Wednesday January 25, 2012
COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR OUR LATINO OUTREACH! As I've said before, I don't like to trawl comments sections, but sometimes it's too instructive to pass up.
Walter Russell Mead has an article called "Black Women Lead Shift To A Post-Blue World." As it's mainly about how black women are getting jobs -- "as increasing numbers of Black women enter the professional world, they are beginning to close the the earnings gap between themselves and their white peers" -- you might wonder where he was getting the "Post-Blue" thing. This seems to be the extent of it:
And the good news goes beyond the monetary: the [Washington Post] survey finds Black women to be more ambitious, more religious, and more optimistic about their future than many other groups, with a strong understanding of the value of hard work and achievement.
Condoleezza Rice, in other words, is not alone.
She's a Republican, see. (Unmentioned is this part of the Post story: "Half of black women surveyed call racism a 'big problem' in the country; nearly half worry about being discriminated against.")
Ole Perfesser Instapundit gets excited: "I wonder if their political views will evolve in response to this new entrepreneurialism?"
Well, you know what won't help? Mead's comments section:
Of course Black Woman are becoming entrepreneurs in greater numbers. The Govt has been picking winners and losers for a few decades now and Black Woman are at the top of their list... When a Govt takes from me to give a certain groups it deems “special” privileges that others do not get it’s called tyranny...
“Black women are setting up as entrepreneurs” — or as Affirmative Action gooberment or Big Corp. employees?...
They are essentially fronts for the men who know how to do the actual work...
I’d be ambitious and optimistic as well if the government was stacking the deck in my favor in the form of quotas and set-asides...
It is comic to hear you claim this is the result of “hard work and achievement”. It is anything but these. What silliness. Next you will be calling Obama competent...
To be sure, the fact that “…more and more Black women are setting up as entrepreneurs.” Is not good news overall.
Why does WRM capitalize “Black” while down-casing “white” when referring to the races? I thought we were striving for equality.
These aren't the fringe of Mead's comments -- they're the overwhelming majority. But what did you expect? They're the same people Mead cultivated with his Ooga Booga bullshit, and now they're understandably pissed that their hero said something nice about black women.
If only he could have tipped them off ahead of time that he was only doing it for propaganda purposes! Then we could have had a comments section full of "nudge nudge wink wink" and "Don't worry, Mead, I'm not gonna say that stuff I was gonna say about how they're all lazy." Well, maybe next time.