Cobb

so what are we to learn from this?

I've been hanging out at AfricanAmerican.org and have found myself a little annoyed at the preponderance of conspiracy theories. But I'm also trying to put some numbers out there with regard to the biggest threats to African Americans.

I mean if people are going to suggest that 13 million black abortions are the real genocide, or that lynching is bigger than WW2, it helps to have numbers.

Tuskegee wasn't a conspiracy THEORY...but i feel you.

Here's the thing though. I'm willing to bet that there were more black murders by black murderers committed within Tupelo, Mississippi over say a ten year period, than there were lynchings nation wide. More over a fifteen year period than there were lynchings and suspicious murders in the Deep South.

Would that information be sufficient enough to argue that black on black crime was the biggest problem, and that Jim Crow was nothing more than a blip?

Cobb, this is not related to the topic but it amused me. A friend of mine named her new baby Ethan. She's had three people ask her why she gave the baby such a corny white name!

That would be a startling revelation. If such a matter could be documented, I would use it to suggest that the Civil Rights Movement really only benefitted the African American middle class, such as it was relative to the rest of AFrican America. This would force us to recognize a permanent black underclass which has only shrunken marginally. Thus the thrust of the Movement (clearly led by college students) was always bourgie - ie unquestioning of the reasonability of the American mainstream.

Therefore, could it be said that black radicals have painted the CRM as 'empowering' in retrospect? Or could the thrust of Black Power not been communitarian? In other words were blacks in the middle class subject to the same black radical chic as whites?

I can't comment in depth right now.

This is the time where we've got to expand the form of the blog entry...because yeah you could use it to suggest that the CRM only benefitted black middle class folk. Using the numbers approach? Hell yeah.

But it's deeper than that. A lot deeper. Just like Dyson should be a lot deeper in general, and definitely in regards to Cosby.

I don't think there's THAT much crime in Tupelo. Memphis, maybe.

Bringing my "white" perspective, ha ha ... one realizes that oppressors are oppressed by oppression, too. It dehumanizes a person to act in inhumane ways. Countenancing slavery, and lynching, and Jim Crow, and all that other stuff was and is very bad for white people's souls. This was brought out in Uncle Tom's Cabin 150 years ago, and one sees it today in white folks who hold onto those bad old ways of thinking.

I see what you're saying about the relative numbers of people hurt by the Tuskegee thing and by black-on-black crime, but I hope the day never comes that white people try to say Tuskegee wasn't so bad after all.