The Democratic Party is probably the biggest hypocrite when it comes to giving African-Americans opportunities to develop politically. How many African-Americans and other people of color hold positions of power in the Michigan Democratic Party?Well, Mongo, you asked, and you've been answered:
As to his question, "how many people of color hold positions of power in the Michigan Democratic Party?," Mongo ignores that both the first and second vice chairs of the party are minorities, as are 50 percent of the party officers. The political director for the past five years was African-American. In recent years, there were two African-American Democratic caucus leaders in the Michigan House of Representatives. Chong-Anna Canfora, LansingSpeaking of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, he also had some answers for Mongo (emphasis added):
How many African Americans hold power in Michigan's Democratic Party? Let's start with my former boss Congressman John Conyers. His wife, Monica, happens to be president pro tem of the City Council of Detroit. The mayor of Detroit happens to be African-American as well. And there is the woman who started my political career, Rosa Thomas, who is the recording secretary of the Michigan Democratic Party. Jared Hautamaki, Rochester Hills
As I read Adolph Mongo's rant against Michigan Democrats ("Michigan Democrats don't practice equal rights," June 14), I could not help thinking about poll taxes, Detroit-bashing and race-baiting. I have personally battled them for more than four decades. They are also the platform of the Michigan Republican Party in 2006.And just in case Mongo had a lapse in memory: Blacks should look to Hurricane Katrina to see how much the Republicans love them. I am a Democrat who hopes no one gets fooled at election time. Gary Bergman, Midland
Do not let anyone sell you the twisted logic that Democrats are against equal opportunity and civil rights and Republicans are for it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In Michigan today, Republicans are pushing a radical, anti-civil rights and anti-urban agenda. Recently, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill to finance mass transit throughout the state that specifically excluded Detroit -- a blatant slap in the face to Detroiters. Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed that divisive legislation.
At the same time, quietly, Republicans are pushing legislation that would disenfranchise thousands of minority voters by requiring a photo ID to vote at the polls.
Yes, this is the same party that shut down Detroit's mental health facilities, eliminated the efficient Recorder's Court and led the takeover of Detroit's public schools.
It is easy to throw around anecdotal hearsay to insinuate the leadership of the Michigan Democratic Party is not committed to diversity. But we should focus instead on the reality that no one can dispute: There are more women and minorities serving as department directors and in leadership positions in the Granholm administration than virtually any other state in America.
As a percentage, the governor has appointed twice as many African Americans to state government boards, commissions and councils than former Republican Gov. John Engler. I commend the governor that 24 percent of her judicial appointments are persons of color.
The simple fact is that the Democratic Party and its leaders are the ones committed to opportunity for all our citizens and promoting diversity in government.
UPDATE: Some links showing just how much Republican's care about minorities:
Jim Crow GOP
Southern lawmakers delay voting rights bill
18 comments:
Looks like Conyers' name has come up again. I wish there were more Dems like him.
And how many of the state's Republican leadership is of color? There aren't any on this side of the state!
Abi, I agree.
Lew, good question.
I was going to write a piece dissecting Conyer's comments today but haven't the time. Conyers, and I think most people, mistake patronizing blacks as being for civil rights. Patronizing blacks is being for black rights before others' rights. Patronizing blacks as needing enhanced rights is more paternalistic than anything. "Failure to Launch" was a comedy about an adult child unwilling to leave his parents' house and stand on his own, but could just as well have been about a generation's reluctance to cast off affirmative action and compete on their own merit.
Why after 40 years blacks constitute the majority inside American ghettos? Why after 40 years their incarceration rates are higher than before? Why after 40 years (two generations) their children aren't prepared for school? Why after 40 years black leaders still use slavery and Jim Crow as excuses for why black children commit crimes, score poorly on tests, speak poor English, and continue voting for democrats?
Why after 40 years they think it's "society's" responsibility to make them successful when black leaders and other organization work desperately against assimilating into American culture? We're worried about illegal immigrants coming to America, resisting assimilation, and draining our welfare programs when politicians like Conyers see nothing wrong with doing the same through 40-year-old failed civil rights era policies?
dude, 40 years is nothing.
Why , after forty years do blacks constitute the majority inside ghettoes? Affirmative action only addresses one of the problems facing poor blacks, and usually, it's the ones who live outside the ghettoes who benefit from it. Because they are poorer, they can't afford the better lawyers like white people can, so more of them end up incarcerated. Because they are poorer, they lack the basic fundamentals you take for granted, pencils, paper, books, that help them get prepared for school. Because they have to work to work several low paying jobs just to keep food on the table, their children are often times left unsupervised, as childcare is expensive, and unsupervised children have away of finding trouble (like drugs) which begins the cycle over again.But mainly, it's because after forty years they have to deal with racist bigots like yourself whom pass judgement on a social environment you are completely ignorant about.
