One person makes a legit point, and the opposing party purposely misinterprets and redefines what you just stated very clearly. This is called the strawman’s argument. Sometimes these conservative nuts even argue some eloquent points against the imaginary argument that was never made in the first place. Other times, the propaganda con-artists will still make stupid arguments against even misrepresented statements.
Calling for Conversation
In the wake of all these police shootings in the last several years, you’ll see Black liberal pundits and celebrities begging their Democratic daddies and liberal media mommies for a “conversation on race” – whatever the hell that means. When they have that highly-coveted “conversation on race,” liberals make the most profound and cogent observations on systemic racism on a broader level outside of the specific, racially charged, police shooting incident that brought them there in the first place. Conservatives like Larry Elder and many others then make this stupid and irrelevant statement about racism as a whole not being that bad, to the point of keeping a hard-working Black person from becoming financially successful and attaining social mobility. They do this to imply that liberal pundits are claiming racism keeps Blacks from becoming successful.
In separate news stories, you’ll hear rags-to-riches success stories online or on TV about some random Black person whose million-dollar idea finally came to fruition after a lifetime of poverty. The random successful Black person won’t directly attack pro-Black critics of systematic racism while talking about their journey to success. The media will nonetheless, indirectly slant their statement to say he became a millionaire despite racism and poverty, with the implied statement being that other militant crybabies need to shut up about racism. The media also loves to steer more mainstream celebrity athletes and entertainers into implying that their individual success is proof that racism is extinct.
Do Conservatives Have a Point?
These conservatives are absolutely right. Racism won’t stop a Black individual from attaining personal success with a career and money. This is not even the argument you hear from most complaining Blacks. When I was growing up in the 1990s, I was told you have to work harder than Whites and have less room for error than Whites in order to succeed. I was also told that I will receive a harsher punishment than Whites for committing the same crime. It wasn’t told as an excuse for failure, but more as a motivation to become successful. It wasn’t stated as a complaint nor was it the central point. It was said with passing cynicism with the central point being to work hard to overcome this miniscule hurdle of racism and attain individual financial and career success.
If you take ten hard-working, disciplined Black people today with respective individual career goals, they can accomplish them. If one Black person wants to attain their Master’s degree or Ph.D., and get XYZ lucrative career for a White institution, or a few Black incohesive institutions making $80,000-$100,000 a year, he or she could. If they wanted to join the military as a career and rank up to the highest rank possible and retire with a good nest egg and pension, they could. If they wanted to excel in sports and entertainment, they could if they have the talent. Their lucrative business idea could catapult them in the upper class of millionaires as well.
A Black person can even climb the corporate ladder of a traditionally White-owned corporate institution and become Lead Manager of the Button Pushing Department, Vice President of the Paper Filing Department, or any other high salaried, random, fancy title that’s considered prestigious in the corny subculture of a company. They can even have Whites, Blacks, and other races working under them. With this individual success, they can become homeowners and send their children to college and ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Racism as a hurdle to their individual career and monetary success will resemble a mosquito being swatted away. No one’s making the argument of racism keeping Blacks from attaining individual financial social mobility.
What About the Collective?
Now what if those same ten Black people who attained individual financial success decided they wanted more than personal career success of helping themselves, their wife, children, parents, or any other close relatives in financial need? They have a nest egg of money, and/or passive income from some lucrative idea that keeps them from being self-absorbed in their own individual quest for monetary survival. They then decided to pursue a collective goal of helping the entire Black community become successful on a mass, cohesive, and systemic level. They organized at a grassroots level and successfully encouraged that low percentage of troubled, disenfranchised Blacks – you know, those gang-banging, murderous criminals constantly mentioned in the news – into positive, crime-free actions. The grassroots leaders aren’t being ignored by this troubled segment either. They actually have credibility amongst them and have their attentive ear and responsive souls. This grassroots leadership also had the gift of gab to mobilize, and the talent to organize them into a sociopolitical powerbase. Suddenly, there was a mass reduction in so-called Black-on-Black crime and the private prison industrial complex started to lose money.
This same grassroots organization or individual somehow found a way to convince the higher percentage of working class, middle class, and upper class Blacks to buy Black and organize their dollar nationally and globally among the Black diaspora to create Black owned corporate institutions to employ Blacks… and employ Whites and other races as well for that matter. Suddenly, White owned corporations stopped benefiting off the Black flaw of mass consumerism, and new Black businesses benefited from it and they started to grow.
I can tell you what would happen to those Black grassroots leaders in their quest for collective success. They would die mysterious deaths. Maybe they would shoot themselves in the back and put the gun in their pocket after they die. Or at least this bizarre, hypothetical suicide would be the official story being told to the masses on mainstream news media. And of course any so-called race-baiting cynic who questions the mainstream media’s monopoly on the truth is a conspiracy theorist.
The Grassroots Backlash
Either mysterious deaths would happen, or the ambitious-for-collective-success grassrooter would get locked up on trumped up charges, deported from America the way they did Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, or have their message misrepresented and/or character destroyed in the media, causing previously supportive Blacks to turn away from them.
The grassroots organization might also start killing each other out of the blue and have petty squabbles causing the gifted mobilizer and organizer to get killed and the group to disband. The media will demonize the event as just run-of-the-mill, criminal negroes killing negroes. Cynics will likely suspect that a Black FBI agent or two were planted in the group to instigate divide and conquer chaos. Idiots will call the cynics conspiracy theorists, with their rational argument being “That ain’t what they said on the news.”
Thirty years later, you will see some balding, gray-haired Sambo in a documentary about the now grassroots legendary organization, saying he was a former FBI agent and his first assignment was to infiltrate and cause chaos among the grassroots movement and organization. He’ll say he applied for the FBI position thinking he would have some noble job of catching a serial killer or infiltrating and disbanding some mafia boss, drug kingpin, or the pedophile rings in Hollywood. But instead, his bosses told him this righteous, grassroots leader who’s encouraging Black socio political and economic unity needs to be taken down. In the eyes of the government intel, a conscious Black person encouraging Black unity is more of a threat than dealers, killers, and pedophiles of any race. You’ll see a thirty years younger, less balding and gray haired version of the Sambo government agent standing among the grassroots leaders doing his job of pretending to be down for the cause so he can destroy the cause per his master’s orders. Anyone ever heard of COINTELPRO?
Are We Successful?
Basically, if you try to get a good job or career as a Black person, you’ll be successful. If you try to create jobs and resources on a mass level as a Black person among the collective Black downtrodden and working and middle classes, you’ll be dead, jailed, deported, character assassinated, and ultimately, unsuccessful. “They” only let scattered Black individuals succeed, not a cohesive collective – Uncle Larry Elder.
