Fully agree with your first paragraph to me. Resentment is a significant factor in modern race relations, and a lot of that stems from the way we “gave” blacks their freedom. It could not have been done in a more condescending and emasculating manner if we had set out to do it that way intentionally.

In a sense, your second-to-last paragraph succinctly explains the roots of another aspect. We “freed” a bunch of blacks from chattel slavery, where at least you could put a dollar value on yourself, and then turned them into beggars subsisting off the scraps that white society gifted them. Not a recipe for healing wounds of involuntary servitude, that…

It’s easy to imagine an evil witch who can only prey on the weak. There are plenty of real life people like that. Drug dealers, child abusers, grifters. They’re easy to beat but only if you gang upon them. Their powers simply don’t apply to the problem of defending themselves.

Kirk: The only true freedom is the freedom you earn. But the South had worked out an effective system to prevent effective slave rebellions.

There’s a middle ground. If the Union had encouraged blacks to fight in the Union Army en masse and afterwards encouraged gun ownership among blacks, then Reconstruction might have gone differently and Jim Crow would have been killed early.

And Affirmative Action might never have happened.

The only status lower than slave is to be a beggar. A slave earns his keep and then some. A beggar does not, and knows it. Better to be exploited than pitied.

But if you help people to help themselves… that might work. Just choose carefully. Look for signs of ability.

I got the treat of getting to listen to one of the more racist types a few years ago, and it was… Enlightening.

Gist of it was that she forgave the slaveowners; they knew no better, and were just doing what predators do, like lions. But, the abolitionists and Northern whites who fought slavery? They were, of course, a special kind of evil, because the gift of their effort, money, and lives to end slavery denied agency to the slaves. It was better to be a slave forever, than that you might be freed from slavery by a white man…

Similar dynamic with Jeong. A lot of Koreans resent the US, because they had to be freed from the Japanese by us. Same mentality as American blacks.

But increasingly it isn’t actually worth watching. Years ago, people sat down — as families — to watch TV shows. Now either there aren’t as many families, or the family unit is split up by social mis-function or other attractions (video games spring to mind) or, simply, there is less and less to watch and even less to enjoy. The role models in many shows are either deliberately characterised as shallow and/or easily duped, crude and vengeful, or more likely the ‘message’ of the character is unappealing to anyone but the writer who nurses an agenda and a vague desire to ‘change the world.’ The supposedly entertaining output of modern television has become singularly unentertaining: it would rather hector and posture and pretend all people are equal when clearly they don’t behave in that way. Between and during these shows too we are subjected to a welter of advertising messages that merely bring on both a sense of nausea and a feeling of disaffection for the advertiser’s skewed view of a society we can clearly see is struggling.

We know much of TV (even the ‘factual’ and ‘reality’ programming) isn’t meant to be real but even the make believe is becoming alienating. More and more shows show me things I don’t like, I don’t believe in, and would rather not have in my home. More, it increasingly cannot make me smile or feel good and long ago gave up on trying to inform me in a balanced and thoughtful way.

In a way, this may be the best thing as television’s once relentless grip on life is being weakened. It may even signal the end of a sixty-year era we believed was dominated with low cost, easy-to-digest entertainment direct to our home. It is, therefore, just another mindless distraction and as such, best ignored. The off switch has never been more welcome.