Blacks Are Victims: Because They’re Told They Are

The following is an excerpt from my 2015 eBook: Blacks Are Victims: Because They Are Told They Are.

One of the things that I am asked most often by other blacks is, where I was raised, and how did I come to be like I am. The real question I’m being asked is “Why [and how] would a black man ever be a conservative?”

My standard answer is: “I’m from my mother’s womb; and I find the rest of your question to be as offensive as others find the thick-lipped caricatures of blacks eating watermelon and the idea that all blacks eat fried chicken.” I wouldn’t eat chicken if you held a gun to my head and threatened to pull the trigger.

I was not raised to see myself as a color. I was raised to see myself as a man and to contribute on some level to life around me. I wasn’t raised to feel I had been deprived by white people and/or that America owed me special dispensation based on the color of my skin. I wasn’t raised to view white people as my enemy or as a people who would do me harm at their first opportunity. I wasn’t raised to be afraid of police or to be resentful of those who either in reality, or based on perception, had more than I did.

I was raised to understand that material things do not make the person and that the only person who would hold me back was Mychal Massie if I let him. In other words what I would become or not become wasn’t based on whites or the color of my skin, rather it was based upon how much I was willing to invest into making something of myself.

My friends and I routinely discuss that when we were growing up skin color didn’t matter to us or to our families for that matter. As I have shared many times, while I was aware of the word, I was never called the “N” word until I attended Pennridge Junior High School in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. And at the time Rosa Parks was being thrown off the bus, I was riding in the front of the bus, up Third St. in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with my white nanny. We lived in a fully integrated middle class neighborhood and I attended fully integrated schools.

My mother become ill when I was 10-years old and it was necessary for us to move back with her family until she was able to recover. Little did I know then that the next time she came back to my childhood home it would be when she was 86 years-old and I was forced to place her in an assisted-care living facility.

That said, having a handful of boys who called one another names that I personally found more revolting than the “N” word, albeit they called one another that word too, had no debilitating affect on me. It had no debilitating affect because I wasn’t raised to be a victim. Nor was I raised to be envious or filled with animus toward whites for some perceived ill deed they had committed against me and/or my family.

I didn’t resent what others had. The men in my family all worked. Some of the women worked as well. My mother recovered from her illness enough to work and she provided a quality life for me. I hear black athletes today speak of their mother having it hard and having to work multiple jobs to provide. I hear the talk of their fathers not being in their lives for any number of reasons.

The one thing I learned growing up was how to work and how to take care of your family, especially the children. As children we weren’t left to fend for ourselves. There was always an adult present watching us, to correct us and discipline us when necessary, and most importantly to interact with us in the games we played.

We weren’t told we were poor and we weren’t taught the white man had mistreated our people blah-blah. In school I was expected to learn and there were no excuses for anything short of same. Children weren’t promoted out of one grade to the next just to get rid of them. There was no such thing as political correctness.

Which brings me to the point. Black people today are expected to have some sort of overcoming story to tell. They had to overcome racism to play their professional sport. They had to overcome the white racists to get through high school. Everything is a hard luck story premised on overcoming white racism or bigotry of some kind.

Luckily, I suffered none of that childhood inculcated victimizing. My town was far from being something that Norman Rockwell painted but it certainly wasn’t that far from it as such. I’m not saying that I didn’t have to deal with the reality of life as I was growing up, but they weren’t realities of life predicated upon my being a victim.

I never in my life had a black teacher and I can assure you my education in no way suffered because of it. There were no Hispanics in my Junior or Senior High Schools, albeit before my mother became ill and we moved, the school I attended has every description of student. When I say melting pot and fully integrated we had it. But the school wasn’t a jungle. There wasn’t the violence and banal anti-societal behavior. The neighborhood was clean and safe. People weren’t afraid to go out at night, there were no drug dealers and the ancillary occupations associated with the drug culture.

Some years after college and after working in another state, I returned to the town I had grown up in after my mother’s illness and got married. I began my own family, became a Christian, and went back to school to prepare for the ministry. It was on the occasion of talking with a minister acquaintance who happened to be black that I the depth of inculcated victimization showed itself.

