Starting from behind

One of the flimsy excuses for rationales behind NAACP shakedowns reparations for slavery is that, because of slavery and Jim Crow, blacks start life behind white people.  Let me tell you about somebody who REALLY started from behind.

My barber's name is Jackie.  I don't know her last name; I've only been to her shop once.  She and her husband opened it only a week ago.  They are both from Vietnam.  Her husband came to America from Vietnam in 1985; they met and married after she came here in 1991.  Jackie, the abandoned daughter of a GI and a Vietnamese woman, could speak no English, and though she speaks it fairly well now, it's obvious that it isn't her first language.  She and her family got some assistance from Uncle Sam, but were forced by money constraints to share a two bedroom apartment with another family in a bad neighborhood outside DC until they could all find decent work and afford better housing.  She worked in a 7-11 for seven years, learning to speak English on the job.  Because she worked hard, she was eventually promoted to manager.  However, running a quickie-mart is not an easy job, so her husband suggested that she learn to cut hair (as he did).

To make a long story short, she and her husband just opened their own shop and hope to make a go of it.  It's clear that they haven't had it easy since they came here, but they didn't quit.

I know a couple of other refugee families with similar stories: they come to America with the clothes on their backs and little else, often unable to speak English.  My good friend Pete is first generation Polish-American.  As I understand the story, his father's entire village was uprooted by the communists at the start of World War II; the reds shipped all the villagers to Kazakstan and dumped them in the middle of nowhere, apparently with the expectation that they'd starve to death and save Stalin the cost of some bullets.  The Poles, being rather hardier than the commissars thought, didn't die.  The Free Polish government and Churchill both badgered Stalin until he agreed to let the Brits take the pesky Poles off his hands.  Pete's father made it to Iran, where he joined the RAF, learned English and how to be a machinist.  After World War II, he found that other members of his family had made it to America, so he came here, met a Polish refugee woman, married her, and he and his family have lived happily and prosperously since then.  Pete has a masters degree and works for a VERY large software company.

I went to high school with Hung Manh Dang.  His father was a sergeant in the South Vietnamese Air Force.  The family was trapped in South Vietnam when it was overrun by the communists.  Mr. Dang's* cunning plan to escape was to take his family (including infants and toddlers) swimming in the Sea of China on a regular basis, each time swimming out just a littler farther.  Eventually, they swam out and didn't come back, but instead made it to a boat that was waiting.  They endured hunger, thirst, and storms at sea until they eventually made it to (as I recall) the Phillipines and then to America.  Mr. and Mrs. Dang spoke only very broken English when I knew them, but all of their children went to college, most as engineering students.

So, until you're a stranger in a strange land, don't speak the language, don't know the customs, have no money and no family to help you, don't talk to me about 'starting from behind'.

(*) It is my understanding that Vietnamese typically put their family name first, but Mr. Dang Americanized his name when he came here.

Comments

[NYgirl]

Great article. Ironically, these are the very people who refuse handouts & work 80 hour weeks. They are also good parents who insist that their kids work hard in shcool, do well & nto be a burden to society.

[Dell Gines]

That is a fallacious argument Doc. You never measure the whole by the part and you are misrepresenting the reperations argument. Your argument that because hung lee or whatever her name made it good, that this is the rule and not the exception is backwards. That would be similar to me holding Bill Gates up as the rule, and using him as the standard normative individual as opposed to an exception.

Simultaneously, if you know anything at all about economics, then you know it is based upon labor and capital, and the exchange between these two things. Slavery, segregation, jim crow, and sharecropping restricted these thereby advantaging the group restricted, and disadvantaging the restricted group ECONOMICALLY. Economics 101.

During slavery, obviously labor was done without exchange for capital. In fact, technically blacks were an asset on a balance sheet. During jim crow, segregation, and sharecropping, you had a restriction on both labor, IE blacks not being hired even if they were perfect substitutes, or being forced to work for wages at a subsistence level, which reduced black capital. Simultaneously capital in the form of loans was severely restricted through redlining and other forms of discrimination.

So what you have is a so-called 'free market' in which a significant subsegment was not allowed to participate in 'freely'. Competitive capitalism, the mantra of the conservative, was disallowed and thwarted in the black community as capitalism again is the process of labor and capital.

Now you combine the disadvantages blacks faced in terms of their economic development and the converse advantages that whites gained because of the disadvantages imposed upon blacks, and the nature of economic disparity is obvious on a macro level.

Let's say hypothetically, me and you doc wanted to start a business, the same business, a perfect substitute business, meaning individuals have no preference whether they bought from you or from me. However, you have access to multiple capital sources and I have to 'sleep in a 1 room apartment and work at McDonalds to save' for my capital. Although their are some outstanding individuals who would be able to over come the immediate capital limitations and catch up with you, 99.9% would not be able, as you would be 1) First to market, which gives you a powerful advantage in market share, 2) Gives you greater access to alternative capital, as under capitalization is one of the main reasons businesses fail, and 3) Allow you to have a position of growth and recapitalization from net profit much faster than the competitor thus giving you an extreme advantage over the competitor, as again, economics is about capital and labor.

Apply this to 350 years of slavery, and segregation, and on a macro level, that is why black people are behind, economically.

I have consitently argued that reperations is the only logical solution from a CONSERVATIVE standpoint towards racial justice.

And arguments like the one you made are fallacious as they use micro examples to generalize to macro issues. Doesn't work.

[docjim505]

Dell,

Thanks for your thoughtful post.

The important word in your argument is 'was'. Slavery and Jim Crow happened in the past. There are no people alive today who experienced slavery, and the number of people with direct memories of Jim Crow is shrinking.

If we are going to declare that only VERY exceptional people can overcome their past, how would you explain me? My grandparents were poor Southern farmers; my grandfather had only a 5th grade education. I have a master's degree. There are a lot of Southerners like me, whose ancestors were farmers or sharecroppers, dirt poor, little or no education, ground under by debt peonage, and yet their descendents managed to make good.

I agree that one can't make generalizations about large groups based on a few examples, but eventually a preponderance of evidence DOES allow such a generalization. For example:

- In my first job, I was a lab supervisor. When I left, I recommended one of my technicians to be my replacement. He is a black man. I did so because he was the most-qualified;

- In my current job, three of our four reactor operators are black. They were explicitly recruited by our (white) plant manager because he knew from personal experience that they are excellent at the job;

- My father's cardiologist, one of the best in the city if not the state, is black;

- Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Denzel Washington... These are all black Americans who have done well. Two of my four neighbors in my middle-class housing development are black. Three of my drill sergeants in basic training were black. The battery executive officer was black. The battalion sergeant major was black.

At what point do people like these stop being exceptions and start being the rule?

You mention Bill Gates. I reply with Earl Graves.

There's no doubt that racism has affected black achievement in the past, and some of that ugly heritage lingers on. However, I believe that black Americans in 2005 are just as capable of succeeding as white Americans or Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans. In my opinion, the biggest stumbling block that blacks have is the belief, pounded into them by black 'leaders' and white liberals, that they CAN'T get ahead without special help. It's soft racism.

I'd also argue that using slavery and Jim Crow as excuses for black underachievement aren't going to do anything to end racism and prejudice toward blacks. Why should white people (or anybody else, for that matter) have any respect for people who whine and cry about what happened to their ancestors every time they hit one of life's brick walls? On the other hand, it takes a VERY prejudiced heart NOT to respect people who just grit their teeth and try again until they succeed.

There's no question that blacks have been hobbled in the past by racism. However, serious barriers to black achievement have been removed... except one: the idea that blacks are permanent victims.