Reply #34: I object to the racism and classism in your assertions. [View All]

[OttavaKarhu]

Poverty doesn't create criminals. Poverty creates poor people.

Poor people make choices how to spend their lives.

In my predominantly (70%) black home ghetto city, we all faced the same economic violence and injustice.

But we didn't all become criminals, not by a long shot, and I resent and detest the liberal/Democrat assertion that we all were/are so weak, mediocre, and unambitious that we couldn't earn or excel our way out of these background conditions.

Or the assertion that if you see POOR and BROWN then obviously CRIMINAL is going to follow.

This is why I always refused affirmative action efforts on "my" behalf. I didn't want my excellence to be monkeyhumped by liberal Democrats' sense of their own fairygodmother superiority being responsible for my successes, if any. I wanted to earn them fair and square.

If you want to help me as a kid, or my hometown's kids, then quit with this nonsense about how poor brown people have no choice but to become thugs. The reason my friends and relatives who became thugs, became thugs, was that that was their choice. The more bitter truth is that rich white Democrats made a lot of money off those choices--for instance in the Social Work Industry (today called the Nanny State). I can't begin to count the number of those upscale degreed types tried to give me a pass when I was looking for a challenge.

In my experience, excellence was a much harder choice than not trying. Getting involved in crime was very easy. It is for rich white kids too. Peaceful living was a much harder choice than playing testosterone roulette. Education was a much harder choice than dropping out or going into the military with dreams of flying jet fighters or being a wargame hero in a uniform. Being a woman on your own was a much harder choice than getting knocked up.

But that's what real success comes down to: making the harder choice in the name of a better future. Not being rescued by Daddy Democrat, who by the way never lets you forget that you owe him your dumbed down/Special Olympics freedom.

Unfortunately this liberal Democrat view said to all over us, over and over again, that we weren't capable of anything better than the easier choice, and I don't see how that isn't racist in the extreme. ("You're brown, therefore you're doomed. Unless we parcel out Opportunities and Affirmative Action to you, and then of course you will always know that you didn't really earn your way, you got it through politics.")

I always thought it was disturbing how my best teachers were all Republicans, while the Democrats left me feeling queasy and soiled somehow. Even though I spouted H. Rap Brown at them, they were tolerant and caring men and women who didn't care about my politics (squarely left from my teens on). They cared about my desire to work hard, earn my own (and my family's) way, excel, and evolve my own talents and spirit. When they challenged young men and women from my hood to work hard and earn theirs, they were called racists for "expecting too much."

Thank the gods they expected too much of me, my family, and my friends and neighbors who also refused to believe we were second class when others insisted we were. (Mostly liberal Democrats.)