On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 10:28 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
It goes beyond just the "black leaders" thing--it's also about "black pride.""Kevin S. Van Horn" wrote:Tyler Durden wrote:Black leadership is one potential issue here, but the other ethnic groups that do so well in the US have no identifiable leaders here.Which is precisely why those ethnic groups do so well, while U.S. blacks do not. The value of "leaders" is vastly overrated in American society.Same over here in London. I'm a white, English, middle-class sort of bloke. Who are my "community leaders"?
My eye-opening experience was my arrival in college (as Brits would say, "at university") in 1970. UCSB, in beautiful Santa Barbara. There I found students from diverse backgrounds and cultures, mixing in the classrooms, the dorms, and the eating halls. Except for the negroes, who all sat together at one set of tables in whichever eating hall they were in. There may have been a few "stragglers" scattered amongst the other tables, but basically it was de facto, self-selected segregation.
Much was spouted about "black pride," and the negroes took to wearing huge afros with pimp-combs in their hair. They openly insulted "whitey." Essentially, they aligned themselves into a gang.
Many of them switched dorm rooms around, resulting in de facto creation of segregated dorm halls. White students avoided these ghettoes, for good reason. (I interviewed in 1971 for a "R.A." (resident assistant) position, to help with living costs, and my negro interviewer only asked my questions about what "CORE" was, what "SNCC" was, etc. My answers were PC enough, and I was turned down. More and more of the R.A.s were negroes by 1973.)
Special departments were created to handle the surge in negro students: Black Studies was the main one, with Sociology expanded to teach classes about the oppression and the marginalization of the black race," blah blah. Swahili was the language they took to meet the minimal foreign language requirements. There were no negroes in my math or physics classes.
They were active, however, in student government. One of them, a woman named Judy McClellan, used to hop up on the conference tables in the student government meetings and walk up and down, ranting and screaming at the non-negro, non-Hispanic students. She once, according to reporters for the student newspaper who were in the meeting, had her negro aides stand at the doors so she could tell the council that "nobody is leaving until you pass this" (something about funding for her programs, etc.).
The next year the President of the student council, one Robert Norris, flashed a revolver at white students who were opposing one of his resolutions. When this was reported in the campus newspaper, bails of the newspapers were thrown into the lagoon by negroes.
I wrote all of this up in a letter which I sent in June of 1973 to the Regents of the University of California. I included descriptions of many of the atrocities, including the shakedown of funds from white students to go to bogus inner city youth programs (including purchase of a $2500 "rare" comic book about negroes, a comic book which nobody could later produce to investigators). I described the "La Raza Libre" Hispanic gang on campus, the MeCHA rival gang, the Black Pride contingent, the Black Students Union, etc.
The Regents replied that what I had reported was known to them, but that we live in troubled times, blah blah. I did get a signed letter back from Governor Reagan's top assistant saying they were adding my report to the list of reported problems. The campus newspaper ran my letter in full, and it triggered a minor firestorm. I became sort of the "right wing mascot" for a few months. I got a few death threats, too, and met with the Chancellor to discuss the issues I'd raised. He agreed with all of my points, clucked about the black and Mexican gangs, but said, echoing the Regents, that we live in troubled times.
It was clear to me at the time that the focus on "black pride" was destructive of _real_ pride. Instead of excelling in math or science, or even law or English or whatever, many of them went into dead-end fields like Black Studies and Swahili. (My nearby university today is UCSC, which has similar programs in Women's Studies, Queer Studies, and History of Consciousness. While a few actual scholars no doubt will come out of such studies, a lot of the graduates will be waitressing at local restaurants, their degrees in Women's Studies of no use in Silicon Valley or anywhere else.)
I think of it as evolution in action. Of course, sometimes evolution needs to be helped along a bit.
--Tim May
