Toward a Usable Black History
John H. McWhorter

You brought me here in CHAINS! You brought me here in CHAINS!" James Baldwin exclaimed to a white interviewer in the late 1960s, summing up the sense of our history that most blacks have. Yes, we pay lip service to our having "survived" in this country, but the image most resonant to us is being brought here packed in ships, treated like animals for 250 years, and pushed to the margins of society for the next 100. Many black thinkers downplay even the "survival," depicting modern black America as a variation on slavery and dismissing the progress we've made since the 1960s by condemning successful blacks as "house niggers." The result: for most of us, "black history" summons images of endless degradation—slavery, the quick demise of Reconstruction, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Klan, lynchings, the beatings of civil rights activists, Dred Scott, Emmett Till.

Not to attend to such things would be folly; but a history only of horrors cannot inspire. What could be more demoralizing than Mba Mbulu's Ten Lessons: An Introduction to Black History, for example, a chronicle mostly of slavery and segregation, with "White People's Attacks on Other People" and "Back in Our Place" as typical chapter titles? Except for a little dollop of blacks' contributions to what is called "White History," the overall message is a grim saga of victimization. This kind of history is deeply damaging to blacks. When "Learn your history" means "Don't get fooled by superficial changes," today's New York City Street Crimes Unit can't be distinguished from yesterday's Bull Connor, and our aggrieved despair over our sense of disinclusion from the national fabric remains as sharp as ever. Could any people find inner peace when taught to think of their own society as their enemy?

Our question, then, is whether black history offers us lessons beyond teaching us that we are eternally strangers in our own land. This is a momentous question: we can only feel a visceral sense of legitimacy on our own soil when black identity is not founded on a sense of whites as the enemy without—when we feel American first and black second, which is far from the case today. Today's diversity fans will object that this goal smacks of the erasure of a culture. And in a way, they are correct: once wariness between groups disappears, people marry across ethnic lines and create a new hybrid people. History records no exceptions; love knows no bounds.

In real life, the "salad bowl" metaphor that diversity fans use to describe our proper relation to American life can only describe a temporary stage and shouldn't be our ultimate goal. To be sure, many blacks, and many white fellow travelers, see the competing "melting pot" metaphor as threatening. But since only assimilation will give black Americans a sense of America as a homeland rather than a place of temporary residence, a truly useful black history must teach black Americans that the melting pot is possible and desirable. Yes, residual racism persists in America and must be identified and expunged. But a black history whose main message is "Watch out!" sows cynicism and parochialism and can only point us backward. The history blacks learn must prepare us to take advantage of the ever richer opportunities available to us rather than to resist them as selling out to the Man.

Yet we were indeed brought here in chains. Is there anything in our deeply troubled story in America to give us the courage to get past this and embrace becoming, to the depths of our being, American?

We'll never do it by one popular approach black historians have taken. The sense that what has happened to us in this country is too demoralizing to focus on has led them to parse our time here as a gloomy second act, after a glorious and untainted first act in Mother Africa.

Hence Kwanzaa , for example, created in 1966 by Afrocentric scholar-activist Maulana Karenga and modeled on African harvest celebrations. It is founded on seven guiding principles with Swahili names, most stressing collectivist ideas, from unity (umoja) and collective responsibility (ujima) to cooperative economics (ujamaa). Yet after 35 years, few black Americans practice Kwanzaa; Hallmark may have released a line of Kwanzaa cards, but I would venture that 19 out of 20 blacks would draw a blank on the seven principles, and Christmas remains as central to the black experience as it was in 1966.

Let's face it: calls to found our identities upon Mother Africa are asking us to pretend to feel living kinship with people who speak languages we do not know, who neither move, dance, cook, sing, nor view the world the way we do. We are asked to adopt a "culture" that never existed: the monocultural conception of "Africa" is a post-colonial construction, essentializing the peoples of an enormous continent home to over 1,000 languages, with even Swahili spoken in only eight of the more than 50 African nations. Afrocentrists here fall prey to the American tendency to see Africa as a continent of indistinguishable "black people," but the Africans who sold one another into slavery were certainly under no illusion that "black" overrode cultural differences. For a descendant of Sierra Leoneans to learn Swahili and cherry-pick aspects of assorted African cultures is like a white American of Welsh ancestry slipping on some Dutch clogs and breaking into a Russian trépak, while exclaiming in Portuguese that, after all, "Europe is Europe."

