of any other auto parts places that were open, since I assumed he knew which places around town were open late.  He told me to wait just a second and he pulled his car around behind me and turned on his lights and acted like he had stopped a suspicious person and proceeded to do one of these complete vehicle searches with other officers who came to the scene as backup and never acted like it was anything except a routine traffic stop.  I always remembered those experiences and thought how much it would suck to have to go through one's entire life being treated that way, and I understood how it might make you angry.

So yes, I think that most of the reparations line of thinking is ridiculous, but there are still a lot of racial problems in the U.S. that are not simply a function of black people not studying enough or being unable to avoid the temptation to destroy cities when they get mad about something.

Another area in which a lot of black people (and poor people in general) just get screwed is when it comes to legal representation in criminal matters.  If you don't have the money to pay a good lawyer, you WILL get treated worse in most criminal cases, and this is a really unfortunate state of affairs.  I'm not saying that if you break the law you shouldn't be willing to face the consequences, but people who commit similar crimes should face similar consequences, and that just isn't the reality in most cases, and I wish that were different.

There are lots of cross currents in any discussion of race/ethnicity, though.  I just wanted to toss my own experiences of being "black-like" in some respects and how it felt.

[dualstow]

One area, however, that I think black people have a legitimate complaint (especially black males) is the way they are treated by the police.  It would be incredibly annoying to me to know that if I was simply driving my car around doing nothing wrong I would be FAR more likely to be stopped and questioned by the police than if I had been white.

And of course it pervades our society; it's much more than the police.
Oftentimes, when I had a Dilberty office job I would run into a black coworker on the street and we would chat on the elevator on the way up to our floor. Still chatting as we went through security, he would get asked for his badge at least once a week, while I was never asked. His smile would disappear and he would shake his head saying, "I hate this." I didn't know what to do but stand there, wait for him to get through, and then apologize.