I remember doing a report a looong time ago in high school on Frederick Douglass. I thought he was a very smart man then, and I still think that today. I remembered something he had written that struck me as just plain common sense. It was written in 1862, before slavery was abolished, and he was answering the question of what to do with all the blacks if they were freed. Below is part of that article entitled "What Shall Be Done with the Slaves If Emancipated?"
"Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by ever interference, and succeed best by being let alone. The Negro should have been let alone in Africa, let alone when pirates and robbers offered him for sale in our Christian slave markets (more cruel and inhuman than the Mohammedan slave markets), let alone by courts, judges, politicians, legislators and slave-drivers, let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be left alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jews, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows. When you, our white fellow-countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you. When the planters of the West Indies used to attempt to puzzle the pure-minded Wilberforce with the question, How shall we get rid of slavery? his simple answer was, "quit stealing." In like manner, we answer those who are perpetually puzzling their brains with questions as to what shall be done with the Negro, let him alone and mind your own business.....Don't meddle with him, nor trouble yourselves with any questions as to what shall be done with him."
They should have followed Mr. Douglass' advice back then. But they didn't. At first they passed laws against blacks, separating them from white society. Then, starting in the 1950's, they went 180 degrees in the other direction. The liberals, showing utter disdain for the intellect and capacity of blacks, decided blacks were incapable of doing anything on their own and started the welfare state. That destroyed the black family, throwing them back into slavery of a different sort.
What do we do now? The same thing we should have done in the 1860's. Nothing. Let blacks fall or rise on their own. Period. The same goes for any other group of people. No special privileges. NONE! Fair and honest competition amongst all.
That is my view.
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