Since most black Americans cannot know exactly what parts of Africa they trace to, perhaps pan-Africanism is the best we can do. But the artificiality remains. Culture sits in the heart; a holiday made up at someone's desk a few decades ago cannot help but sit in the head. Kwanzaa asks the black car salesman in Chicago to celebrate the first fruits of the harvest in a Ugandan village. Obviously, we—as a people so deeply American—need something beyond this.

Then there is the Afrocentric history school, founded on the idea that the ancient Egyptians were black, that the ancient Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt, and that the Western intellectual heritage was therefore a black creation. Advocates cherish this idea as giving black students a sense of historical importance, but Afrocentric history is false, based on laughably sloppy scholarship. Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa has refuted all of its tenets, and, despite the predictable cries of racism and right-wing backlash, no Afrocentric historian has presented a factual rebuttal. The facts are simply too clear to refute.

Afrocentric history takes us away from becoming fully American in another way, too. It is difficult to feel truly a member of a society that you suspect considers you slightly dim. How realistic is it to expect to be accepted as mental equals, when blacks presenting themselves as "professors" frame our history as a mythical narrative, as if we were preliterate hunter-gatherers? And especially when the narrative is a tissue of fabrications anyway, how constructive is it to foist upon us a "history" that only heightens our sense of embattlement and alienation?

Black Americans will never again live in Africa; our connection to it will remain largely gestural. Charting that connection is valuable in itself: I have devoted much of my own academic career to doing this on the topic of Creole languages. But beyond the ceremonial and the academic, a conception of ourselves as balefully conflicted victims of a diaspora from an alien continent will serve no purpose in giving us a sense of rootedness in the only country we will ever know as home.

If McW is underestimating the level of racism in America, some people overestimate it as well.

Why can't we get that sense from the pantheon of black heroes amply celebrated in TV documentaries or in Black History Month—upgraded from what used to be a week? The truth is that the big pictures of Harriet Tubman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, Medgar Evers, and so on that festoon urban public libraries every February, the "Great Blacks in History" calendars hanging in the typical black barbershop, and children's books like the endlessly reprinted Color Me Brown are about as inspirational to most blacks as Mount Rushmore is to most whites. We genuflect—but we do not feel.

The reasons for this are local to our moment. Because many black Americans today have drunk in a conception of racism as a perpetual obstacle rather than a surmountable inconvenience, they see black heroes less as inspirations than as exceptions to the rule. Sure, they admire Harriet Tubman; but it is a different thing to transform this formal esteem into a sense of individual empowerment, when so many modern black thinkers and leaders insist that black success is merely a matter of a few tokens let through a crack in the door. Instead of being moved by our heroes, we see them as beside the point.

Furthermore, today's sense that "real" black people define themselves against the mainstream has a way of blunting the inspiration that blacks once derived from figures like Marian Anderson and George Washington Carver, who made their mark in equaling whites in a race-neutral activity. In a black popular culture that celebrates rebellion, that enshrines as "authentic" the antisocial tendencies that early civil rights leaders deplored, it is not an accident that Malcolm X is the most beloved black figure of the past among young blacks. Within our Zeitgeist, Phillis Wheatley's ability to write classical poetry in English after having been born in Africa and taken into slavery elicits respect but not identification. After 1960s radicals lambasted Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks for conforming to "white" norms, any aspiring black poet was unlikely to seek inspiration from an ancestor who took her cue from the likes of Alexander Pope.

If black history in America really had been a mere matter of a few superstars rising above a vale of tears, then our past would be of little genuine use to us, and the best we could do would be to counsel spiritual fortitude. But in fact, ordinary blacks, bonding together on the communal level like all successful immigrant groups, have forged spectacular successes in America. A pernicious ideological tradition, dismissive of the power of human agency and romanticizing failure, has painted over glorious aspects of blacks' story in America with dutiful recitations of the horrors and setbacks, hoodwinking blacks into thinking that it was ever thus.

