This appears to be an argument that no amount of sanity or reason can possibly win. Because it doesn’t matter how fairly you treat a black person, or how much you pay them, you are simply defined in terms of being on the wrong side of slavery.
Adrian Peterson: NFL Like ‘Modern Day Slavery’
First Posted: 03/15/11 02:19 PM Updated: 03/15/11 02:24 PM
Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson made some controversial comments about the NFL labor situation in an interview with Doug Farrar of Yahoo’s Shutdown Corner. The interview was conducted just before the NFLPA decertified.
“It’s modern-day slavery, you know? People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too. With all the money,” Peterson continued. “The owners are trying to get a different percentage, and bring in more money.”
Farrar took out the quote shortly after publishing. He tweeted that he wanted to give Peterson an opportunity to explain. Farrar described the comment as “a real misstep.”
When asked about the owners not showing their financial information, Peterson suggested that they are hiding something.
“Well, show us.’ We want more information, and they want to bull****, going around, saying this and that, just open it up and give us the information we want. If they have nothing to hide, just give us the information,” the 25-year-old said. “Why not? Obviously, there’s a lot to hide — these guys are professionals, and they’re maximizing what they do.”
You can read the entire interview here.
This is a mindset that is so committed to an ideology of victimization that it becomes incapable of any form of personal self-introspection whatsoever. It is immune to fact, to logic, to criticism or to the fact that it is quintessentially hypocritical.
What you end up with is people with giant chips on their shoulders and chutzpah the size of Jupiter.
I have no idea how many black people think the way Adrian Peterson thinks (i.e., that life is one big entitlement and that they can invoke the ghost of slavery to get what they want whenever they want it).
I have had the honor of knowing a few black people who were very, very elderly (in one case over a hundred years old!). And I heard them tell their stories. The thing was, I knew the eras they had lived through; and I knew from their stories where they had lived (e.g., Mississippi). So I knew as they told their stories that they had without any question suffered real racism.
The kind of racism that an Adrian Peterson has never begun to experience in his entire self-centered, self-absorbed life.
And the thing that most impressed me as I heard these several stories from these great elderly black men was how sweet they were. There was no bitterness in their souls, because they had always sought the best in people, and found it often. Even in white people. And when (not if) they were abused by one white person, they chose instead to focus on the kindness and graciousness of another white person instead. And they were the kind of people who made the best of their world, and enjoyed their lives, and fixated on what was good and kind and decent instead of what was hateful and bigoted and cruel.
Another thing that characterized them was their sense of personal responsibility and drive. They didn’t wait around for handouts, because they knew there wouldn’t be any handouts.
This crap –
“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. If I help him, I know he’s gonna help me.”
– and this crap –
ROGULSKI:Why are you here?
Woman: To get some money.
ROGULSKI: What kind of Money?
Woman: Obama money.
ROGULSKI: Where’s it comin’ from?
Woman: Obama.
ROGULSKI: And where did Obama get it from?
WOMAN: I don’t know, his stash. I don’t know. I don’t know where he got it from, but he’s givin’ it to us. And we love him. That’s why we voted for him. O-ba-ma. O-ba-ma.
– was just alien to their thinking.
It is that perversion, that degeneration of what used to be a proud spirit but which has been corrupted into something pathetic, that Anne Wortham so eloquently denounced.
This is the new black community:
DAYTON — The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.
It’s a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.
Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.
Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two.
The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That’s the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’.
“It becomes a safety issue for the people of our community,” said Dayton Fraternal Order of Police President, Randy Beane. “It becomes a safety issue to have an incompetent officer next to you in a life and death situation.”
“The NAACP does not support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be gainfully employed,” agreed Dayton NAACP President Derrick Foward.
That local NAACP president is “old school.” He was told to shut the hell up by his national leaders, who have since loudly defended flunking police officers, as long as those flunking police officers are black.
Something has happened to the black community at large. And it isn’t good.
Many black people in America today are the descendants of slaves. Those slaves were involuntarily forced into their slavery, and dreamed of freedom for themselves and for their children. And yet today, their descendents have to a shocking degree and extent willingly placed themselves in the relationship of dependents waiting for their handouts. I quote myself:
Democrats were the party of slavery, and the party of the Klu Klux Klan (and see the link here for a thorough treatment). They were the party of the Klanbake at the 1924 Democrat National Convention.
But at some point, the Democrat Party began to morph into the party of the immediate post-civil war reconstruction, when elitist whites decided that ignorant, inferior blacks couldn’t do anything for themselves. They needed whites to lead them.
