Acting White: CNN Black In America

Over the past few weeks I have gotten plenty of calls from friends and family beckoning me to watch CNN’s Black in America, presented by Soledad O’Brien. I have perused the series web site many times and watched portions of the shows. The show has value, especially to blacks who suffer the main stream media’s (MSM) penchant for ignoring them or showing them almost exclusively at their entertaining worse,
ala’ BET.

So why haven’t I jumped on the bandwagon of this show? Last week I saw Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, talking about paying black kids in NYC for good grades. Nothing new. I have blogged about this and that I think he is a very smart, frustrated, and desperate man flailing his arms in the wind. Last night I listened to the plight of Black women lacking eligible suitors. Again, nothing new. I hear of drop-out rates, HIV/AIDS, crime, drug-abuse. All bad – nothing new. I see interracial couples, no nirvana, still not new.

What I do not hear are solutions, beyond talk that black people really need to get it together and the rest of America needs to help them. But how would a real solution look, if it were to walk in the door? Would anybody recognize it? What would it purport to do to make a real difference in 40 million lives?

Well first off, any solution has to recognize and offset the gap in intelligence between blacks and non-blacks. This subject must be un-tabooed. The universal one standard deviation difference in intelligence makes blacks non-competitive with their socio-economic counterparts of other races, and all that follows this disparity. The way to challenge intelligence difference is with skill-building through more education. Better education is good, but more of it is the only way to beat your competition from a point of deficit. Blacks need more and different schooling than non-blacks, to ever catch up. This is true at every level.

Second, blacks display a gap in work ethic where they labor for themselves the same way their ancestors worked for the white man, poorly. Hustle to a great number of blacks does not mean moving faster, but rather gaming the system to get more for less. Of course this self-investment strategy works against skill building, and competitiveness.

Lastly, it is human nature to value that which is earned and to devalue gifts, no matter the spirit of the giver or recipient. The energy invested in getting someone to give you anything of value, is wasted. Wrestling away what is rightfully yours is another thing. Equal opportunity must be truly equal and not rigged. That which is not given to blacks will be won, and fully appreciated to deliver much more.

This is some of what I would talk about.

James C. Collier

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