THE PATRIOT POST ALEXANDER'S COLUMN 12/03/2014

Alexander's Column Black Privilege From Suppression to Supremacy By Mark Alexander · December 3, 2014    "There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue ... if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice." --John Adams (1775) From MLK to BHO. 1963: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." --Martin Luther King 2014: "The fact is ... a deep distrust exists [in] communities of color. ... There are still problems and communities of color aren't just making these problems up. ... [The] frustrations ... have deep roots in many communities of color. ... Too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly." --Barack Hussein Obama That's right, more than half a century has passed, and "color" still trumps "character." But the segregation between those distinctions is not the result of racism -- quite the contrary. In August of 1963, when King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial, parts of the nation were deeply entrenched in racial discord. Notably, that racial tension was far from limited to the stereotypical Deep South struggle. In 1966, when King went to Obama's hometown of Chicago, where racial factions had erupted in riotous violence, he observed, "I can tell you that the hatred and hostility in Chicago are really deeper than in Alabama and Mississippi." Chicago was then, and is in many respects now, not only a cauldron of racial hatred but also the birthplace of the black supremacist movement. Indeed, Obama was steeped in racist hostility by his Afro-centric "pastor," Jeremiah "G-- d--- America" Wright, the mentor Obama says filled the role of the father he never had. Of such racial antagonists, King said, "Those who are associated with 'Black Power' and black supremacy are wrong." King had the right idea in '63, but the Democratic Party has, over the last 50 years, inverted the wisdom of this iconic civil rights leader. Today, this agenda implies that King has rather said, "I have a dream that my children will be judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character." King's dream has been betrayed by Democrat cadres of "poverty pimps," who have done a very effective job of corralling black voters into their most loyal constituency. Today, more than 90% of black voters support Democrats. The party accomplished this subjugation by convincing generations of black Americans that they will forever be victims of racial inequality and must therefore be dependent upon the state to survive. The "Great Society" social programs of King's era have, in effect, enslaved generations of black men, women and children on urban poverty plantations. In 1964, the poverty rate was 19%. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson's Economic Opportunity Act, which launched the Democrats' so-called "War on Poverty," more than $15 trillion of individual and national treasure has been redistributed, ostensibly, to "lift up the poor." Today, after Obama has redistributed almost $1 trillion in national treasure for his failed "economic recovery," the poverty rate for black families is now 27%. Black unemployment is 11.6%, more than double the rate of white unemployment. Among blacks age 16 to 19, unemployment is now a staggering 36.8%. And that brings us to August of 2014, and the fatal confrontation between a white police officer and a towering black thug (a.k.a. "unarmed teenager") in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. After Officer Darren Wilson shot assailant Michael Brown in self-defense, as affirmed by at least six black eyewitness reports before a grand jury that investigated all the evidence, Brown became the latest poster child for the Democrats' race-baiting political hustlers. Facts of this confrontation notwithstanding, it is a case study on the sense of entitlement that emerges in any interracial interaction that can be reframed by Demo race hustlers as white-on-black injustice in order to foment racial disunity and distract the attention of their black constituents from more legitimate concerns -- such as black-on-black crime, drug abuse, rampant illegitimacy and fatherlessness, crumbling inner-city schools, and a pernicious and destructive "gangsta" culture. However, Obama's race-bait confab at the White House this week, featuring über-racial antagonista Al Sharpton in the seat of honor next to Joe Biden, addressed none of this "black culture blight." Instead, it was about appeasing his constituents by insisting that men and women in blue are responsible for the racial tension between police and inner-city black folks. To solve this problem, Obama announced that his corrupt Attorney General Eric Holder "is going to be working ... to convene a series of these meetings all across the country, because this is not a problem simply of Ferguson, Missouri; this is a problem that is national." He then declared, in a self-aggrandizing third-person, "Part of the reason this time will be different is because the president of the United States is deeply invested in making sure this time is different." (So, are we to assume that in all the previous times Obama has thrown accelerant on racially charged incidents he wasn't really "invested"?) However, what underlies the "racial entitlement" that emerges in events like Ferguson, as it did in the 2012 Zimmerman/Martin case, is something much more endemic, dangerous and consequential. The foundation of this racial entitlement is the assumption of "black privilege," similar to the Race Industry's constant cry of "white privilege" in that it is associated with skin color. However, black privilege differs from white privilege in that its scope is far more pervasive, discriminatory and, yes, racist. Across the nation, mostly on the "more