{"id":906,"date":"2013-07-19T15:16:30","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T19:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=906"},"modified":"2013-07-19T15:16:30","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T19:16:30","slug":"about-that-honest-discussion-on-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/07\/about-that-honest-discussion-on-race.html","title":{"rendered":"About that &#8220;Honest&#8221; Discussion on Race&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For years, Eric Holder has bellyached over the unwillingness of this \u201cnation of cowards\u201d to have an \u201chonest\u201d discussion over race.\u00a0 The George Zimmerman verdict is the latest occasion that Holder has exploited for renewing his call on this score.<\/p>\n<p>Though a loathsome man, he is correct about this much: Americans, of all races, are indeed unwilling to speak truthfully about this charged topic.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, to a large degree, this unwillingness is due precisely to the bullying tactics of the Holders of the world\u2014i.e. just those people who incessantly bemoan our dishonest treatment of all matters racial while castigating those who dare to speak honestly about race.\u00a0 Still, when a person is right, he\u2019s right: candid talk on race is long overdue.<\/p>\n<p>In the spirit of straight shooting, then, I submit the following observations.<\/p>\n<p>Blacks were enslaved in America, it is true.\u00a0 Yet to know only this is to know next to nothing. It is like knowing that George Washington led a band of colonists that killed English soldiers without knowing anything else about the context in which this killing took place\u2014i.e. the colonists were waging a war for independence that they felt was their last resort after other attempts at conciliation were tried and failed, etc.\u00a0 More accurately, to know only that blacks were enslaved in America is like thinking that George Washington and the colonists were the only people in the history of the world to have ever killed!<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race <i>must <\/i>mention the stone cold fact that for millennia, well before the first white man ever stepped foot on the African continent, blacks were enslaving blacks.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race must mention that there never could have been a Trans-Atlantic slave trade had it not been for, not just the cooperation of Africans, but their zealous participation in it.\u00a0 Moreover, such was their zealotry that when whites\u2014that\u2019s right, <i>whites<\/i>!\u2014tried abolishing the practice via the awesome power of the English empire in the 18<sup>th<\/sup> century, Africans resisted their efforts.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race should mention that slavery was a universal practice up until\u2014but only until\u2014<i>whites, <\/i>white Christians, specifically, revolted against it (And it wasn\u2019t just Africans, but Arabs and Asians as well, who fought mightily to keep alive their trade in human flesh).\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, it was the mass enslavement of the (white) Slavish that eventually gave rise to the very word \u201cslave.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race should mention that for about 250 years, 1.5 <i>million <\/i>Europeans had been <i>enslaved by <\/i>(Northern) <i>Africans<\/i>.\u00a0 Honesty demands that we mention as well that in early America, it was common practice for <i>whites <\/i>to be sold into <i>slavery.\u00a0 <\/i>Furthermore, whites, not infrequently, children, would be abducted from the streets of England and made to endure passage to the New World aboard ships, and on voyages, that were in many respects comparable to, if not worse, than those suffered by Africans. The word \u201ckidnap\u201d actually stems from this practice of stealing young English kids\u2014another tidbit that should be included in any honest discussion of race.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race should mention that in the antebellum South, there were literally thousands of free blacks who owned slaves.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race should mention that, materially speaking, the black minority in America has managed to achieve a standard of living far greater than that of blacks\u2014or anyone else\u2014living anywhere else in the world.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race should mention that at only 13% of the American population, blacks contribute much more than any other group to the nation\u2019s crime rate. When it is considered that it is a minority within this minority of 13%&#8211;namely, black males who are neither small children nor elderly\u2014that perpetrate the bulk of this crime, an even more alarming picture comes into focus.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race should mention that the Trayvon Martins of America are influenced by a degenerate black underclass subculture that has been romanticized by Gangsta\u2019 Rap and Hip Hop while, at best, ignored by Eric Holder and his fellow \u201canti-racists.\u201d\u00a0 An honest discussion of race would consider that this culture of criminality and violence compels not just whites to \u201cprofile\u201d young black males; it compels <i>blacks <\/i>to do the same\u2014even if it is only in unguarded moments when blacks like Jesse Jackson confess to their fears of other blacks.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race would take stock of the hypocrisy of advocating for a colossus of \u201caffirmative action\u201d programs for blacks while decrying \u201cracial profiling,\u201d or discrimination of any kind in which race plays a role.<\/p>\n<p>An honest discussion of race would draw our attention to the obscene levels of black-on-black, as well as black-on-<i>white, <\/i>crime.\u00a0 Regarding the latter, there can be no racial harmony when the members of one race repeatedly besiege those of another with violence.<\/p>\n<p>These are just some of the things that should be included in any genuinely honest discussion of race in America.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For years, Eric Holder has bellyached over the unwillingness of this \u201cnation of cowards\u201d to have an \u201chonest\u201d discussion over race.\u00a0 The George Zimmerman verdict is the latest occasion that Holder has exploited for renewing his call on this score. Though a loathsome man, he is correct about this much: Americans, of all races, are&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>About that &quot;Honest&quot; Discussion on Race...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/07\/about-that-honest-discussion-on-race.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"About that &quot;Honest&quot; Discussion on Race...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For years, Eric Holder has bellyached over the unwillingness of this \u201cnation of cowards\u201d to have an \u201chonest\u201d discussion over race.\u00a0 The George Zimmerman verdict is the latest occasion that Holder has exploited for renewing his call on this score. 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