Whining While Black   Now that Confederate history month is over, maybe the racial grievance mongers will let up a while--and let black people turn their attention back to earning a piece of the American pie.   Thank goodness Confederate History Month is over!  Maybe journalists, black politicians and Civil Rights organizations will stop whining for awhile.   Fat, middle-aged suburbanites waving Confederate flags create too many excuses for hysterical rhetoric. Ironically, the volume and shrillness of attacks on Confederate heritage is inversely proportional to the actual racism and threat to personal safety. But alarmism is profitable if you’re a race pimp. When your skin color is your day job, you need something to cry "wolf" about.   The professionally black blacks, whose jobs are based on "African-American" in their titles, are working a decades-old scam that is a shame to the nation.  The racial politics of these Judas goats keep millions of blacks in poverty, jail, pain and suffering. Despite them, the majority of blacks are a generation away from earning their piece of the American pie.   A significant minority of blacks are succeeding equally and above other Americans. These are hard-working people who achieve color-blind success. Which is precisely the point: The way up has nothing to do with race. The way to succeed in America works for immigrants who don’t speak English, aren’t white, and don’t have a penny to their name when they arrive. But, it takes a generation. The parents sacrifice and provide for the children to have abundant opportunities. There are "7 Steps" from whining to winning.   Get married before the baby arrives.  Stay married and raise your children. Don’t use drugs or abuse alcohol.  Push educational achievement without excuses. Master the English language. Choose American, not a separate identity, like African-America. Live a purpose-driven life from the Bible. Whites who fail these seven steps will grow mullets, trash their lives and stay losers. Hispanics who fail have activists to demand government programs--as in, government programs that employ the activists. Blacks who fail have a well-established excuse-making industry that also lives at their expense. Eliminating poverty in the ghetto and barrio would do to race hustlers profession what tax reform would do to tax lawyers. Jesse Jackson would have to get a real job.     The seven steps to a better life in America don’t have the land mines in the path that blacks leaped over in the past. When Booker T. Washington and his students built Tuskegee with their bare hands, they made the brick kiln five times before it worked properly. They didn’t whine. Blacks came up from slavery further and faster, with a dignity and class under real duress, that is unfathomable to the "hip hop gangsta’s" culture. Blacks, still living today, overcame barriers that no black child faces now. Yet, although the rhetoric of race is elevated and pervasive today, the underlying messages are perverse and destructive.   Racial integration is a morally superior and ascendant idea for America. Yet, racial quotas-- by any disingenuous name, race-based programs, awards and organizations--are anathema to integration. They promote black, Hispanic, Asian, Indian, whatever racism. That is why good-hearted people would go nuts if any quota, program, award or organization had the qualifying adjective "white" in its name. Look at the outrage on college campuses when Conservative students have a race-based cookie sale. The hypocrisy would be funny if the potential outcomes weren’t so sinister.   White racism is vanishing, especially in the South.  (Send a memo to Liberals). Southern identity and distinctiveness increasingly arises out of evangelical Christianity rather than the regional, Confederate flag waving nationalism of old. Human hearts are being transformed to a higher standard than racial reconciliation--to loving-kindness. Meanwhile, the same Democrat Party that exploited race mongering with whites plays race-based politics using blacks--and reaches for other minorities. The hateful refrain of permanent victim-hood and grievance creates problems. Black racism and black-on-white hate crimes are increasing.   There is no excuse for defeat and decline among people whose ancestors and peers have accomplished so much since 1619--every step of the American experience.    New immigrants joining the Great Experiment give their children "American" first names. The exceptions are Muslims who don’t intend to integrate and some Hispanics whose numbers are so great they don’t have to leave their insular sub-culture. Blacks who invent alien names keep it "real" with the neighbors, but make it obvious they are separate. Separateness doesn’t produce victory in life.    Search any field of endeavor for greatness and see black Americans. Like politics: Who is more articulate than Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes, Walter Williams, Ward Connerly, J.C. Watts, Colin Powell and Condileeza Rice? They aren't whining while black.   -- May 9, 2005