A Message To White America:
Black People Can Teach You A Lot If You’d Just Listen
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I recently ran into a guy at the supermarket who came up and introduced himself as I was loading my goodies into the car. He said that a friend of his pointed me out and told him that I was Eric Wattree, and he wanted to tell me that while he didn’t always agree with me, he loved reading my articles because he appreciated the "outside of the box" insight that I bring to many issues. Then he went on to say the following:
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"But here lately, every article you write seems to always be Black, Black, Black. One of the reasons that I enjoy reading you is your opinions tend to be balanced and evenhanded, but again, lately, your focus seems to be narrowing, and I believe that could have a negative impact on your readership. I’m a Republican, so naturally, I don’t agree with many of the things you say, but you have changed my thinking on a few things, so I really think that you’re worth reading. Like I said, I don’t always agree with your overall philosophy, but I do like the way you think, and I believe that you would gain many more readers if you’d continued to focus on America as a whole, as opposed to just limiting your writing to Black issues alone."
The gentleman really opened my eyes to an important issue that from this point on I’m going to take into consideration - I need to make it a point to more carefully incorporate what he considered "Black issues" into the impact that they have on America as a whole, and I want to thank Bob for providing me with that insight.
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But I pointed out to Bob that while I agreed that we should be discussing America as a whole, that’s less than realistic, because when we discuss America as a whole, the discussion always turns out to be "White, White, White." So in essence, what he’s actually saying is, I need to stick to discussing more White issues. But I think I’ve found a way to remedy that, and at the same time, be much more informative to all.
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But the fact is, a discussion of the Black experience IS a discussion of America as a whole, because it permeates everything that America is as a nation, and it goes to the very core of what America is suppose to stand for. What people who think like Bob need to recognize is when the founding fathers agreed to compromise on the issue of slavery while establishing this nation, they also compromised every word and sentence that they so eloquently laid out in their founding documents, and America as a whole has been paying a huge price for it every since. That one decision, made over two hundred years ago, is having a negative impact on our current economic condition even now.
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Few people can legitimately deny that Barack Obama literally saved America - and that includes those people who love to call him an "un-American, socialist, Kenyan" - from having to endure a second Great Depression. But since many of them - including a few Black critics who are suppose to be educated - have so little knowledge of history, that they have little or no idea of what this one Black man saved them and their families from having to endure; nor do they have any idea of how much better that both our economy and our lives would be if it weren’t for the racist obstructionism of the GOP. The GOP has PURPOSELY sabotaged economic relief for the American people for not only political purposes, but to prevent this first Black President of the United States from getting the historic credit that he deserves. Thus, ALL of America is suffering as a direct result of the nation’s failure to correct the founding fathers' hypocrisy regarding race over two hundred years ago.
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Also reflective of this problem is how the race issue is used to keep America divided. Generally, the only time we see a story in the media that’s Black oriented is if a Black person does something extraordinary, or if a White cop kills a Black kid - and even then (in the case of the cop) the story is about why the White cop was justified in his actions. That’s one of the reasons that Black people have traditionally been seen as unimportant in America, because we’re invisible, and the American people know virtually nothing about us. And the frustrating part about that is, it’s not always based on blatant racism. In most cases it’s based on America’s unconscious racist attitudes. In many cases the White people who suffer from this malady routinely have family barbeques with their Black next door neighbors.
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Thus, Black people need a voice. We need to be given visibility in America - and not as just criminals, victims, dysfunctional entertainers, or swaggering athletes. The AVERAGE Black person needs to be seen and heard from in this country - the postal worker, the salesperson, the computer analyst. America needs to see these people, and understand their views, concerns, and love for their families. America needs to understand that Black people - and every other cultural ethnicity in this country - are just like them, and they ALL bring something culturally unique and of value to the table. Barack Obama has benefitted this nation greatly, and contrary to popular belief, he’s not an aberration. There are literally thousands of Barack Obamas out there, so because of a handful of insecure and self-serving bigots, the nation is wasting its most valuable natural resource - the brilliance and unique skills within its population.
