Author Anthony Jerrod begins his article with a glowing description of black people’s existence in America, referring to the many and various trials and tribulations we as a people have endured and indeed overcome since the dark days of slavery while ignoring so many of the actions and activities that we bring upon ourselves, but that is another article for another day.

My main focus is on the “Eight Political Lies About Blacks That You Shouldn’t Believe”. First, these “lies” are more like OPINIONS, which cannot be lies unless they are untruths presented as facts. My dad used to say “opinions are like a**holes. Everybody has one and each one is different”. Just because ONE PERSON puts forth an opinion doesn’t make it an urban legend as this writer seems to say.

Secondly, the article says these lies are POLITICAL, which is a huge misnomer. I will indicate these as I advance.
Third, I am posting this rebuttal on my own blog at www.blackindependent.cordpress.com because the Atlanta Post will not publish dissenting viewpoints, giving credence to at least one charge that the black press is monolithic and does not tolerate dissent. That is not true of ALL black press, just 98% of it.

Lie #1 Black children were more likely to be raised in a two parent family during slavery

The article begins with a commentary about the statement in a Family Leader pledge and signed by GOP presidential hopefuls Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum that black children were more likely to be raised in a two parent family during slavery than during the Obama administration. Mr Jerrod falsely claims that the statement says that black children are “better off under slavery” which is a total misrepresentation of the statement’s content as well as the intent.

In addition, the statement may actually be more accurate than you might think. While it is true that slave families were not families in the traditional sense, it IS true that SOME slave children were raised in families where the mother and father were present. My Great grandfather, a Cherokee Indian, was captured and sold into slavery as a youth, then fathered one child during and six children AFTER slavery. He, his son and his wife of African descent lived together for the last seven years of slavery. In today’s America, with almost half the black children born out of wedlock, the instance of two parent families is almost a myth itself.

Lie #2:  Blacks are the biggest benefactors of government programs.
The writer rightly points out that more whites than blacks receive government benefits, but fails to mention that, on a per capita basis, a larger percentage of blacks receive benefits than do whites. Perhaps the article should have said something like four of ten blacks and two of ten whites get benefits. That would mean that millions more whites get benefits but that is because they outnumber us ten to one. You can prove this “myth” yourself. Just drop by ANY government office and see who is standing in the lines.

Lie #3:  All Black people are liberals and are affiliated with the Democratic Party.
First of all, only an idiot uses the term ALL when describing people’s behavior. I have NEVER heard any credible person say that ALL blacks are liberal Democrats, but I do know that economists say that 5% unemployment is FULL employment, so what is it when 95% of blacks vote Democrat? Close enough? Mr Jerrod also claims there is a “diversity of ideas” in the black community. OK, Just listen to black owned radio, watch black owned TV (OOPS. Sorry. I forgot there ain’t no more of that after BET was sold to Bill Gates), check out the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, read any black owned newspaper and let me know if you find any such diversity. The monolith is so intense that when the NCAA adopted it’s “No Pass, No Play” rule several years ago, almost every black coach and politician in the country pitched a fit, saying that”African-Americans would be hurt most”. Say what???

Lie #4:  Blacks teach their children to hate America.
This is one that gives Rush Limbaugh a lot more power than he deserves. The notion that the statement of one man can become legend, upsetting so many people is incredible. Anyway, Rush never said Blacks teach their kids to hate America. What Rush DID say was that MANY Black parents raise their kids raise their kids under the premise that America owes them something and that the reason for their lack of station and standing in this country is due to RACISM. If you are raised with that notion in your head you are BOUND to hate America. Trust me. Rush does not hate Blacks. None other than the honorable Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (the most powerful black man in the country then and now) officiated at Limbaugh’s wedding several years ago.

Lie #5:  Black women were better off under slavery because abortion was illegal then.

