"We Hear the Grievances; Where Is the Gratitude?"

I received this letter in an e-mail from a friend of mine a few days ago. It was a forward from another e-mail he had received, and it was supposedly the text of a letter written to NObama by an American religious figure. I won't name who it was supposed to be written by because I have some serious doubts as to whether the person who was supposed to have written it really did write it. I have these doubts because in the original text as I received it, the letter was too full of grammatical and punctual mistakes and context errors to have been written by the educated man the supposed author really is. So I have cleaned it up grammatically and am posting it here without naming the alleged author, and I'm posting it because it hits the nail square on the head on a few points that I happen to agree with 100%. But while I agree with the content, I cannot and will not vouch for the accuracy of the percentages cited in the letter simply because I don't have the time to research them, and the point is well-made even if the numbers are not 100% accurate.

Having said all that, here's the letter.

"Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America. Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. [Reverend] Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the black community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants. Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated their time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances.

Where is the gratitude??

Barack talks about new 'ladders of opportunity' for blacks. Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for 'deserving' white kids.

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for black Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the black community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Reverend Al Sharpton about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago."

Exactly.

IHC