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| Dr. Mark Dean, Principle Architect Of The Personal Computer |
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So a discussion on the Black experience doesn’t just benefit Black people and minorities, it’s also important to America as a whole. Minorities make up a huge part of the 99 percenters, and since we are literally in a class war in this country, minorities and the White lower and middle class are natural allies. So it’s important that we know one another, so the enemies of the American middle class can’t divide us and neutralize our political clout - and currently, that’s their most effective weapon.
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In addition, the White middle class needs to recognize that Black people can bring much to the table that can benefit them greatly. As a direct result of our having to routinely endure and overcome every kind of adversity over the centuries, Black people have a specialized insight into sugarcoated malevolence and demagoguery that White people don’t always share. Having to deal with, overcome, and outwit blatant and more subtle racists of every kind every day of our lives has caused a sixth sense to evolve in Black people. It has caused us to develop an intellectual muscularity in this area that’s nearly infallible, and it’s a form of knowledge that the White middle class could benefit from greatly.
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Conservatives like to claim that Black people vote Democratic in order to get government handouts, but that’s not the case at all. We vote Democratic because we’re not idiots. Here are the facts:
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The vast majority of Black people in this country are middle class or above. African Americans are the second largest consumer group in America with a combined buying power of over $892 billion currently and likely over $1.1 trillion by 2012. In 2002 African American owned businesses accounted for 1.2 million of the US's 23 million businesses, and 47% of Africans Americans own their own homes. - U.S. Census Bureau. And in spite of the fact that Black people are forced to run a marathon against White people while wearing lead boots, spotting White folks 50 yards, and a study has shown that a White male with a felony has an equal chance of being hired for a job as a Black male with a clean record, as a percentage, there are only 1% more Black people on welfare than Whites, and in actual numbers, many more Whites people are on welfare than Blacks (Whites - 38.8%; Blacks - 39.8%).
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So again, it’s not handouts that keep Black people flocking to the Democratic Party, it’s that sixth sense that allows us to see through political demagoguery. It struck me as completely ironic when Herman Cain said (echoing a GOP talking point) that he wasn’t getting Black support because two-thirds of Black people were brainwashed. Yet who turned out to be right when Cain turned out to be just another philandering pervert, the "enlightened" GOP, or the "brainwashed" Black community?
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The same was true of Dr. Ben Carson. Even as Carson was being lauded by "politically sophisticated" White conservatives, once he started talking politics Black people immediately saw right through him - and that’s in spite of the fact that he had formerly been one of the heroes of the Black community. Now that it’s been revealed that Carson is guilty of plagiarism and being associated with a shady company that was selling "miracle cures" and snake oil, it seems that the Black community was right on the money yet again (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ben-carson-issues-apology-plagiarism-book/story?id=28092225).
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And finally, if the nation had followed the lead of Black people in shunning Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in droves, we wouldn’t be suffering through our current economic crisis. Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt, abolished the Fairness Doctrine, and destroyed America’s industrial base, and George W. Bush destroyed the nation’s economy as a whole. Thus, in terms of rock-solid political statistics, Black people are batting a thousand.
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| Child Labor During The Great Depression |
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
The American middle class is being decimated. The reason that we're being decimated is because the corporatists and their political cronies have a vested interest in lowing the standard of living of the American middle class in order to become more competitive in the new global economy against countries who pay their workers less per week than the average middle-class American worker spends on lunch per day.
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So we'd better wake up and recognize that we’re knee-deep in a class war. The business community is making record profits, so there’s absolutely no economic reason for unemployment to be so high - and regardless to what Obama does, he can’t force a private corporation to hire workers if they find it in their best interest not to. And let there be no doubt it, it is in their best interest not to. They’re using high unemployment in order to beat the American middle class into a desperate state of submission. That way the American people will be more agreeable to lowering their standard of living. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see what’s going on.
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So, while they have us divided, miserable, and debating the evils of socialism, they're using capitalism to cut our throats. It’s not the “isms” that are evil, it’s the people who are running the “isms” who are the source of our problems.
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So if we're smart - and have anything less than several million dollars tucked away - we'd better ALL start listening to one another. If we fail to do so, the Tea Party, the Mexican Mafia, and the Black Guerilla Army are ALL going to find themselves shoulder-to shoulder picking virtual cotton on the very same Corporate-Republican plantation. Thus, the poor and middle class had better wake up - and fast!!!
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GOP STRATEGY: DIVIDE AND CONQUER
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Eric L. Wattree
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.