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I came across today a movie trailer today which is/was The American Society of Magical Negroes. It really showed me how much the elite black class is grifting. The story apparently revolves around black people using magical powers to keep white people from chimping out and attacking black people. I'm not going to sit here and say black don't have grievances in America and against whites, but I don't think this whole type of thinking helps blacks. It makes it clear to me (and many other instances obviously) that the black elite and black academics define themselves against whiteness. Like they can't imagine blackness without white people in America. An America with no racism against blacks isn't possible to them, and the DEI and all that kind of stuff is necessary to keep them safe. This leaves many kinds of positions for more or less grifting that are basically only open to blacks and leave them a position to cry about racism and also benefit from it handsomely in terms of salary.
Working in Silicon Valley has given me the opportunity to work with a bunch of Nigerians that make insane salaries and live luxurious lifestyles. One thing I've noticed from them is that they don't think about the black/white distinction the same way. At my current company, the director of security is a Nigerian and half of the staff is Nigerian. Obviously they are hiring their own ethnics at a preferable rate, but I haven't seen one of them be part of the "Black at XYZ Company" groups or really care about that. They actually seem to be pretty happy with the current state of affairs in the US an have integrated pretty well.
I'm going to sound like a boomer conservative here, but it seems to me black elites in America seem obsessed with keeping the race divide front and center and their bloated salaries are a direct benefit to them. I don't think that black performance or lack thereof has anything to do with racism. I've never met a single normie person that is anti-black and hates them. I myself am pretty racist and HBD minded and I don't hate blacks at all. I find ghetto criminal blacks to be a nuisance and I don't like that, but even I would have to admit the vast majority of blacks are just normal people who want to live their lives and be happy. When I lived in Chicago, other than a few really unsafe areas I didn't mind walking around majority black neighborhoods.
It seems to me that there is an elite black class that was raised on the Civil Rights movement that can't move on. Their world view of racism is hopelessly outdated and most people would be fine hiring blacks and living near them. However, as currently constructed there is an elite black class that wants the status quo because they benefit from it Being a civil rights activist and a socila justice advocate is beneficial for these people instead of telling blacks they can succeed or fail on their own merits and to just be normal Americans.
As a non-American, the blacks have no one to blame but themselves. No, I am not being unnecessarily harsh on them or anything of that sort. Why the fuck does someone have to "make it out of the hood"? Just literally walk out of the hood. There are for hire signs everywhere and just start working a minimum wage job. Done, you're out of the hood! If you are not braindead, sit for the SAT, and then go to community college -> a state university, student loans are a thing, right?
If a group of people can't make it in the US of all places, there is NOTHING, NOTHING you can do for them.
And of course, grifters gonna grift. Is their grifting feeding the cycle? Probably, but its probably a coup complete problem at this point.
I think this is probably much easier said than done. You know how it's pretty easy for the average kid of 7 or so to learn a new language, but it's much harder for most adults?
If you grow up in the hood, by the time you develop any sort of adult-style self-awareness, you might already be fucked because you just spent your most formative years getting conditioned in really unproductive ways.
Add on top of that there is the violence that is common in the hood. It's probably pretty hard to focus on productivity if you regularly hear gunshots when you're lying in bed at night. I think that high levels of exposure to violence also tend to put people into a near-permanent fight-or-flight mode in which it is difficult to focus on any future further ahead than maybe tomorrow.
I think that some social justice activists are really doing the wrong thing by making it seem like it's all the fault of the white man, when in reality many of the problems of black communities are mainly caused by other black people.
However, I'm not going to blame some kid who grew up with a single mother in a violent inner city neighborhood for not having the sort of psychology and life skills that the typical kid who grew up in a healthy family in a safe neighborhood will tend to have.
I think you're making his position a little too strong. First, he never said it was easy. Secondly, there's no guarantee of success for anything you do in life, but you try and seize the opportunities that are available to you, and if they aren't there, you do your best to create them. That's the formula for every community out there.
Like you, I wouldn't fault a kid who grew up in the hood for being the kind of person he is, beset with all the influences he grew up around. I fault him for not trying to do something about it. It's the same reason I roll my eyes when I see people complaining about "the economy" and how "poor" they are, but it's a really odd thing to have observed. I've never seen a self-described "poor" person who 'didn't' have a smartphone. These are the kinds of people who live to the maximum of their income, and have worse "lifestyle" inflation than the economy has "monetary" inflation. When you're eating your meals from a crockpot, working 2 jobs, and are paying your bills before you pay for anything else, you then have a 'right' to complain about how bad things are. I feel bad for impoverished communities who are casualties of the system despite their best efforts. But I have zero sympathy to give whatsoever for the ones that don't even try.
I'm poor (particularly right now), and I don't own a smartphone — just a $8/mo. "Obamaphone" subsidized flip-phone that's something like a decade old.
I see someone watches Jesse Lee Peterson.
Poor people of course exist. Most of the people living the high life in the urban cities who burn their paychecks within a day of getting them are going to have a hard sell of it, in tying to convince me.
Never heard of him. I'm just disabled and living on various government handouts (and currently fighting with Social Security over my SSI due to issues from the COVID days, along with them counting among my assets a bank account that literally doesn't exist).
I'm going through a massive haggling of my own with the government at the moment. It's quite sad how the law protects criminal behavior from being exposed by those who would seek to do the right thing.
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