The Left Relegates Black Americans to Another Generation of Disadvantage - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Left Relegates Black Americans to Another Generation of Disadvantage
by

I have standing to speak as a Jewish leader and even as an American opinion-maker. I do not have the hubris to push aside charlatans like Al Sharpton and Tamika Mallory and to speak for Black America. I regret that latter lack of standing because I am watching the Left destroy yet another Black American generation, and I cannot do a damn thing about it.

Jews historically have done well because we historically never got breaks. We had to figure it all out. No one paid my grandparents welfare to come to America. No one greeted my Bubbies (grandmothers) and Zaydies (grandfathers) with “entitlements” when they arrived at Ellis Island during the great East European migration of 1881-1914 that saw three million Jews come to America from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary, and elsewhere under the Tsar’s rubric.

Entitlements? Are you crazy? They were “entitled” to nothing. They were lucky to be allowed in. If they had been found with tuberculosis at the holding pens in Ellis Island, they would have been sent back to Alexander III and Nicholas II. 

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They had to pay their way from day one — or out they would go, back to Eastern Europe. No one was allowed here who would be a “public charge.” If they did not have a source of income, they needed to have a family member or someone sign a personal guarantee that the sponsoring family would cover every cost. America was letting them in; that was more than kind. America certainly was not about to pay for them, too. Yes, America gave them access to a free education, but America had to make that investment — for America’s own self-interest. If we spend on educating immigrants, sooner or later they will become productive and pay taxes. By contrast, if we opt to “save money” by leaving them illiterate, they will end up robbing banks, holding up stores, rearing new generations of miscreants, and costing tax dollars rather than paying into the public bourse.

But other than a basic education — nada, zilch, gornisht. And that education came on America’s terms, not theirs. We tell you what subjects you will learn. We tell you what is math and what is reading and what is spelling. We tell you the history we want you to know. And don’t you dare come to us for “bilingual education.” We teach in English — our way or the highway. Math really is only numerical symbols and calculating, so theoretically an argument could be made to teach that subject in a native language — German, Italian, Polish, Yiddish. But ya know what? We don’t feel like it. So we’re gonna teach it in English. Either you learn — in English — that 16 times 4 equals 64, or you end up a bum. Welcome to America.

That’s how Jews got to be successful in America. And Italians and Germans and Poles and Chinese and Japanese and whatever else ya got. They faced discrimination, closed doors, and workplace prejudice. Judges ruled against them unfairly in the courts. Hotels kept them out, even cheesy motels. Country clubs? Fuggediboudit. Sophisticated telephone systems did not yet exist, but — if they did — no utility company would have built in an option: “For Italian, press 2. For Chinese, press 3. For Polish, press 4. For German, press 5. For Yiddish, press 6.” You woulda got one choice — namely no choice. And, sonovogun, everyone managed to learn how to pay their utilities bills, that 16 times 4 equals 64, and everyone either supported themselves or had a guarantor who did.

If only I could be a leader of Blacks in America, I would offer that secret to success. Affirmative action? You want special preference to get into colleges with lower SAT scores than White people? Well, they never offered that to Jews here. In fact, they did just the opposite: the entire Ivy League infrastructure maintained explicit quotas to keep Jews out. So you know what Jews did? We worked even harder — just to get an “even break.” Most Jews won’t tell you that, but that’s how we all were reared: “If you think ‘they’ are going to give you an even chance, you are crazy. You only will get in if you are better.”

There is a reason that many people stereotypically want a Jewish doctor, a Jewish lawyer, a Chinese doctor. So what’s behind that? It should be obvious: We are not born with a “doctor gene.” That is why I became a rabbi, an attorney, a law professor, a political pundit — but not a doctor. It’s not in my genes. But — at least until 20 years ago — you knew if you got a doctor who is a Jew or Chinese that he or she had to be damned good because “they” never otherwise would have let that person into medical or law school or through it to graduation.

Adversity builds greatness.

We have been giving Blacks affirmative action for half a century. The Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case was decided in 1978. It was argued in 1977 after Allan P. Bakke twice had been rejected by the University of California at Davis medical school. For 50 years, our society has been giving Blacks the advantage in college and graduate school admissions to “make up” for slavery and the evils we perpetrated against Blacks for centuries. We barred them from everything, even baseball. How can we not be ashamed that it took until 1947, only after Hitler had made everyone ashamed of racialism and after Blacks had fought every bit as bravely as Whites in Japan and in Europe, that Branch Rickey had the courage to do the right thing?

But the question fairly must be asked: how is it possible that, after 50 years — two, even three generations — of affirmative action, the highest crime rates and the highest percentage of young men without fathers at home persist in the Black community — all leading to the highest crime victim rates because, after all, street thugs and gang bangers do not take limousines to Malibu, the Hamptons, and Chicago’s Gold Coast District. They attack near their homes. What has held Blacks back today? How can anyone be talking about even more “reparations” now — that I, whose forebears were not even here until the 1900s, should be paying reparations to LeBron James and Obama?

The answer is stark. It is not “systemic racism” because the “system” is not a tinge racist. It is not unfair laws. It is not a police force that needs to be defunded. It is not global warming. It is not a lack of government assistance. It is not an absence of Medicare for All. Rather, the Left which destroyed Black America continues destroying Black America, and now has set in place an entire leftist infrastructure to assure yet another destroyed Black generation.

Leftist educators want to help by offering “woke math.” All addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division answers will be right. Yes, but the kids who grow up with that woke “education” not only will be rejected for accounting jobs at Ernst & Young, KPMG, and Deloitte — they won’t even be able to get hired at H&R Block. Leftist educators want to mark them correct when they speak with neighborhood grammar constructs and syntax that trample proper English. But when those kids someday show up at job interviews and speak an imperfect English, they will not get hired. Even leftist law firms need their court filings to be comprehensible and persuasive.

President Lyndon Johnson and the 1960s liberal Democrats thought they were helping Blacks with the “Great Society” programs of welfare and handouts. Instead, they destroyed the Black family. Since the government gave more money if household income was lower, men left the household, stopped working, or stopped struggling to attain pay raises. Boys grew up without on-site fathers whose very lives would demonstrate that a man must wake up in the morning, get groomed and dressed, go to work, work a long day, come home tired, go to sleep at a sensible hour, and do it all over again the next day — pretty much forever. That may not seem as romantic as joining a local gang, but an on-site father can tell his son about the friendships at work, the funny stories, the products he helps bring to market — and can model quiet heroism. Instead, a fatherless home is led by a mother who, no matter her heroic efforts to rear the boy right, is not a man. She is a woman. For all of Leftist non-binary orthodoxy, a woman cannot role-model for a boy.

I wish I could push that charlatan Sharpton aside and share my message for Black America. It would be: I wish for all of you exactly, precisely, what I got: nothing — except for a working dad who lived at home, watched some TV with me on the weekend, taught me to observe the Sabbath and to love G-d, and instructed me on life values until leukemia took him at his age 45, my 14. I wish for you schooling that shows no respect for your neighborhood grammar or your math challenges. I wish for you a cultural environment where it is unseemly to blame others for your poor results — even when it really is their fault, not yours — where the police are always right even though they include bad apples, where the school principal always is revered by your parents instead of being targeted for lawsuits, where you get into college or graduate school only if you make the grades and not by having the standardized tests suspended to slide you in.

I can’t do it. If I tell you the truth, Sharpton will call me an epithet. You will, too. And all the White liberals — who never ever would let their own kids dare accept any of the “entitlements” they offer you — also will call me an epithet. But they never would let their own kid accept a welfare check because they know that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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