Hogwashed

Townhall must be in hog heaven having so many Black and/or Jewish writers putting out. Of the top 10 hogwashed articles, rated by TH readers e-mailing (may have changed by now), 1/3 of the topics tell us liberals and Blacks are lying about reality:

1. Walter E. Williams: Victimhood: Rhetoric or reality? (Liberals fooling Blacks into playing victims because Blacks are dumb and liberals are liars.)

2. Thomas Sowell: Looking back. (Will future generations look back at how we weren't militaristic enough on NK and Iran, kill more brown people.)

3. Thomas Sowell: Liberals and class. (Being stuck in your class system a liberal lie.)

4. Thomas Sowell: Liberals and class: Part II. (More liberal lies about race, class, gender.)

5. Jeff Jacoby: The slavery shakedown. (Bad Black folks, still want that 40 acres and a mule in today's dollars from nice corporations who aren't really guilty because it happened so long ago.)

Remaining articles on UN, Amnesty International, Hillary, the usual. But the first 5 above affirm that liberals are to blame for the quality of life for Black Americans. The articles state that upward mobility is available to all and point to the hordes of "recent immigrants" who have been successful. Why can't Blacks? Because the liberals keep Blacks in perpetual victimhood, yak yak yak. I first heard that talking point around the time of Bush II's run in 2000. The racist freeper types chanted the mantra in nearly every argument on any subject with anyone who had a whiff of liberalism in their tone. Jeff Jacoby, Jewish, should not have been assigned an article as inflammatory as "slavery shakedown" for what has the holocaust been but a 60 Year Racket? If 'twere me passing out assignments I'd have asked Williams to write the victimhood rhetoric or real on the Holocaust Shakedown. And Jacoby could have written a prosy piece on "looking back at brown people of the world and will we regret we didn't kill 'em all."

When offering the "immigrants are successful why can't more of yous Black folks do that" conservatives always forget to mention that many, if not most, of the "immigrants" they're talking about are given perks and benefits that the rest of us are not. Many of the immigrants these conservatives point to are the happy beneficiaries of policies which enable U.S. trade negotiators to offer non-immigrant visas with benefits in return for overseas business opportunities for US corporations. There's a fortune in grant monies to NGO and States for immigration programs, which leads to NGOs targeting immigrants with programs for education, health, housing, employment, business loans, etc. While there are similar programs for all Americans, the targeting and concentration on immigrants remains lucrative for grant seekers and thus the focused aid to immigrants is more beneficial to same. The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, Office of Refugee Resettlement, and after every US war there's a bounty of ad hoc task force agencies to atone to a few of the folks left standing after our liberation sprees.

Excluding Mexico (#1), in 2001 India was second in immigrants to the US, followed by China, followed by the Philippines, and Vietnam. Let's look at a few factors the conservative why-can't-you-be-like-them crowd never mention. Many immigrant programs focus on self-employment for immigrants. Often these (legal) immigrants are backed by middle and upper-class White business owners who don't want to deal with predominantly Black or Latino working-class customers and "use" Asian/Indian immigrants to serve as a "buffer zone" while they still control wholesale and distribution and the immigrant business "owner" is left to face the hostility that would be directed at Whites. A few studies show that Asian business owners make modest profits, often exploit their workers, use extended family labor for free or cheap, and rarely become the moguls the rightwing wants us to believe. They also rarely point to the foreign Mafiosi involved in immigration.

Another factor is that most immigrants are not the poorest of the poor. It costs quite a bit and requires preparation to immigrate. Legal immigrants as a group have a higher college degree rate and a higher rate of having an advanced degree (medical, law, or doctorate) than do the US-born. The "model minority image" has more to it than just good ol' ingenuity. Refugee and asylum seekers are often former government, military, and upper middle class citizens in their country of origin.

Another item rarely mentioned is the US preference for immigrant labor as opposed to the alternative to train and hire Black Americans. Only at the height of America's industrial age of blue collar workers were Blacks entering the middle class in record numbers, and only because there was insufficient numbers of immigrant labor at the time. American industry prefers a labor pool of brown folks fearful of deportation. Today with the manufacturing base shrinking, and the same bigotry, employers still prefer lighter skin immigrants, who, aided by tax money and do-gooders, benefit over Blacks in the work force. Most forward thinking Blacks are against immigration. We know it's another policy that aids in the destruction of Black America. Pay no attention to what Vincent Fox says.

The preference of less pigment is everywhere. Black stars, especially females, are generally light-skinned, body and facial features less Black. Male stars are allowed more pigment, but Wesley Snipes hasn't been around a lot lately. Female singers are lighter skinned. Rapsters are allowed blackness as the genre is considered thuggish and gangster which perpetuates the Blacks are sinister mentality. I've watched high profile Blacks grow Whiter and lighter, Colin, Oprah, etc. Whoopi is an exception to the rule. Employers will go with the lighter face nearly every time. We have a phrase 'light, bright, and damn near White.' What a difference a shade makes. Remember Texaco "black jelly beans" are stuck at the bottom of the bag.

There's a variety of reasons Blacks are not living up to the "model minority" images. Men like Williams, Sowell, etc. know why and should stop pretending it's nothing more than liberal policy. We can't all be tokens. This is not to excuse the behavior we see today; criminality, promiscuity, ignorance, English only momma can understand, drugs, immorality, are everywhere, but where are the pundits demanding to know why millions of poor Whites aren't living up to the model immigrant image? Where are the pundits pointing to millions of poor lazy Whites performing a "shakedown" as they cash their government checks and whine about Blacks on welfare and Mexicans at the border.