Urban black business districts will serve as Exhibit A in a new black history, an antidote to the view that between the demise of Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance there's little but lynching and Plessy v. Ferguson. During this very period, blacks were building thriving commercial districts of their own. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has remarked: "What really captivated me was that in the all-black world of Amos 'n' Andy . . . there was an all-black department store, owned and operated by black attendants for a black clientele." Ideally, more blacks would know that such worlds-within-a-world actually existed.

Chicago's "Bronzeville" is a handy example. As the city industrialized after 1875, blacks occupied a three-by-15-block enclave on the South Side, and the Great Migration from the South swelled the black population to 109,548 by 1920. Bronzeville, also known as "Black Metropolis," was home to several black newspapers, including the Bee, which occupied a magnificent Art Deco building, and the Defender, a publication of national influence, whose editorials urging blacks to migrate from the South were a major spur for the Great Migration itself. The literary-minded of Bronzeville also had such news magazines available to them as The Half-Century and The Light.

It was said that if you held up a horn at State and 35th, it would play itself because of the musical winds always blowing. Bronzeville was a leading center of innovation in jazz, nurturing Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Earl "Fatha" Hines. Oscar Micheaux's film company, producing a pioneering oeuvre of "race movies," was based not in New York or Hollywood but Bronzeville.

For all the jazz and journalism, though, at the end of the day, the business of Bronzeville was business: there were 731 business establishments in 1917, in 61 different lines of work. Of several banks, the most prominent was the Binga State Bank founded in 1908, Jesse Binga having begun with a coal, oil, and gas wagon and parlayed this into realty investments. Many other Bronzeville blacks purchased real estate just as avidly, amassing holdings that totaled $100 million by 1929. Several magnificent buildings besides the one housing the Bee ornamented Bronzeville, including the Overton Hygienic—which contained a cosmetics firm, a life-insurance company, a major bank, and a drugstore—and the seven-floor Knights of Pythias building, put up by one of the district's innumerable lodges (the inspiration for the Mystic Knights of the Sea on Amos 'n' Andy, which took place in Chicago in its original incarnation). The district boasted seven insurance companies, 106 lawyers, and several hotels, including "The Finest Colored Hotel in the World," the Hotel Brookmont.

once wariness between groups disappears, people marry across ethnic lines and create a new hybrid people. History records no exceptions; love knows no bounds.

For example, I agree with him when he said this: (which was in post #1)

Racism in America is the cancer eating at our national heart. To deny it is insane. I don't expect you to reallly understand if you don't live here, but I promise you, every single day brings another outrage, another stupid defensive posturing, another noose on another fucking tree. It's killing my city, it will bring down this nation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_Six

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20737211/

And Barbara, I know people seldom look their best in police mugshots, but those six people charged with that hate crime in West Virginia look mentally retarded.

You don't have to look charming to be innocent of attempted manslaughter.

Prosecutors filed amended felony charges Tuesday in the case of a woman tortured for days in rural West Virginia, changes that mean the six defendants could face life in prison if convicted...

Magistrate Jeffrey Lane referred the case against Frankie Brewster, 49, to a grand jury for action. She owns the home where the suspected assault took place. In addition to charges of kidnapping, sexual assault and giving false information to police, the prosecutor filed three counts of misdemeanor battery against Brewster and dropped a charge of unlawful wounding.

The six, all white, are accused of assaulting Megan Williams, who is black, for more than a week at a ramshackle trailer in Big Creek.

Reading from a statement Williams gave deputies that day, Sheriff's Deputy Jeffrey Robinette said Megan Williams had been stabbed with what she described as a butcher knife and beaten with wooden sticks and fly swatters. He said the woman was sexually assaulted, doused with hot water and taunted with racial slurs.

While this may be greeted by another *no no no no* kind of reception, I thought that the multi ethnic London thread was getting off topic, when talking about stuff like this.


Given the era, I think this kind of politics was justified. But I think that people like McW should (at least) be regarded as having some legitimacy, when they take on the modern politics of race.