Here we go again. This was attributed to a statement by an anti abortion group Conservative Radiance Foundation that “Abortion Makes Three-Fifths Human Seem Generous”. Well, think about it. Congress declared, after emancipation that a black man was “three fifths” of a person. Today, the pro abortion crowd considers a fetus to be even less than three fifths of a human being, so the statement is actually TRUE from the viewpoint of the fetus. Sure, abortion was not illegal but unheard of under slavery. The owner would be stupid to kill his own “assets”. That would be left to the free black woman of today, to kill her own offspring in the name of CHOICE, which, in this case, is just another word for convenience.

Lie #6:  Blacks lack a sense of morality.
Here again the writer imposes his own misguided interpretation of a statement to fit his own philosophy or lack of knowledge. No one says that Blacks are less moral than whites due to our higher levels of out of wedlock pregnancies. The way we live, black or white, is not a political issue, but a cultural one. Out of wedlock births is less stigmatic than in years past, and whites have as many if not more unwanted pregnancies than blacks, but again you have to look deeper into the numbers. Blacks have a higher percentage of teen pregnancy than do almost every other ethnic group in the country. That has less to do with morality than with just plain dumb. Being born BLACK in America is tough enough without making it worse by having children that you cannot afford to take care of.

Lie #7:  Blacks are not able to sustain their own businesses.
This is my favorite! Black apologists always tout the glowing numbers about how much money blacks earn, spend and invest in their businesses but again they are preaching to an audience that largely declines the effort to analyze in detail the information that is placed before them, preferring to let others do the difficult mental work and then running with the resulting opinions. I include the entire quote:
According to the Census Bureau, there are currently over 1.9 million black-owned businesses, a figure that is up 60.5% since 2002.  Among all businesses in the US, 7.1% are black-owned, up from 5.2% in 2002.  Sales from black-owned businesses totaled $137.4 billion, up 55.1% from the previous survey in 2002.  The total number of black-owned businesses according to the survey was 1,921,881, and of them, 1.8 million had no paid employees, an increase of 64.5% from 2002.   In 2007, non-employers accounted for 94% of the total number of black-owned firms and 28% of gross receipts. Clearly, blacks are able to sustain their own businesses.

Of course you feel good about these great numbers, but think about it: NINETY FOUR PERCENT of black owned firms had NO PAID EMPLOYEES? almost two million black owned businesses with total sales of 137.4 billion??? That is just over $70,000 EACH. Now, there are a handful of black owned businesses earning MILLIONS of dollars each, and for each of those there are about 14 that earn next to nothing. I agree with the writer that MANY Blacks can indeed sustain their own businesses, but if by SUSTAIN you mean the business pays for itself, I can prove that the vast majority of black owned firms are supported (sustained?) by the income from other occupations. In other words, the owner has to use money from other sources in order to operate his “business”. The way I see it, if a business does not survive on it’s own income it should not even be counted as a business, but a hobby and an expensive one at that.

Lie #8:  Many blacks are lazy and won’t work.
Let me you something. Are there lazy whites? Are there lazy blacks? Are there MANY of them, both groups? So, why is this statement included? And Why is it a lie? Surely there are lazy people of all ethnic persuasions. I don’t get this one at all, but the six comments the Atlanta Post chose to publish indicate that the readers agree.

In my opinion this is due to the fact that the average reader of certain media venues don’t even bother to think about the deeper implications of what they read, but are completely satisfied to take someone else’s opinion as their own as long as it conforms to their own views. You know, like the people who claim that God approved of slavery because He mentioned it or that the Bible contains approval for incest and marijuana use.

I am not saying there are not a whole lot of misconceptions and misinformation about blacks floating around in this country if not around world. What I am saying is that most of what we are reading, watching and hearing is not much more than the ravings of tiny groups of lunatics who have nothing better to base their arguments other than speculation, ignorance and a slanted view of their surroundings and the people in it. What is really sad is that so much attention is being paid not only to the perpetrators but to those who choose to waste their time and energies responding to it.

As individuals Blacks are no more and no less moral, noble, lazy or ignorant than any other group, but as a group, we seem to conform to what most of the world thinks of us.

Finally, with the POSSIBLE exception of #3 and #4, these issues are not political at all, but social and cultural, so the premise of the article itself is incorrect, but since it is a collection of the opinions of one person, I guess it doesn’t really have much impact on people with thinking brains.

