Unity

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Dr. Martin Luther King

Today we have lost sight of the real meaning of this speech. It has become a talismanic icon, not an actual message, not a manifesto. Come Monday this will be truer than ever as we hear about the need to celebrate diversity, and how far the diverse minorities in America have come, and so on and so on.
And not half of it will be true to what Dr. King wanted, what he preached, what he spoke for in that famous speech.
Dr. King did not preach diversity. He did not preach minority. He preached Unity. Unity is something we have not achieved. We are still classifying people by colour and by creed - Celebrating diversity, encouraging minority development, all of these things sound good but in the end, in truth, they are simply polite ways of maintaining racial barriers.
Diversity is not a good thing - It says "We are different - We cannot be alike - We are not brothers". Minority implies that some people are less than others because of their ethnicity, it says "You are Black, Asian, Indian, or White, and I am not Black, Asian, Indian or White - We cannot be brothers".
This is not what Dr. King wanted.

"The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'"

That is what Dr. King wanted - Unity, Not Diversity.

The Problem with "Diversity"

I'm about to make myself un-popular, I'm afraid, but before I do I want to say something. Something I've actually said all too much in recent weeks - I Am Not a Racist, White Supremacist, White Separatist or any other form of "intolerant". There, happy now? Everyone can relax.
Well, probably not... after all, I'm about to say some rather imflamatory things that are quite contradictory to the current en-vogue perspective on how things "should be" as propogated in school and on tee-vee...

I've been watching the news on TV, reading the papers, and checking out the media outlets online as well as blogs and other webpages. I am a sort of infophile, I like to be informed. Unfortunately, instead of being informed lately I've been hearing more about how recent events in New Orleans and the rebuilding process are some sort of "war" on the black community.
Louis Farrakhan (Bloggers spell checker things Farrakhan should be Foreskin, as a humorous note) has stood up and said he knows, knows by Allah!, that Bush blew up the levee's in NOLA to flood the black areas of NOLA and kill or drive out the black people. Of course, ol' Louie is a fucking idiot, and I think everyone knows that (except for a passel of other religious zealots who think Louieness is next to Allah-y-ness).
Similar nuttery has been going around the web, with everyone from Aztlan (a Hispanic "radical" movement) to individual black bloggers claiming that, if no criminal detonations occurred, that racism at least occurred in the evacuation policies and is continuing in the current rebuilding. Again, just the tin-foil hat crowd venting their spleens.
But, tonight on the news there was a spokesman from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) talking about how 33.6% of the black population wont be returning to New Orleans, and how that's part of a great white conspiracy to rebuild NOLA as a "white" city.

Do people actually believe this shit? Is there a large portion of the "African-American" population who is actually rallying around the idea that this is some great act of white hatred against "African-Americans"? (I hate that term - just as much as I hate "Welsh-Americans" [which I am] or "Irish-Americans" - We're American. Period. That's what American is, a melting pot nationality. If that's not good enough for you, if you have to add "African" or "Irish" or "Mexican" in front of American, then you loyalty is not with your country, so why don’t you go elsewhere?)

It was a natural disaster. They happen. They always have happened and they always will happen. Some will do relatively little, and some are going to do truly horrible things, but no matter what they are completely, totally, natural events.
People, of all colors and creeds, need to pull their heads out of the sand and accept this - the world is a hostile place, things do go bump in the night, its the natural order, life is hard, survival is not guaranteed but death is.
We need to stop looking for people to blame - we cant blame someone else for every thing that happens.
Yes, the system and its leaders failed miserably and didn't do for the people in the path of Hurricane Katrina what should have been done to make them safe - but did those people fail maliciously just to target black people?
NO.
Most certainly not. The majority of the population of New Orleans before Katrina was black (66.6 percent). Almost the entire population of NOLA below the poverty line was black. Who were the people who couldn't evacuate? The poor. Terrible coincidence, but malicious and racist? Bullshit. White folks were left down there too. White folks got trapped in the Superdome or Convention Center too. As did Latino's, Orientals, and Native Americans.
Yes, most of the people were black - was that because whitey evacuated everyone who wasn't? No. Its a simple numbers thing, you have a majority in an area who is of type A, and something bad happens in that area, who will suffer the most from it? Yes, people of "Type A".

(Now, earlier I know I said that those who were left behind were the "entitled" fools who didn't bother to get smart enough to leave - and I stick by that. I realize no everyone was like that though, and many people honestly had no way to get out. You can fault people for making the foolish choice to be solely dependent upon the city for aid in an emergency, but you cant fault them much for being stranded when that city welcomed their dependence and then abandoned them because the mayor is a retard.)

And now, in the aftermath, as the city rebuilds there are claims that it’s going to rebuild as a "white city". And that may be true - but it’s not a racist issue. A lot of people, in the worst hit areas (the poorest areas) were black. Those people have left the state, and a great many of them have done so thanks to the kindness of their fellow Americans of all colors and creeds who have, out of the goodness of their hearts, provided money, clothes, a place to stay, jobs and even entire houses for displaced families.
If you were given a new house, and a new job, that greatly improved your status in life, would you go back to a city full of un-repairable water damaged homes, still covered in disease filled mud from between six and twelve feet of flooding? Of course you wouldn't. No one in his or her right mind would.
Are those people not coming back black? Yes, a lot of them are - a majority of the population of NOLA is black, and the majority of the affected and displaced are black. There is simply no way that the majority of people not returning would be anything but black.

