Pat Buchanan, the conservative columnist who was President Nixon's speech writer, is most definitely not one of my favorite political columnists. Once in a while though he does write something worth considereing by all of us. Last March, Buchanan wrote a column about Obama's race speech, the one he gave after Jeremiah Wright, his pastor and mentor, had given his "God Damn America" tirade of a sermon. Buchanan's column was widely criticized as a racist diatribe.
Today, a friend sent me another Buchanan column which contains some of the same material from his previous column and which will undoubtably be subjected to the same racist allegations. Actually this "new" column was published on August 6, 2008 by Stand Up America.
I will be the first to admit that over the years blacks have had good cause to be unhappy with white Aneruca, Forget about slavery - that was abolished by Lincoln's Emanciapation Proclamation. Once freed, blacks were denied even the semblance of equality in our predominantly white society. The southern Jim Crowe laws were a travesty that continued well past the mid-nineties. Denied a quality public school education, blacks were doomed to live in poverty.
By the late-nineties many blacks had achieved entry into the middle-class. But some civil rights leaders, notably Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have perpetuated a perception of black victimology which fed on white guilt and has actually worked to the detriment of black Americans. Had blacks stopped blaming whites for all their problems, they might well have come along a lot further. How much longer are whites expected to keep paying for the old racism and discrimination?
Because much of what he writes about in the new column has a definite ring of truth to it, I have chosen to reproduce Buchanan's column from Stand Up America.
BUCHANAN TO OBAMA
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America . Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:
First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ' 60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants. Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated their time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.
We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude??
Barack talks about new 'ladders of opportunity' for blacks. Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for 'deserving' white kids. Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?
Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena . And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.
Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.
Be a better friend,
Patrick J. Buchanan
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