[legion]

Good article today...

Oh, no, not another "blacks in America" news special! One of the cable networks recently put together another one of these "specials" on what it's like to be black in America. The network asked a conservative friend of mine to participate.
...
I asked my sister-in-law why they didn't spend four hours on the "experience" of Chinese-Americans? Americans of Chinese heritage are among our country's most successful — despite being the first ethnic group to be specifically excluded from legal immigration to America, by laws enacted in 1882, and despite mistreatment and discrimination including many anti-Chinese laws passed in places like San Francisco, which were designed to protect the "native" laundry business.

Why doesn't the cable network, I asked her, do a show on the "experience" of Japanese-Americans, also some of the most prosperous of all Americans — despite the World War II "relocation" camps and California's anti-Japanese laws, once passed to prevent them from owning farmland?

I don't compare this in kind or in degree to slavery, but it's 2008 — with a black man possibly on the brink of attaining the presidency of the United States. Can we move on? The problems of the "black community" have to do with the welfare-state-induced breakdown (or, more accurately, non-formation) of the family. This causes a disinterest in education, and leads to poor values, reckless and irresponsible breeding, as well as a lack of the job skills necessary in an information-age society. We also have grievance groups — black "leaders"; the oh-so-sympathetic media; fear- and guilt-laden whites who refuse to say (as they do to their own children) work hard and play by the rules; and many reluctant blacks who refuse to preach the message of "no excuses, hard work" for fear of being labeled "Uncle Toms."

I told my sister-in-law that nearly half of Harvard's black freshman class consists of blacks from the Caribbean or Africa — areas less prosperous with far less opportunity. Care to explain that?