In a shocking Kanye West Move, Jesse Jackson is claiming that an influential group of people don’t care about the black folk. The group in question? Democratic Presidential candidates (Barak Obama included, only John Edwards excluded.) In the Chicago Sun-Times Op Ed section today, The Rev. registered his concerns publicly, indicating that the democratic presidential candidates did not care about the plight of the black man, and were paying no attention to issues that affected them.
Now I’m no politician (yet), but it would seem to me that the idea behind governing a nation like the United States is that all people are created equal. By perpetuating the idea that we need to pay special attention to “the plight of the blak man”, we’re essentially writing a blank check to a large demographic and teling them “It’s okay, screw up all you want. Nobody expects anything from you.” Maybe if we didn’t hold our citizens to different standards, there wouldn’t be discrepancies. By championing the need for specific programs and legislation aimed at one group, we are letting them off the hook.
When it comes right down to it, a black student with average grades has a better chance getting into most universities than a white student with perfect marks, and has a much great chance at getting scholarships to pay for their entire education. We can’t be parents to screw-up kids, and we can’t be safety nets for screwup parents. I’m all for legislation that gives people equal opportunities if there are legitimate precedences for not providing equal opportunities, but that’s not the kind of stuff that Jesse Jackson is championing, he wants the government to fix black people’s problems. Short answer? No.
I think Kanye actually takes lessons from this jerk. Put yourself in the shoes of the white-upper class in the post civil war era. They’re all sitting around thinking, “How best to ensure that the blacks never take their full place in society?” Someone offers the idea that whites could somehow psychologically entrench in black culture that they are victims and must always blame someone else. Who would they have picked to lead this group? Jesse Jackson. What a douche bag.
A-Bomb
December 2nd, 2007