A major part of the solution should be the elimination of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state
The Stream:
Walter Williams- As a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains — over some of the highest hurdles and in a very short span of time — of any racial group in mankind’s history.
What’s the evidence? If one totaled up the earnings of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank among the 20 richest nations.
It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, who once headed the world’s mightiest military. Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities, and a few are among the world’s richest people.
The significance of these and other achievements is that at the end of the Civil War, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in a little over a century — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people.
Just as importantly, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on the face of the earth would such progress be possible except in the United States of America.
How Can These Gains Be Extended?
The big and thorny issue that confronts our nation is how these gains can be extended to the one-third or more of the black population for whom they have proved elusive.
A major part of the solution should be the elimination of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. more here
This sorta ties in with the white privilege thread today.
If you think it’s bad enough getting passed over for work that was given to a minority, because PC and other stupidity, imagine how a black person actually got a job on his own merits feels when people are staring at his ass thinking it was because of PC, affirmative action and quotas? I have been on that end of the stick, and it wasn’t fun being the only Conservative in that office either. lol.
Many officers consider Colin Powell an Affirmative Action product.
awd
Colin Powell, even his name implies that he is an a$$hole.
Speaking of Colin Powell – if Anglophobic policies (like ‘affirmative action’) were eliminated, the economic gains by blacks would vanish.
They can’t compete on a level playing field.
I thought it was lack of education and being given everything without working for it.
The only people holding back Black Americans are themselves. I am sick of the blame game on external excuses. Even Blacks can recognize political correctness when they see and hear it.
I’ve loved Walter Williams unceasingly since the seventies and I’m as white as an unused powder puff, except where the sun tans me. He’s brilliant and conservative and that equals hot for me.
This was linked to a post by Fred Reed over at American Digest:
If you are a white student in college, you doubtless hear daily that white people are evil, the principal cause of everything wrong with the world. Whiteness is bad, white people are bad. We are to blame for everything.
If you believe this, you are being gamed. What you are being told is nonsense. If you have the intelligence and self-respect to think for yourself, ask:
“What have other races and ethnic groups accomplished in the world compared to what we white people have?”
This question will be shocking to you because you have been carefully programmed not to think such things. But ask. I think you will find that the groups who complain the most have accomplished the least. Check for yourself.
A white man’s stick hut. We began building these things in 1137.
Look around you. Can you find anything with a moving part that was not invented by whites? Anything electronic? Cars, telephones, computers, aircraft, antibiotics, on and on–all sprang from the minds of white people. You are not supposed to say such things, and could be run out of a university for it–but ask yourself, if you have the courage: Is it true? Do not think that because things are commonplace or easy to use that they are not products of fields of extraordinary difficulty.
The Hubble Space Telescope. Twenty-five hundred years of phenomenally complex math, physics, electronics, optics, and chemistry went into the Hubble. It is entirely a white man’s show. Nobody else has come close. Your professors will not want you to think this. They will not want you to think. But you have a mind. Use it.
Look around your university. Who do you see taking the hard subjects–math, chemistry, physics, engineering, philosophy, computer science? Whites and Asians…right? Are they the kind of people who complain constantly about White Privilege? You may notice a pattern here: Those who can, do. The rest bitch and moan.
How about your own classes? You are not blind. If you think for yourself, you can see who the smart ones are, and who are those getting a free ride. Usually, a free ride at your expense. Your professors will not want you to notice this either. The question is whether you have been so profoundly brainwashed that you cannot see the obvious.
Being very young, you will probably have little idea of the vast body of knowledge, won over millenia, behind all the things you take for granted. At your age, I didn’t either. It takes years to get a handle on things. It will be harder for you because your universities will discourage you from looking around you. But glance at the very partial list below (I paste from an ancient column of mine) to get an idea of what the white race has done over the centuries. You will never have heard of many of these things. And that is curious. While your nose is being rubbed into the virtues, often real, sometimes imagined, of other groups, your own race is seldom motioned except to revile it.
Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry. Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Skyscrapers. The piano. The harpsichord. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera at great length.
If you talk about these things on campus, you will be called a “white supremacist.” This is silly. But calling you a racist is an effective way of making you shut up. Do you want to be supreme over anyone? I do not. Yet other races are proud of their achievements. Why should you not be? Ask where they would be without electricity, sterile water, telephones and–well, just about everything.
You hear from your professors that white people were guilty of colonization, slavery, and oppression. This is true. What your professors will not point out is that such behavior was, and is, universal. Human beings are a sorry species, given to murder, torture, genocide, thievery, looting, conquest, and slavery. This has been, and is, true of Africans, American Indians, Latin Americans, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Japanese, Chinese, and Europeans.
The Larrge Hadron Collider, a gigantic particle accelerator at CERN, in Switzerland, a massive instrument for research in subatomic physics. It is one of the greatest and most challenging projects of humanity. The Japanese could do this if they wanted to badly enough and soon, perhaps, the Chinese. They didn’t. The technology is a white man’s show, starting from Athens 2500 years ago. Are you sure you should be ashamed of this?
You mgmt reasonably be proud of these things. Any other race would be. Your people invented virtually the entire modern world. But that is not too important. The important thing is understanding that intellectual advance comes from some groups and not others. This may not seem fair, and you are not supposed to notice it, much less talk about it. Yet it is obvious. You might prefer that it not be true, but it is true.
Think of the above as a white man’s cave paintings.
http://fredoneverything.org/notes-for-a-white-kid-in-universityan-introduction-to-the-blindingly-obvious/
I’m with Loretta on this one. They hold themselves back.
I work with some damn fine people who just happen to be
black and don’t give a rat’s ass.
@jpm – thanks. That article is a must read!