Holy Fuck

http://nytimes.com/2003/03/10/international/africa/10BANT.html

Check that out it s an article talking about how a tribe of 1200 Somali Bantus are being let into the US, wholesale, as refugees. The article talks about how they ve been enslaved by Arabs in Somalia and denied access to education and jobs in Somalia. The article also mentions how the lighter-skinned majority rejected the Somali Bantus because of their slave origins and dark skin and wide features .

So, good for the US, we re helping these people, right, yay for America? Not so much.

The writer, describing their transition to American life, here then contrasts the benefits of our society with its negative aspects:

The refugees watch snippets of American life on videos in class, and they marvel at the images of supermarkets filled with peppers and tomatoes and of tall buildings that reach for the clouds. But they know little about racism, poverty, the bone-chilling cold or the cities that will be chosen for them by refugee resettlement agencies.

They know little about racism or poverty? What the fuck? The writer s just been detailing the slavery and oppression they ve been put through in Somalia, many of them hardly had homes, they couldn t own land and he s saying that they re going to be learning about racism and poverty when they come to the US?

This is why people say that left-wingers hate America - you understand?

This chick is suggesting that their lot in America is going to be racism and poverty so much, in fact, that their horrific experiences in Somalia have still only taught them little by comparison.

Lets just assume the existence of all the difficulties that will probably come from their being black and uneducated: they have little savings, will be living on welfare, may have their welfare cut off if they don't find jobs, may not have complete medical care, they won't have enough Affirmative Action to benefit them, won't be receive the same cash-equivalent benefit from a tax cut that someone paying $20 million a year in taxes will, they'll recite a Pledge of Allegiance that may impinge on their right to be atheists, blah blah blah, so on.

Even taking all of that bullshit into consideration, the idea that whatever sort of poverty and racism these people will know in the US could be even comparable to the life they had in Somalia is fucking insane. How could anyone not ridden with anti-patriotic self-hatred be so blind as to think that?

The structure of those two sentences above necessarily sets up a negative comparison between aspects of American life: (good) "supermarkets" and "tall buildings" and (bad) "racism", "poverty", and "bone-chilling cold". If we're to assume that these 1200 Bantus "know little" about the American levels of "racism" and "poverty", then American racism and poverty has to be really, really, really fucking bad - the lot of someone undergoing racism/poverty in the US will necessarily (according to this woman's statements) be worse on average than the lot of an ENSLAVED BANTU IN FUCKING SOMALIA.

This is the dream world that many of these upper-middle-class-fuck-ups live in - one where they assume the faceless masses of the American poor live a life so torturous that America is no better than, say, Somalia, or Iraq. Given that our poor know far more about racism and poverty than the average Bantu in Somalia, who are we to criticize Saddam Hussein? Shame on us, right? Fuck them.

I want to retch.

Stone