Damon, what happened to Bronzeville? What happened to Detroit's Black Bottom? What happened, in city after city, to the vital centers of African American life in US cities? They were urban renewal-ed away. Those neighborhoods were flattened, plowed over, paved over, made into freeways, condos, neighborhoods for the wealthy. The black communities in the States were displaced over and over again, this is how we came to this pass.

when an entire fucking continent get dragged into a world market it can't compete in, thats racism.
when food lies rotting on a eu food mountain, that could be used to feed starving and undernourished people, thats racism.
when multi fucking national companies steal land from indiginous people, who could use that land to be self sufficient, butr are then forced to work for slave fucking wages - thats racism.

Hybrid people my arse.

We have come a long way since the first Race Relations Act was created in 1976. Back then, racist attacks were more common and prejudice more evident in the immigration service, police, employment, housing and education. Thirty years on, racism is clearly in decline, thanks to the efforts of many progressive activists and the gradual cultural integration of ethnic groups in society.

Yet in many ways, our society is much more anxious about race than before. Early findings from the 2005 Home Office Citizenship survey show that nearly half of all people (48 per cent) questioned believed that racism had got worse in the past five years. This was a rise from 43 per cent in 2001. White people were more likely to say this than ethnic minorities, suggesting that perception does not reflect the reality experienced by most people.

Why has this strange paradox emerged? While people from ethnic minority backgrounds are today less likely to confront old-fashioned racism, they are much more likely to confront multicultural policies and practises that racialise them. The principle of equality – that all people should be treated the same regardless of their skin colour or ethnic background – has now been replaced with the principle of diversity, where all cultural identities must be given public recognition. While this sounds nice and inclusive in principle, the overall effect is that people are being treated differently, which fuels a sense of exclusion.

The most pernicious effect of this new racial thinking is how it fosters tribalism between ethnic and religious groups. They end up competing for resources on the basis that they are more excluded and vulnerable than others. Some Muslim lobby groups have argued that Christian groups already have public funding for their schools and services, so they should, too. In response, there are now Hindu and Sikh organisations demanding their own concessions lest they feel left out. The demand to wear the headscarf one day spurs the demand to wear the crucifix the next. There is a perverse incentive to assert one’s victimisation by others, rather than build alliances. In this climate, no wonder everyone thinks that racism and discrimination is rife.

To challenge the dominance of identity politics, we need to champion an alternative universalist approach. This wouldn’t mean bland similarity, with everybody talking and looking the same. Instead, it would help us challenge the imposition of formal, ethnic categories and allow us to develop richer differences based on character and interests.

Today Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton are down in Jena Louisina leading a protest.

Many will roll their eyes. I typically do at the theatrics of aforesaid Messrs. But there are times when it's time to take out the old whistle and blow it on good old-fashioned bigotry.

At Jena High School, black students have traditionally gathered on certain bleachers, while white ones have gathered under a certain tree. At a school assembly last year, a black student jokingly asked whether he was allowed to sit under "the white tree." He and his friends then did so. The next day there were three nooses hanging from that tree.

In the months after this, assorted black-white altercations culminated in six black teens beating up a white one who taunted them.

Five were first convicted of assault, but District Attorney Reed Walters upped the charges to second-degree attempted murder. These boys could have been in jail into their fifties. Jena's black community rose up in indignation.

This month, the conviction of one, Mychal Bell, was overturned since he was under 18 at the time of the attack and should have been tried as a juvenile. Most of the others' charges have been reduced to battery as well.

The Jena story, it must be said, does not show the school's black teens in their best light. In protest against the nooses, a large group staged a sit-in under the tree, and later a larger one tried to address the school board about the incident.

The nooses, though, were a prank. Mean, but a prank. Humor and mischief are all about pushing the envelope: witness Kathy Griffin's comments about Jesus at the Emmy Awards last week.

With racism treated as morally equivalent to pedophilia, naturally some will venture racially insensitive comments to get attention, a tic comic Sarah Silverman overindulges in. The question is why black people must jump to the bait.

"I will go to pieces if you push certain buttons": a statement of weakness. Sweaty youths hang some strings in a tree to remind you of lynching. Would the sky really fall in if you just ignored it? Think how that would deflate the youths, for one thing.

