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Columns and Articles by Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman

February 10, 2015

Victimization Has Become Chic---Diluting the Message.

Our country is wallowing in the blame game with endless demonstrations protesting injustice. It is said that Black youth are being unfairly persecuted by police---and too often becoming victims in police shootings. Nobody is protesting the murder of Black youth by Blacks.

That we have had 300 years of injustice to Blacks through slavery and after that Southern Jim Crow and northern inner cities cannot be denied. However, the past fifty years has produced a revolution in race relations---something once thought impossible in this country.

It is no longer against the law for Blacks to marry Whites, and biracial couples have become common enough to evoke no reactions. We have a biracial president. Even under slavery, there were those who served as pastors, were literate, and played an enormous role after emancipation in helping urban Black populations to join the ranks of the literate and professional. There are today many Black millionaires: athletes, actors, inventors, corporate executives, and doctors and lawyers. They live well integrated into white communities of like wealth. The former community laws banning Blacks are gone.

Absent from this prosperity are Black people living in the inner cities, along with new Asian or Hispanic shopkeepers just beginning their own upward mobility. Black inner city youth so often targeted by police are not, as demonstrators profess, innocent. Many have been born to young single mothers; have had no responsible father figure; no Black professionals to emulate (they have moved to better communities); do badly in school; and wind up unemployed and unemployable. Criminal activity appears to be the only outlet, hence the presence and hostility of the police.

These young men are not stupid; it takes considerable mental agility to stay alive in the drug and prostitution trades. But those who have been lucky enough to be admitted into burgeoning Black academies, boarding there and being taught study habits and behavioral responsibility, are largely going to college and are on the way to middle class or better American life. This model should be multiplied if we ever want to empty inner cities.

Demonstrations.
Across the country following several unfortunate police shootings of Black youth with police not found guilty by Grand Juries, the press and organized demonstrators are not addressing what could make things better; they only revisit the bad history. Indeed, community policing on foot is needed. Trust must be built between the police and the inner city populations who are themselves being victimized by criminal youth. And the tradition of "gangsta chic" must end. It is a dead end. The boarding school model is really needed here. The only other model substituting for solid family or community values is gang culture. Not a good choice.

History of Prejudice.
The Irish first to arrived in the young US (1840s) and they came in sheer desperation during the Irish potato famine. They were relegated to the lowest jobs, housemaids for women, railroad building labor for the men. Signs banning the Irish from restaurants or jobs appeared everywhere.

What did the Irish do then? They joined the most dangerous institutions: police and fire-fighting and thrived. They next engaged in politics and emerged running a number of major cities.

Jews arrived from Europe in two waves: literate German Jews fleeing the 1840's abortive revolutions and later hordes fleeing Russian pogroms and government persecution. The German Jews went west with the Gold Rush and became the founding parents of San Francisco, where they lived without prejudice. The Russian Jews were initially less lucky. They wound up in ghettos in New York, working in sweatshops, but within a generation, sent their children to college. Jews, like the Irish and Blacks, were not permitted into certain clubs, neighborhoods, or faced quotas in universities (as the Chinese have done). But this is gone today.

None of these groups demonstrated, whined, or burnt down their neighborhoods, even under provocation. They aspired to something better and they succeeded. Isn't this a better model than anarchy?
Note: Everything said here applies to Muslims in France too.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God's Law or Man's Law. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.

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