Said Farah Despeignes, a mother of 2 sons, quoted in "Missing in School Reopening Plans: Black Families’ Trust/Deep-seated mistrust among Black families toward their public school districts is holding back school reopening, even as Black children suffer inordinately from remote learning" (NYT).
February 1, 2021
"Everything that has happened in this country just in the last year has proved that Black people have no reason to trust the government."
"My mantra is, if you can do it for yourself, you shouldn’t trust other people to do it for you. Because I can’t see for myself what’s going on in that building, I’m not going to trust somebody else to keep my children safe."
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258 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 258 of 258Hey Achilles...telling Crack he's not Special says awfully racist to me. Are you sure you're not just a Leftist troll making Trump supporters look racist.
I am simply telling Crack what any sensible person would tell him. Fix yourself and don't expect the world to give a shit about you.
It's what I told my kids...does that still make me a racist?
Nope. Can't get aroused when Billy Bob is onscreen.
There's another one but I think Travolta is in it so still a no-go.
All you are doing is comparing apples and oranges.
If you and all of your white friends grew up in the same circumstances as Crack and his friends then I think statistics would even up real fast as far as crime and dropout rates and murder rates.
I had a violent abusive Father. I saw the things he did to my other and brother. These things don't just happen to blacks you know.
Then you would just have people telling you to help yourselves.
Lol...I've had people tell me to help myself. Your assumption that I've had some privileged life because I'm white is amusing.
Fascinating.
Well Disney is out to help Black people rise in business and education by pushing a Wakanda program for children in their Disney + network.
When are Milwaukee and Madison public school teachers going to go to work? These kids are damaged goods now.
I guess the Biden admin doesn’t give about koc, watch what they do. Not what they say.
"In his defense, he is raising interesting and provocative ideas that are worth engaging in but is getting mostly pat dismissals in response."
No, he's having an incoherent childish temper tantrum.
Which he justifies by saying "I'm Black, and my problems are everybody else's fault."
I do think that staying away from daytime TV might be a step in the right direction.
@walter:
Wait..I enjoy Patrice O'Neal.
Don't I get some social credits for that?
At the very least, you get credit for good taste. Patrice O'Neal was a genius. His death was a terrible loss to the culture. He occupied a very specific space between a Kevin Hart Stepin Fetchit type and a bitter and resentful Paul Mooney type. He was someone who could relate to black social activists and black conservatives.
Patrice did a couple of appearances on Fox News back in the day both on issues of what we now call "cancel culture." The first was Don "nappy-headed hoes" Imus, and Patrice was on a panel with Marc Lamont Hill (who I actually kind of like) on Hannity & Colmes. He did a great job balancing the Hannity and Hill perspectives. At one point Hill makes a reference to "soft shoe tap dancing," intimating that Patrice is basically being an Uncle Tom. The way Patrice shut him down was masterful. Hill was fumbling for words and immediately backing down.
Not only was Patrice a smart cultural critic, he probably articulated game better than anyone ever has. His insights into male-female sexual dynamics are worth more than the entire psychology and sociology departments of the academy. If you want to understand what alpha behavior really looks like, look at Patrice O'Neal. It's much subtler and more laid back than a pseudo-macho buffoon like Donald Trump. If anything, Trump is more a alpha-female. His command of presence is much more like a diva or a queen. To put it in the parlance of gay Harlem drag culture, Trump can read but Patrice could throw shade.
All I can say is that Crack were a woman, she'd be amazing in bed.
Rabel:
Focus on the tits, man. Focus on the tits.
It's not that hard.
@boatbuilder:
No, he's having an incoherent childish temper tantrum.
Which he justifies by saying "I'm Black, and my problems are everybody else's fault."
Yes, I agree that is there, too. But interspersed are genuine and important insights that are rarely discussed in the public sphere because they are very complex and primeval. If you've never been a minority, it's not a concept that is easily articulated.
Social identity is not a position you take or something you reason yourself into. It permeates you like water through a sponge. It grows in you like a seedling. If your interior culture matches the exterior culture, you don't notice it. Only when there's an incongruence does it reveal itself, and that experience of incongruity is the minority experience. It's a similar dynamic to what's called "culture shock" when traveling abroad.
Ignore the tantrum bits and engage with the insightful bits. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's likely a matter of regional/cultural dialect.
Not worth the trouble, Farmer. We all have stuff we can scream about. Nobody wants to hear it. That's why psychiatrists get paid to listen.
I mean perceived Alpha signaling..not tits.
