Friday, June 15, 2012

The Real Enemies of Charles Ogletree

I'm back in Chicago for a few days and yesterday did what probably middle aged white males shouldn't be doing a lot of. I walked through, the black, south side of Chicago, Michelle Obama country, as the sun went down.

During my stroll, I happened upon, of all things, a lecture about to be given by the Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree. So I bought a ticket ($25.00) and sat myself down to hear what the professor had to say. Between heavy name dropping that showed he is close to both Michelle and Obama, he hinted that Michelle was smarter than Obama.

He also told the crowd of about 100 that he feared that the American black race may become extinct because of the number of black males incarcerated.

He went on to speak about the terrible racist problems that still exist in America and then he talked about the 2009 arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in Cambridge by the white police officer James Crowley.

Ogletree represented Gates and was the one that got the charges dropped against Gates and sprung him from jail.

He now has a book out on the case, The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America. According to the description of the book on Amazon:
it uses [the Gates] incident as a lens through which to explore issues of race, class, and crime
After Ogletree finished telling his version of what went down between Gates and Crowley, I have become more convinced than ever that the Gates-Crowley incident was more about state power versus the individual.

Ogletree says that Gates almost immediately showed Crowley his Harvard ID and driver's license, but that Gates kept on mouthing off at Crowley, which Ogletree said should come as "no surprise to those who know Henry."

In addition to having the right to freedom of speech, on top of it, Gates was also in his own house, so Gates was completely in the right. But here is the real tell as to what went down. Gates asked Crowley for his name and badge number and that's when Crowley asked him to step outside and arrested him.

Ogletree at this point in retelling the event said he tells his Harvard students to never, ever ask for a police officer's name and ID number. He said the name and badge number are on the uniform and if you want it to just read it, implying that once you ask a cop for his name and badge that it's going to put you more at risk, since, if he thinks a complaint is coming, he is more likely to arrest you, so that it becomes more of a "he said, she said" situation.

So Ogletree is pretty much telling us it was a state versus individual situation.Yet he, himself, seems to miss what he is saying because he has on these damn glasses, through which he has sees everything coming out racist.

He did a lit more commenting about racism, amazingly hailed some little black kid who said he wanted to be a cop when he grows up and then told the crowd they need to be more active in the community.

It was then Q & A time and I raised my hand high and strong, I knew the moderator saw me but he never called on me. I was the only white person in the room. I think he was racist. (Hey, two can play this game.)

The question I was going to ask is this:
I don't doubt that there is some racism in America, as a white man I get to see it from a different perspective than you, and sometimes I think you guys actually miss some of the subtle racist stuff but, that being said, don't you think that harping on racism in a predominately white country creates a crutch for black people? If a white person fails in America he most often will look inward to see why he failed. But if a black person fails, all the black leaders are throwing him this racist crutch and he can think he failed, not because of a failure of his own, but because of racism. Would it not make a lot more sense to give young black people a boot in the butt and say, forget about the racism, just get out there and achieve? 
The great black economist Thomas Sowell, who deserves the Nobel Prize in economics, has written extensively on racism and prejudice. He points to the fact that Jews and Chinese are regularly  discriminated against, but this has not stopped them from being extremely successful in business and academics.

If Ogletree took the racist-searching lenses off his glasses, perhaps he would be able to see that the real problem is the state. It's what got Gates arrested. It's bans on drug selling is what gets blacks thrown in jail every day. It's government "education" that fails. It's government instituted minimum wage laws which keep the poorly government educated blacks from getting jobs. It's the splitting up of families by LBJ's Great Society programs that have left many black kids without fathers at home as role models.

Yes, Ogletree is correct that American blacks may become extinct, but it's not because of racism. It's because of government laws, rules and regulations. That he supports a kid who wants to be a cop, in this day and age of growing totalitarianism, which especially suffocates black youth, demonstrates that he doesn't have a clue as to the real enemy.

The real enemies of Charles Ogletree and his black community are the black crutch and the state, and he isn't close to understanding that with the glasses he is wearing.

5 comments:

  1. Ogletree is a professional black. Everything else comes in a distant second. If Ogletree were a professional Irishman or professional Jew he'd be a laughingstock. But since he's a professional black...well then, respect must be shown. Enough already.

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  2. Thank you for speaking out against race baiting and the promoters of the black crutch. As a teacher, I know that many young black men drop out of school when confronted with the slightest amount of adversity, blaming whitey for all their travails. Along with the welfare state and the drug war, these race baiters have done great damage to the black community.

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  3. Well said. This has been my position as an african american for years!

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  4. Interesting.

    I have to wonder if many of the 'issues of racism' that many blacks see are actually NOT racism, but just little things (thoughtless behavior or maybe rude behavior) that the over sensitive think are racism, because they see everything thru that lens?

    I know of some successful professionals (who happen to be black) make comments about 'little issues of racism' and had to wonder at the time what they mean.

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  5. Another great black economist, Walter Williams has a great book on this very subject...

    The State Against Blacks

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