SOURCE betrays Hip-Hop, diasporan Africans, teams up with U.S. Army

I agree with everything in this post except for the word 'almost.'

 

And amazingly thousands of 18 yr. olds still enlist. Must be the gourmet food and pleasant working conditions.

 

I agree, the military should be Whites only.

 

Um, you know...

I had a dreadful time as an enlisted man. Believe me that the ability to kill people legally for a living was not the reason I signed up. But, the mililtary was there when I needed direction, a leg up, a new start. The best thing that military service did for me was to re-wire that anal-cranial misconfiguration I seemed to have been born with. It was also the only way I knew to give back to my country without having a college degree. I can't speak for young Black Americans, but if they feel, as I did, that it is important to do service for one's country, then it makes perfect sense for them to join the military. The real problem is not that the military reaches out to these young people, it's that they have no other choice, if they'd like to delay or avoid college and serve their country. That's a good starting point for some change.

 

I don't think what I'm saying is completely ridiculous. For the majority of US history, any decent consideration given to blacks has been reluctant at best and responded to with violence and/or death at worst. I can't believe I even have to do so much explaining about this.

 

Never mind the fact that the military (along with pro sports) has traditionally been at the forefront of integration and equal rights for blacks.

 

Ah, well then give the armed forces the proverbial cookie. Our government fought like mad to deny even basic human rights forever, but we'll let certainly let them die beside us to fight the wars our white led governments went into.

What a joke of an argument.

(were you the person who tried to argue against Strom Thurmond detractors by saying he was the first government official to hire a black employee??)

 

What are you talking about, man? What rubbish, stop playing Mr Victim.

 

The military exists to protect the citizens. That it has a better track record than the private sector with regards to fair treatment isn't really relevant. To join up is, at the end of the day, to protect a lot of people who have done little to deserve protection from Black soldiers.

I still say it had and has to be done, tho.

 

Hmmm fought like mad to deny the most basic of rights...like freedom? I think we fought a little war with the South you should read about because it freed a people.

And don't tell me we didn't fight over slavery cause we did. From the Proclamation (1862) on abolition was a driving force in the North.

 

If you were a black guy in the 1950s and had the choice of either working a low-paying job and being treated like crap by whites, or working alongside whites who treated you as equals and knowing that at the end of the day you and them were one and the same and that they would give their lives to save yours just as you would give your life to save theirs, what would you do? (Assuming here you don't have the ability to play pro sports)

No, but I do believe that actions speak louder than words.

 

Do you think most white Americans today are racist?

40 years ago I would have agreed with you, but the vast majority of Americans today view blacks and whites as equals...and blacks join the military today for the same reasons whites do. Back then, even if they may not have joined to protect a nation that by and large had treated them like crap, they joined because it was really the only area where they would be treated equally to whites.

 

Are you insane?? Are you trying to say that after the Civil War, everything was fine for blacks?? Are you trying to say that nothing was ever denied to minorities?? Do I need to give you a US History education??

 

Strom Thurmond was one of the most dispicable people in American government in the last 100 years. Simply hiring a black person is nothing special, everyone should do it and to point it out as an attempt to excuse an entire lifetime of organised racism is absolutely ridiculous and a tad insulting to any audience you might be speaking to.

 

I don't think most whites are racist, although most are more that they will let on to (of course, I'm from Texas, so I probably have a pretty skewed view).

 

I wouldn't disagree with you there--although hiring a black person probably was "something special", especially for a white Senator from South Carolina, at the time that Thurmond did it (don't have the date off hand). My point was simply that actions speak louder than words--for instance, if a white person constantly refers to black people by the n-word but treats them exactly the same as he does white people, that person is in my mind less racist than a white guy who is always PC with his words but actively discriminates, behind the scenes, against black people--not hiring them if he's in a position to hire people, etc.

BTW, I was in the Bay Area this summer and must have seen a dozen cars going around that had lone-star flag bumper stickers with "Texile" or "Tex-Pat" written on them, none of those would've been you would they?

 

Hehe, I do my best to hide my roots.

 

I really can't say. I don't know most White Americans. That sounds simplistic, but it really isn't- your idea of racism is probably different from mine. Of course, there ain't many lynchings or "Whites Only" events going on, but I think there's still a great deal of cultural segregation in existence, propelled by Whites who make individual use of America's freedom of association to dissociate themselves from people of color. I don't see the lid on the melting pot opening for Black people the way it has for a lot of other cultural minorities, no. That says "racism" to me, tho to you it might be considered less offensive. I'd never want to turn back the clock, but the repealment of segregationist laws has given lots of people the false impression that all is well, when the truth is that many individuals haven't changed their ideas. In this regard, things might be worse than ever.

It's a stretch to say they were ever treated equally, man. More accurate to say they faced less discrimination in the military.

 

My two cents --

African-Americans have historically tried to use the argument "if America (read white America) sees us serving, fighting, and dying in a war, they'll see we're just as committed to defending this country and therefore will respect our god-given rights as laid out in the Constitution and stop treating us like second-class citizens." I believe Frederick Douglass once advanced an argument along these lines as a means to press for greater citizenship rights for blacks in the 1800s.
The logical flaw in the argument was pointed out by people like DuBois, who argued that whites could see blacks succeeding in American commerce, obeying American law in some cases more so than their white counterparts, and fighting and dying in this nation's wars to prove their patriotism and still treat black people poorly, deny them rights, lynch them, take their property, disenfranchise them, etc. i.e. that racism against black people was so powerful that it really didn't matter what black people did, white people's opinions wouldn't change and their resistance to respecting ANY rights for black people would remain strong.
There is merit in both arguments because the white population is not monolithic. The problem for black folks is simple -- we never know who is going to believe what and for how long before some social tide changes people's beliefs back to where they were in a previous period.
I think any people who don't question the real purpose of the military and sign up are have an almost deer in the headlights inability to see what's potentially coming, but again, with few opportunities, it's not surprising that so many find it appealling and don't really entertain the thought of possibly getting shot at until it's right upon them, like in the past few months.

 

Mel, remove slavery from the American equation and tell me there would have been a war over seccession.In fact, the South would have never seceeded like it did if it weren't for slavery.

"Our new gov't is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races...Its corner stone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. This..government is the first in history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth."~Confederate Vice President Alexander. H Stephens.

 

Exactly. We would've fought to keep the Union together regardless of the slavery issue, but the South never would've seceded were it not for slavery.

 

Right but...Alex, for Southerners the war was about slavery. At first for Northerners it was about preserving the Union, but after the Proclamation the war was about slavery for them aswell.

The souths constant defense of slavery made a lot of Northerns actually think about what abolitionists like william lloyd garrison were saying (the South Carolina legislature offered 5,000 dollars for Garrison's arrest.)

Here's a great excerpt from "The Civil War-An Illustrated History" by Geoffrey C. Ward that illustrated how abolitionist the North had become by 1850.


"Let the president drench our land of freedom in blood," said the abolitionist Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, "but he will never make us obey that law." In Chicago, the city council passed a resolution declaring the Fugitive Slave Act in violation of both the Constitution and the laws of God.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, students freed a captured runaway from a nearby jail in Wellington.

In Boston, federal troops and and an outlay of nearly $100,000 were needed to send a single fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, back to his master. Church bells tolled in mounring. The American flag was lowered to half staff. "We went to bed one night old fashioned,conservative, Compromise Union Whigs," one Bostonian wrote after Burns and his captors had sailed south,"and waked up stark mad abolitionists."

 

silence speaks volumes

 

Lincoln went as far as possible on race without becoming totally unelectable. Of course, you like the unelectable types. So does George Bush.