I am SO glad I don’t have to depend upon the government for anything I get that I didn’t earn with my own blood, sweat and tears.
More on Bristol Palin
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Mr McWhorter: You say you are as committed to advancing blacks as is Tavis Smiley. In my opinion you are missing the same point that Smiley, Jackson, Sharpton, Lowery, Bond and all the rest of the black liberal “leaders” have been missing (or ignoring ) for decades.

I can tell you right now, you can check every year for the next century and you will find blacks in pretty much the same condition and position (if not worse) because of one thing: Our lack of attention to our ECONOMIC advancement. I don’t mean our SURVIVAL, where we live, as you say, because of stimulus sending or some other government program. I mean as long as black enterprise runs on a hand to mouth basis, where the black owner has to hold a second job in order to keep his business afloat, and where self employed black accountants and bookkeepers are almost nonexistent, then there will be no real change in our status, and that includes social, economic and political. You can throw in the high rates of black imprisonment and unplanned parenthood for good measure.

The war on drugs? Are there no black Americans more worthy of our support than a bunch of drug users, gang banger and street thugs? I couldn’t care less how many blacks are in jail for drug involvement or how great the disparity between sentencing for black and white cocaine users. I AM bothered by the fact that there are less than two dozen black owned corporations on the Stock exchanges.

The war on drugs could never succeed as long as the people you are trying to help are fighting against you, and if the war stopped tomorrow it would only mean that the misfits, miscreants and useless, worthless debris among us will have free access to their self destructing activities and the rest of us will wind up paying more for it than we do now.

Free access to legalized drugs won’t stop the destruction of the black family, it will accelerate it. Users will still have to buy the stuff and the lack of criminal prosecution will increase demand, thus raising the price. These street urchins will have to steal and rob in order to buy their legal drugs just like they do the illegal ones. Are we so naive that we think the majority of users are middle class blacks? Get real.

I have watched these “black forums” come and go for decades and nothing has come of them except some black talk shows have been floated with public funds or blackmail from corporations. The mother of all black forums, the “Million Man March” saw 250,000+ black men spend an average of $500 to travel to Washington just to proclaim their intention to be good citizens. If that same number had pooled HALF that amount they could have created and entire financial infrastructure that could have by itself moved millions of blacks out of poverty within a decade. Instead, it seems that the march only gave us an indication of how many unabashed and unashamed liars there are among us.

Black on black crime has increased, along with unwanted pregnancies, incarceration of black youth and continued sliding DOWN the economic ladder.

I have followed and admired your commentary on these and other relevant issues for years. For the most part you and I have been on the same page, but on this one I think you are way off base. I do trust your continued investigation of this issue will bring you to my way of thinking.

You refer to blacks from the standpoint of black men being able to “find and keep a good job”. Until some of that focus rests with blacks being able to CREATE and maintain jobs, it will be, as that great philosopher Yogi Berra said “Deja vu all over again”.

Prior to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, I was a committed, bleeding heart liberal. That all changed during the administration of Jimmy Carter (the worst voting mistake of my life) when Carter and the Democrats decided to raise my taxes, already among the highest in our history at the time, to help pay for all the social programs that helped them get re-elected year after year, and my tax contributions DOUBLED from one paycheck to the next.

At that point, I stopped listening to the black politicians who had been feeding me the crap over the years, saying the same stuff you guys are spouting now. I decided to study the issues, focusing on what the candidates (Jesse Jackson, Reagan, John Anderson, Jimmy Carter, Lenora Felani) and a host of others had in mind to FIX the interest rate, unemployment and inflation rates, ALL of which were above TEN PERCENT) and to lower the income tax rates, at the time as high as SEVENTY PERCENT.

ALL of the Democrats and most of the others were telling me how they would get the RICH to pay “their fair share” and thus make life better for the rest of us. Well, after what happened to ME I wasn’t dropping my pants (again) to allow THAT kind of government to continue, so I staked out a platform of my own and raised the flag. Ronald Reagan was the only one to salute it. His platform was closer to my own than all the others.

