Racism made me do it: the failure of BLM and other such movements

Should Buddhists care about the movement Black Lives Matter (BLM)? Probably not insofar as BLM’s politics are strictly racial rather than moral and spiritual.  Becoming a better human being who is able to follow the Buddha’s path, hopefully, to attain nirvana in this lifetime is what Buddhism offers.  This is a spiritual path; certainly, not a political path with a racial agenda.

Buddhism is also concerned with ends and means.  Buddhists do not believe a noble end can justify the use of an ignoble means.  Look at the religion of Islam, for example, which believes the end justifies the use of ignoble and cruel means, for example, terrorism.  The present day Muslim, in order to live and become productive in the modern world, is forced to give up the aims of his violent religion.  BLM (the movement, not the organization) which is not as bad as Islam by a long shot, nevertheless, is deploying an ignoble means because it believes that ending racism warrants such confrontational actions. 

But is racism really the problem facing the African-American community?  Or is the BLM exploiting the African-American community by proclaiming that all the African-American community’s problems stem from racism?  Well over a hundred years ago Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), An African-American educator and advisor to presidents of the United States had this to say:

"There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."

Such Black movements which claim the African-American’s problem is due, strictly, to racism do not seem to care about the consequences when one takes up such a belief.  For one thing, individual responsibility and moral behavior suffer as a result.  Any conduct, even violent criminal conduct including murder, can be blamed on racism.  But the troubles of the African-American community have little if anything to do with racism in the final analysis (but don’t tell that to a black Buddhists like Pamela Ayo Yetunde).  It has to do with the powerful influence of a particular, out of control, subculture within the African-American community which runs away from individual responsibility and moral behavior; which, in addition, doesn’t understand the golden rule; and wants to be taken care of just because they have been told they are hapless victims of racism.  This attitude is summed up in Taleeb Starkes’ two books, The Un-Civil War: Blacks vs Niggers: Confronting the Subculture Within the African-American Community and, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry.

From a Buddhist perspective, the problems facing the African-American community cannot be solved by going to the default position of racism.  This is a huge copout.  Change can only come about by such things as a radical improvement in child rearing practices from the third trimester to age seven followed by an educational system that has high expectations for their students in which schools will no longer be seen as feeders into the prison system.  It must be understood that our mind has enormous power over the fifty trillion cells of this body we inhabit.  Because Buddhism has understood this for some 2,500 years, Buddhist-asian juveniles as an example exhibit very little if any criminal behavior unlike subculture black juveniles (the black author Starkes calls them juviNIGGERS).  Buddhist-asian juveniles show a great deal of individual responsibility and moral behavior as compared with black juveniles who have one mantra in their head, racism made me do it.  Clearly, Buddhism works—blaming one’s failures on racism doesn’t work.  Buddhism and BLM (the movement) are worlds apart.

Comments

[smith]

zennist: agree completely. The poorest, the ones marxist claim to most fight for and represent,are also always those who suffer the greatest harm under the marxists. That's the irony, they use them for their own ends - ultimate power - and the inner-city poor, the urban poor, black and white, but especially blacks, support them. Not knowing exactly how they are supporting their own demise, general impoverishment in all areas. The marxist elites - like the obamaexcrement regime - do know this, and are perfectly willing to use them and lie to them. They are their mob-weapon of mass exploitation. The useful idiots are the 'supposedly more educated', such as the white liberals who have been fully indoctrinated by 'political correctness', including white-guilt shaming, such that they support those who seek their utter cultural, economic and racial demise. None of them can see that the house is on fire. Which is the deeper evidence that un-programming marxist true believers or even those mind-conditioned to serve them ala pavlovian dogs, is for all intents and purposes not possible. I contend that only enlightenement, awakening in the truest spiritual sense can liberate one from such deep rooted false identity. Which incidentally is why marxism is always atheist in its ends also, and in its true ideological and philosophical basis, and why it always attacks GOd/religion as a first order of business generally. Everything that God is, the truth, love, freedom, wisdom, are antithetical to what marxism is.

