I’ve watched far too many clips of Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’s testimony lately. It’s like the proverbial train wreck. You won’t learn anything from it, you won’t feel good about it. It is gratuitous stupidity on display. Too many drivers gawk at traffic accidents. I have been gawking at this obscenity.
Affirmative Action may have once served some kind of purpose. Perhaps to be implemented for a very brief time, until the playing field was leveled. But that time has long passed. Fani Willis is absolutely the most ignorant, ill-educated, and unqualified person for someone with her position that I have ever seen. As a radical blue-collar worker in the late 1970s and 1980s, I toiled alongside and socialized with literally hundreds of Blacks. None of them went to college, let alone law school. All of them were more articulate than Fani Willis. She sounds just like the average woman working in housekeeping did back than. Except that those housekeepers weren’t generally dishonest, or virulent racists.
Willis represents the next step in what is the ghettoization of America. Public officials didn’t used to sound like Fani Willis. People scrubbing toilets for a living did. There was a Black man in the Senate back in the day named Ed Brooke. He spoke English as correctly as any other dishonest “representative.” Look at Colin Powell. Or the much demonized Clarence Thomas. I think the main objection to them, on the part of depraved Social Justice Warriors, is that they don’t speak ebonics. They don’t “keep it real.” A young Black conservative who has built a big following, Candace Owens, is looked at in the same way. Not just because she speaks correct English, but because of what she says. She calls out ghetto culture. Which has become U.S. culture.
I would be all in favor of an Affirmative Action that gives those from impoverished backgrounds- of all races- a chance at upward mobility. But they’d still have to be qualified. What we’re seeing is an exclusively Black phenomenon. Can you picture some “White trash” from a trailer park, with similar English proficiency and impulse control as Fani Willis, being admitted to any law school in the country, let alone becoming district attorney? You don’t see any White talking heads, on the news or even in sports, who butcher the language the way so many Black talking heads do. What we are seeing is only slightly less ridiculous than when the federal government installed illiterate slaves into the U.S. Congress during Reconstruction.
Decades of capitulation to ghetto culture have helped to build the mess that is America 2.0. I guess I’m the only White American who doesn’t find life in the “hood” fascinating. I’m not interested in “gang bangers.” I’m repulsed by them, as all decent people should be. A century ago, the media began glamorizing gangsters like Al Capone. Tough guys portraying gangsters onscreen were the toast of Hollywood. While millions of Americans enjoyed gangster movies, they didn’t mimic the lifestyle. They didn’t pretend to be “gangstas,” throwing up ridiculous hand signs that are often Satanic in nature as well. They didn’t ostracize those in their community who read, and wanted to be educated. Fox News can dutifully say “African-American” all they want. It’s a stupid, divisive term, and serves to notify others of one’s cuck status.
During the first few decades of Affirmative Action, the scores of Black talking heads on local and national news all spoke flawless English. There was the sense that, even though their Blackness had vaulted them to the top of the heap, there were minimal requirements to be met. How much skill, really, does it take to read a teleprompter? But you were at least expected to read it in proficient English. Ebonics, for instance, would have been unthinkable. I don’t know if White Americans, already starting to cuck out at that time, would have objected, but I guess maybe it was thought that they might. I never watch local news, and only rarely watch national news, but my sense is that, generally speaking, this is still largely the case.
The early Black talking heads in the world of sports, like Irv Cross, again spoke perfectly fine English. But then multiple ex-players, all too fluent in ebonics, like Michael Irvin and Shannon Sharpe, were handed “analyst” or commentator jobs, in which they simply “kept it real,” “analyzing” football and basketball they way they do in Black barber shops. The louder the better. The way they did back when I was a Blue collar worker, discussing the sports we all loved. Except that those Black co-workers of mine were earning an unimpressive wage. They were certainly more receptive to my belief that sports were fixed. They were just as knowledgeable and entertaining, but no one would have suggested they were ESPN-worthy. Just as no one would have promoted the average Black housekeeper back then as a potential district attorney.
In 1996, America crossed a huge racial line in the sand with the Oakland Ebonics Resolution. The school board, which presumably wasn’t comprised of gangstas or old school rappers, announced a goal of “maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language.” Think about this; a group of alleged educators gave its stamp of approval to the loudest slang, the most offensive pidgin English, the world has ever seen. But this was 1996. The resolution was soundly condemned by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Maya Angelou, and the Clinton administration. Gradualism. By 2007, the Linguistic Society of America, the preeminent group of professional linguists, passed a unanimous resolution declaring that the Oakland school board was correct in their decision and lent their support as language professionals.
Once “ebonics” became an accepted thing, it was essentially over for the King’s English. Films, television shows, and the music world promoted ebonics nonstop. It was a celebration of incorrect English. And inevitably, it was decreed that proper English, and basic grammar, were “racist.” Just like mathematics. I guess they’re still working on an ebonics form of arithmetic. Common Core math comes close. We all grew up- at least I did- with teachers and parents politely correcting you if you made a grammatical error. Mixed up your plurals and singulars. Now virtually all Black public figures mix them up constantly. It’s part of “keeping it real.” I’ve seen Black graduates of Yale and Harvard speak like those housekeepers of yore. As a mere community college dropout, I shouldn’t sound more articulate than Ivy Leaguers.
Blacks are only about thirteen percent of the U.S. population. This would be an incomprehensible statistic to an alien from another world watching American television. Blacks utterly dominate in the worlds of sports and entertainment. And network “news.” Watch the Grammys. Tell me what the racial breakdown is there. Just a bit disproportionate to the numbers in the population. Blacks have been gifted positions of prominence in all the fields everyone out there in the hinterland fantasizes about. Music stars. Movie stars. Comedians. College and pro athletes. Local and national TV anchors. There are as many Blacks in these desirable roles now as there were working menial jobs at the hospital where I was employed, more than forty years ago. But the Black public figures actually appear to be less educated.
In politics, you have ebonics queens like Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee. Again, I could take two random Black laundry workers from back in the day, insert them in Congress in their place, and no one would know the difference. And they’d be a lot less corrupt. Our esteemed vice president, Kamala Harris, is Black. Well, about half-Black. They don’t mention the Indian part. But the point is that, there has never been a White female vice president. What are the odds that the first one would be a “person of color?” As distinguished from a colored person. Which is a racist label. It’s a ghetto thing, you wouldn’t understand. I think we all can agree that Harris didn’t beat out all the White women on merit. She is a laughingstock, a national embarrassment. She has the maturity and intellect of a teenage valley girl. We’ve never had a meritocracy. We now have a ghettoized Idiocracy.
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