So, is the Left Overreacting? Are African Americans Overreacting?
I can't really say whether typical African American response is overreacting or not as I haven't lived life with their skin color. Yes, my skin is dark, (I am of Mexican American heritage), but overt prejudice hasn't been much of a factor in my life; I am indeed fortunate. Unfortunately my African American countrymen can't say the same.
What I have noticed though is that African Americans tend to see national events very differently from non-African Americans.
Examples include: the O. J. Simpson verdict, government response to Katrina, Ohio voting irregularities, accusations of police brutality (e. g., Rodney King)). I've even seen this at the local level; a few years ago there was an incident (a dispute over a parking spot!) in which a white sitting city council member the other person a "nigger"! (and was accused of "keying" her car; he was acquitted of that in a jury trial but admitted to using the slur). Local African Americans were outraged; many non-African Americans wondered why simple "name calling" was such a big deal.
So, why is this? Why the outrage over Bill Bennet's remarks in which he made a rhetorical point?
Background: see, for example,
http://blueollie.blogspot.com/2005/10/dr-bennett-and-his-if-we-aborted-all.html
Well, let us remember that humans tend to reason inductively; that is, we go by what we actually see. With this in mind, let us have a brief review of part of relatively current US history:
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The United States government did something that was wrong: deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist. President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for "bad blood", their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. "As I see it", one of the doctors involved explained, "we have no further interest in these patients until they die. "
Source:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762136.html
Lifting the Curtain On a Shameful Era Thousands were sentenced to sterilization during rubber-stamp hearings in Raleigh
"By Kevin Begos JOURNAL REPORTER
They were wives and daughters. Sisters. Unwed mothers. Children. Even a 10-year-old boy. Some were blind or mentally retarded. Toward the end they were mostly black and poor. North Carolina sterilized them all, more than 7,600 people.
For more than 40 years North Carolina ran one of the nation's largest and most aggressive sterilization programs. It expanded after World War II, even as most other states pulled back in light of the horrors of Hitler's Germany.
Contrary to common belief, many of the thousands marked for sterilization were ordinary citizens, many of them young women guilty of nothing worse than engaging in premarital sex.
I don't want it. I don't approve of it, sir. I don't want a sterilize operation.... Let me go home, see if I get along all right. Have mercy on me and let me do that. Â A woman pleading with the eugenics board, 1945.
The sterilization program ended in 1974, but its legacy will not go away. Many of its victims are still alive and they bear witness to a bureaucracy that trampled on the rights of the poor and the powerless. "
Source and much more: http://againsttheirwill.journalnow.com/
Controversry Surrounding Testing Pesticides on Low-Income Children.
Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said they were placing parliamentary holds on the confirmation of Stephen L. Johnson as EPA administrator because he had not canceled a controversial program that would pay families to videotape the effect of pesticide exposure on infants through routine spraying in their homes.
[...]
The White House said it intended to stand behind Johnson, a 24-year EPA official who has headed the agency's pesticide programs since 2001, and Crawford, a pharmacologist who has served as the FDA's acting commissioner for about a year.
"We will continue to work with the senators to see to it that the president's nominees are confirmed," said White House spokeswoman Erin Healy.
The nominations of Johnson and Crawford were part of a second-term shuffle in which nine of 15 Cabinet portfolios changed hands. [...]
(Boxer) said she decided to take the unusual step after Johnson told her committee that he had suspended, but not canceled, a program that proposed to pay 60 Florida families to record the effects of pesticide exposure on their infant children.
"Until this program is canceled, no ifs, ands or buts, I am putting a hold on this," Boxer said after the hearing. "This is completely beyond the bounds. It's a horrible idea. It's an immoral idea. It's harmful to these children."
The conflict in Johnson's nomination involves the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study, a two-year program that was in the process of signing up participants when Johnson suspended it in the fall. Sixty Duval County families were to receive $970 each, plus a camcorder and children's clothing, for letting agency officials track the effect of pesticide exposure on children in their first year of life. The American Chemistry Council, a trade group, was to provide $2 million of the program's $9-million budget.
"The government should not be asking families to turn their babies into guinea pigs," Nelson said in a statement. "They should be protecting children, not exposing them to pesticides."
Johnson told the Senate committee he had suspended the program after questions were raised about its propriety and said he was awaiting the results of an external scientific and ethical review before deciding whether it should proceed.
Source:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/school/cheers040805.cfm
Conclusion
So, we are talking about a government and an establishment that was (and is) willing to cold bloodidly sterlize and run medical and chemical effects tests on its own, especailly low income and African American.
Do you wonder why African Americans (especially lower income ones) might be a bit more cynical about the govenment and people in power than some of the rest of us?