Of course I heard and considered all the other stuff that The Root’s constituency is so up in arms about, NONE of which have anything to do with SUBSTANTIVE issues like the economy, national defense, social issues that I care about.

All I had to do was figure out: Am I more concerned with whether or not the president says bad things about me or whether he would take my money against my will and give it to to other people who, in my opinion, were not deserving of MY family’s resources at the expense of our needs and problems.

I didn’t focus on the Confederate flag flying, Trent Lott’s social commentary or Ronald Reagan’s veiled snipes at blacks, poor people or liberals in general.

I saw then and I see now that what a politician says has nothing to do with what he does, and I am ONLY interested in what he does.

Talk about selective amnesia… all the wailing and whining about Reagan said this and the GOP said that also forgets that the Dems have been SAYING for decades that the GOP is “for the rich” or “anti-poor”, and we blacks have voted for them without remembering (perhaps not even realizing) that we have gotten NOTHING in return. When prices rise, we pay just like the rich do. When the economy gets a sniffle WE still get pneumonia.

Fortunately for me and my family, I chose to vote for the candidate I thought would best allow me to earn as much as I could and keep more of it. In other words, I was tired of being poor and wanted to become one of the rich, and I KNEW I had a better chance at a better economic future if I helped elect someone who, while maybe not giving me a handout, would not stand in my way of pulling myself up.

Well, I am still not rich but much better off than YOU are because I own my own business and I have people who depend upon ME for a job. I still feel the pain when prices rise, but I have enough of a cushion that it doesn’t upset my life, just means I don’t save to invest quite as much.

I still try to drive the biggest car I can afford and I don’t even look to see what price gas is when I fuel it up because no matter how much it is I can afford it. I do not depend upon the poverty pimps (Reagan was too nice a guy to use that term) to lobby for me at the White House or to secure more benefits for me because I know that SOMEBODY has to pay for the freebies that I would get.

I can and am taking care of myself and my family and I owe Ronald Reagan a great debt because he helped me see that all the goodies the Democrats were trying to get the government to provide for me would taste a lot better if I got them for myself.

For sure, I didn’t get as high as I wanted, but at least the height to which I was able to rise was my own doing.

So, you guys who need the nanny state to fill in for the holes in your own capabilities, and if you think that bad mouthing some politician makes you feel better, go for it. Just make sure you keep thinking like you do.

It will not harm ME or any other heterosexual if gays marry (of course it won’t hurt ME if my neighbor beats his wife, drowns in his pool, or suffocates on his own puke, but I digress) and a state’s constitution should not exclude a group based on it’s sexual orientation. Of course, a Supreme Court ruling which would affirm the unconstitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 will mean not only that gays may marry in ANY state, but also that gays who marry in one state are entitled to the same privileges and benefits of traditional marriage in EVERY state. That situation could result in unintended benefits (and some problems) for all Americans. The constitution’s equal protection clause should also be applied to the following situations, the results of which will cause no harm to any citizen under the federal court’s guidelines.

1. If a prostitute or casino owner wants to move operations to Georgia or any other state, they should be allowed to do so.

2. A man who wants to marry half a dozen women, men or combination thereof in one state should be allowed to do so. If the constitution cannot regulate whom you can marry, where does it get the authority to regulate how many spouses you may have?

3. It should be made illegal to force one class of people (the rich) to pay more as a condition on citizenship than another class (everybody else). People should not be taxed on the basis of how much money they earn unless they are given tax advantages for the number of people they hire or the amount of money they invest. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates should receive the same amount of money in their social Security check as Joe the plumber.

4. A person who is collecting unemployment insurance payments should be able to do so in ANY state regardless of the state of his or her past employment unless such person was excluded from paying federal employment taxes. In addition, benefits should be paid only from proceeds of such unemployment taxes until such funds are depleted. This would mean that benefits would be similar in amount throughout the country and would be available as long as the funds were available, thus negating the need to constantly “extend” benefits.

