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Traditional Tradesman
  1. Any appeal or coherence that your position might have had if you were talking just about African-Americans (who, as I said, obviously have a unique history in this country) is lost when you start including “black” people from the diaspora, Hispanics and especially Asians. About the only thing these groups have in common is that they’re not “white,” but their experiences are totally varied and distinct. Asians in America are disproportionately ABSENT from the underclass, while African-Americans disproportionately REPRESENT the underclass. Moreover, you are implicitly positing some sort of Manichean taxonomy where “white” people, no matter how varied their backgrounds and experiences, all get put in one category (sinful oppressors) and all non-”white’ people, no matter how varied their background and experiences, all get put in another category (sinned-against and oppressed). This does not withstand even the most cursory historical scrutiny. It is pure nonsense. You talk about the value of having “empathy and understanding for people of color experiences beyond my own,” but maybe there’s also a value to expanding your circle of empathy even further to include “white” people. Maybe it’s time to start judging people as individuals, no matter what color their skin pigment is.
  2. You and your family may have made it, economically speaking, but that’s not my point. Black people, as a whole, are still disproportionately poor in America, and that’s what results in their getting stereotyped as underachievers, under-educated, unmannered, uncouth, dangerous, dysfunctional, etc. My point is that when other Americans look around them and no longer see African-Americans as disproportionately part of the underclass, they’ll have no basis whatsoever to make these kinds of assumptions. This is what’s happened, historically, with every single other ethnic and racial group, where there was lots of discrimination against them when they were poor and the discrimination largely ended when they “made it.”
  3. As far as intermarriage, the statistics show that black Americans continue to be the most unintegrated major group in America. Ghettos have actually become more race-polarized in the last few decades. African-Americans have mixed ancestry because of the well-known history of slave masters’ various violations of their female slaves. It is, in most cases, not due to regular intermarriage. It’s easy to be racist against people when they’re the poor, living somewhere in their ghettos; it’s much harder when they’re part of your community, your workplace (as equals, rather than “the help”), your schools, your associations and your family. That’s the kind of integration I’m talking about. When that’s achieved, racism will subside.
  4. The value of toleration is a core founding value in all Western democracies. It did not exist at all until Western democracies brought it to fruition. You are pointing out that there were many cases where people didn’t practice what they preached. That’s completely correct. But you‘re looking only at the negative side of this. You have to realize that before the U.S. created a multi-religious, multi-ethnic democracy here, such a concept did not really exist anywhere in the world. It takes time for that value of toleration to become a full reality, and it‘s still a work in progress. But you’re not giving credit where credit is due.