Nevertheless, the villain of the piece is the district attorney. It started after the sit-in, at an assembly the next day. The students were chattering somewhat — that's what teens do. Annoyed, Mr. Walters growled to the black kids, "I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen."

And then trying to leave five teenagers behind bars for thirty years for beating a guy up. That's all it was — Justin Barker was out of the hospital after a few hours and attended an awards ceremony that very night.

I find it impossible to conceive of Mr. Walters trying to put away white kids for thirty years for beating up a black kid. When I say that racism still exists, I refer, after all due reflection, to people like Reed Walters.

If a white mechanic in Queens thinks black people aren't as intelligent as whites, black people can go on with their lives. However, when white officials act upon a sense that what merits a slap on the hand for whites merits decades of confinement for blacks, they contribute to the fact that almost half of America's prisoners are black. In stunting the lives of black men, they help create fatherless communities with young boys on their way to becoming statistics themselves. Furthermore, they feed the defeatist ideology that cherishes decrying racism over teaching black people how to thrive in an imperfect but negotiable world.

So many look upon an America where black-white marriages are ordinary and black people are helping run the country, and are perplexed that so many blacks insist that America is still a "racist nation." To those blacks, however, prisons that are half black when black people are only a tenth-and-change of the population proves that America remains racist to its core despite pretty surfaces. This is the main meal of "gangsta" rap lyrics. This is the root of Sister Souljah's cop-killing insight way back.

To the extent that black men do commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes, this is largely connected to the War on Drugs, and I have argued in a previous column that we need to re-evaluate the criminalization of drug possession and sale, which has been no more successful than Prohibition.

But meanwhile, moves to put away black teens for mere misbehavior for long spells no one would even consider for white teens must be condemned, loudly. For the sake of black communities, and to chip away at the sense that the American establishment views black men as inherently reprehensible.

Most Americans do not view black men that way. However, half-black prisons will always stand as a graphically vivid argument otherwise. Half-black prisons pollute, distract, and constipate our national conversation on race.

To the Jena protesters today, then, please make noise.

Imho the police force in the uk is institutionally racist, lip service and a few token positive discrimination appointments and the jobs done eh? No. To fit into our Police force in it's current form it helps to show to a fair percentage of your workmates (off the record obviously) that you're a reactionary racist sexist homophobic bigot.

As I said, it's the institution of the force that's racist, topple that and a domino effect should fall into place.

I met Mark Daly in a Berlin bar a few years back. I didn't know who he was at first, but I had heard about the "Secret Policeman" documentary, so I knew what he was talking about when he mentioned it. Still haven't seen it yet. He's a very nice and intelligent young man, and an impressive journalist. Brave, too.

Damon, first McWhorter, then national recognized racist prick psychopath Glen Beck? ai yi yi.

The nooses, though, were a prank. Mean, but a prank. Humor and mischief are all about pushing the envelope: witness Kathy Griffin's comments about Jesus at the Emmy Awards last week.

With racism treated as morally equivalent to pedophilia, naturally some will venture racially insensitive comments to get attention, a tic comic Sarah Silverman overindulges in. The question is why black people must jump to the bait.

"I will go to pieces if you push certain buttons": a statement of weakness. Sweaty youths hang some strings in a tree to remind you of lynching. Would the sky really fall in if you just ignored it? Think how that would deflate the youths, for one thing.

Nevertheless, the villain of the piece is the district attorney.

To fit into our Police force in it's current form it helps to show to a fair percentage of your workmates (off the record obviously) that you're a reactionary racist sexist homophobic bigot.

Bronzeville's leaders, clearly, had their eyes on community stability and self-sufficiency. As uncultivated new arrivals from the rural South flooded the city after the 1890s, the black middle class did not cherish them as more "authentic" versions of themselves; they unequivocally saw themselves as models for the new masses. Walters African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church's pastor William A. Blackwell matter-of-factly noted that the migrants, "while speaking the same language as we do, are in many cases little more accustomed to the freedom of this city, the habits and customs of our people, than is the newly arrived peasant from Europe. These people must be amalgamated and assimilated." There was no question of adopting working-class ambivalence toward striving, no question of teaching the district's residents to distrust black successes as "selling out." Quite the contrary: in 1929, a chronicle of Bronzeville's rise counseled, "The Old Negro teaches his children to fear an authoritative white person and to disrespect intelligent and cultured persons of their own race in the same position; the New Negro teaches his children to fear no one and to respect every one worthy of respect."