I've got my share of grievances, and I'm not sure if my resentment is perfectly calibrated to the offense. It's hard to have just right amount of resentment, but, for some offenses, there is not only no forgiveness, there is no revenge. Well, most of my enemies are dead, and my greatest enemy is growing older and has lost a step. Let it pass.....The Irish were never able to join Great Britain. Too much history. Maybe some Blacks will never be able to be part of America. Too much history. On the other hand, I've known some Blacks who were able to fit seamlessly into the American middle class. Maybe Crack is an outlier or maybe he's a bellwether.....I'm reading Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. Babel is billeted with a small Jewish shopkeeper. The shopkeeper tells him how much he had approved of The Revolution. The Revolution is killing Poles, and Poles never gave him anything but a hard time. But then The Revolution started appropriating his stuff and giving him nothing but chits to show for it. He's starving, and there's no help for it but to go to the Synagogue and pray.
"I dare you to try"
Okay. Demographics. White women watch Nancy Grace-level fear porn masquerading as news in quantities that dwarf all other demos. They want to see their white daughters like Natalee in peril because their mundane lives are so devoid of any real drama. It has to be manufactured and broadcast. Shit, you claim to be a cult expert, but you're missing out on the cult of the safe rich white woman. Not to sound like rhardin, but I've noticed that they're potentially the most dangerous cult around. Their neverending safety trumps all other needs across the country.
You'd have a better point to make if your demographic were more than 12% of the population Sorry, your team doesn't bring the numbers like them white wimmen do.
Farmer
Yet somehow African blacks, Caribbean blacks and Asians seem to be able to either step outside their social identity or somehow embrace it without the negatives American blacks seem to have a problem with.
Personally I think that decades as wards of the state have damaged black social identity until the idea that they are their own solution is apparently seen as racism.
@The Crack Emcee:
Now - that's a few scenes from before adulthood - give me your experience that compares.
Well, I certainly won't apologize for having a good family that protected and nourished me. I was very lucky. I have a close personal friend from northeast Thailand who spent the first 25 years of her life as a sex slave. First to her father then to the man he sold her to and then to the parade of sex tourists who provided her only source of income. Booze and meth provided some solace. She's now a very accomplished woman with a beautiful family and a tremendous amount of dignity and self-respect. I grant that resilience is not well-understood, but it does exist, and it is possible.
@BobJustBob:
Yet somehow African blacks, Caribbean blacks and Asians seem to be able to either step outside their social identity or somehow embrace it without the negatives American blacks seem to have a problem with.
Those are immigrants. They made the decision to leave their native culture and adopt ours. That isn't true of ADOS. John Ogbu discusses this distinction in detail in his "voluntary vs. involuntary minority" concept. Also, African immigrants are much more likely to be above average or of a higher social strata in their native countries. It's a self-selecting population.
Personally I think that decades as wards of the state have damaged black social identity until the idea that they are their own solution is apparently seen as racism.
That's basically a variant of the "welfare did it" argument that is popular within black conservatism and was most influentially advocated by Charles Murray in Losing Ground. There's some merit to it, but it's way overblown. Du Bois published The Soul of Black Folks in 1903.
There is no society in which people are "their own solution." Everybody is simultaneously an individual and a member of a group. An I and a We. A Them and an Us. We're always mediating our individual agency with social structures. Why not have totally open borders, totally free trade, and tell people, "You're your own solution. Lots of luck."
If I were black, I wouldn't let my kids anywhere near a normal school if I could help it. On one side you'd have the traditional racists, treating your children like problems, and on the other side you'd have the woke racists, treating your children like victims. Horrible. No.
The Crack Emcee said (in part) ...until today, whites expect the least educated, the least able, the least equipped, the least financially secure, and the least LIKED, to be able to handle everything...
Like the hillbillies? The trailer trash?
It doesn’t have to come down to race. I don’t trust anyone that isn’t from my nuclear family. But that’s probably a result of my upbringing by my hillbilly trailer trash ancestry.
HillbillyTrumpDocumentary
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Ronald Reagan
No one should trust a government. That was a big point of the American Revolution and a prime reason the Constitution was written to limit government's power while enhancing the public's authority.
Crack said, "Oh, please, I grew up 400 miles from Silicon Valley and I didn't discover computers until the late 90s - meanwhile, you assholes were making fortunes.."
Again you seem to assume that being white means a person is guaranteed massive success. That isn't true.
You seem to lack any empathy towards whites who didn't make millions as you accuse whites of lacking towards you and blacks who haven't become financially successful.
