“Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture.”
There is nothing that can hold back any human at any point in time in history than their mindset. No matter what gender, ethnicity, or age someone is, if they think that the world is coming for them or certain people are gunning for them, they will be limited by this belief. In the land of opportunity, it is very ironic that so many people pull out their victim cards to get out of the responsibility to grow up and be great. This is a universal issue that is bigger than any demographic. If today, Asians started to pity themselves for being so smart and accomplished and gave up their commitment to greatness and instead chose to be mediocre or below average in order to fit in. Within one generation, Asians would be dethroned as the most educated and highest earning people group in America (they make more than whites) in a heartbeat. In my opinion, Jason wrote his whole book to make this one point. He wanted to give a full argument of the causes that were holding back blacks, and even in the midst of these arguments we have given, he concludes the book, saying that high murder rates and fatherlessness are not the biggest impediment but instead the victimhood mentality. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this ten-point summary book, it’s this same message. There are millions of immigrants that have come from all different income and education levels from every country in the world, and they came with hopefulness and a desire to be self-developed. Their mentality pushed them to incrementally become better and more valuable, even if they had no idea how to speak English when they came here. Even if they were being killed by their fellow countrymen in their homeland, had no formal education, or grew up in abject poverty, they would not be limited. Even if they were set aside to work menial jobs for little money because of their lack of skills and communication ability, within one generation, their children would be running alongside the other fellow American children who have been here for many generations.
A personal anecdote of this is that one of my childhood friends' father grew up in poverty in the mountains of the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua (second only to Haiti). He came here not knowing any English and painted for the school his whole life. He never felt a victim of the simple, limited childhood but felt grateful for the opportunity to be in the best country in the world. His kids never felt the victim of having parents that could not speak English their whole childhood (later, their father learned English fluently). I promise you that no black man or woman grew up as disadvantaged as he did. He spoke a tribal language, he did not even grow up speaking Spanish until he was older. He did not come to America until he was an adult. He was not educated in American schools. Now he travels back to Nicaragua and helps out the people from his own country (He is a pastor and thus goes and preaches there and ministers to the people in his retirement years). If he had the victim mentality, he would be pouting now, and his children would feel his self-pity for themselves that they would have learned from him. He would not be going back to his own country with his own retirement money, he would be using his time on himself.
Instead of being like my Nicaraguan friend’s dad, the Black leadership blames things outside of themselves.
“After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the verdict in this way: ‘They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.’ Obama was doing exactly what liberals have been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the president is conditioning the next generation of blacks to do the same.”
It has been sixty years since the Jim Crow Laws were dealt with, yet when there's a Black President in office, he turns to these days as the reason why things are happening today. It is absurd and frustrating. It would be like Jews blaming the Holocaust for their current hardships or the Japanese blaming the bombings of Japan for their limitations now. There have been generations born and who are now dying off that actually lived during those days of WWII. No one is looking back on those events and saying that is limiting them today. Especially because ever since the Jim Crow days, “White Guilt” has watered down the actual racism of Americans for decades on end. The millennial generation was less racist than Generation X, and Gen Z is even less racist than the millennials. The next generation after generation Z will be even less racist. I could understand if kids who are growing up today still hate each other based on race and bringing up those days of segregation, but that is not what they are doing. I learned about the Civil Rights movement in school and a few days in class; before that, I had never heard of it, and after that, we never talked about it. We did not care what skin tone you were; if anything, black children were worshipped for their style, culture, and athletic ability in the school I grew up in. So it is just a misdirected and blatant lie to say that we are racially stagnant or worse than we were that day. The reason why Blacks and Whites don’t get married as much is not due to racism but because Blacks prefer marrying each other. Preference is not racism.
Jason’s opinion on how Black liberals have handled things like this.
“Those legacies are not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help them “overcome.” The left’s sentimental support has turned underprivileged blacks into playthings for liberal intellectuals and politicians who care more about clearing their conscience or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement of King has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of his day. King’s successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backward to accommodate blacks, nevertheless insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone somewhere in white America is still using the n-word.”
Here is the heart of his argument. The liberals are using Blacks as their little intellectual playthings. They are treating blacks like they are some troubled kid or some unfit child. They are condescending to them and telling them they will not amount to anything because their ancestors went through hardships. Think about how stupid that is, though. The Civil Rights movement was not fought so that sixty years later, a Black President could look back on it and say that they could not overcome because of these events. The whole point of the Civil Rights movement is that together they can overcome anything and that they did. The legacy is that self-improvement and self-development is the equalizer of all peoples of any country, which is obviously what Martin Luther King Jr. was going for when he made this most famous of points, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." - Martin Luther King, Jr. If the black culture looks to their own color of their skin to identify how far they can go in life, then how do they blame others when they just acknowledge this sentiment. (whether it is legitimate sentiment or not) Today, Black Liberals are directly rejecting the message of the Jim Crow Civil Rights era and instead using it as a perpetual scapegoat. At this rate, Blacks in the 2060s will still be blaming their limitations on what happened then.
As we said earlier in this book, the black leaders coming out of slavery would have been so upset to see over 150 years after slavery that people are still blaming their past hardships of slavery as their limitations. They believed in so much self-development that they wanted no government assistance at all.
“In April 1865, one hundred years before Johnson addressed Howard University graduates, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke at a Boston gathering of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on a similar theme. “Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What should we do with the Negro?’” said Douglass. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall.…And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!”
Douglass was stressing the primacy of group self-development, a not uncommon sentiment among black elites in the decades following the Civil War. Booker T. Washington, who like Douglass was born a slave, said that “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.”
