Ahh changing the topic are we? Committing crimes, having babies and being unemployed have shit to do with you ONLY disliking hyphens when Minorities use it.
Try again sparkey...Lemme guess, you don't have a problem with "hyphenated americans" anymore.
I'm changing nothing.
I ask you a question which you cannot answer.
And then I explained why I'm not complaining about the other hyphenated Americans.
And yes, that is some of the problems I see within the black community.
You don't see the problem?
Are you another apologist like your buddy Poet?
Dear CC and LL: What I learned from a workshop in mediation, is that different cultures tended to represent and communicate/negotiate differently. For example, people from a European/patrilineal type culture tended sign things in writing and not rely on word-of-mouth agreements; and tended to put a focus on individual will, ownership and responsibility. While people from either Asian, Latino, or African communities tended to make decisions "holistically" in relation to other issues and people not always directly related to the matter at hand, and to put the "collective" family/community identity BEFORE the individual. So this affects what people need in order to exercise equal representation, whether you rely on individual or collective identity to invoke authority.
So the mediators had to work around this, so people from different backgrounds wouldn't miscommunicate by sending the wrong signals because of how they represented or expressed their interests in the process of negotiation and decisionmaking.
It is important for people to form social groups by cultural, religious and political interests in order to organize resources and assistance around their concerns and programs.
Instead of competing to dominate or defend one group's priorities and issues over others,
we should use these networks for people to move toward more direct representation and self-governance. Since parties and civic/cultural associations already elect their own leaders democratically, or split and form their own groups if they disagree, it isn't that hard to use these existing structures to organize communities locally and nationwide to resolve their own issues their own ways, using their own resources and leaders, and not push that on others.
With the political and cultural diversity in America, I believe we are heading in this direction.
The more we localize responsibility, we will take that burden off govt and let people represent themselves and fund the policies consistent with their views and beliefs, instead of abusing govt and political process to impose agenda on others by bullying by coercion or exclusion. We need to respect political/cultural differences as we do religious beliefs, and let people form and fund their own groups and programs without imposing on others' views.