The New Negro certainly didn't romanticize the black criminal as a martyr, either, despite whites' restriction of blacks to menial jobs until well into the teens. Bronzeville's civic organizations agitated constantly for cleaning up seedy streets and disciplining criminals for the benefit of the community. In 2000, Jesse Jackson decried as "racist" the suspension of black Decatur teenagers who had engaged in a brawl in the stands during a football game. In telling contrast, Dr. George C. Hall of the Chicago National Urban League branch complained in 1917: "The delinquent colored boy or girl who is taken to the juvenile court is turned out again on probation to learn more. If Chicago lacks the vision to see ahead, it will reap the harvest of fostering a kindergarten on the streets where gamins learn crime."

Nor was Bronzeville a fluke: the all-black world now so often considered a fantasy in Amos 'n' Andy also existed in West Baltimore, Atlanta's Auburn Avenue district, Washington, D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood, and elsewhere.

A usable black history can't avoid recounting the demise of these districts. It must cover the race riot that destroyed Tulsa's Greenwood district and the Great Depression's effect on Bronzeville. But simply to treat these districts as an object lesson in white malevolence will extinguish the soul rather than kindle it. Our historical account must show that when blacks were relegated to separate quarters of a big city after Emancipation, the immediate result was not Washington, D.C.'s "Barrytown." Even in a period of naked discrimination, the human spirit bore fruit, and thoroughly ordinary black people again and again created a "Chocolate City" on the middle-class American model and could not have imagined doing otherwise.

You post that crap then call me childish? Twat.

but this idea that the police are always the dogs of repression, I think, is childish.

A mean prank would have been one thing. But in the Deep South, a noose is a noose and it isn't anything else. Guys like McW can protest all they like, it meant exactly what it means.

It's the Becks and the McWhorter and those stupid cruel entitled little fucks who hung the nooses from the tree to remind the black kids of Jena that they hung black guys from trees before - for being uppity - and will DO IT AGAIN.

A bit like with the IRA. I would be broadly sympathetic to the Irish Republican movement as it emerged from the Civil Rights era. I might even defend the Provisional IRA as it took the war to a new intensity in 1972. But they (I think) should have called it a day after that. The British state was too strong, and carriying on for another 25 years, brought nothing but bad shit to the people of Ireland (and Britain).

Today we assume that in any black community an educational crisis must be in full swing. But that wasn't the case in Bronzeville: truancy rates were no higher than among Chicago's white students, and black students performed scholastically as well as white ones. But today's consensus view of the history of black education sees an unrelieved procession from the substandard segregated schools of the South to the inner-city sinkhole schools in today's headlines.

A history ushering blacks into a sense of true membership in their country must make clear that the execrable inner-city schools Jonathan Kozol loves to describe are products of our own times, not business as usual for blacks. From the late 1800s to the 1950s, several black schools were models of scholarly achievement. Students at Washington, D.C.'s Dunbar High, named for the black poet, often outscored the city's white schools on standardized tests as early as 1899. Schools such as Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Booker T. Washington in Atlanta, P.S. 91 in Brooklyn, McDonough 35 in New Orleans, and many others operated at a similarly high level.

Dunbar alone produced Charles Drew (discoverer of blood plasma), Edward Brooke (the twentieth century's first black senator), William Hastie (the first black federal judge), and other prominent figures. As Thomas Sowell puts it, the sheer weight of accomplished black people that schools like Dunbar produced "suggests some systematic social process at work, rather than anything as geographically random as outstanding individual ability."

Meanwhile, the top black colleges were also providing students with fine educations. The students at Fisk (my mother's alma mater) were put through their paces in Horace and Livy, and graduate W. E. B. Du Bois went on to write his doctoral thesis in German. A Fisk professor's wife was aghast at the news that Talladega (my aunt's alma mater) in Alabama did not even require Greek and Latin for the bachelor's degree.

