🚀 go-pugleaf

"Mark Richards" <markrichards8@hotmail.com> wrote:
>"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote in message
> > How do you know that I am white?
>
>You will probably find my answer more objectional than anything else I have
>said as yet. In this discussion, as well as in a previous lengthy discussion
>on education, you provided coherent arguments that were passionate and
>thoughtful (though I believe, wrong) without a word of pofanity. Good
>grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. You're white, all right. No doubt
>about it.

Shall I direct you to the writings of Colin Powell:
http://members.tripod.com/RobtShepherd/powell.html
or Thurgood Marshall
or Martin Luther King?


>> >So you think America owes its prosperity to blacks.
>>
>> Did I say that?  Nope.  I said that American was NOT built solely by
>> white men.
>
>Are we splitting hairs here? America was not built "solely" - as in 100% -
>by white men, and I doubt anyone would claim it was. But the white male
>contribution so overwhelmingly surpasses the combined total of everyone else

I disagree.  I do not think that the white male contribution
substantially exceeds the white female contribution (And I'm not even
counting the fact that there would be no white males to contribute if
not for white females).  And I don't think that the minority
contribution of any particular minority is significantly less than
that minority's percentage of the population.

>> >Bob, that is amazing. If
>> >blacks are such a benefit, Africa would be an economic powerhouse.
>>
>> Why would that necessarily follow.  Africa is not the United States.
>> Different continent, different climate, different resources, a lack of
>> investment by those with money.  A lack of good natural transportation
>> in the time before modern transportation
>
>None of which slowed down the white colonialists.

In Africa, it certainly did.  You recall "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."
have you heard the story of the Boer's trek which was hardly
comparable to that of the settlers of this country that crossed the
continent.

>Now we're heading for the most tiresome of arguments. The state of blacks is
>America is all the white man's fault.

I never said that.  Are you?

>The state of blacks in Africa is also the white man's fault.

I never said that.  Are you?

>If we turn our attention to Haiti, black failure and
>misery is the white man's fault.

I never said that.  Are you?

>> Perhaps it is because the old habits of the white supremacists did not
>> fade away after the end of slavery, and THEY kept the economy from
>> recovering.  They also kept the blacks down by failing to provide them
>> equal educational services.
>
>Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Ah.  Then you agree that we cannot make absolute and unqualified
statements as to what caused the problems and who is responsible for
solving them.

>Are you saying the white Southern leaders would choose
>poverty for themselves and their families out of spite, just to make sure
>blacks were denied opportunity?

Not out of spite.  Out of ignorance and unwillingness to change and
adapt.

4th grade white kids in Mississippi have reading test scores 8 points
below the national average.  8th graders, 10 points below average in
science.  (I'm not being selective - those are the two subject/grade
combinations for which NCES reports test scores broken down by both
race and state).

>This "equal education" argument works for me, too. We agree that whites have
>an obligation to educate their young.

We do?  Society as a whole has an obligation to educate its young.
There needs to be no racial lines drawn, and it would be better that
there be no racial lines drawn.

>You could say
>that recently freed and mostly uneducated slaves were denied the opportunity
>to learn education skills, and I would agree, except that the same argument
>is being used today.

Not the same argument.  Except by the voucher supporters that think
that the inner city kids ARE being deprived the opportunity in inner
city public schools.

>> >Do you believe it was impossible for estate
>> >owners to run their property without slaves,
>>
>> Probably.  There was a labor shortage of people willing to work the
>> back-breaking work needed to produce cotton.
>
>Yet the industrialized North managed without slavery. How strange.

It was industrialized.  It had resources the South did not have.  

>> That is why they first
>> imported slaves.  If the had had to pay workers, the wages would have
>> been high because of the shortage.  If they had had to pay their
>> slaves, and if they could not sell them, they would have gone
>> bankrupt.  Indeed that was WHY the South was unwilling to abandon
>> slavery, and part of the reason it did not recovery quickly from the
>> Civil War.
>
>I do not agree. The fact that the South utilized slavery does not prove it
>was the only or best alternative. Radical changes always come slowly. With
>this argument, any system can be justified: we use it, and it seems to work,
>therefore it's the best we can do.

I don't think anything I said contradicted this.  During the
transition, inevitably some people will get hurt.  Jefferson would
have been clobbered by emancipation.  He was deeply in debt, and his
assets were the human beings that he owned.

