Not really worth reading, and I can't figure out why AOL keeps him around on a blog (much less promotes him on the home page), where pretty much all he does is shil for his own books.
The most typical lines in The Greatest African-American:
Does Dinesh really believe this crap, or is he (I hope) simply an amoral profiteer who's figured out that saying outrageous things (hello, Ann Coulter!) tricks some people into buying really vapid, meaningless books?
The most typical lines in The Greatest African-American:
But now there are hardly any Bull Connors and Southern segregationists to fight, and so the activists are reduced to fighting "covert racism" and "institutional racism" and "racism that has gone underground" and basically racism that is only visible to them and to no one else....
The immigrants know that racism today is no longer systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to find ways to navigate around its obstacles....
At the time of his death King was peddling all kinds of impractical schemes for sharing the wealth and he also became unnecessarily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement which diluted his currency as a civil rights leader.
Does Dinesh really believe this crap, or is he (I hope) simply an amoral profiteer who's figured out that saying outrageous things (hello, Ann Coulter!) tricks some people into buying really vapid, meaningless books?
Comments
Not all coercion is physical; nor is all systemic prejudice as obvious as a lynching.
Red-lining certainly still exists, as does significantly discrimination in housing, employment, and even retail service.
I won't say that there hasn't been progress, but to suggest that we've wiped out racism in this country is at best hyperbole.
I grew up in the South in the bad old days and while you don't have sheriff's conspiring with the Klan to murder people, there is plenty of racism.
People in the South have accomodated themselves to dealing pleasantly with black coworkers on the job, or being in the same public facilities. They've gotten used to black people occupying economic niches besides maids and warehousemen.
But they don't socialize together.They don't sit together in school lunch rooms. Indeed, look over much of the South and it's remarkable how schools have resegregated.
Members of the same denominations still have separate churches. Economic disparities are much the same by race.
Seeing the Democratic Party going sideways on race in the 1960s, Southern Democrats first went Wallacite, then Republican. Who gets worked up about poke-in-the-eye issues like Confederate state flags, making voting harder to do, welfare queens- it's all in code, like President Bush's recess appointments of appellate judges with dodgy prejudice issues in their confirmation records- on Martin Luther King Jr Day a year or two ago. Or Trent Lott's speech at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
Indeed, lot of the effects of racism now are those of indifference. Like ward Conerly and other conservatives, the race question has been declared over. We don't have t think about it any more. Everyone is on his own and the genius of the market is that everyone gets an equal chance, and that charity from private sources will dole out mites to those who don't make it.
BTW- I was at a Christmas Party in Birmingham a few years ago. I met an interracial same-sex couple. They own Bull Connor's house. After they moved in, they went out to to Connor's grave, just to listen to him spin.