In an age when existing social and economic inequalities are so often mistaken as the decrees of immutable destiny, the fact that these schools existed and that blacks excelled in them as a matter of course, can seem incredible: all the more reason that historians need to bring them to life in all their vivid glory for a much larger audience than the ones that academic chroniclers, such as the invaluable Thomas Sowell, have reached. Otherwise, collective black success again gets lost in the cracks of an historiography dedicated to stressing the obstacles and setbacks.

One result of that victim-centered approach is the trendy contention that American education is constitutionally inappropriate to the "African" soul, a view Carter G. Woodson memorably espouses in The Mis-education of the Negro. Don't underestimate the influence of this notion: witness the Ebonics movement or the resonant title of the recent megahit black pop recording "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill." The excellent black schools and colleges that actually existed succeeded without Afrocentric curricula. In fact, Dunbar taught Latin into the 1950s, and in the late 1800s black college students often—and famously—took top honors over whites in oratory, and not in the artful slang of "slam poetry," but in literary standard English.

Meanwhile, in an extraordinary and powerful outburst at the awards late last night, Decima Francis, of Boyhood to Manhood, hushed the audience after she was interrupted while reading out a list of recent victims of knife and gun crime that included the white schoolboy Rhs Jones, saying: "19 people are dead. You do not have the right to talk when we're talking about dead people who will not be here tomorrow. You cannot be disrespectful because it is the disrespect for other human beings why we here in Britain are considered the rudest, the most savage, the dunces of Europe - and it's not acceptable. We have the best language you can possibly imagine and we're not using it."

She went on: "I'm going to have a go at the musicians now. You have not got the right to call me a 'ho' and a bitch. How dare you? Get a dictionary and use the language. Don't call us names."

That is complete an utter bullshit. McWhorter should be embarrased for even suggesting that.

Therein lies the rub.
These were highschool students: - not even able to by a bottle of Bud, for another three or four years.
So are therefore deemed immature.

What they did was wrong. And they have to have that fact drilled into their heads.
If the school they are at, and the town they live in, don't make efforts to instill this in their children, then that is where the problem lies.
And McW said as much in his article.
The District Attorney Reed Walters, who reccomended the horribly unjust prison sentences, is the villain in this case.

And yes, white trash like those six morons charged in the West Virginia hate crime case are scum.
But that their crime should be highlighted when talking about the politics of race on a forum like this, I would have to question the wisdom of.
Those were not normal people.
That there may be several million people like them in America is tragic.

But the real question should be: ''How did they end up so educationaly subnormal?''

better than having your nose up the arse of someone at spiked, i reckon.

Chaining black youth to the victim culture.
Are the commemorations of the abolition of the slave trade helping to foster fatalism amongst young black Britons?

After months of build-up and some cringing apologies, the two-hundredth anniversary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade takes place this weekend. Commemorations of such events from the distant past are rarely subjected to much debate. But they should be.

This week London mayor Ken Livingstone joined in by apologising for London’s role in the slave trade - has Ken really been Ye Olde Mayor for that long? Elsewhere the BBC, always quick to promote ‘racial awareness’, aired numerous programmes on the slave trade in the run-up to the bicentenary. On Sunday, BBC2 will show a documentary titled Ms Dynamite In Search of Nanny Maroon, which follows the titular 25-year-old London rapper as she uncovers the story of the titular black-slave resistance fighter.

And yet, for many it seems that the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade does not serve as a reminder of how far humanity has progressed, but rather of how little things have changed.

In Sunday’s documentary, Ms Dynamite (known to her mum as Niomi McLean-Daley) argues: ‘There are things which are the direct result of slavery which still affect us today as black people.’ She claims the problem of ‘absent fathers’ can be seen as a ‘result of slavery’, because ‘men were not allowed to be fathers but were used to breed, to create more slaves’. Ms Dynamite has often been criticised for blabbering spectacularly naive comments in the press, but on this issue she’s not alone. Other black commentators and academics also attempt to make a link between slavery then and problems within black communities now.

In recent months, news items seem to have been devoted to monitoring how difficult life is for black Britons. Whether it was ex-Tory frontbencher Patrick Mercer’s comments on ethnic minorities in the army, or the violent arrest of a young black woman, Tomi Comer, in Sheffield, the message constantly rammed home is that if you’re black and living in Britain, the chains of slave-rooted oppression are all around you.

