It's All About The Company You Keep.

One can only wish the majority of the blacks were like her. She too lament the passing of a white America and the history that was part of its making.

Anytime someone of another ethnicity, namely that of the average white American, points out what they deem to be positive behaviors or traits in blacks, and wonders aloud why couldn't those other blacks be like him or her, that irks me on a deep level. It's a phrase that claims these "positive" traits are not "typical" or the "norm" for blacks and that whatever behavior white Americans see in their fellow black Americans is instead the baseline for how all blacks tend to behave.

This blog post is brought to you thanks to the village idiot a resident commentator over at Redeye's Front Page. During one of his many tirades on how blacks are general failures without the benevolent intervention of and direct governance by white America, he made mention of Elizabeth Wright, proprietor of Issues & Views (blog and website), who recently passed away due to cancer. I haven't heard of this woman before and I can't remember hearing anything about her in the blogging circles I usually frequent, so I decided to do a little research. Gotta love having Google around for these things.

What I found...wooo boy...imagine having to clear a bunch of kudzu and thorn vines from a grove. You can't just burn or bulldoze the whole mess down without knocking down a bunch of trees, so you have to go in with a machete and do what you can.

Elizabeth Wright's views on the black community would have her written off as an "Uncle Tom" (or more accurately, an "Aunt Jemima") at first glance, but I'm not going to do that and just walk away.

In a nutshell, Wright believed that in the quest of granting equality to black Americans, whites ended up prostrating themselves at the feet of a black race who are now coasting along on a wave of hand-me-ups and federal largesse. She believed the "endless retelling" of Jim Crow, lynchings and other heinous actions visited upon the black community are just ways of "race pimps" and similar "extortionists" to keep the pot of psychological racial dependency bubbling. She saw a people who were, in her opinion, being crippled by embracing "perpetual victimhood" and that "white liberals" are to blame for "coddling" blacks. She believed that whites are "disgracing themselves" by apologizing and fretting over race, and that whites should be more outspoken on when to tell blacks to go "sit and spin" when presented with racial grievances, contrived or otherwise.

In other words, she specialized in something I find rather disturbing: the act of chastising blacks and pointing out flaws in black society for the indirect amusement of her fellow white Americans. Not to say that she shouldn't have done these things, but when you have folks from the Council of Conservative Citizens and Stormfront co-signing with you, you should take a good, long look at the message you're sending.

There's something to be said about the company you keep. The "company," in this case, is a collection of groups and individuals who are in the business of promoting a "positive white identity." The Council of Conservative Citizens, Vanguard News Network, American Renaissance, V-DARE, etc, either pay their respects to or make mention of Wright. These aren't places where you'd see a significant amount of black conscious thought, if any. Yet these places make mention of a woman who apparently appealed to their sensibilities due to her positions and opinions on the black community.

So many blacks and their white liberal gurus failed to appreciate those Anglo-originated laws based on “self-evident truths” and the consent of the governed, which were flexible enough to take under their protection the nation’s former slaves. Who will there be to ensure that jobs and scholarships and government contracts, and the surfeit of other entitlements, will be available for a people who have grown used to looking to others for slices from the economic pie, instead of baking their own share of it?

The above ignores attempts to do just that, only to have the whole pie snatched away or spiked with poison: Tulsa's "Black Wall Street," Rosewood, Florida and many other attempts at a separate, prosperous and self-sustaining black community destroyed out of white jealousy, Haiti and other black nations left with dysfunctional governments thanks to constant sabotage and interference from European and American powers. Wright also ignored continuing racial abuses aimed at black Americans -- I wonder what she would have said about Oscar Grant, James Craig Anderson, Brandon McClelland and others?

Similarly, Ed Koch had claimed that in this terrible society of America, “all blacks” face racism “every day.” According to Koch, from the minute a black leaves his home in the morning to go to work, he encounters ugly, persistent racism, which goes on throughout the day. My ears perked up, because I wanted to know in just which city or state or region were blacks being tormented openly and on a daily basis.

Damn. She makes it too easy for me.

I thought reading about Frantz Fanon would prepare me for someone who seems so conflicted. Or perhaps that's the wrong word to use. But how could someone be so resolute in their stand on issues when it meant standing with people who see you and yours as a nuisance or a problem, at best?