enlightened" college and university campuses, professors and students alike are engaged in "whiteness studies" promoting the notion of "white privilege." It is not coincidental that "white-skin privilege" has its origin in the 1960s writings of the Weatherman terrorist group headed by William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Yes, that would be the same Ayers and Dohrn who were Chicago neighbors and friends of Barack and Michelle Obama, and who launched BO's political career by hosting his first fundraiser in 1995. Today, the term "white privilege" encompasses the assumption of social status based solely on skin color -- accessibility to more beneficial unearned societal privileges than non-whites. I would argue that there are to varying degrees undeniable societal biases based on all those human traits and attributes we are supposed to ignore -- race, gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, etc. Do I think those biases are so pronounced that some groups experience more privilege under some circumstances than others? Yes. Is it worth discussing? Yes, but only if that discussion includes the whole color spectrum of privilege. Unfortunately, there are no academic degrees or studies in "black privilege," and it does not even rate a Wiki entry for proper definition, though my colleague, former leftist radical David Horowitz, has written on the subject extensively. Beyond all the benefits that clearly fit under the category of "black privilege" (if anyone dared label them as such), perhaps the most obvious would be the across-the-board institutionalization of affirmative action and a wide range of other preferential treatment standards based on the sole attribute of being anything but white. It has been more than 150 years since the last person in America was born into slavery prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. And on December 5th, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified, followed by a plethora of special protections for those who are anything but white, including most recently the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Since 1863, black Americans have in ever-greater numbers achieved enormous success, including the 2008 election and 2012 re-election of a black president (though some of that president's supporters are experiencing significant buyer's remorse). Black privilege dictates that all such special preferences must apply in perpetuity. However, there is a much darker side to black privilege, which underlies racially politicized incidents like the Ferguson case. Here is how that underlying privilege manifested in that case. First, if a white police officer (or a "white Hispanic" citizen as the race-obsessed New York Times labeled the defendant in the Zimmerman/Martin case) shoots a black person in self-defense, black privilege dictates that shooting is indisputably racist. In Ferguson, black privilege meant that a drug-using 300-pound black man was entitled to walk into a convenience store, brazenly steal merchandise and physically assault a tiny store clerk. It means he was entitled to walk down the middle of a street taunting traffic. It means that when a police officer told him to get out of the street, he was entitled to punch the officer through his patrol vehicle window and attempt to take the officer's weapon. It means that he was entitled to defy lawful police orders to stop when he turned and charged toward that officer to assault him again. It means when the officer shot that black man, it was, by default, racist. It means that you can adopt a "hands up" symbolic gesture, though the assailant's hands were not up. It means that race trumps facts, even as determined by a grand jury. It means that, in the name of "civil rights," black people are entitled to riot and loot small businesses, most owned by responsible and hard-working black residents. Black privilege also means that a black president and his black attorney general are entitled to frame this case as one based on "color" rather than "character," and launch a national constituency-building initiative. Meanwhile, they are entitled to ignore the epidemic of black-on-black violence and the grossly disproportionate examples of black-on-white violence occurring in urban centers across the nation. Notably, as Obama and Holder are busy dealing "race cards," maybe the political urgency is compelled by the findings of a comprehensive national survey on racism by Rasmussen: "Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way." Obama and Holder would far better serve their constituents if they focused on the real divide in America -- the moral divide that accounts for the racial disparity in crime. The fact is, the number of our black brothers and sisters across the nation who take great offence at black privilege is growing. In 1911, Booker T. Washington, the American political leader, educator and former president of Tuskegee University, wrote in "My Larger Education": "There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy, and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. ... There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public." What do modern-day "race-problem solvers" like Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson think of Mr. Washington's century-old observation? In 1963, Martin Luther King concluded his timeless "I Have a Dream" speech by asserting the need to distinguish character over color. "If America is to be a great nation," he said, "this must become true." Today, however, and for as long as the race hustlers about whom Booker T. Washington wrote are the de facto spokesmen for black Americans, King's dream will remain only just that. Pro Deo et Constitutione -- Libertas aut Mors Semper Fortis Vigilate Paratus et Fidelis