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Our art of blaming of our victims

Chapter 39

 

 

  

Interview with this wino:
"I think everybody was born naked, so we're all human beings. But until I find someone that was born with clothes on I'm not going to think they're any more than me. That's the way I feel about it."

  

  

This type of "Give a damn about your fellow man" - journey through Harlem illustrates in all its saccharine sentimentality the white liberal way of seeing the ghetto.

From the paternal, almost loving care of blacks by the Southern plantation aristocracy there is a direct link to the endless talk about helping one's fellow man among Northern liberals.

  

  

Many liberals do a great and tiresome job in the ghettos, but whether we breast-feed or bottle-feed our outcasts the result is the same:

We are actually blaming the victims themselves by trying to adjust them to their unhappy casteless fate in an unjust caste society - instead of changing ourselves. We do not consider blacks inherently inferior as do the conservatives.

  

  

Instead we see them as functionally inferior as a result of the injustice, slavery, and discrimination of a distant past. After having experienced this presentation we will ask with despair: "What can we do?"

  

  

But we will do nothing which would threaten our own privileges and the present distribution of society's goods.

We do not have the courage - or are paralyzed with fright at the thought of looking into the depths of the soul to get in touch with our abyss of pain.

That pain which makes us into such powerless, but effective oppressors.

  

  

Thus we liberals, in fact, are among one of the most important tools of racism and continued oppression.

We help the underclass to adapt itself to an oppression which renders it functionally inferior enough to satisfy our own need to administer paternalistic care to the "untermensch" (subhuman).

  

  

The underclass blacks have no time to spare for the liberals' condescending attitude and constantly try to provoke forth our true conservative face.

  

  

They refuse to see it as progress that the knife in their back is pulled back from four inches to only two inches and would rather stab the liberal back to the age-old "white backlash" where he belongs.

  

 

The blacks' own view of Harlem is directly opposite the white liberal one since they cannot see only the dismal in the ghetto without going insane.

  

 

In order to survive you must look at the positive sides.

  

 

For instance, they will not emphasize that 10% of Harlem's youth are bloody criminals terrorizing the streets.

  

  

They will turn it upside down and be encouraged by the incredible fact that in spite of this criminal environment, 90% of the youth have not been in conflict with the law. 

  

  

They will look at the flourishing culture thriving in the midst of the oppression, be heartened by the fact that the
majority of Harlem's population are surviving - see the many roses that manage to grow up in this jungle.

  

 

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