Racist or Realist 2893

I don't think that it has any DIRECT impact, but I do believe that most of the crime buttociated with blacks is caused, either directly or indirectly by their culture. African-Americans are somewhat different from almost any other ethnic group in this country by virtue of their circumstances. Being brought here as slaves, they came from disparate tribal cultures. Often, they couldn't even talk to each other, since each tribal region had its own language or dialect. When they came together here in the US, they had to learn a new language (at first a synthesis of English and tribal words called Pidgin English or Gullah, etc.) and they had to synthesize a new culture, since individual tribal cultures were mostly forgotten as various tribes intermingled on these shores. After the War Between the States and emancipation, black Americans started to construct an artificial culture based partially on white, southern culture, and partially on half-remembered African precepts. Overriding all of this was a resentment of white America and the discarding of much that white America stood for. This atbreastude accelerated with time as African Americans found that the rest of the country really had no place for them. They started to eschew American values in favor of their own. Unfortunately, their synthesized culture doesn't work very well in 20th and 21st Century America. Some of the characteristics of this synthesized culture that, in my opinion, has done the most damage to the buttimilation of African Americans into the mainstream of American society are: Lack of value for education, lack of a strong work ethic, a tradition of the balck community discouraging smart or ambitious blacks from exploiting their intelligence and ambition by joining the white community (black kids who did well in school, for instance, were actually ridiculed by their peers and called names like "Oreo" - black on the outside, white on the inside.). If a black man had a good steady job, his peers would accuse him of selling out to honkey.

These atbreastudes have served the African American community very poorly in this country, but the tide is turning. More and more African-American leaders see that this anti-establishment counter-culture that blacks have erected for themselves is extremely self destructive and that it has woven a cycle of almost unbroken poverty, crime, and misery. Unfortunately, judging by the "lyrics" one hears in black hip-hop and rap, they've got a long way to go to purge themselves of this self-imposed stigma.

-- George Graves The health of our society is a direct result of the men and women we choose to admire.