Compare this to the message of Black leaders today. There is no hope for the future. There is a perpetual negative upset mood amongst blacks. The sad thing is that the Black leaders tried to stop blacks from killing each other by being lenient on crime. They tell them they are hated, and they are the victim, which fuels the self-hatred that blacks have for each other. So subliminally, blacks hate one another, and they do it because of the black leadership. Are the blacks trying to do this per se? No, they are not, but when you have generations of self-pity, and those who are around you look like you, then you will naturally lash out to kill one another in emotional response to those “educated,” powerful intellectual leaders who share your skin. If those with the most societal power that share your skin tone tell you to be a victim, then who are you to question what their spirit says? If Latino culture and leadership told them that no one wants you in America and your work here is not valuable all the time, they would probably be in a victim mentality and thus be limited by this belief too.
Jason explains the situation like this,
“Liberalism has also succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today, there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing miscreants. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites. The result, manifested in everything from black studies programs to black media to black politics, is an obsession with racial slights, real or imagined.”
The name of this book is really directed as such liberals, especially at the black ones since they are seen with extra potency as they share the same skin tone and ethnicity as those they speak of. It reminds me of how Jesus in the Bible directed many of his messages to the Jewish leadership of his day, namely the Pharisees. Many of his sermon titles could be, “Reasons Why The Pharisees are Wrong.” Jason is critiquing his fellow black influencers and telling them that their methods, actions, and messaging have not helped blacks overcome their past limitations and look towards the future with hopefulness. It has allowed the Blacks to see themselves as living in a country where they feel subhuman. They feel like they are under the water while everyone else is above water just because of their skin tone. They live in a country founded on the idea of an individual’s unlimited potential to become as educated, gifted, and wealthy as they put their minds to. Liberal leadership lets everyone walk through the door stating “The American dream” while stopping blacks at the door and telling them that their past keeps them from entering the door. This is a blatant lie and is only true as long as they believe it to be, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In another book I am writing on self-ownership (people own their own body, work, and their own rights), I talk about how slavery is just pretend. One person owning someone else is pretending that one person has personal self-ownership rights while others do not and they are actually under the ownership of someone else. We were able to get rid of slavery, not because all the sudden Blacks began to own themselves all the sudden in 1866, but instead, we just stop pretending that they did not already own themselves. Humanity had a double standard that said some people owned themselves while others did not. Once we became consistent and said that no one, no matter their age, skin tone, nor gender, does not have the right to own themselves, then not only did slavery end in America but the once universal practice of slavery was logically dismantled all around the world.
In the same up way, until the Civil Rights movement, people were still pretending that skin tone had anything to do with the value of a person or their capacity to succeed in this life. The Civil Rights movement dismantled that notion. Most of America does not believe skin tone nor melanin count has anything to do with brain function or bodily capacity anymore. The majority of people who do are the older generations. In an attempt to help the kid who is struggling, the liberals have done a ton of damage to the black psyche. If someone can come from another country, even from Africa itself and thus have the same skin tone as African Americans and succeed, then it has nothing to do with your skin tone. Any doubt that blacks should have been blown up when we started having black billionaires of both the male and female genders. And then, when we had a black president, Barack Obama should have stood in the oval office and declared that anyone could stand where he stands, but instead, he pretends like all the progress that blacks have made means absolutely nothing just because someone dies in an altercation. If having black billionaires and having a black president is not enough, then I am afraid that at this rate, we will have people in the 2060s hoping for just a little bit more help to get past their victim mentality.
Until the liberals, especially black liberals, see themselves as detrimental to black culture or until the black culture sees them as harmful lies, then the people will keep lapping up the victim mentality mental vitamin pill. Blacks will continue to be fatherless, underperform in schools, be anti-achievement and continue to harm each other. If the victim mentality is unraveled, then all the other things will be done away with as a result. If people adopt Booker T. Washington’s mindset of helping one’s self, then it will not matter if their own father was murdered by lynching. Many blacks have woken up to the victim mentality vitamin pill and have decided to stop accepting the lie and gone on to live stable lives of high success. The government does not fix the problem, it just puts a Band Aid on it. The actual healing under the hood comes from fellow blacks helping one another and believing that they can be as great or better than the most successful people group, Asians. Not even white culture thinks they can outpace the Asians, yet they don’t think of themselves as victims for making less money and being less educated than their Asian counterparts. I want to end this chapter with a section that Jason did on the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. There is nothing that limits blacks but their own mind.
“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas touched on this phenomenon when he told an audience that 2014 America seems more color conscious than when he was growing up in the segregated South. “My sadness is that we are probably today more race- and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up,” Thomas said. “Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them—left them out.”
Tim Bankes II
Tim is a Christian author. His worldview that informs his writing is Calvinist, Baptist, and Libertarian. His main series is his Christian picture book series, "About God for Kids", where he discusses the attributes of God in a way kids can digest. He also wrote a Christian Romance novel, libertarian book for beginners, and Christian coloring books. He graduated with a Bachelor's in Biblical Studies from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
He has written a book on freedom called “Are You Free” (If you are into listening to books I have it in audio also, Are You Free Audiobook )and he has written multiple children’s books about God. Be Sure to check out the podcast version of the blog, Labor for Truth Podcast. And check out “The Truth About” YouTube Channel. You can find his works at his amazon author page, https://amazon.com/author/timbankes. He even has a free digital ebook on how God is the creator. Get your free copy today at, Greater Creator .Also If you are into Christian Fiction, he has made his first book in his Futuristic Christian Fiction series free, Her Dying Wish