Lee University Establishes Micah 6:8ScholarshipLee University recently announced the new Micah 6:8scholarship fund, which will provide financial assistance to qualifying students of color. The scholarship is named for the Old Testament verse Micah 6:8
Not until next year!, Or do you reckon it has been all white until this year? ________________Some facts but mostly just my [email protected]/
Not at all, Eddie.
Re: Not at all, Eddie.
Eddie, you assume too much.
If we don’t see color, congratulations, you just wiped out the rainbow.I think God made us the way He did for a purpose…to learn to live together in harmony and respect and celebrate our differences. This world would be a boring place if we were all the same! Just my two cents worth..________________More of Him…less of me.twitter.com/camiracle77www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=691241499&ref=name
Correct! It always amazes me when I see people say “I don’t see color’ and the next thing you know, they are talking about “black on black†crime in Chicago.
Re: Eddie, reparations?
With respect, this is a misunderstanding of what is going on here. It is not about guilt or compensation because slavery happened. Let me give you an example. I made an offer on a house yesterday and it was accepted. The house costs nearly half a million. I needed some extra money for the down payment, so I called my dad and asked if he could come up with 70k to give me, which he did by the afternoon. I am working with a title attorney who is a personal friend and is giving me a great deal. I have a number of other connections, such as friends who own inspection businesses, that are making this process simple and cost-effective for me.That is extreme privilege, and it is a privilege that derives largely from the fact that I am white. Before anyone stops reading in anger, let me explain. It is an absolute fact that there are many white people who do not have the access to the resources and money that I have, and it is a fact that some black people do. But generally speaking, these types of wealth and connections are concentrated in the white community and are not present in the black community.The wealth and connections that I have access to are a result of the fact that my parents experienced no racial barriers when seeking employment or earning money. They were able to get a mortgage without being redlined, they were able to go to good schools that weren’t segregated. My grandparents were able to get my parents off to a good start because they were able to use the GI bill for housing and education, which was something that was denied to black servicemembers of their era.Forcing a white person to write a check to a black person would be wrong and unjust. It is asking the 21st century white person to own the responsibility of slavery (which is the misconception you are voicing here) and to attempt to make it right. As white people living today, we are not responsible for the evils of slavery nor do we have any obligation to somehow attempt to compensate black people living today for what their forefathers suffered.But it would not kill us to understand that the financial privilege we enjoy today (again, generally speaking — of course there are individually rich black people and individually poor white people) is something that was constructed over a couple of hundred years on the foundation of a ~$20 trillion dollar transfer of wealth from stolen black labor, stolen black business, stolen black taxes, and stolen black opportunity.
Help me understand how this viewpoint is in line with MLK’s vision of true equality, and not just like Jim Crow laws and White man’s burden philosophy that early 20th century democrat progressives espoused. To me it looks like their leftovers wrapped in shiny new tinfoil. That was all based on the same progressive idea that minority races weren’t capable of being our equals so we have to make laws that are for their own good.
Yes, as I said above, there are plenty of individual counter examples. That’s why it’s important to look at it aggregately rather than individually. This is the core misunderstanding that literally the entire post was about.
With respect, this is a misunderstanding of what is going on here. It is not about guilt or compensation because slavery happened. Let me give you an example. I made an offer on a house yesterday and it was accepted. The house costs nearly half a million. I needed some extra money for the down payment, so I called my dad and asked if he could come up with 70k to give me, which he did by the afternoon. I am working with a title attorney who is a personal friend and is giving me a great deal. I have a number of other connections, such as friends who own inspection businesses, that are making this process simple and cost-effective for me.That is extreme privilege, and it is a privilege that derives largely from the fact that I am white. Before anyone stops reading in anger, let me explain. It is an absolute fact that there are many white people who do not have the access to the resources and money that I have, and it is a fact that some black people do. But generally speaking, these types of wealth and connections are concentrated in the white community and are not present in the black community.The wealth and connections that I have access to are a result of the fact that my parents experienced no racial barriers when seeking employment or earning money. They were able to get a mortgage without being redlined, they were able to go to good schools that weren’t segregated. My grandparents were able to get my parents off to a good start because they were able to use the GI bill for housing and education, which was something that was denied to black servicemembers of their era.Forcing a white person to write a check to a black person would be wrong and unjust. It is asking the 21st century white person to own the responsibility of slavery (which is the misconception you are voicing here) and to attempt to make it right. As white people living today, we are not responsible for the evils of slavery nor do we have any obligation to somehow attempt to compensate black people living today for what their forefathers suffered.But it would not kill us to understand that the financial privilege we enjoy today (again, generally speaking — of course there are individually rich black people and individually poor white people) is something that was constructed over a couple of hundred years on the foundation of a ~$20 trillion dollar transfer of wealth from stolen black labor, stolen black business, stolen black taxes, and stolen black opportunity.Set-aside scholarships like this one are a very, very small way that the benefactors of that unjust transfer of wealth can provide compensation to the community from which that wealth was taken. I’m thinking why many resist the programs that specifically benefit people of color. I’m thinking why many people don’t like being told they are privileged. I think it is because many individual experiences are vastly different from the generalizations, as has already been discussed. I’m sort of rambling here….but your post made me think.I also think people struggle with basis of privilege. Am I privileged only because I was born white? Or am I the beneficiary of a family that nearly worked themselves to death, in order to succeed? