Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [31]
• Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot-busting treatment for stroke.
• Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth.
• Black levels of unemployment have been roughly twice those of whites since 1954.
Does this make anyone angry besides me and the Reverend Farrakhan? To what do African-Americans owe this treatment, considering that they are responsible for so little of the suffering our society faces? Why are they the ones who are being punished? Damned if I know.
So how have we white people been able to get away with this without all ending up like Reginald Denny? (The white truck driver who was dragged from his rig and beaten nearly to death by blacks during the LA riots in 1992.)
Caucasian ingenuity! You see, we used to be real dumb. Like idiots, we wore our racism on our sleeve. We did really obvious things, like putting up signs on rest room doors that said WHITES ONLY. Over a drinking fountain we’d hang a sign that said COLOREDS. We made black people sit at the back of the bus. We prevented them from attending our schools or living in our neighborhoods. They got the crappiest jobs (those advertised for NEGROES ONLY), and we made it clear that if you weren’t white you were going to be paid a lower wage.
Well, this overt, over-the-top segregation got us into a heap of trouble. A bunch of uppity lawyers went to court—citing, of all things, our very own Constitution! They pointed out that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t allow for anyone to be treated differently because of their race.
Eventually, after a long procession of court losses, demonstrations, and riots, we got the message: if we didn’t wise up, we were going to have to start sharing some of the pie. We learned an important lesson: if you’re going to be a successful racist, better find a way to do it with a smile on your face!
So white people got smart and took down the signs, stopped lynching black men who might have stopped on the street to talk with our women, passed a bunch of civil-rights laws, and ceased saying words like nigger in public. We even got magnanimous enough to say, Sure, you can even live here in our neighborhood; your kids can go to our kids’ school. “Why the hell not? We were just leaving anyway. We smiled, gave black America a pat on the back—and then ran like the devil to the suburbs. Now we get to have things just the way we always used to have them in the cities. When we walk out to pick up the paper in the morning, we look one way down the street and see white people; look the other way, and guess what?—more white people!
At work, we whites still get the plum jobs, double the pay, and a seat in the front of the bus to happiness and success. Look back down the aisle, though, and you’ll see the blacks sitting where they’ve always been, picking up after us, waiting on us, serving us from behind the counter.
In order to create a cover for this continued discrimination, we hold “diversity seminars” at our workplaces and appoint “urban relations” people to help us “connect with the community.” When we advertise for a job opening we gleefully include the words “An Equal Opportunity Employer.” It feels so good—and it’s good for a chuckle, ‘cause we know there’s no way in hell a black guy’s going to get the job. Only 4 percent of the African-American population have a graduate degree (compared with 9 percent of whites and 15 percent of Asian-Americans). We’ve rigged the system from birth, guaranteeing that black people will go to the worst public schools, thus preventing them from admission to the best colleges, and paving their way to a fulfilling life making our lattés, servicing our BMWs, and picking up our trash. Oh, sure, a few slip by—but they pay an extra tariff for the privilege: the black