A Quote by Nicholas Kristof
The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
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The African-American is often used, and has conspired with the rest of America to be used, as a diversion from America's problems. I wish African-Americans would stop contributing to this sideshow. I also wish all African-Americans would cease to sing and dance just for a generation. I think we provide too much entertainment.
America should be ashamed to say they have the best justice system in the world when, every day, race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don't go to prison.
At least in my perception, seeing accomplishments of minorities is a way to actually be critical of the country, not celebratory of it. The reason for celebrating all of these minorities - women, African-Americans, pick your minority - who do something that hasn't been done by somebody in that group before? The media goes nuts. It's one of the greatest things in the world! At the root of that is that America's unjust, that America is unfair, and that America discriminates, and that America is biased and bigoted and whatever.
You have to have a government to provide you with legal order, with stability, enforcement of property rights, enforcement of contracts, definition of rules and regulations - the rules of the game, so to speak - and to provide certain shared goods and services, public services. Several people have tried to estimate this and they come out with figures like government spending at 15% of GDP. In the modern world it has gone to 40% or above. So we are way beyond the optimal, and that is easier to say than what the optimum is.
Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.
Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control or saddled with criminal records. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men either are under correctional control or are branded felons, and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.
Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.
All of you are aware of the tragic history of racism in America, but for a very long time, African-Americans and their white allies came together and they struggled and they stood up for justice and they stood up to lynching and they stood up to segregation and the stood up to a nation where African-Americans couldn't even vote in America.
Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
The national media which I consider to be very racist against European Americans and I think they have caused the incitement of African Americans against European Americans.I also think that they have also facilitated European Americans being angry at African Americans.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting distributes an annual appropriation that we provide in accordance with a statutory formula, the vast majority of which goes directly to public radio and television stations.
How do we get more politicians to move from 'fixing' the system to reforming the system? The obvious answer is to either improve the quality of public services or reduce the public's dependence on them. Both approaches are necessary.
Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this secret that has been going on for more than two hundred years. The intermarriage of the Indian and the African in America, for example, has been constant and thorough. Colin Powell tells us in his autobiography that he is Scotch, Irish, African, Indian, and British, but all we hear is that he is African.
For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: "Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison."
There is no better way to return the matter of taxation to full public discusssion than to repeal the withholding taxes on wages and salaries. Only when the American people are confronted with the enormous excesses of government in a personal and direct way - by an annual bill for services rendered - will they be able to make an informed judgment about which services they want and which ones they can do without.
For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I've found my place in the world, that there's something out of my own culture which i can express and perhaps help others preserve..i have found out now that the African natives had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone age...an integrated thing, which is still unspoiled by western influences...I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of the modern dance steps are relics of African heritage.
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