It ain't all good, and that's the truth
Thangs ain't goin like you think they should - it's all on you.
-- De La Soul
Following up on my post Why Race Talk Doesn't Work, I remind people that national conversations on race turn out to be useless. My case in point.
TOWARDS ONE AMERICA: A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ON RACE
Here's the Google search. Go spelunking for yourself. Many of you may recall, or perhaps even more telling, you do not recall, that President Clinton initiated a presidential level one year conversation on race from the White House. It doesn't get any better than that, unless you believe that Clinton simply couldn't do it because he was white. In which case you might be likely to hold out hope that Barack Obama can do it because he is black. And of course that would only work if Obama dictates the content, in which case ... well, he's got a lot of 'splaining to do.
In either case, it's a travesty and a sham. There was nothing created by that presidential commission that improved anything about anything except for the political careers of those people who took part in it, notably Christopher Edley Jr, and the Thernstroms. And there is nothing either of them has done from a national perspective on race that holds a candle to what Shaquanda Cotton, or the Duke Rape Case or Kanye West or Jeremiah Wright or Don Imus or Michael Richards has undone.
Repeat after me. Your racial ethics are a matter of personal responsibility. There is no other way. You should have learned these values at home. Family values.
Once again. The difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals seek to use the public power of the state to guard against the deprivations of the dysfunctional family. Conservatives seek to use the power of the family to guard against the deprivations of the dysfunctional state.
There is no way to improve the quality of America's race relations by proxy. No committee, no ethnic leader, no policy, no religious crusade, no demonstration, no lobbying group, no campus speech codes, no public service announcement, no MTV Rock-the-whatever, no celebrity endorsement, no multicultural chorus singing We Are The World, no endless loop of MLK speeches, no critical theory reinterpretation of Founding documents, no deconstructive analysis of images in media, no parsing of vocabulary, no editing of dictionaries, no banning of words, hairstyles, websites.
There is nothing but you, your morals and your discipline, and your neighbor and his.
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