<p>rorosen:</p>
<p>
I think there is a relationship between what I am talking about and the alienation everyone experiences at some point in their lives. In fact, I think at some level all of this is just one thing.</p>
<p>The problem is, with blacks, the scope of the alienation is vast. There are social, religious and general institutional forces in this country that forcefully and persistently maintain the disaffection. And these forces have existed since the early 1600s right up to today. We have never dealt with them. Whereas whites may experience temporary alienation, or, at worst, chronic alienation that is only local to them (affecting them only as individuals), black kids experience it far more comprehensively. They look around and see the thing continually bearing down on every single one of them. And to make it worse, they generally dont have a clue what is going on. They just know they dont feel comfortable. And it grows from there until they come into the racial consciousness that affects blacks generally. An indication of the widespread alienation can be seen in the words of blacks. Whites often refer to America as my country. Many blacks, almost instinctively, refer to it as this country. These folks have grown up under a social structure that keeps them always outside looking in.</p>
<p>There are ways to fight it. But all of them are fraught with difficulty. We could steel our kids against America by encouraging them to just give up in bitterness and despair, as some few blacks have done. Louis Farrakhan and guys like him, for example, offer blacks a belief system and life structure that is in many ways a lot healthier than wasting away in the inner city streets. But, of course, Louis Farrakhan is not exactly a guy I think anyone should follow. Alternatively, we could trust America, hiding our prejudices from our kids and teaching them to go for the opportunity that the country seems to offer. The idea here is to just hope for the best and teach the kids, even against our own perceptions, that they are in fact inside looking out, just like everybody else. The problem with this is, it is false (maybe?). I am just not sure America is worthy of this trust. It could be that if we choose this latter option, we are making our kids sitting ducks, vulnerable to the racism that could stop them cold and take them down.</p>
<p>I have chosen the latter option for my own kids because it just seems to me that since I am in this country, I need to work with it no matter what. And the kids seem to be getting on just fine, much better than I ever did. But none of this is easy. That is for darned sure.</p>