I've gone from a person who as a teen in the sixties was very pro-civil rights and believed all the liberal malarkey about white racism causing black failure to a cynic on the subject. I thought for sure that passage of the CRs bill of the sixties and all the other policies like busing for integration and affirmative action would fix all the problems.
Obviously, they didn't. In fact AA (or Affirmative Discrimination as I like to call it) was probably one of the worst things to happen to black people and by extension the country. Black people were told they were victims and all their problems were caused by white people. What could go wrong?
Now who among the general non-black population believes that any black person they see in a prominent non-sports or non-entertainment field deserves to be where they are? I'll bet the great majority believe the black person was an incompetent person placed in a position simply because of their color. Unfortunately, many competent black people are under a cloud because of AA.
The whole load of AA, set asides, quotas, etc. needs to be junked. Black people need to know they have to work just as hard and obey all the rules to get ahead just like non-black people. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
The whole idea of all those programs was to allegedly right supposed wrongs perpetrated generations ago upon blacks, often by perpetrating wrongs on whites to somehow balance things out. That didn't help anyone, it just made a new 'victim class'.
Despite all that supposed prejudice and alleged wrong, a successful black business man I knew drove a new Cadillac, and had a white-faced jockey statue holding the lamp at the apex of his paved drive. While I knew plenty of field hands (and worked alongside them in tobacco fields and baling hay, and even oystering and crabbing) the younger folks had a plan.
If they couldn't score a scholarship to one of the (traditionally) 'black' universities, or even a 'white' one based on academics or athletic prowess, they planned to go into the military, do their hitch, get out and go to school on the GI Bill. I knew white guys in college who did the same.
But between the race riots derailing education for everyone, the incited anger fired up by outside (of the community) agitators, the expansion of drug culture, and the whole Liberal '
the man is holding you down so there is no point in even trying' meme, attrition was high, and many promising people fell by the wayside.
After that spate of violence had settled down, I worked a couple of summers fitting structural steel while I was in college, and about half the crew there was on work release from a Minimum Security Prison.
Most of the inmates were black, and one who seemed to be the 'boss' of that bunch buttonholed me one day.
He asked me what I was studying in college, and I told him I had been considering law, but decided I liked Geology even better. After explaining what geology is (in my mind there is no such thing as a dumb question, only not knowing because you didn't ask), he tossed out the $64,000 question, sizing me up. He asked "If you were a lawyer when the black man was fighting for his rights, would you have fought for the black man?"
I thought for a second, and flatly said. "No."
That caught him a little off guard so I explained. "First off, rights aren't rights unless they are for everyone--it doesn't matter what color you are." "Besides", I said, "the black man didn't get any new rights out of that, it just made a bunch of lawyers rich."
His reply? "You're a right-on mother f***er!"
I never had any problems with anyone on the crew.