Twenty or thirty years ago, of course, racism was a powerful social force. Back then the police routinely targeted (and sometimes killed) black people living in Britain; local councils frequently denied equal access to resources such as in health and housing. The often open hostility of the state towards black people encouraged freelance racists to go on the offensive.

While black people may experience occasional petty prejudices and verbal abuse today, such actions are no longer given broad sanction by the state. In fact, official ‘anti-racism’ has become so enshrined within every corner of British public life over the past five years that any isolated incident is seized upon as ‘proof’ that Britain is rife with racism. It can equally be argued that it is precisely the rarity of racial incidents today, especially violent ones, that make them so shocking to us.

As a Further Education college lecturer based in inner London, in recent months I have noticed how young black Londoners seem to be internalising today’s gloomy prognosis. Even allowing for the excessive particularism that multiculturalism fosters, there seems to have been a palpable shift amongst some black teenagers in how they see themselves within society. They often perceive Britain as a place that is either ‘out to get them’ or not really ‘for them’.

In fact, some of my black students are preoccupied with a sense of racial persecution above all else. Classroom chatter revolves around the neglect of black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; the banal comments made about slavery by a contestant on Channel 4’s reality TV show Shipwrecked; that deranged madman who randomly shot at black people in Islington; and, of course, the ongoing ‘relevance’ of slavery. Black students from more middle-class backgrounds reference iconic black figures such as Gil Scott Heron and Stokely Carmichael, though often only in the context of today’s victim culture.

Seeing as young black students are constantly told they will face obstacles in later life, it may not be so surprising that they pass fewer GCSEs than other ethnic groups. No doubt the disadvantages of social class have an enormous impact on educational attainment, but that raises the question of why, say, Indian students from similar social backgrounds do far better than black students. From my experience in front of the whiteboard, students of Indian parentage don’t perceive Britain as peculiarly hostile, whereas black students do.

So Damon, if youre saying that the police force isnt institutionally racist would you please explain how it is that the majority of people who get arrested and charged are of ethnic origin?

That was 20 years ago, and I don't think anything's changed!

It was still light, and some local black people came by, and we talked a bit. They couldn't understand hardly a word of what I was saying. I told them I was from England, and (honestly) they hardly knew of its existence.
''You mean like: The Queen of England?'' they asked.
I don't wan't to be mean, but they were about as educated as those West Virgina six, who are accused of that hate crime.

To fit into our Police force in it's current form it helps to show to a fair percentage of your workmates (off the record obviously) that you're a reactionary racist sexist homophobic bigot.

So Damon, if youre saying that the police force isnt institutionally racist would you please explain how it is that the majority of people who get arrested and charged are of ethnic origin?

is it
1) people of ethnic origin are more likely to commit crime
2)youre talking a load of wank
3) you need time to think carefully abut the answer.

Ireland forced to open immigrant school.

· Dozens turned down by local Catholic primaries
· Councillor warns of mini apartheid in seaside town

Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent
Tuesday September 25, 2007
The Guardian


Under a dank sky and with a statue of Christ, arms outstretched in welcome, it seemed like just another opening day in the life of an ordinary Irish primary school. But the school in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, which finally opened its doors yesterday morning, has been the centre of a national controversy which has highlighted how Ireland is failing to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants.
Ireland's newest primary school is overwhelmingly black, the majority of its pupils with parents from Nigeria and some, judging by the number of mothers in head-scarves, from the Islamic faith.

The school was created out of incompetence rather than design. A huge population increase, partly due to immigration from Africa, China and eastern Europe, has put enormous pressure on the school system. The result, according to one local councillor, has been the creation of a "mini-apartheid" in the seaside town, with the new "emergency" school almost exclusively filled with the children of immigrants.
Dozens of children from non-Irish ethnic backgrounds had been turned down by local Catholic schools principally because they did not hold Catholic baptismal certificates. More than 90% of schools in the republic are run by the Catholic church. Up to 100 children were facing the new term with no place at primary school in the north Co Dublin region.