>> >> The wealthy white Northerners used their ill-gotten wealth to build
>> >> industry (incidentally, often by industrial espionage against the
>> >> British), whereas the South did not have the resources, and kept their
>> >> wealth in land like the aristocrats of Europe.  Yankee ingenuity also
>> >> included Yankee cutthroatedness.
>
>Let's see if I get this:
>
>Northerners used slavery to acquire wealth, then eliminated slavery when it
>no longer suited them. Then they took the proceeds and built the economic
>foundation of our country.

Not quite.  Northerners profited from the import of slaves to the
South.  Slavery never was significantly established in the North
because the industry and crops did not require the manpower that that
of the South required.

>So financial centers of New York and Boston, the mills and factories of New
>Enlgand and the Midwest - these existed only because of slavery. Is that it?

Not "only".  But it was a factor. One needs only to look at the
relative populations and wealth of Virginia and Massachusetts before
the Revolution, as well as the power of Virginia in the early
republic, to realize that slaveholding Virginia was the economic
engine that made this country possible (Massachusetts especially
needed the South during the time that when the port of Boston was
blockaded.)  The Civil War continued until Virginia was totally
subdued and not significantly longer shows that this power did not
dwindle rapidly, while on the other hand, without the slave-picked
cotton that was so highly valued in Europe, the Confederacy would not
have survived more than a year or so.

>> Am I ashamed of my country?  Not hardly.  I'm PROUD of my country -
>> all of it *including* the minorities
>
>Including minorities? So far your praise has been exclusively for
>minorities. Are you proud of anything whites have done?

I'm proud of America.  ALL of it.  My "praise for minorities" comes
only in contrast to your apparent denial that anyone but "white males"
built America.

>who have as much right as I do to
>> its wealth (maybe more, because the ancestors of most blacks were here
>> for 300+ years, whereas my ancestors came here 100-150 years ago).
>
>With that logic, you have more right to the wealth of this country than any
>recent immigrant. But I'll bet that's not what you meant.

I said "as much right" as my main claim.  The parenthetical note is
only if you were to ignore the fact that nearly all blacks in this
country are descended from people who were here before the Revolution
and most whites are descended from people who came here after 1800.
Unless YOU are saying that the immigrants to this country built the
country.

>Here's a revolutionary idea. None of us have the "right" to the wealth of
>the country. We only have the right to earn it.

OK.

>It's the redistribution of that wealth that creates anger.

The redistribution takes place because a large sector of the
population did NOT "earn" the wealth of the country, but instead
inherited it from others who "gained" that wealth in part by "using"
the ancestors of another sector of the population, in so doing setting
up unequal conditions that make it harder for the latter sector to
"earn" wealth than those who were born with wealth.

>The fact is that
>blacks as a group take so much more out than they put in. As a group,
>whatever they contribute is far offset by what they cost.

If they were not so readily identified by skin color, this might not
be the case.  I am sure that I could select some 14% of the population
which is entirely white, which would be even less productive than
blacks if treated as a "group".  But since you can't see that 14%, you
don't case epithets at them.

>Once, most of us thought like you. In our egalitarian youth, with our state
>indoctrination still fresh in our young minds, we agreed that we had to make
>up for the sins of the past. And we have made up for it. The transfer of
>wealth of white to black since Johnson's Great Society is roughly equal to
>amount of reparations being discussed these days.

I don't hear much discussion of "reparations", so I wouldn't know.

>But it hasn't worked. Every black inequity is at least as bad is it was in
>the 50's, and some are far worse.

Not hardly.

 We say it's high time blacks shouldered
>their own responsibilities like any other American and stop trying to blame
>anything and everything else for their failures. You appear to be saying
>that we've done virtually nothing, and in fact all black suffering is the
>fault of whites.

I most certainly do NOT say that, and have no idea where you get that
from what I say.  You seem to be a black and white thinker (in more
than one sense) in that you think my opposing your racist thinking
means that I am a racist in the other direction.

>Here is your quandary, which I have yet to see anyone from your side
>address:
>
>1) Whites throughout the world must create or at least          finance a
>modern society for blacks. It is unacceptable     to expect them to create
>it themselves, even if the             know-how is provided for them.
>2) Blacks, as a group, are equal to whites in every way.

I don't think either of those two statements is true, though the
second would depend on what you man by the word "equal" and  the
phrase "every way".

lojbab