Thomas, if the problem isn't societal, and therefore one that needs to be addressed with programs like affirmative action, what is it? Genetic? Are you a Shockley fan?
Troll Watcher and Abi, thanks for answering Thomas for me. Your comments pretty much sum up my opinion.
Thomas, I'm a woman, so I see affirmative action differently from you. If you believe our society is equal and treats people equally according to their ability, then I say you're a white male who never had to really prove himself. You're a member of the "club" already.
I think everyone missed the point of "why after 40 years." Before the 1960s, blacks were more fully employed than they are today. Before the 1960s a lower percentage of them were in jail. Before the 1960s a lower percentage of them populated ghettos. The problem with initiatives like Affirmative Discrimination, is white liberals get to feel good about themselves (look at what we're doing) without having any accountability for the actual results of their programs.
Home ownership has grown only 9% in the 40+ years since the 60s for blacks.
Can we really blame the problems of today on the legacy of slavery when none of these statistics were as bad the decades immediately following the civil war?
No it's not bigotry. It's an honest assessment of our welfare state and our paternalism towards blacks. Liberal welfare policies have turned blacks not into equals, but into pets. 100+ years later and liberals insist (really) on providing for minorities in a manner so addictive it has sucked motivation from entire generations, or as Thomas Sowell puts it, ".. the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of discrimination, has disintegrated in the wake of the liberal welfare state.."
I suspect conservatives have more respect and are more prepared to treat blacks as equals than our liberals who treat them more as devices to prove their social superiority than as fellow human beings with as much potential as themselves.
Thomas, I think you might be oversimplifying. Lots of factors affected the lives of blacks and all of us since the 60s, such as the widening gap between rich and poor, and the proliferation of drugs.
Assuming your stats are true (I'd love to see a cite), they are not the whole story. For example, a few years ago, the Christian Science Monitor reported a study that shows blacks faring the same or slightly less well today than in the 70s. At the same time, blacks in professions such as medicine and the law increased several times during that period.
Also, Bureau of Justice Statistics show that between 1990 and 2005, the rate of incarceration of blacks increased, but at a lower rate than for whites and Hispanics during the same period.
But again, my question to you is still on the table - how do you account for the statistics you cite?
"How do you account for the statistics you cite?"
I've been reading a lot lately, but many of them can be found repeated in two columns from Thomas Sowell.
Liberals try to rewrite disasters of the '60s and Liberals try to suppress facts that counter their vision.
Thomas - sorry, I worded my last question badly (altho I did previously ask for a citation, so thanks for that).
What I meant to ask was this: If societal factors don't account for the statistics you cited, which indicate that blacks have fared poorly despite affirmative action, then what does?
"What I meant to ask was this: If societal factors don't account for the statistics you cited, which indicate that blacks have fared poorly despite affirmative action, then what does?"
Perhaps they've failed poorly /because/ of affirmative action. Not it's original intent as briefly covered here, but in the corrupted state it's become, the blackmail and extortion diversity and affirmative action have created entire industries for.
Shelby Steele makes a great point in his book, White Guilt (pg. 66). I've edited it for brevity:
"If a young black boy cannot dribble well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an injustice. No one will worry about his single-parent home, the legacy of slavery ... or the inherent racial bias in a game invented by a white man. His deficiency will be seen for what it is--poor dribbling. His peers will taunt him mercilessly, and even adults will give him no hugs to assuage his self-esteem. [He may do it without a father.] [If he meets the impossible standard] he will feel proud of himself as a result.
"But if this boy's problem is reading or writing rather than basketball, white guilt will certainly prevent even a modified version of this natural human process from occurring. Career-hungy academics will appear .. and argue his weaknesses reflect .. the workings of racism. His reading and writing problems will be seen to follow from countless racial and psychological determinisms...
"The boy will not be asked to truly work harder, nor will he be guided in the mastery of sentence structure, parts of speech, and verb tenses. No one will righteously insist that he speak correctly. Yet, he will be an object of compassion for everyone."
It's time to get over ourselves. It's time to cease policies we use to feel good about our intentions but lack results.
Many self-improvement and management books make the point that people will live up to your expectations--whatever those expectations are.
