>>Like we did for the asians, irish, and indians?
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>
>In fact, for Native Americans, there have been a number of programs, but I don't think we're really finished addressing what we did to their ancestors and culture.
>
>As for Irish and Asian immigrants, the discrimination they faced doesn't come close to what was done to Africans in this country. For the Irish, you're talking about one or two generations of people facing job discrimination in the big cities. Living in the east, I don't know the Asian story as well, and we certainly do have more to answer for in the case of Japanese-Americans. But I don't think either compares to 8-10 generations of enslavement followed by another 100 years of legalized discrimination.
>
>BTW, the "we" here refers to the country and government as a whole, not to us as individuals.
>
>Tamar

And yet the black family did not disintegrate until the 60s when redressing of long-overdue legitimate grievance and outrage was packaged with a benevolent colonialism and a culture of victimization imposed on a people whose very survival in the society had implied a strength and dignity worthy of so much more.

And Asians who arrived in the 70s with language problems and no resources quickly provided a very disproportionate number of valedictorians.

And of course there were those who arrived on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, fleeing pogroms that made Jim Crow look like affirmative action ...

An argument can be made that African Americans - very much like the Palestinians - have been manipulated as political pawns and as a result not had the leaders they deserve and the culture has taken a wrong turn. I don't think AIDs was a plot by the CIA to 'eradicate people of color' but I often think Gangsta culture, hip hop and rejection of any black voices that do not come from the extreme left may be a plot koncocted in a Klaven.


"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings."