[AKA_Monet]

Originally Posted by EE-BO

I do believe that a number of African-Americans and other legally defined and protected minority groups take unfair/unintended advantage of legal protections offered to them. There is no doubt about it- I have seen it with my own eyes.

I have not seen very many people of color take advantage of things legally offered them. I have not seen it, myself. That does not mean that it does not happen. Most people get what they deserve and work for 90% of time.

Originally Posted by EE-BO

I also have observed that some people of ALL races, religious groups etc. do look out for their own first to a degree that is detrimental to the long term goal of a true melting-pot society.

However, the cold hard reality is that African-Americans as a group seem to get the "shaft" when this happens.

This is what I want to understand and what I think needs fixing.

Well, folks get stabbed in the back by their own everyday. Black on black crime has gone up and is very violent. In my youth, many of my classmates started dying while pursuing gangs. Two of my friends were gunned down, 1 over a drug deal gone bad and one because he fought with doped out gang members. That was mid-1980's... A few folks in college decided to pay for school by selling drugs... They were criminally assaulted. These were all African Americans.

Positive interactions with my own has been tempered. Good and bad. But I have not given up, some of these "statistics" are in my own family... I don't know that many Caucasian families under similar circumstances. But I am meeting more and more who can relate. However, while growing up, I did not see my peers experiencing similar activities that I had friends and loved ones going through. Make sense?

Originally Posted by EE-BO

This Democratic Primary is a good example. Obama gets the African-American vote while Hillary is stronger among women, the aged and Hispanic voters.

This messy Democratic Primary is a perfect example of what scares me. Whichever way it goes, there is going to be a lot of ugliness.

African-American vs. Hispanic interests are the real key economically. The big problem Democrats have right now is the issue of immigration and jobs going abroad as two of their key target constituencies are at complete opposite ends of the spectrum on how to deal with such issues.

Slavery and segregation were abolished in prior generations- but I think in my generation we are going to have to come to grips with the realities of a global economy, a growing permanent underclass in the US resulting from globalization and outsourcing; and why that hits the African-American community like a sledgehammer.

But amid all this cold analysis are human faces.

I don't know about all of that now. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama was interesting to me. And bottomline it is the human faces in the end. Help the people become better people rather than destroy them or living by the sword...

That is MLK's legacy more than anything else. You should read Taylor Branch's "At Canaan's Edge". He interestingly was a part of the MLK movement right after the Bus Boycott as a Caucasian man... He was ~little older than you are now during that time... And the assasination of King is coming up on April 4, 2008...

Originally Posted by EE-BO

These are the individual people I lose sleep over.

And I get upset because a lot of self-proclaimed black leaders are just as responsible for some of these dilemmas as the existing power structure.

You can ponder these things if you'd like, but losing sleep? How will that work? How can you be effective as a leader by losing sleep?

I would not worry about these self-proclaimed leaders. They will ultimately speak up or they will falter. The order is NOT to be in the existing power structure--but to make your own...