Pat Dollard

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Let me tell you something about this article and Jesse Jackson. This is very troubling.

Jesse Jackson is still pursuing an agenda of placing people in power, based on the color of their skin. You know, the whole Affirmative Action and sometimes Reverse-Discrimination thing (although I don’t like the “reverse discrimination” term because it implies only white people are capable of forward discrimination, discrimination is what it is, period).

This comes even after my generation, who went to school in the 60′s and 70′s, helped bring about true equality beyond the Civil Rights Movement’s early days which brought about changes in the “Letter” of the law, to a point where the “letter” of the law was being followed more and more in the “Spirit” of the law.

In other words, most white people today are no longer anywhere near as discriminatory in their own world views and beliefs, nor are Blacks being discrminated against as they were 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago.

African-Americans today are viewed as equals by most white Americans. You may see me go off sometimes on this theme of black entitlement based on identification of past wrongs. But that is because I don’t buy into the “white guilt” bull, and also, quite simply because I KNOW I personally never wronged a black man because he was black, and that someone like Barack Obama (same age as me) is not entitled to anything from me personally, or my tax dollars, because of the injustices suffered by folks of his grandparents generation.

I sure hope that makes sense. To me, it as as equal as can be. I ascribe, sort of, to the way Gunnery Sergeant Hartman put it in Full Metal Jacket, and that was along the lines of not discriminating against or looking down upon people based on race, religious beliefs, or color of skin, because he considered all recruits equally worthless.

Mine is not that way in the negative sense (I’m sure you get my meaning), my values and judgements and discerning of people is based soley on their words and their deeds. So I form my opinions of people not based on their race or creed, but on their words, deeds, honor, or lack thereof.

Period.

So I get pissed when I see these remnants of a time when it was, indeed, very rough, yet very transitory for Black Americans like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan. They were accosted by the dying specter of an evil mindset that said “Because you are not white, you are inferior to me.”

The problem is, those same people, those remnants from that time, have taken and adopted the mindset of the very people they were struggling to be free from, and that is basically…well, here is a quip from the article below:

Jackson said that among the issues discussed in the upcoming conference will be a sustained effort to create “functional coalitions” between African Americans and Latinos.

Why leave out white people, Jesse? Could it be that it will be impossible for the civil rights era African-American champions to even place white people as legitimate voices in that conference because they are…white?

This is what I don’t get, and this is what pisses me off.

I am a white American Male (with a hispanic last name and Spanish/Portuguese blood in my veins) who has been experiencing discrimination for being a white male based on what white men did before I was ever born. I was raised up as a child by hippies who were like, peace, love,and granola, dude, totally into the “…imagine all the people living life in peace” crowd…like the John Lennon song.

Then I turned 18 in 1980, went out into the real world, and found that as a white male, I was at a disadvantage in so many instances because of what happened decades before I was even born.

It’s as if Jackson is saying here, that no white males can truly be trusted, and that he doesn’t want them in his conference expressing ideals and giving input.

What would you call that?

Here’s the Baltimore Sun article by Rick Pearson:

Posted June 25, 2008 7:00 PM

by Rick Pearson

The Rev. Jesse Jackson says the anticipated nomination of Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate represents a crowning achievement for the civil rights movement as well as an “I-told-you-so” moment in the history of race relations in the United States.

Jackson, appearing before the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune in advance of the annual Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention that begins Saturday, also said he was largely satisfied with the Democratic delegate selection system that was a key to the extended party nominating–a system Jackson was primarily responsible for in 1988.

Jackson called Obama’s nomination “the last lap of a 54-year marathon race” that began with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that separate was not equal in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, followed by the lessons learned from the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and the inspiration of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington in 1963.

“People have been too quick to say, ‘Back in the civil rights day.’ The civil rights movement never stopped,” Jackson said. “Its form may have changed from certain kinds of demonstration activity but the struggle to get the right to vote was not led by either party. They celebrate the results of it, but in those marches, neither party invested in the success of those marches or martyrs.”

Jackson said that while the Democratic nomination represented a victory for Obama, “it’s a victory for America in that it’s a redemptive, transformative moment for America, showing growing maturity and broader vision, more inclusion.”

“This,” he said, “is an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment.”

Jackson said he believed a review of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention rules are in order, but noted that “the superdelegates in the backroom, determining the outcome in Denver, that didn’t happen. The worst fears were not realized.”

It was Jackson’s negotiations with Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988 that ended winner-take-all primaries in the Democratic Party and created a system of proportional representation in which even a loser in a state is entitled to delegates. It was the proportionality rule that largely kept Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race against Obama, with top party leaders acting as superdelegates who gave the Illinois senator enough nominating delegates to claim the nomination.

Jackson was opposed to the superdelegate concept but said the results showed most party leaders acting in a superdelegate capacity “wouldn’t go against the popular base, the popular vote.”

“It needs to be reviewed, but I think, in the end, in this instance, the rule of the people prevailed,” he said.

Jackson said that among the issues discussed in the upcoming conference will be a sustained effort to create “functional coalitions” between African Americans and Latinos. While voting results in the primary contests showed Clinton gaining the backing of large numbers of Hispanics compared to Obama, Jackson said the outcome may not be “the truest measure” of the Illinois senator’s backing since “she was kind of already on the ground because she had 20 years of relationships.”

“We’re going to be neighbors for a long time, working in hospitals together and hotels together and schools together and public transportation together,” Jackson said of African Americans and Latinos. “We are each others’ future in so many ways.”

The Swamp