Jamilah Lemieux Says Black People Need To “Stop Trying To Be Good”
V. Saxena
July 2, 2015
Ebony editor and frequent MSNBC guest Jamilah Lemieux believes black people need to “stop trying to be good” and just “be black” instead.
“Being college-trained and well-spoken, employed and law-abiding may — may — take you to the middle-class dream so many of us pine for, but what it will not do is protect you from the crushing white supremacy that is America’s greatest national accomplishment,” she wrote in an article for Mic.
Basically, in her mind, the rest of us need to stop telling black people to “stop using the word ‘ni**er,’ stop sagging, stop littering, start finishing formal education and have children only when married.”
Why? because these legitimate behavioral recommendations allegedly take away from “the role that the prison industrial complex, crumbling public school systems and other pillars of structural racism have played in the plight of our communities.”
I could argue that black behaviors and attitudes are themselves the primary root of black America’s problems, but okay …
The very idea that black people should try and behave normally — like everybody else, I might add — is what Lemieux and others like her have termed “respectability politics.”
It just so happens that Lemieux hates “respectability politics” — so much so, in fact, that she actually sees something wrong with shaming black women “for having numerous out-of-wedlock births.” Should we give them a trophy instead?
“We cannot demand justice for Mike Brown when some of our own people are wringing their hands over the slain teen’s decision to smoke weed,” she also wrote.
Justice for Mike Brown? If I am not mistaken, both the St. Louis Grand Jury and former Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice both reached the same conclusion — that Brown’s own actions led to his untimely demise.
But see, that phrase — Brown’s own actions — radiates with something Lemieux and her pals at Ebony and MSNBC loathe: personality responsibility.
What she calls “respectability politics” is in fact nothing more than a push to encourage black people to act with more personal responsibility.
And that, alas, is the pinnacle of all sins in this day and age of racial grievance mongering run amok!
http://downtrend.com/vsaxena/black-people-stop-trying-to-be-good