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle? Did I benefit from the hard work of my grandparents, combined with the opportunities that were available, because of their race? Maybe white people today are resistant to the idea of privilege, because they feel it diminishes the hard work that contributed to their success. One is not inherently successful, because he/she is white. BUT maybe it would be great for white people to recognize the additional opportunities they received, in order to achieve that success. My grandfather bought a farm in 1944. The bank would not loan him the money, because they didn’t want to be responsible for him starving to death. He borrowed the money from a few individuals in the county, to make the purchase. Granddad nearly worked himself and his family to death, to survive and pay back the loan. My dad still owns part of the land today.One one hand, I think, Privilege? It was granddad’s privilege to walk behind a mule barefoot, to feed his children. On the other hand, I think, If he were a black man, me may not have owned a mule.I don’t always agree with you Dave. But I appreciate your post. It made me think. Blessings________________
Eddie, I am so grateful for your kind response and enjoyed reading your thoughts in reply. I realize this is a very contentious subject and I hesitated posting anything at all, but I thought maybe I could just give someone something to think about. I am not at all persuaded that there should be any kind of targeted reparations program, but these are some of the things I have been thinking about over the last few years and my only intent was to perhaps give someone else the opportunity to do the same.
Yes, as I said above, there are plenty of individual counter examples. That’s why it’s important to look at it aggregately rather than individually. This is the core misunderstanding that literally the entire post was about.And my parents aren’t rich today. They live in a town home in a middle-class community. When I was growing up, they worked four jobs between them at times to provide for me. But over their lifetimes they were able to slowly accrue access to wealth that is just frankly not available to others, even today.
I don’t intend to be callous toward the economic experience that southerners had after the war, and there was for sure overreaching as there is in most any situation like this, e.g. the Paris Peace Conference. But one of the major reasons this was challenging was because so much of the antebellum southern economy was built on stolen human labor that was no longer available. And again, while I by no means intend to dismiss the economic turmoil that successive generations experienced, it seems a little ghoulish to place it on the same level as the economic turmoil experienced by the successive generations of those whose labor was stolen and exploited.Imagine a man with two kids, 8 and 10 years old, kills another man who also has two children of the same age. Even though the murderer’s children are innocent, they will experience economic disparity with their peers as a result of not having a father or becoming orphans, etc. Their challenges should not be dismissed or minimized, and any help that can be given to them should be given to them. But it seems inappropriate to compare that to the economic disparities that will be experienced by the children of the victim,
This is one of the things I have always liked about acts-celerate. Unlike FB, fellow believers with substantially different views can (more or less) say what they think.Yes, it can also get nasty. And you would be mistaken if you thought I came to bring peace. As usual, my take on the subject favors one side. (but you will soon see I draw the line between the sides at a different place)What I taught my children is what my parents taught me. You have a responsibility to be successful in providing for yourself and anyone you marry or create. THAT is my white privilege. It is part of my white culture. And for the most part it does not exist in MOST of black culture. My biggest white privilege has been the parents God gave me who are coming up on their 65th year of total commitment to each other and their responsibility to raise up and train their children in the way that they should go.And lets agree on one thing, we totally failed at getting rid of segregation. Segregation is just about the most natural of human social realities that exists. If there is anything the social experiment called Planet Earth has proven, it is this. And why is it not racist to refer to The Chinese or The Russians? The Tower of Babel still dominates human existence.Now, none of that refocused anybody’s view, did it?But I would propose that there is an elephant in the room. I personally believe there is a far larger culture divide present than race or wealth of the individual. I believe whites and blacks are both divided within themselves along another line. Urban vs rural. Whether white or black, urbanites are far more likely to believe themselves to still be in chains, and not responsible for their own next meal. This exists whether they are among the richest or the poorest. One famous successful half black urbanite said, You didn’t build that. Kind of sums up my point.I think the further one gets from providing by the sweat of their brow, the more they observe privilege lacking in their own life, and abundant in someone else’s.It is this division of today’s America that is natural and innate and produces a house divided among itself.I would also point out that rural folks do not attempt to tell urbanites how to live and that they must conform to the new normal. They never try to rule over city folk. Such is not the case from the urban side.
Bro Bob, I have some disagreements with what you posted, but I would like to highlight and focus on one major point of agreement: that we can discuss these things charitably even if we have disagreements.More and more, I am interested only in talking with people who are willing to give others permission to disagree with them. One of the major destructive forces in our society today is how so many (mostly on the left, but also on the right) absolutely refuse to agree to disagree.I’m okay with disagreeing with you, and I’m okay with you disagreeing with me. But intolerance toward disagreement is where I draw the line.