Okay, for today’s lesson we will look at Black People.

First off, you will probably admit most of you white folk have had little, or no real contact with the Black population. Basically, you grew up in lilly white neighborhoods where the outsider was either the new Italian family, or perhaps some kind of neighbor with Germanic leftover dialect.

Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage set in motion 400 years of slavery in the Americas. An estimated 650,000 African captives were transported to what would become the United States between 1619 and the eve of the Civil War.

Now, before you determine any derogatory opposition to Black People, remember you have been taught they are often dirty, shoot each other in cities and have a notorious habit of breeding, then abandoning their families. The news shows prove that nearly every night there are videos of Black males pining over their dead sons, it is always the lonely mother and aunt. Therefore...

While in Catholic grammar school, a nun tried to assure her all-White class that Black people really do not smell different.

We separated, ripped apart Black families for hundreds of years, but get over it. We have progressed, haven’t we,  and hardly ever point out Blacks many weaknesses now. Crime is rarely a Black female’s lead, unless of course they are into drugs, prostitution and shoplifting. Otherwise it is always the Black kid/man with the gun shooting aimlessly into a crowd.

You think that it goes without saying that Black People are lazy, refuse to lift themselves up from poverty and are always, always looking out for that government handout. Geeps, some have the nerve to ask for reparations due to their great-great grandparents being squashed and denigrated by slavery.

They push, along with ultra-liberal Whites, to remove our sacred Confederate flags and symbols, claiming those  statues are the plague of past lives and futures lost to generations of being held down by the White establishment. Hey, they never made statues of Blacks hanged. That would just be improper.

Next, the Black People will say generations of discrimination in hiring, education and financial dealings has been a deterrent to progress, a stumbling block to growth.

Jobs, you want jobs? They never even finished that free public school education. Like it is our fault they decided to live in deteriorating inner cities with a plunging tax base and no real escape. Is it our fault that inner conflicts have caused drug and gun problems from taking a toll?

Why can’t Black People lift themselves up from the boot straps like the Irish did? Everything is on an even keel, level playing field, except perhaps for that color thing. Am I a bit apprehensive when approaching a Black Person? Hell, yes! Ever meet a well-educated, well-dressed Black Person? They ooze snootiness. “Like look at me. I’m on an equal footing with you.” As if...

Here are just a few facts...

• The first is that race is not biological. Race is often confused with ethnicity, when the two are not the same. Race is actually a social construct.

• Even though more White people reported using crack more than Black people in a National Institute on Drug Abuse survey, Black people were sentenced for crack offenses eight times more than whites. The criminalization of people of color during the crack epidemic made mainstream white Americans comfortable knowing that this was a contained black-on-black problem.

• When it comes to black dads specifically, most, in fact, live with their children. No, really!

• Broken families are an inevitable consequence of the exact kinds of problems protesters are currently standing up against. Innocent Black men who are killed by police obviously won’t be there for their families. If you care about Black children being fatherless, you should be supporting the protesters. George Floyd, after all, is being remembered as a good father and family man. Yes, he was flawed, but who isn’t, living in a very segregated world.

• Black people are also more likely to be charged, tried, convicted, and sent to jail for all sorts of crimes than white people are—which, again, pulls fathers away from children. Mass incarceration is a huge part of the problem and liberals think we can solve the problem by far less incarcerations.

This problem is be exasperated by White and Black police fearing the  confronting of Blacks males and this often leads to overreactions.

• According to an FBI’s study on homicide, 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by fellow whites, while only 14 percent of white victims were murdered by Blacks. But beyond numbers, black-on-white crime is a social problem - it isn’t systemic. More than 100 unarmed black people were killed by police in 2014. Guilty or not, this number of deaths in comparison to how many white people were killed is staggering.

• The “reverse racism” card is often pulled by White People when people of color call out racism and discrimination, or create spaces for themselves that White people aren’t a part of.

• The affirmative action debate has been raging for decades, with many people arguing that it’s a prime example of reverse racism. They believe deserving White students are discriminated against while academically unqualified students are given highly coveted college or company positions  just because they happen to tick the “ethnic minority” box. This argument ignores the fact that affirmative action did not come out of nowhere. There was a need for a system that would address the decades of under representation of people of color both academically and in the job world. Is it a perfect system? Hell NO! Even now, White college students are 40% more likely to get private scholarships than minorities, and although 62% of college students in America are white, these students receive 69% of all private scholarships.

• At its core, racism is a system in which a dominant race benefits off the oppression of others - whether they want to or not. We don’t live in a society where every racial group has equal power, status, and opportunity. We are simply not there yet. Someone with a “white sounding” name is 50% more likely to get a job call back than a person with an “ethnic” sounding name, according to a study.

• The 1954 Brown  Supreme  Court decision stripped away constitutional sanctions for segregation by race, and made equal opportunity in education the law of the land, but in never really ended. Even today, more than half of school children in the United States attend school districts where more than 75 percent of the students are either White or of color — a clear sign of continued segregation and failure. 

Then, there is the fact that millions of Blacks have moved into the middle and upper classes (rich), but just one news report of an inner city shooting relegates the Black population into the old  lower class discrimination status. 

Yes, color is a distinguishing factor in our bias, we just don’t like to admit it.