But, despite this obvious "numbers issue" black activists (and all sorts of minority activists, including [especially] those rich white folks who want to assuage some of the mythical "white guilt" by pretending to give a rats ass) are claiming that it was all about race. That a black mayor abandoned every black person in his city, and that now he and everyone in charge of the rebuilding operations are continuing that trend of abandonment and failing to provide, as part of a great white conspiracy to kill, or drive out, black people. They are getting on TV and claiming this as the truth, and getting all riled up about it.
And this raises a question, at least for me, the question that's the title of this post (and that probably has all of you hot under the collar still) - Do they want to be niggers?
Now, I’m not saying “they are niggers” – I abhor racism, its vile – but these people who make these claims, who act like this and rally around these nonsensical ideas honestly seem to me as if they would be happier if everyone just called them “nigger”. They would feel justified in their claims if that happened – they want, so badly, for someone to blame, someone to be responsible for them, that I think they would actually accept the title of “nigger” so long as it gave them more leverage for their whining, crying and swindling of the system.
Many members of other minority groups do this, but right now yes I am focusing on blacks who do this.
They start out preaching “brotherhood” and “equality” as strength in the face of disaster, but at the first hint of something going wrong it starts, “Masa, help us! You owes us, Masa!” playing off bleeding-heart white guilt, that somehow by being a minority group they are worse off and more deserving of help than anyone else. And finally when that doesn't get enough attention, they are twisting events so they can say "Masa tried to KILL us, masa tried to drive us away, masa is conspirin’ ‘gainst us!”
Instead of standing up on their own two feet, and standing straight with their own spines, they want not only someone to blame, but someone other than themselves to be responsible for them.
They claim they want equality and independence, but when the chips are down what card gets played? The "We're a minority, you owe us!" card - they don't want to be equally responsible, they don't want to be independent when it means working, they want to be taken care of. And that is patently bullshit. If they don't want to be "whiteys nigger" then they need to suck it up, like they've got a pair, and stand up on their own legs instead of playing the "minority" card.

Being a minority isn’t an entitlement to snivel and wait for someone else to help you.
What happened to being truly proud of your heritage and taking strength from that? I thought that’s what “celebrating diversity” was all about.
Why cant people stand up and proudly say “I am ‘whatever’ and I don’t need anyone’s help – I am responsible for myself”?
What’s wrong with that? Nothing.
And oh yes, its paid a lot of lip service too – but when the chips are down, minorities are entitled, and the majority is guilty of nothing short of gross-criminal-negligence when we don’t kowtow to their ever whim, whine, snivel and sobbing demand.

And this is something we, as an entire nation of diverse ethnicities, have brought upon ourselves by celebrating Diversity, instead of Unirt.
This idea that we must all "celebrate diversity", and that being a minority makes you special leads to just this kind of behavior.
Celebrating diversity just creates more division between the races – it draws the dividing lines deeper, and then keeps filling them in with heavy black-ink.
If I celebrated a "white history month" I would be called a neo-Nazi and a racist scumbag, but Black History Month is a wonderful celebration of the oppressed and minority “African American” community in the nation.
Am I the only who sees these types of celebrations as just reinforcing to the idea that minorities are oppressed? You keep telling a people they are oppressed, and thus entitled, and pretty soon that’s the only world they will know.
But no, it’s beautiful to celebrate cultural “diversity”.
Everyone who is Latino, Asian, Black, or Middle Eastern is entitled to have a unique culture, and to celebrate it (here in America) as separate and special from American culture – but white American’s aren’t allowed shit, a celebration of that is “racist”.
Anyone else see the double standard here?
I have no problem with cultural heritage, but I think everyone should be entitled to celebrate theirs.

No one is any more special than anyone else because of the color of his or her skin. We're all human, that should be enough. "Special" is a quality of personal character, unique and individual to each and every human being - not to an entire group, race or religion.

Diversity is junk - it’s just another form of racism, promoting the drawing of dividing lines between the races and encouraging racist, classist, attitudes.
What we need is Unity, not Diversity.
Unity to stand up as Americans, as Humans, and rebuild our cities and populations after a disaster - to call to task those who failed, and to celebrate those who stood strong, not to hunt boogers and make up reasons to expand the dividing lines and cry "poor me!” That kind of thing is killing our nation, and is truly breeding racism.
We don't need "minority" and "majority" groups, when you make those kinds of definitions someone will ALWAYS get the short end of the stick. We don't need "Diversity" - that's just a nice word for saying "racial separatism" - we need Unity. Everyone standing up together - Strong, proud and capable, as Americans.
American should not be a bad word. American without and preface should not be a bad thing. Not Black-American, African-American, White-American, Irish-American, Indian-American, just plain AMERICAN. United, strong - one people who are capable of dealing with problems, fixing mistakes and rebuilding from disaster.
But... no. American is a bad word. We are not united. We are not strong. We are divided - we are minority or majority, we are "diverse", we are "something-American", and we are a bickering, quarrelsome, nation always pointing the finger at each other and screaming insults. We are weak.
And it makes me terribly sad. Because I am not only proud of my country, I love my country - I love the ideals that my country was founded upon, strength, self-reliance, and honest independence. And I love the people in my country, of all races, colors, and creeds, who uphold those ideals.
But, there are all these people, all shapes and sizes and colors of people, who don’t – and they are ruining my country.