Some of them are nice
It is customary on the blogosphere before this type of post to issue a warning about it being a boring and confusing inter-blog dispute, but if you don't like those you probably shouldn't be at this site, which specialises in them.Anyway, Natalie Solent responds (indirectly) to my post below wrongly accusing her of racism, taking refuge in the old line of 'someone has to say it'. To be honest the post isn't much better than her previous one, with some classic touches such as the phrase 'informed black opinion' (that's the black opinion that agrees with her, naturallly). She quotes Martiin Luther King (an informed black) as if that ends the debate, despite the fact that we clearly aren't in the world he dreamt about, which is why we have affirmative action programmes.
Some progress has been made, as she now says she was only talking about a subsection of the black population. And yet I'll quote her original article again:
"This truth is often denied, but you watch the loudest deniers choose which tube carriage to get into late at night and you will get an education. Even black women will avoid a group of young black men. Imagine the tragedy of a black mother who watches her son go from being a lovable kid to being one of those rowdy, threatening youths. "
There's nothing qualifying the 'those rowdy threatening youths' except that they are 'black, young, men'. However if I misunderstood what she was trying to say then that's all well and good.
Essentially however the point of our disagreement is that Solent believes that black youths try less hard at school because they don't think they'll need qualifications because everything will be made easier for them. I think that's a load of Horlicks.
ps Oh Cuthies involved too! He thinks I'm ingenious! He writes (to Solent) "What I find truly ingenious about the post is the way he manages to interpret every piece of evidence in the post that you are not a racist as confirming his views, all being part of a cover-up scheme."
pps Incidentally, on the bit where she says I misrepresented her as saying 'punished for getting lower grades' she's entirely right, and I apologise. I was merely trying to cut down on words, and did so rather unfortunately.
ppps I made a slight edit to this post as it was unnecessarily snippy.
posted by Matthew @ 8/28/2003 11:02:00 AM
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