They went from being the Confederate Party of institutionalized slavery to the Union Party of the white benefactor, as epitomized by the words of the Colonel James Montgomery character in the movie Glory:
“They’re little monkey children, for God’s sake. And you just gotta know how to control them.”
Good little monkey child. Keep voting for us and we’ll keep handing out bananas.
Charles Payne – a man I genuinely admire and respect – had this to say about his black community in a powerful discussion:
“I believe a lot of this goes back to when black Americans accepted this liberal premiss that we’re not accountable for anything; that because we’re descendants from slaves, that you know, ‘it’s OK, it’s not your fault, you’re a victim’ – and they’ve created this sort of pool… you know it’s not just a physical ghetto I’m talking about but a mental, sort of barrier.
“Where, you see, OK Michael Vick is a victim of the justice system, not a person who committed a crime. That mentality is pervasive. You see it over and over, and it’s fed to us and it’s fed to us, and it’s fed to us – and we accept it. We take it.
“And at the end of the day what we’re getting for it: we wait for our welfare checks. We wait for it – people wait for it like ‘I wait for my check,’ like it’s something I worked for. And it has taken away everything; everything that God gave us innately – you know, when you put two people on an island they’re going to have certain things innately; they’re going to have the desire to survive, to thrive, to do better – all that is suppressed in our community. And what’s left is this sort of squalor.”
I don’t doubt that I’m going to get called a “racist” for writing this piece. I’m fine with that, because I know my own heart, and the hateful opinions of bitter, malicious race-bating demagogues doesn’t mean squat to me. I want to see black people lift themselves up and get respect because they EARNED respect.
The government is running out of other people’s money, which Margaret Thatcher famously said was the singular inevitable problem of socialism. And there’s a massive reckoning coming.
We have seen the total abysmal failure of welfare to foster an environment of anything other than more and more generational failure: a permanent dependent class waiting for their government handouts. Handouts don’t work at creating work; it is simply a fact no matter how you slice it.
Under Obama, we have seen a shocking failure in the ability of government to take care of the poor. Which means that the poor had damn well better learn to start taking care of themselves. But I have literally come to believe that black leaders want their people to be totally unprepared to take care of themselves 1) so they continue to be slavishly dependent on these selfsame failed leaders; and 2) so that when their black community begins to suffer the fruits of generations of stupid and immoral decisions from their failed leaders, they can decry how evil “conservative” “whitey” is and demagogue their way to continued power.
Even Jesse Jackson once questioned the abortion-on-demand liberal mindset that he predicted would one day lead to hell on earth. That was back in 1977 when the man may have had a shred of personal honor and decency. Today, with the assistance of black leaders like Jesse Jackson, three out of every five black babies are murdered by their mothers in the womb. Which amounts to a self-genocide of massive and evil proportions.
But instead of trying to do that, we just hear more and more demands from the left for the rich to have their wealth seized by the government and redistributed to the poor.
There’s a massive problem with that – especially for black liberals who decry slavery. I write about this despicable hypocrisy in an article titled “Obama’s Government As God Believes It Owns Everything The People Earn.” Basically that problem is that, in order to maintain this belief, one has to believe that the government very literally owns everything that its citizens earn or build, and then allows its citizens to keep some of that wealth and seizes the rest to give it away to others who did not earn it. Which is to say that you have a shocking number of black people saying today that the government de facto owns people and owns their labor and owns the fruit of that labor. And ought to be able to take it away from the producers as it wills in order to hand it out to someone else.
And for all that millionaire Adrian Peterson decries the NFL that made him a rich man, THAT is what slavery is.
Too many blacks have joined too many liberals in demanding that rich people pay their fair share. But these poeple are paying massively more than their fair share, while nearly half of the country pay no federal income taxes at all. Meanwhile, those who pay nothing demand more and more from those who are already paying everything. That is not only sick, it is depraved.
About 13% of American citizens are black, according to the census data. That is a large enough number that this country cannot succeed if African-Americans are anchors weighing us down rather than angels lifting us up. But they have been anchors for a generation, and seem determined to continue to be anchors. When 13% of the population is determined that the other 87% owes them something, and when you have one of the two major political parties cynically demagoguing that bitterness – the result is bad for everyone.
I myself am a disabled veteran. And for a while I had the idea that everyone owed me for my sacrifice. I was particularly bitter that my disability had significantly worsened due to inadequate treatment. One day I realized that I could continue to keep thinking that way, and continue to wait for someone else to give me what I thought I deserved, or I could actually take personal responsibility for myself and improve my own lot in life. Fortunately, I chose the latter path for myself. But that is a reckoning that the black community will tragically never have as long as they listen to the demagogues in their communities and in the Democrat Party.
Start Thinking Right 