Whites and government are not the "managers" of blacks. I'm confident they can manage their affairs nicely without more assistance than is provided anyone else.
Thanks Thomas. I see your point now.
I don't agree that minorities are being patronized. Society's responsibility is to make the playing field level for everyone, not to guarantee success for a particular group.
No one is suggesting that minorities be given a free ride - just a fair shot.
I read through Conyers' letter that Kathy linked to, and I don't see why you found it so objectionable. The photo ID requirement for voting is an attempt to disenfranchise people -- poorer people, not minorities per se, and poor people tend to vote Democrat. Don't you find that offensive?
I also have no problem with Conyers' applauding the governor's hiring record. There shouldn't be a limit to the number of qualified minorities who can be hired to fill leadership roles, should there?
I see there was quite a discussion going on last night. Thomas, I still side with Abi on this subject. Affirmative Action may not be perfect, but it has helped level the playing field for minorities.
Let me give you a few links to check out:
Civil Rights Coalition for the 21st Century
Affirmative Action Review Report to the President [Clinton]
Evidence of discrimination in hiring, pay, housing, etc. A statistic from this site: The average woman with a masters degree earns the same amount as the average man with an associate degree. (42) While college educated black women have reached earnings parity with college educated white women, college educated black men earn 76 percent of the earnings of their white male counterparts. (43) Hispanic women earn less than 65 percent of the income earned by white men with the same educational level. Hispanic men earn 81 percent of the wages earned by white men at the same educational level. The average income for Hispanic women with college degrees is less than the average for white men with high school degrees.(44)
Clinton Speech to Chicago Federal Reserve Board on Affirmative Action Here are some of his remarks from that speech: I must say, I think it is ironic that some of those not all, but some of those who call for an end to affirmative action also advocate policies which will make the real economic problems of the anxious middle class even worse. They talk about opportunity and being for equal opportunity for everyone, and then they reduce investment in equal opportunity on an evenhanded basis. For example, if the real goal is economic opportunity for all Americans, why in the world would we reduce our investment in education from Head Start to affordable college loans? Why don't we make college loans available to every American instead?
If the real goal is empowering all middle class Americans and empowering poor people to work their way into the middle class without regard to race or gender, why in the world would the people who advocate that turn around and raise taxes on our poorest working families, or reduce the money available for education and training when they lose their jobs or they're living on poverty wages, or increase the cost of housing for lower income, working people with children?
Why would we do that? If we're going to empower America, we have to do more than talk about it, we have to do it. And we surely have learned that we cannot empower all Americans by a simple strategy of taking opportunity away from some Americans.
I also recommend reading, The Shape of the River: Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, by William Bowen, former president of Princeton, and Derek Bok, former president of Harvard. Their book examined the experiences of minorities at 28 universities with highly selective admissions standards (ranging from the University of Michigan to Yale) that had affirmative action admissions programs. They also tracked the college and postgraduate careers of these students admitted over the past four decades. They discovered that the black graduates of these schools became unusually successful in business, law, medicine, etc., earning significantly more money than African-Americans with B.A.s from less selective schools. Also, these beneficiaries of affirmative action reported that they were highly satisfied both with their careers and with their college experience. They didn't believe affirmative action was demeaning or belittling as Sowell or Steele suggest.
Finally, I agree with Abi that there are lots of reasons why affirmative action hasn't done more to lift the boats of blacks and other minorities. Poverty, children being raised by single mothers, low paying jobs, drugs, and a government that chooses to incarcerate large numbers of our population rather than spend the money to rehabilitate.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson also blames a lot of the problems on the media:
[...]this generation by age 15 have watched 18,000 hours of television. They've listened to more than 22,000 hours of radio and video, as compared with 11,000 hours of school and less than 3,000 hours of church, temple, or synagogue. This means that the mass media quantitatively has more access to their minds and qualitatively penetrates more deeply than home, church, and school combined.
So you don't see on their t-shirts the pictures of judges or professors or doctors or lawyers or chemists or computer scientists. You see programmed into their minds images of people who are violent or who are marginalized. Even the wearing of the baggy britches hanging we can see their shorts in such perfect view. Or when $200 Nike tennis shoes made for $10 a pair in Indonesia, without the strings. Well, what does that style come from? It comes from jail. That's recycled jail culture, where they cannot wear belts because they may hang themselves or hurt themselves or hurt someone. Or they can't have strings in their tennis shoes. They may do the same. So when you find youth having jail culture recycled into them, it is almost as if you're eating your own vomit. It's a kind of recycled sickness.
