See, the main problem with a lot of the African American organizations, events and whatnot that are in place is that they send the wrong message. That message is "'The man' is holding you down. It's no use trying to make something better of yourself because 'The Man' will always be there with a safety net to catch you before you fall flat on your face". Admittedly, white guilt is a large part of this problem.
I would like nothing better than not to step into the middle of this, but on this one assertion, I strongly beg to disagree. While I am not African American, and therefore am not a card carrying member of the NAACP, to give you an example, I feel that you are misconstruing, if only to yourself, its aims.
The organization in question, for one is about advancing (why, "Advancement" is part of the acronym, after all) the position of African Americans within their professional and personal sphere by providing its members a network that helps them achieve outside and above their limited community resources (hence the scholarship funds, and legal help when fighting gross discrimination that is tended to all their members, and so forth). For the other, it is an organization that much like HBC was established at a time where few if any doors were open to African Americans who worked and still work their ass off to advance themselves and their community. The fact that it has not been laid by the wayside says nothing about their own philosophy, and more about the fact that there is still a need for that kind of organization.
Even semi-militant organizations like the Nation of Islam do not "blame the man", so much as advocate a vision of growth and advancement that is separatist, i.e. calls for self sufficient black communities, to the point of refusing government aid and trying to grow the neighborhoods as their own closed circle economies. That is perhaps a philosophy that is diametrically opposed to your assertion of encouraging exploitation of a "safety net" (I put that in quotation marks because Medicaid, SSI and SS are a poor excuse for a safety net - all three combined for a single parent household of 2 or more are not enough to live on).
Most other minority-based organizations fall in between those two extremes. So I have to wonder, where exactly do you get the above quoted idea? TV? Newspapers? One or a handful of conversations you had with one black person you know? Because if the latter, you cannot judge a whole entire race and its social structures based on just one person. If the former, you're letting mass media organizations do all the fact finding and thinking for you, and that's never good.
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Re: Uh...
Date: 2007-08-17 04:27 pm (UTC)I would like nothing better than not to step into the middle of this, but on this one assertion, I strongly beg to disagree. While I am not African American, and therefore am not a card carrying member of the NAACP, to give you an example, I feel that you are misconstruing, if only to yourself, its aims.
The organization in question, for one is about advancing (why, "Advancement" is part of the acronym, after all) the position of African Americans within their professional and personal sphere by providing its members a network that helps them achieve outside and above their limited community resources (hence the scholarship funds, and legal help when fighting gross discrimination that is tended to all their members, and so forth). For the other, it is an organization that much like HBC was established at a time where few if any doors were open to African Americans who worked and still work their ass off to advance themselves and their community. The fact that it has not been laid by the wayside says nothing about their own philosophy, and more about the fact that there is still a need for that kind of organization.
Even semi-militant organizations like the Nation of Islam do not "blame the man", so much as advocate a vision of growth and advancement that is separatist, i.e. calls for self sufficient black communities, to the point of refusing government aid and trying to grow the neighborhoods as their own closed circle economies. That is perhaps a philosophy that is diametrically opposed to your assertion of encouraging exploitation of a "safety net" (I put that in quotation marks because Medicaid, SSI and SS are a poor excuse for a safety net - all three combined for a single parent household of 2 or more are not enough to live on).
Most other minority-based organizations fall in between those two extremes. So I have to wonder, where exactly do you get the above quoted idea? TV? Newspapers? One or a handful of conversations you had with one black person you know? Because if the latter, you cannot judge a whole entire race and its social structures based on just one person. If the former, you're letting mass media organizations do all the fact finding and thinking for you, and that's never good.