About a year before graduation from college (again, only this time bible college) the Lord called me into full-time Christian ministry serving the district of my denomination in prison ministry. In that capacity I was also named head of chaplaincy of the prison and ministered in many others as well. The minister I referenced asked where I had grown up and when I told him he made a comment about what it was like “growing up with all those white people.” Understanding his reference, I explained what it was like. It was then that he said words that would forever bring me to understand how victimized the minds and psyches of blacks had become.

His response was “The only reason y’all all got along was because there weren’t more niggers living there.” I immediately responded with “Is that how you think of yourself?” I was filled with righteous indignation and was not about to surrender the moral high ground until he was able to justify his comments. He, of course, was unable to justify his comments finally saying something to the effect that he was just kidding. An answer that I wasn’t willing to accept either.

Living some 50 miles outside of Philadelphia, it wasn’t the first time a black minister had asked me what it was like living with all of “those white people,” but this was the first time one had said the words this person did.

It was something I would hear and have heard many times. It is based on the dirty little secret that very few black people will tell a white person, and that is the depth of raw animus many blacks harbor for whites. White people have no clue as to the depth of resentment that is felt toward them. And it is only with the election of Obama that blacks have been more open in showing such antipathy.

It is this mind-numbing antipathy for whites and the inculcated belief that life’s ills are the result of evil white people that has become as much a part of “blackdom” as breathing. And the stronger this mindset of victimology is cleaved to, the more they are viewed as a pandit. Especially if said individuals articulate a message of contempt and blame for whites.

I have witnessed this mindset acted out from the ghetto housing projects to a bar in Manhattan. I have been told that I dressed like a white person apparently because the person trying to insult me reasoned that wearing a polo shirt with Bermuda shorts and loafers without socks was the way white people dressed. I have been told that I’m trying to be white because of the way I speak. A black person working for Governor Andrew Cuomo, NY, told me that black people do not use words like “vis-a`-vis” and the fact that I did proved I was an Uncle Tom. I had a black minister from Philadelphia tell me that I drove cars that white people drove, at the time I was driving a Volvo.

A young black woman and I were talking in my office and I mentioned that my wife and I liked the Chestnut Hill area of Philadelphia and had considered buying a home there. Her response was that she didn’t go there and didn’t like it there because “there were too many white people there.” She said: “I don’t want to be around all those white people.”

This young woman was at that time employed by a big box store and running a department earning nearly $50,000 annually. The majority of the people she worked with were white. The majority of the people who worked in her department were white. And the store itself was located in King of Prussia which was at the time predominantly white.

Think about it for a moment. Think about the dishonesty of the woman who smiled and talked to white people all day while just below the surface she was harboring racial animus for them. I’m sure some bright person is saying, “You don’t know that.”

Well actually I do. Because as we talked she explained how much “those old white people” made her sick. She opined that she wouldn’t go around them if she didn’t have to work where she did.

I’ll guarantee you that none of the white people she assisted or that worked with her had an inkling of the contempt she had for them. This is not uncommon nor is it territorial. And even more disturbing, it is a mindset that can be bought into as easy as brushing your teeth.

Ignorance, antipathy, and an unfathomable desire to be victims have destroyed the character of many blacks. I reference “character” because to secretly hold the depth of ill will many blacks hold toward whites is a reflection of moral opprobrium that places hatred on a plane equal to self-defined religiosity.

Which is one reason why so many black so-called ministers preach veiled, if not outright contempt for whites. Many blacks today are taught to resent whites based on an adherence to a belief that the “white system” is out to get them and/or hold them back.

Victimology is the sacramental cup from which blacks are encouraged to drink. So much so that in order to keep it real the more successful a black person is the greater the story of overcoming he/she must be able to tell. If there is no story of overcoming, then not unlike Spike Lee, the pint-sized, pigeon-toed film maker who is frequently seen court- side enjoying his over $130,000 court side season ticket seats at the New York Nicks games – you keep your blackness real by indiscriminately calling white people racists.

This is the zeitgeist that victimology has inculcated into the minds of many blacks. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that a long-time pejorative of one black for another was “Huxtable” as in the name of Bill Cosby’s fictional television family. Being called a “Huxtable” was an insult signifying the black in question behaved more like a white person than a black person.

A black person can be pretty much anything they want to be as long as they keep it real by remembering their victim card.