5. Pot, alcohol and other drugs would not only have their “sin tax” removed, but would be legal in all states.

6. The legal citizens of the District of Columbia would be entitled to full House and Senate representation just as Delaware and California. It makes no sense that D.C. residents may vote in presidential elections but not in senatorial or house elections.

7. While under our constitution a woman may not be required to become a mother, there is no such protection for a man. If a woman becomes pregnant and decides NOT to murder her child in the womb, she in effect forces a man to become a parent. For equal protection, if her decision is to carry the child to term, no man should be forced to support her choice, neither financially nor emotionally.

I can see and I recognize there would be tremendous negative results included in the application of these principles, but such is the case now. Besides, in the mind of the liberal, the law is the law and justice should be blind. In the mind of the conservative, justice should be totally unrelated to law.

I can see no reason the above propositions are not incorporated into our system except that I realize it would take a monumental effort to overcome the hypocrisy of the American people, who are predisposed to cherry picking which laws they would support and which they consider “unconstitutional”.

In the American way of doing things, doing the right thing only applies to OTHER PEOPLE.

Of course some people might say that my proposals are just rants, that I bark at the moon, that I would prefer that a person should only be allowed to vote in the jurisdiction in which they pay INCOME taxes or own property, and that my true intent is to DESTROY the constitution in order to start fresh with a NEW constitution more in tune with my personal beliefs.

To all of this I say: I do NOT bark at the moon.

He also might see that Lehman Bros, AIG and other “Too big to fail” companies went belly up after digesting all the “loans for leeches” program forced upon them by the CLINTON administration, again with the help of the Chris and Barney cartel.

For sure, Bush could have vetoed some of the spending and the GOP could have stopped some of their own pork barreling, but it was the Pelosi-Reid juggernaut in the last two congresses that helped throw gasoline on that fire.

What any Republican, Democrat, or Independent SHOULD be thinking is, “Would I rather have a group of SOCIALISTAS who are halfway to complete socialization of our country or would you prefer a group of people who, no matter how bad they govern, would at least leave an AMERICA in it’s wake”?

I, for one, would rather live in a SLAVE state run by the GOP than a socialist utopia run by Democrats. At least with the former there is always a chance I can break free. With the latter, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This latest surrender by the GOP only reinforces the notion that they just don’t have the guts to lead this country any more than the Democrats do.

It also makes it easier for a conservative to vote for a third party candidate just to send a message even if that message results in a Democrat victory. There seems to be little benefit in electing Republicans anyway.

I Personally think BLACK HISTORY MONTH/WEEK/DAY or whatever, is a real nice way for ALL Americans to take note and be proud of what blacks as a people can accomplish when we set our minds, our hands and our intellect to it, but sadly, black history has been on virtual hold since the advent of the “Great Society” and the civil rights battles of the 60′s.

Not that the laws and the society are the blame, far from it. The activism of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, and the hundreds of other soldiers for justice clearly helped open doors and pave the way for opportunities for blacks and women to lift themselves up and take their places as full participants in the great American dream.

I would be the last to deny the enormous contribution these and lesser known heroes have made to not only blacks but to America in general. What I can’t deny is the perception, yea, even the fact that instead of working to overcome, black people have apparently taken the position that passage of the law completes the “overcoming”, “the dream” is reality, and now it’s just a matter of waiting for the checks to arrive.

We have been sitting around and complaining, and have accomplished precious little and overcome nothing since the laws supposedly eliminated discrimination and made us all suddenly equal in every respect. I’m reminded of the black South African woman who, while waiting her turn to vote for Nelson Mandela after the downfall of apartheid, responded to a reporter’s question with, “Now, we will all have houses like the (white) Afrikaners!”. Half a generation later and she is still waiting, patiently I presume.

Fast forward to the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election, which saw the nation’s first African-American elected president. A widely circulated  video clip shows a black woman delirious at the prospect of, in her own words, “Now I won’t have to buy gas for my car or make my house payments!”. Recently it was revealed that the woman’s home had been foreclosed. Wonder how that CHANGE thang is working for HER.

Most of the history that we will read about over the month of February will be about events that occurred 60 years ago or more, and the only things we have accomplished since then have been “He was the first black to (do something)…”, or “She was a successful applicant for (something)…”, as if just being black and doing something ordinary is an accomplishment in itself.

