Discriminations

John writes:

>>>"But if blacks do not consider themselves, and are not considered by others, to be “a single race,” that assumption lies in tatters. Especially because such a large preponderance of those who receive such “racial” preferences are from only one of the two black races, the middle/upper class one. And this is itself odd, since blacks from the poorer/lower class black “race” would provide much more “diversity” than the blacks who are more like whites and Asians."

John, after all these years, you still don't seem to get this.

It doesn't MATTER what the minority (blacks) label or consider themselves. The group in POWER (whites) makes the final determination.

Fox News Sunday Contributor Juan Williams writes:

>>>"Over half of all Americans -- people of all colors -- believe that the values of poor and middle-class blacks are becoming more different. When the question is limited to black people, the answer is even more definitive: 61 percent say values are now more different between middle-class and poor blacks"

Anybody who believes that all African-Americans think alike will be shocked by this poll.

Not even White Americans, (who by the way, control the vast majoirty of power, wealth and status) consider all White Americans to be of their same....ilk. I'll let them speak for me.

>>>"Like Mr. Crespino, Matthew D. Lassiter was motivated to research his own Southern roots. He found a gap between the history he had learned in school and his experience growing up in its wake in Sandy Springs, a white, middle-class suburb of Atlanta. “I was trying to find my own people, my parents and grandparents,” said Mr. Lassiter, 36, who wrote “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South” (Princeton) published last year. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters and the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he taught undergraduates and assigned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/arts/01sout.html?8dpc=&_r=2&pagewanted=all

And how does this translate to politics?

>>>"Mr. Lassiter, who now teaches history at the University of Michigan, said: “Who are these moderates? They don’t seem to be participating, yet they’re completely complicit in the system of Jim Crow.”

Mr. Lassiter’s book looks at how the federal government subsidized white flight to the suburbs, where middle-class whites could embrace colorblind values but still maintain all-white enclaves and schools. “When you look at suburbs and middle class, then you start getting a national story,” he said. “White suburbs outside Charlotte are reacting the same as white suburbs outside Los Angeles or in New Jersey.”

Kevin M. Kruse, who grew up in Nashville and now teaches at Princeton University, focuses more on rank-and-file segregationists than moderates. In his 2005 book, “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism” (Princeton), he argues that in moving to the suburbs, “white Southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery, and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/arts/01sout.html?8dpc=&_r=2&pagewanted=all

White Moderates? White Liberals? White Conservatives? Nothern Suburban Soccer Moms? Southern NASCAR Dads? White Bill O'Reilly viewers? White Keith Olberman viewers? Toby Keith fans vs. Marilyn Manson fans?

Apparently, no race in America is a monolith.

--Cobra

I am ignorant and I admit it. I read PEW report and the question "Are Blacks a single Race" was not clear to me, especially after I looked at some of the answers. I read Juan Williams column that was basically a recap of the PEW report and it shed no light on the issue. What I gathered from the question made me think of breaking up the "black" community by ethnic groups, skin color groups, nappy hair and straight groups, big lip groups and thin lipped group all forms of self hatred and distancing from being black, but it didn't say that. It sounded like it was division by class and pedigree, which is another issue entirely. Or, is it now self-determination made by the individual such Latin immigrants who become white upon reaching the United States, shedding their ancestral baggage in the process. Or is it a rejection of government grouping? I don't know anything on this. I don't even know if I've asked the right questions.

Confused