I totally agree some of these guys here really are jerks. But then so was that comedian who ridiculed a black man for being with a white woman. She's just a status symbol, the black man's trophy. And the black man is just a reverse racist, thinking he's superior for getting a hot white woman. Meanwhile she felt she had to sit there and had to laugh. I would have walked out.
Well the black mother has a point where it involves publci schools and teacher's unions. Most ublic unions are a cancer on society--both black and white.
Farmer said:
"We're always mediating our individual agency with social structures."
I agree. It's the finer mediating as to where the boundary between individual agency and social structures gets drawn. I think Crack and a lot of others draw it to far in one direction.
"Why not have totally open borders, totally free trade, and tell people, "You're your own solution. Lots of luck."
For the same reason that infantilizing an entire group is sub-optimal. Again there is the problem of where to draw the line. Treating people as if they are helpless to control any parts of their lives doesn't seem the proper place to draw the line...unless that is what is desired.
Colored people or people of color? Black people or people of black? Baby people or people of baby? BP or POB? Pro-Choice. #BLM
Focus on the tits, man. Focus on the tits.
Uptown? Downtown. Back... Blacktown, for some. A veritable black hole... whore h/t NAACP
The Rainbow of inclusion excluding black, brown, and featuring the divided remains of white. Send in the lion, his lionesses, and their cubs, oh my. A pride parade for the King, his harem, and their unPlanned cubs.
I think BLM means, in the black community: "see me as an individual," and fair enough. Not as a stereotype in the stereotyped relationship. But how then?
Suppose I was writing in the future analyzing the phenomenon of blog culture and was doing Althouse commenters. I might say:
Crack was not the same kind of guy as almost anyone. The son of an advanced musician will take a lot for granted that other people go out and learn as adults. He wasn't saying the same things as everyone in his day and he thought it was all better said in music. The white community couldn't understand him, and the black community understood all too well that he was a critic. Politics-as-usual spoke of the need to concentrate on education and jobs while Crack kept pointing out the need to challenge Oprah. You'd think followers of Breitbart would know that Crack was saying that politics is downstream from culture so that the main political fact was that Oprah was creating a New Age culture in the black community, replacing their Christian culture. Our politics never did reach the community till it engaged with their inner New Age vision.
Well, I don't know. I try stuff out in these blog comments and, Crack, I have to say, you are interesting - elusive, yet a head banger.
@BobJustBob:
Again there is the problem of where to draw the line.
I completely agree. Even the notion of drawing a line oversimplifies the matter. The two are very entangled, and it varies among individuals (conformists vs. mavericks) and social contexts (bottom-up vs. top down).
Earlier I made the injured pedestrian analogy. Even though a pedestrian injured by a negligent or malicious driver is not responsible for his injuries, only he can do the physical therapy necessary to repair those injuries. Social structures can cause problems that can only be solved through individual agency.
“Crack has got to be some White guy trolling us...”
Haha I’ve been saying this for years!
@farmer: I like your analogy of the wounded pedestrian, but go further: Posit that as a result of the accident, the pedestrian has lost control of his bladder. He frequently stinks and people avoid him because of this. They're not biased. He really does stink. On the other hand, having people constantly turn up their nose and avoid him, does nothing to help the wounded pedestrian to accept or negotiate his limitations......There are psychic injuries like that. Also many people think certain kinds of psychic limps and deformities quite amusing. Sometimes they're the people who caused those limps or deformities.....Life sucks.
@reader:
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Ronald Reagan
That's an old Reaganite chestnut that needs to be flushed. It's simplistic and not even true. How popular is abolishing Social Security and Medicare? How many communities want to get rid of their municipal police, fire, and EMS services? We've had privatization, market liberalization, and deregulation for over 40 years. Yes, outsourcing to low-wage countries, mass immigration, and financialization has helped spur economic growth. But they've also exacted enormous social costs.
@William:
There are psychic injuries like that.
I completely agree. Stereotypes are often based in some truth but they describe groups not individuals. At best it's a kind of social short hand. Many people have a hard time understanding the difference between the two. My first ever supervisor was a black clinical psychologist whose parents were both university professors in Alabama. She despised what was then popularly referred to as "ghetto" behavior on the part of blacks. It's the same thing Chris Rock talked about in his infamous "N***** vs. Black People" routine. She believed it reinforced negative stereotypes about blacks and that this would inevitably have consequences for all blacks regardless of their behavior. I think there's a lot of truth to that.
She's right--Blacks can't trust the govt.
Neither can Whites... Latinos...Asians... Native Americans...
Municipal government is not the same as federal and is on the outer limit of being effective. When it comes to federal one major problem is that one size does not fit all and government becomes a tentacled monster when it tries to put in enough sub regulations to meet the needs of every city in every county in each state.
