NAACP exhorts voters to oust Bush
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| Mon, 07-12-2004 - 4:06pm |
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/12/naacp.convention.ap/index.html
NAACP chairman Julian Bond urged members of the nation's oldest civil rights organization to increase voter turnout to oust President Bush, and condemned the administration's policies on education, the economy and the war in Iraq.
"They preach racial neutrality and practice racial division," Bond said Sunday night in the 95th annual convention's keynote address. "They've tried to patch the leaky economy and every other domestic problem with duct tape and plastic sheets. They write a new constitution of Iraq and they ignore the Constitution here at home."
Volunteers with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have been working on voter drives in black communities across the country, registering more than 100,000 so far in 11 key states, including Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and New Mexico, Bond said.
Bond, a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s civil rights movement and a Georgia legislator for 20 years, became chairman of the NAACP in 1998.
Leaders of the Baltimore-based group are upset that President Bush has no plans to attend the convention. Bush spoke at the 2000 NAACP convention when he was a candidate but has declined invitations to speak in each year of his presidency, making him the first president since the 1930s to skip it, officials said.
Democratic challenger John Kerry has accepted an invitation to speak Thursday on the final day of the convention, the group said.
Bond said that 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, and 40 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, schools remain segregated based on income, and racism still exists in many forms.
Minority children still face inequality in school spending and are being disproportionately hurt by the accountability aims of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, he said.
"On our present course, we are formalizing two school systems: one filled with middle-class children, most of them white, and the other filled with low-income minorities," Bond said.


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When colleges stop accepting legacy students then AA SB discontinued.
AA also helped women get into many jobs where they weren't the best candidate. My XDH
>"for every person for which the outcome is a successful education and career, that person's children and grandchildren are more likely to be able to compete on equal terms"<
I agree.
I am about to get lambasted, probably, but I think there are tears in our social fabric that have to do with the breakdown of the family unit. It isn't just minorities who are struggling with a generation of children from blended families, divorced parents, single parent households or two working parents. And then there are the less than savory media influences that are fostering the value system of consumption, instant gratification, and gangsta chic. Though not impossible to nurture children in those settings, it IS much more challenging. Her style was abrasive, judgmental, and overly simplistic but I agreed with Dr. Laura Schlesinger's message that parents' number one priority is to consider their children's needs (not "wants"!).
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
For every person who is given a hand-out simply because of race or gender and not merit, that person's children and grandchildren can wonder whether their success is do to hard work and won honestly or if they succeeded simply because that company hadn't met its quota of minorities or women. I agree that the ways of the past were not even, but slanting our society the other way only serves the create a larger problem. We should create oppportunities for anyone and everyone who chooses to exert the effort involved to achieve the goal and not create a feeling of handicap because of race or gender.
This statement indicates that you think Affirmative Action isn't working. I beg to disagree, slowly A-A are moving into mainstream America. This never would have happened without laws forcing it upon society. Less than fifty years of imposed equality cannot make up for 200 years of imposed inequality, and with a president like GWB, we will continue to spread the difference between wealth and poverty regardless of race. You really can't blame people trapped in poverty if they're never given the same opportunity.
Here's the relevance. You got a "leg up" when you got scholarships and grants; GWB got a "leg up" because of his father's position and family's money. Then you critize A-A because they are given a "leg up".
"Less than fifty years of imposed equality cannot make up for 200 years of imposed inequality"
I was about to
That would be a sufficient argument if not for the fact the A A poeople are not the only race that has ever been mistreated in this country and it is not a simple case of wealth versus poverty. Since the Civil war, we have had millions upon millions of people who have immigrated to this country to create a new life for themselves in the land of the free. If they happen to have light colored skin, they are automatically handicapped with past inequality that had absolutely nothing to do with them. Rather than creating a way to level the playing field, we are creating a deeper hole and making minorities and women more dependent in a system that only makes them more subservient.
I agree that laws that level the playing field are key to making this work, but offering a system that rewards merit regardless of race or gender will go further to create a nation of equal people than a law that offers people a leg-up regardless of merit or effort simply because lawmakers feel that this group is somehow handicapped or of less quality and not able to do it on merit alone. As a woman, I understand that there have been inequality issues in the past, but does giving me a job I didn't earn solve the problem or simply create a new resentment with men who know I didn't get the job because I didn't earn it? Affirmative action would then promote the idea that I needed the help in order to be equal. This applies to the workplace and education. Creating a system where every student in the country could attend college as long as they met the academic qualifications would go better to create an equal setting and a sense of accomplishment for all people.
It seems odd to me that the current system could "make up" for past inequality. I wasn't aware that there was a way to "make up" for something like that, but if I were going to make up for it, it wouldn't be by creating a system that shows gneration after gneration of AA children that they need an advantage in order to be equal to white children. Instead teach all children to be assertive, confident, and take control of their own future.
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