(ThyBlackMan.com) Norman Vincent Peale, the Christian philosopher and author of the best-selling book “The Power of Positive Thinking,” is credited with having coined several axioms that have become fairly commonplace in the American lexicon.
Among these is the phrase “We tend to get what we expect.”
While this may seem somewhat trite, many will concur, outrageous fortune notwithstanding, that there’s a lot to this saying. In general, people who expect positive outcomes tend to experience more of them – and of course, the reverse often bears out as well.
Last week on CNN, retired NFL tight end Martellus Bennett and “CNN Tonight” host Don Lemon were discussing members of the Boston Red Sox visiting the White House to celebrate their World Series victory with President Donald Trump in the context of Bennett having opted out of a White House visit when the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl with Bennett as a player.
Bennett’s responses spoke to his belief that although many white players in pro sports do show solidarity with black players who decry alleged racism, they cannot understand what black players experience as black men in America, “even though we have money.”
Pretenses to victimhood like these are a noxious political device, even if men such as the Bennett brothers remain unaware of this fact, and that they are themselves being played (pun intended).
Martellus Bennett is the brother of Michael Bennett, an activist, author and defensive end for the New England Patriots. Both are of a generation of young black men (even though the former has already retired) who grew up indoctrinated into the belief that the same system of institutionalized racism that existed in America prior to the Civil Rights Movement still exists today.
I cannot tell you what it was like to be a black man in 1935 or 1955 because I hadn’t yet been born. My direct experience, which began in the 1960s, reflects a time when there was still a great deal of inequity existing in the area of race, but also a time where there was a great deal of hope and the knowledge that things were improving – quickly – because many people were fighting valiantly for that cause.
This has not been the case for many blacks who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement. As this period came to a close, the political left increasingly co-opted the civil rights agenda, with powerful white liberals, their high-profile black lackeys and activists increasingly controlling the narrative on race. Racist white bogeymen were everywhere; blacks could count only on liberals and their largesse to save them from an imminent return to segregated water fountains and politically sanctioned lynchings.
Naturally, blacks’ alignment with Democrats and the ensuing socioeconomic malaise blacks suffered as a result of this served to artificially “validate” the idea that blacks were still being systematically oppressed – because in the context of the previous paragraph, they were.
Black Americans were no longer being demoralized by your archetypal bigoted “white crackers,” but by the political left. Unfortunately, this was nearly impossible for them to discern, due to the carefully crafted propaganda and systematized cultural indoctrination being imparted by the educational system, media, activists and, of course, the widespread corruption of the black church via Black Liberation Theology.
Martellus Bennett and Michael Bennett were born in 1987 and 1985, respectively. The brothers have been massively successful – quite against the odds, one would think, in such a racist nation. By their words and their NFL knee-taking practices, it is clear that they’ve taken to their indoctrination very well.
The problem is that neither has a frame of reference for what real racial inequity is. Driving around in a luxury automobile in a state of self-induced, paranoid hyper-vigilance doesn’t count, I’m afraid.
Institutional racism and the use of excessive force on the part of police are unacceptable. It has been proved definitively, however, that in most of the extremely rare cases in which white police have used deadly force against unarmed blacks in recent years, the black individuals in question were engaged in behaviors that put them at risk of contact with the police in the first place.
As I’ve pointed out previously, my nearly innumerable observations involving blacks and law enforcement evidenced that in the majority of instances in which a law enforcement officer contacts a black person, the latter invariably acts with anything from indignation to outright belligerence, whether that individual is a street dealer or a Ph.D. Considering the paramilitary modality in which law enforcement officers must operate, this is probably one of the most unintelligent deportments anyone of any color might adopt.
Conversely, I cannot count the instances in which, as a teenager and young adult, I was contacted by rude and belligerent police officers whom I knew were bigoted morons, and in which the situation was handily defused simply via my being polite.
With blacks in America lined up behind the power brokers of the political left, nothing in the way of overtures toward parity will ever be sufficient, because their socialist overlords will deem any and all measures insufficient whilst continuing to keep blacks disenfranchised. Neither reparations, increased entitlements, socioeconomic strides, legions of black multimillionaires and billionaires – not even the election of blacks to the highest offices in the land will suffice. Blacks will continue to believe and claim that they are second-class citizens, even if no one else views them as such.
Most unfortunately, they will continue to expect questionable treatment and, by their overall deportment, many will continue to get it.
Written by Erik Rush
Official website; http://www.erikrush.com