Social security? Will it be there for my son who will pay in and most likely get nothing. When it isn’t enough for people to live on - because it was never intended to be - but people think/dream it will be.
Medicare? I’m fighting with them as they denied every (state mandated) coronavirus test my mother had to take. Even though they were mandatory and covered. The tests were administered weekly. Denied. Denied. Denied. Denied. Ok, they’ll approve one. The oldest. Denied. Denied. Denied. Ok, we’ll approve one. A shining beacon deserving of my trust.
Whites have never actively created a space for anyone else to be comfortable in.
It's not up to us to create spaces for you, comfortable or not.
@reader:
Municipal government is not the same as federal and is on the outer limit of being effective.
That's precisely my point. There is no generic "government." And there is not really anything inherent about a public institution that ipso facto makes it less trustworthy than a private institution. The way you establish trust with a school is the same for a public school as a private school: be involved, know the staff, have regular communication with the teachers, etc.
Social security?...Medicare?...
I'll repeat my question: how popular is abolishing Social Security and Medicare.
"I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid." -Donald J. Trump, 2015
Is it that no one enjoys Crack's posts because everyone is racist, or could it be something else?
The undeserved attention one can get with this "I'm Black and you need to ..." shtick is really something else.
Why would anyone trust the government? The swamp is rigged as per my Orange President
Crack, there are many reasons I believe it doesn't matter your starting point, it's what you do with what you've got. From my 6th great-grandfather with my mother's surname- as far back as I can reliably trace it, I have traced over over 1700 that surname descendants. He was a farmhand who acquired his own farm. From that starting point the over 1700 descendants are doctors, judges and lawyers, sailors, soldiers, marines, and airmen, boiler operators, teachers, drug addicts and alcoholics, and jailbirds. And- he has both white and black descendants- and the same thing applies to both white and black family branches. Same starting point, similar genes, and all these different outcomes.
It's possible to see it in just one family, one generation. My parent's-in-law- both worked. Had 7 children. Good Catholic family. My late brother-in-law, closest in age to me, died 2 years age 63. Minus one leg. Mother-in-law had to make a decisions since he was in the hospital unconscious- take his leg off so he can live- or let him die. Wow! Some accident to get to that choice, right? No- he cut his leg, didn't take care of it, and it was gangrenous. Druggie-alcoholics aren't known for taking good care of themselves... The state never did give a cause of death from the autopsy- he died alone. The other 6? One never married- she's scraping by on Social Security. Another sister? Let's just say she's a little weird. TBH, I'm not certain if her husband is #2 or #3. No kids. Then the other 4. 2 male, 2 female. All married, all middle class. the sister and brother who married fellow Catholics are both divorced and remarried. The two who married Methodists, which includes my wife, married once. Weird, isn't it? 7 children, same starting point, wholly different outcomes.
My family? 3 children. Parents divorced summer between my 5th and 6th grade year. Mom got custody. Mom was an alcoholic, big time, shortly after the divorce. Dad married my mother's former best friend within days after divorce. Constant screaming matches between my mother and older sister over mom's drinking. Until my she ran off to live with grandmother. Father's new wife didn't want her in the house... That was my 10th grade year. Peace. Well, no screaming... Brother ran off to live with dad during 11th grade year. I stayed, graduated HS, sometime during the summer called the toll free line that at the time had real people on the other end, went the next day to see a Navy recruiter, and in September, enlisted rather than going of to college like all my friends. Told my mom. She actually didn't believe me. A friends father convinced me to call my father and tell him the day I left for boot camp, so I did. My mother believed I joined the Navy when I came home on boot camp leave wearing my dress blues. Blamed herself for my joining rather than going to college, and 2 days later checked herself into rehab. (P.S. It wasn't her fault- it was my decision.) Well, I would have gone to college if I had a full scholarship- but I wasn't disadvantaged, I was WHITE, and had all that WHITE privilege going for me... (and my guidance counselors hadn't bothered to tell anyone about ROTC programs) Oh, she never had another drink, and lived to 82. My parents died 13 days apart after being divorced for 50 years. Dad was on wife 3- wife 2 discovered that if he cheats with you, he'll cheat on you.
Sister now on husband 3. 4 kids, all messed up. Brother married at age 42- to 26 year old divorcee. 2 girls, doing well. She's now on husband 3. We have 5 children, all doing well.
All these different outcomes from the same starting point. Can't convince me that anyone's success or failure is due to upbringing, environment, teachers, genes, or anything other than- the choices they make in life. I see too much evidence showing that's the single most important factor.