Most of the great ‘firsts’ by black people lately have been accomplishments that whites undertake routinely, not due to discrimination or because they had the “luck of the draw” in being white, but because they worked their butts off and didn’t wait for help from some politician. These days, blacks’ accomplishments are measured by who does what while in the White House, and now that an evil Republican inhabits that recently fumigated address, our accomplishments are in danger of completely disappearing for at least four years, if you let the poverty pimps tell it.

Since 1960, Al Gore has invented the Internet, White America has perfected the PC, written software that runs the world, developed products and processes that have CHANGED the world, even visited other worlds while black America has to point back half a century and beyond, to the accomplishments of those who labored under ten times the oppression and discrimination that we have since reconstruction, but accomplished ten times more than we have since.

For sure we should be proud of and celebrate the accomplishments of George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Mme C.E. Walker, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Buffalo Soldiers, and a host of others who did so much with so little and under circumstances that suppressed hope, potential, everything except the soul and spirit. Look at how long ago these events transpired. Seventy, eighty, a hundred years? More?

Sixty years ago a group of black Army aviators flew more than three hundred escort missions, protecting thousands of allied bombers heading to and from Germany. To the utter amazement of the “experts” anthropologists and the general public, these “Tuskegee Airmen”, as we know them today, flew the powerful P-47 “Thunderbolt” and the sleek, fast and deadly (for friendly AND enemy pilots alike) P-51 “Mustang” fighter planes, all single seaters, while our bomber crews comprised of up to thirteen men per plane. Simple math tells you that about 300-55 Tuskegee Airmen were responsible for thousands of bomber pilots and crew and NEVER LOST A SINGLE ONE OF THEM! No other unit accomplished such a feat before or since.

More than a hundred years ago, settlers crossing the plains during the settling of the American West facing hordes of Indian attackers bent on their utter destruction, were escorted, protected and many times rescued by units of Cavalry troopers who charged into the attacking forces with guns blazing and sabers rattling. We have no record of how many settlers were saved or protected, but one testament to the effectiveness of the Cavalry is the fact that today Reno, Nevada is covered by casinos rather than tepees. Oh. And the bulk of those soldiers who helped protect the settlers and thus facilitate the settling of the American West were BLACK. We know them as the Buffalo Soldiers.

There is not a whole lot with which to compare the accomplishments of these two groups of American heroes who, at the time of their actions were only doing their jobs, probably because no one else wanted to do it. Regarding the present day black population vis-a-vis the enormous and largely ignored opportunities which have been presented to us over the past quarter century, with sincerest apologies to Sir Winston Churchill; “Never before in the annals of human history have so many done so little with so much”.

The prevailing attitude of a majority of blacks, reinforced by the rhetoric of the race hustlers of the day, is that “I can’t take a step forward unless a white man takes a step back” or “I’m where I am because of what some white guy did or wouldn’t let me do”.. You can get a black person in America to talk all day about what Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy did for blacks, but we can’t construct a single paragraph to talk about what we have done for ourselves, (well, we could always write NOTHING a hundred times) and that’s true whether you are a black liberal OR conservative.

Even when blacks had the chance to accomplish something (actually help elect a president instead of just pad his lead) we thought important to us, we blew it in a blizzard of unmarked ballots, pregnant chads, and overvotes.

I suppose we could crow about having the Confederate flag removed from public buildings throughout most of the South. That one made us all smarter, richer, and all our troubles are gone! I know I woke up the morning after the Georgia flag was changed and all my bills were paid and there was a brand new Cadillac in the garage! Yeah. Right.

A generation from now, other than the 2008 election results, an event which I admit I predicted would never happen, there will be nothing else to tell our grandchildren about the black history that is being made TODAY. There AIN’T none… unless you want to discuss the results of the voting in Florida 2000, otherwise known as “the scandal in the panhandle”, which should go down in history as a NEGATIVE accomplishment.

We need to stay positive.

Black History Month will be here soon!

Stephen Frazier