Ps,, understanding marxist critical theory is not an easy task, the philosophical positions are complicated and complex. Which is why marxism is so difficult for human beings to understand and or defeat. It requires quite the effort to 'know the enemy', the obstacle, the mara, the ignorance, that marxism is. it's too much for almost everybody, and the reason why it matters etc, therefore the importance and or the incentive for knowing is also not understood. That is why it is the cleverest of strategies, ideologies, religions(satanic), that has ever been invented. In the material world it is superior to any social force or structure that humans themselves could have conceived. Evil genius.

[Oswald Spengler]

"Marxism" made me do it. Lulz.

Unfortunately, what should be stressed here, is that by no stretch of even the most Ameikanized imagination is the Obama administration "Marxist" ( in the actually accepted sense of that term). Ascribing Marxian ideology to what is effectively a Neolib regime diverts attention from what is essentially produced from liberal social-engineering and laissez-faire social welfare programmes.

Outside the metapolitics of the Frankfurt School (or Cultural-Marxism, which has more affinity to the overarrching liberal-dispensation prevailent in the Anglo-Amerikanized "West"), Marxism as an ideo-economic construct, has only ever existed in peripheral terms in the First World. What you guys are actually up against, and the bit that makes your Disney-centric brains go all goo-goo, is that Amerika was founded upon the failed social experiment of the Jacobin Revolution and continues to labour under the delusion that all peoples and all the world want liberty, equality and fraternity, by fair means or foul.

Duh, and I thought I was the dumbass. :-/

[thezennist]

Smith: All the data points to the fact that the African-American community has grown much worse under the Obama Administration.

[thezennist]

NinaB: I have been listening to it. About 90% done (it was hard to put it down). I wish more people could listen to it. Just tonight my neighbor called me a racist over BLM when I cited Starkes' book mentioned in the blog. I am afraid some Buddhists are like my neighbor who are not arguing from facts but mere uneducated opinion.

[smith]

good snapshot of the reality of black America under the marxist regime of obamaexcrement. he is exactly what Booker described - marxists use every social dimension to co-opt and advance their marxist ideology and goals. Their end goals are first and foremost political power, which of course equals economic or money power. Money is power in the world. Second, their equally important goal is to make the world into their vision - utopian from their point of view. Of course the insurmountable problem is that human nature is corrupt - it will not be the heavenly godly or enlightened fantasy that they imagine it will be. Ultimately, marxism is a failure from an economic point of view, it only yields increasing impoverishment, bankruptcy, and disincentives to create wealth. It is utterly empty in its ability to deliver a better reality within the material world for all. It can however yield a better material reality for the elites who rule and their politically associated cronies within it. Marxism as a government can only continue its existence through more control, more concentration of power, as things under marxism always continuously trend and spiral towards hardships and more material difficulties. Thus the need of marxist government is always to need and take greater control and power over the people of whom it claims to serve. Of course always promising utopia to come. always always TO COME -somewhere just over the rainbow. In America the marxist under obamaexcrement, being true believers(completely deluded fools), are doing exactly what marxists do - in particular regarding racism, they are using racism(since they are racists themselves in reality) to sow discord, confrontation, in order to use it, to exploit it, to gain greater power into their hands and away from those and anything socially which is in opposition to their marxist-racist vision. marxism in its need for ever greater control and power in order to maintain and grow itself is by definition anti-freedom. It cannot allow free thinking, freedom of people ala the bill of rights, speech, assembly, thought,teaching/learning. markets, business/commerce. Because freedom and its ends and means do not support at all the ends of marxism - the implementation of a utopian vision including a racist vision where it's all better when blacks are the racists against white people. The deeper complex problem is that the marxists instill through false teaching, indoctrination, lies, the identity, the identification by blacks with the mythology of racism and the marxist solution to it. By tricking, fooling, mind-conditioning blacks and sympathetic whites to believe the lies and the false solutions, they instill a psyche which identifies itself deeply emotionally with those lies and false ideas. That false identity is the key to maintaining the mob which they can evoke provoke and use to act when they call and direct it. marxist are master manipulators - another clarity of their anti-freedom roots. The false attachment to the false identity of victimhood and righteousness to do basically anything because of it, are how marxism uses and is mara - it is pure satanic evil. very complex, very clever, and very destructive and in time mass murderingly so.