Acting White: Red-Hair vs. Black-Skin

African-Americans often present the Atlantic slave trade as the end-all-beat-all of human abuse in the last millennium, and this is the reason for the intractableness of black pathologies, violence, crime, etc. With only mixed results, some (including me) have tendered an alternate view of what besets the stolen peoples of the Americas and Africa. In this view, the pain and lasting effects of slavery are more relative to freedom opportunity and perspective lost, and less comparable to competing histories of who done who the more wrong (sic).

The article from the NYT last week (here) on the subject of red-haired people as genetically more resistant to pain-medication, and therefore subject to more pain than others, caught my attention, as a interesting illustration of apples-to-oranges comparisons. What matters is not the knee-jerk argument of who hurts the most among brunettes, blonde's, and red-heads, but rather that red-heads have comparably bad teeth because dentist under-anesthetize them, chasing them away, as a group, from essential dental care.

Many African-Americans make the case for special dispensation and compensation, because of how inhumane slavery in the Americas was to blacks, compared to some standard in history, rather than looking at the specific plight of blacks and saying, “what does this group need in order to prosper?” What blacks do not need is more pity, but this is what the often-heard mode of complaint suggests. There is nothing intractable about black pathologies, except the insidious re-application of so-called solutions, better designed to keep people down rather than help them up.

We are living an explosion of fatherless kids because the government rewards such behavior. Schools, as hideouts for bum-teachers and dead-ass parents, have been promoting kids for years who can barely read or add, only to now coach them directly to the tests. Trade jobs are gone to China, as Americans hunger like addicts for more and cheaper consumable goods, to numb themselves to the debt required to pay for them. Sorry folks, it ain’t about who’s slavery was worse, but rather from politicians on down, it is really about who is pitchin’ in to make things for themselves and others - better.

James C. Collier

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