If There's A Will There's A Way But George Ain't Found It

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced."

- George Will

Oh boy - now ABC News' conservative mouthpiece is defending Paul Ryan's asinine "black culture" dust-up - Back away, George, back away:

"Paul Ryan was right — poverty is a cultural problem"

Alright, George, but - since we're talking about black poverty - the question then becomes "What culture has the problem?"

Martin Luther King's or the one that produced his assassin?

Neither Will nor Ryan has a word about the white culture blacks have been oppressed by, and studied, for centuries - an amazing, but all-too-common, oversight for (most) white commentators on black anything.

For instance, a HUGE part of white culture, today, is to erroneously imagine not only that race, as a concept, doesn't exist in America (and to force that idea on the oppressed) but - poof! - white's and their influence on others have disappeared with it.

But blacks still see whites, and what they do, because we have to, since they insist on being more-than a thorn in our side:

   "I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be 'independent' of white supremacy. I have not found one. Certainly the antebellum period, when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era.

  We certainly do not find such a period during the Roosevelt-Truman era, when this country erected a racist social safety, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was 'like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.' Nor do we find it during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when African-Americans—as a matter of federal policy—were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison-industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the world's entire incarcerated population.

And we do not find an era free of white supremacy in our times either, when the rising number of arrests for marijuana are mostly borne by African-Americans; when segregation drives a foreclosure crisis that helped expand the wealth gap; when big banks busy themselves baiting black people with 'wealth-building seminars' and instead offering 'ghetto loans' for 'mud people'; when studies find that black low-wage applicants with no criminal record 'fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison'; when, even after controlling for neighborhoods and crime rates, my son finds himself more likely to be stopped and frisked. [The] theory of independent black cultural pathologies sounds reasonable. But it can't actually be demonstrated in the American record, and thus has no applicability."  

Adjust your glasses, George, because you've been alive to see a bunch of that but (for a supposed-intellectual in our major media for decades) you've said surprisingly little about it.

Maybe you, too, "don't see race" as you go about your day, so you don't see (or have to deal with) the damage white culture does.

Maybe you indulge white America's cultural con:

"I refuse to deal with how our culture and society treats people of color because it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to understand how having a different skin color or ethnicity affects other people because that means I would have to think and consider other points of view. What I want is to not have to think. I prefer to believe I live in a fantasy land where no one ever pays attention to skin color, ethnicity, culture, or religion."

In many cases, what [whites] are also saying is that the topic of race is getting under their skin, and that's just not necessary. 'Since race doesn't matter at all to me,' the thinking seems to go, 'why are those annoying people making such a big deal about it?' Since most adults who encounter such thinking in children encourage them to learn how to take other people's thoughts and feelings into consideration, it's surprising how many white adults fail to do so when confronted with perspectives on race that differ from their own."

Isn't it funny how those same "colorblind" whites - America's historical oppressors - assume, still, they alone set the rules on race?

And they instinctively know they have the white privilege of deciding how oblivious to be (12 Years a Slave too brutal? They don't have to go see it, then, right? A conversation about race getting too tense? They can call an end to it and walk away - and they know it) and they know how to use white supremacy to enforce it, too.

Step to them, when they do so, and they'll have the equally "colorblind" cops come and take your black ass away. 

It's still unchecked white power.

And it's a cultural imbalance almost every black person lives with, and under - and resents - every single day of our lives.

But, except when engaging in such evil themselves - and it is evil - willfully ignorant whites deliberately ignore their own culture as an influence on anyone because, as the late Patrice O'Neal pointed out, there's no way to catch and punish them.

There's no law, no social impediment of any kind, nothing to stop whites from acting out - exclusively in their own interests - which makes blacks wonder how we're supposed to build a country from such racist behavior,...but that's a topic for another post.

I'm blogging, today, on the white assumption blacks have to be failures because of our own cultural mismanagement - and how it can be otherwise.

So analyse this, Georgie: 

White culture is seriously screwed up when the cognitive dissonance race produces leads white people to believe only what (they say) they can see actually exists.

And, with blacks outnumbered 6 to 1, there is absolutely no way the continued, and unchecked, mental affliction of white supremacy hasn't - and doesn't - affect blacks to this very day,…