And you look at these ebonics shows on Thursday nights where you basically have white writers with black actors, giving a stereotypical marginalized view of black America. And we have youth who are learning to live out of that reality, and talk that way, and walk that way, and aspire that way. But they are then programmed, so much so until if you say, "Well, well, what about Dr. Skip Gates, the professor at Harvard, or Dr. Cornell West? Like who are they?
So they are in some sense being defined by a by a mass media culture that is as programmed in a racist way as was Amos and Andy - with white writers projecting a certain view of black life. The media projects us in five or six deadly ways every day.
And this is a big factor in our mindset. We're projected as less intelligent than we are, less hard-working than we work, less universal than we are, less patriotic than we are, more violent than we are, and less worthy than we are. That is a basic, steady stream of programming. So the impact of cultural marginalization and cultural decadence is having a devastating impact upon the minds of children, who consume so much of it.
Anyway, we still need affirmative action because passive discrimination continues to exist in this country, and blacks are not the only recipients of that discrimination. Women, Hispanics, Arabs, the poor and even the middle class face it in subtle ways. In fact, I think class discrimination is rapidly growing due to the disintegration of the middle class.
Finally, regarding the idea that liberals turn blacks into "pets" in order to make themselves feel morally superior, I say that's hogwash. I saw Warren Buffett on television last night and he said people criticize welfare for causing dependency, and that was why he was giving his money away. He equated leaving wealth to children who were simply blessed to be born into a rich family as being the same. No one complains about giving hand outs to rich kids though, huh? Society doesn't worry about rich people's heirs becoming dependent, and they don't worry about being paternalistic in that case.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for the lively discussion. It was interesting.
Kathy and Abi, good points all.
"I also recommend reading, The Shape of the River: Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, by William Bowen, former president of Princeton, and Derek Bok, former president of Harvard. Their book examined the experiences of minorities at 28 universities with highly selective admissions standards ..."
According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, blacks college students have a 42% graduation rate. That would suggest that 16 of the 28 students would have been likely to drop out. Did they not? If they didn't, did they need admittance criteria lowered to enter? Yale's black graduation rate is 85% so 4 should have dropped out. Where all 28 disadvantaged and from poor school districts? I may have to read the book to see how it tracks.
Now this part is IMPORTANT, might a program geared to under-privileged high school graduates been just as effective without considering race as a criteria?
The only diversity liberals seem to recognize is race is sexual preference. College admissions based strictly on merit, or aimed at under-privileged youths may have been as effective, or even more just, as it remains consistent with our constitution and a value that the color of our skin should not matter.
Must it always?
"Society doesn't worry about rich people's heirs becoming dependent, and they don't worry about being paternalistic in that case."
No, because spolied rich kids and their offspring are their parent's, their estate's and trusts' problems--not tax payers.
Maybe Jesse Jackson should spend less time protesting the FCC to clean up television and the recording industry for promoting violent rap artists than shaking down corporations for contributions. But there's no money in protesting the FCC. There's no money protesting against Hollywood.
Whoa! I misread something. They follwed black students at 28 universities, not 28 students.
The point still holds, though. How many of the students they followed dropped out?
Regardless, The Hoover Institution's Sowell published his issues with the book, The Shape of the River, and found multiple problems with it, but gives it credit for its politically correct conclusions.
I haven't read the whole analysis but will later today.
Thomas, I'm surprised you took a swipe at Jesse Jackson about his corporate contributions. It does nothing to nullify the importance of the point he was trying to make about media and the influence it has on children - points that have been well established by other family, church and focus groups.
Besides, the same could be said about the source you used, Thomas Sowell, who has been described as a shill for corporate America. He also denounced environmentalism as being based on junk science. That could lead me to wonder if he is on the dole from one of the major oil companies.
Anyway, Sowell has some valid points about the statistics and their interpretation, but the bottom line is that the majority of the 90,000 college students followed by Bowen & Bok were happy with their affirmative action experience. It made a difference in the lives of those people - and I call that a success.
From my experiences with my own children, I have to say it's unrealistic to expect a 100% return on the money spent on educating them. They were all given the opportunity to attend college, but only two actually completed their degrees. However, I don't consider the ones who dropped out failures. Their lives will be richer for the experience, and that opportunity also helped them focus the direction they wanted their lives to go in.
Anyway, I just wanted to give you my final comments on this subject before I turned off my computer for the night. Thanks for the input and the courteous discussion. Once again we end up agreeing to disagree in an amicable manner!
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