The annual conference of the National Urban League was held last week. This is from FoxNews of 28 July: "They're cutting back on public transportation," [Jesse] Jackson said during a morning panel discussion, "cutting back on public housing, cutting back on public ed[ucation]; and the result is [we] have built the largest jail-industrial complex in the world, of which 55 percent [of the inmate population] are black. To me that's the heart of the civil rights struggle."
So…this is what it’s come down to after all these years of entitlements, quotas, affirmative action, and thousands of African Americans elected to public office, with many in high-profile government positions and one even elected to the presidency, who last year nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who was in the process of being overturned by the SCOTUS as a federal judge in her decision to deny white people promotions because of their race. Jackson would say that blacks suffer because of racism, but Judge Sotomayor would prove it the other way; however, one dare not call her racist – absolutely politically incorrect.
Jackson, of course, was actually insisting that the government simply does not give blacks enough, his obvious implication being that the result is an unbelievably inordinate number of black men in jail. What on earth is the connection? It’s a lead-pipe cinch that far less than 55% of the jail population in the 1960s was black, when all the entitlements were passed into law. What happened as result of government actions in that amazing decade so fortuitous for blacks?
One is dumbstruck by Jackson’s allusion to public education. In the last reportable school-year, 2006-07, the average amount spent per pupil throughout the U.S. (13% African American) was $9,557. In the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C., 54% black), however, $16,540, or an increase of 73% over the national average, was spent per pupil. Ironically, that school-system, notwithstanding that inordinate expenditure, is probably the worst in the nation.
In D.C. the teacher-to-pupil ratio was 1:13.5 and the average annual teacher salary was $59,000. The national figures were 1:15.5 and $50,816, respectively so teachers in D.C. contend with much smaller classes while having incomes 16% higher than the national average. Most of the students in D.C. are black, 54% as opposed to 13% of the population nationwide, but the Rev. Jackson would have it that the government doesn’t spend enough on black students. This same paradigm is replicated in other large cities such as New York City and Detroit.
Colin Powell was appointed National Security Adviser by Reagan, Joint Chiefs Chairman by George H.W. Bush, and State Secretary by George Bush. Exhibiting his appreciation, Powell went for Obama in the last election. Ms. Rice was appointed National Security Adviser by George Bush and later State Secretary, meaning that the State Department was headed by African Americans for eight successive years.
Apparently, that doesn’t rise to “enough” for Jackson, nor does the election of a black president, who teleprompted his prowess in a speech on 02 August to disabled American veterans regarding the winding down of the Iraqi conflict although he has merely maintained the schedule established by George Bush. While in the Senate, Obama opposed the “surge,” which made the Iraq affair a winner for the U.S. The hypocrisy was apparent.
Race has been becoming a lesser issue in recent years, especially with the appointment and election to office of multitudes of blacks. With the advent of Obama as president should have come a downright death to the race issue. Instead, there’s been a resurgence in the matter of playing the “race card.” Obama’s “typical white person” remark in Philadelphia in 2008 coupled with his description of the “Bible-hugging, rifle-toting crowd on the hunt for Mexicans” in 2008, along with the “cowardice” remark of Attorney General Holder (another high-level black official) have ramped-up the rhetoric anew.
The “heart of the civil rights struggle” has nothing to do with prisons, as Jackson would have it. The heart of the struggle ended with the civil rights laws of the 1960s, which led directly to the near total dissolution of the black family, black men deciding against work and in favor of not being legally responsible for the products of their often indiscriminate impregnating of black women. The resulting welfare-society-permanent-underclass perpetuates itself as its boys with no fathers to guide them join the drug trade and graduate into prison. This phenomenon is rapidly growing in the white community as well.
So…Obama, Holder and the “old guard” epitomized by Jackson have revitalized the race issue. More’s the pity. The nation deserves better.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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