@Gospace:
All these different outcomes from the same starting point. Can't convince me that anyone's success or failure is due to upbringing, environment, teachers, genes, or anything other than- the choices they make in life. I see too much evidence showing that's the single most important factor.
You don't think "upbringing, environment, teachers, genes" have any influence on "the choices they make"? If the "choices they make" is indeed the "single most important factor," then what explains why people make the choices they make?
If you TRUST the GOVERNMENT....there is something wrong with you. They aren't your Daddy. They only care about their own power and wealth, they don't care about YOU. Every Law they sign is because of the payoff they will get from lobbyists and donors...not what is good and what the constituents want. That government is GONE.
Crack sez: //You've got whole swaths of Americans, existing as corks in the ocean//
These poor corks being continuously soaked.
Heh.
Where do special privileges for the disabled fit into this scheme?
As proof of the thesis.
Have you ever seen a group work harder to reject their “specialness” so others will treat them as equals?
I doubt Reagan was talking about the police and fire departments or even Medicare and Social Security. His reference was more to the sort of thing Biden is doing now with his executive orders. There's still some truth in what he was saying. The unintended consequences -- and sometimes the intended consequences -- of government interference can be a real problem for people.
Critical Race Theory (whatever that is) isn't going to improve race relations. The government's environmental fixes have cost many people their jobs. When the government comes and says it wants to "help" them you can't blame them for being wary. As it is though, the government says it's helping them, but the "help" seems to be telling them to get jobs making or installing solar panels that may not even be made in this country.
It took till now to not trust government?
American s have be "not trusting" Government for 246 years!!!
Our whole system is set up the way it was because they did not trust anyone with power including themselves. And since then people in power have whittled it away till now are are on a cusp to destruction.
Expanded and inclusive version: Everything that has happened in this country just in the last year has proved that people have no reason to trust the government.
Over 10 years ago, I was sitting on the bus on the way to work when a black man next to me said to someone via his cellphone, in tones of disappointment, "I guess the government isn't going to help me."
That guy finally got it.
BTW, who fed, clothed and housed black folk in the antebellum south?
Just another B.S. article from the NY Times? - what a rag? Black people have a fear of "Government" the same way they have a fear of 'White People'. All of this fear is conjured up by the Media types (NY Times) to sell their wares. No more no less.
AA do an article about Tom Sowell and read his superb book 'Intellectuals and Society' maybe it will open your eyes.
Sowell states in his Chapter 10 on Filtering Reality "...Many among the intelligentsia [Media] create their own reality - whether deliberately or not - by filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be. J.A. Schumpeter said that the first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie..."
That's an old Reaganite chestnut that needs to be flushed. It's simplistic and not even true. How popular is abolishing Social Security and Medicare? How many communities want to get rid of their municipal police, fire, and EMS services? We've had privatization, market liberalization, and deregulation for over 40 years. Yes, outsourcing to low-wage countries, mass immigration, and financialization has helped spur economic growth. But they've also exacted enormous social costs.
My, how fucking trite. It's not an either/or proposition. Well at least beyond the minds of simpletons.
BTW, we should abolish Social Security and Medicare as both are irreparably bankrupt. Human being somehow managed to live tens of thousands of years without it. At present, the Amish still do.
The government's environmental fixes have cost many people their jobs.
A couple of days ago I heard President-Select Biden say that yes, people in the energy industry are going to lose their jobs but the hope is that they will be able to find new jobs in green energy.
Who in their right mind would trade their full-time, well-paying job for hope. One can't feed one's family on hope alone.
Hope is a Progressive bullshit, weasel-word.
J Farmer, explain how one child in a family of seven becomes a druggie alcoholic and the rest don't. Same environment. Shared genes. Seme neighborhood. Same teachers. Same schools.
It all comes down to individual choices.
For people who don't trust government, they sure vote for more of it often enough.
"BTW, we should abolish Social Security and Medicare as both are irreparably bankrupt. Human being somehow managed to live tens of thousands of years without it. At present, the Amish still do."
I'm all for it. Just give me back the money I paid in. They don't even have to give me the interest. Furthermore it doesn't even have to be in cash. I'll take the equivalent in federal property. I'll make it work.
Achilles:
If you and all of your white friends grew up in the same circumstances as Crack and his friends then I think statistics would even up real fast as far as crime and dropout rates and murder rates.
Did. Posted about it here long ago. Results were the same. Eleven acquaintances dead by twenty. I'm the only one I know for certain got out.
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