Bill Cosby is fired up.

[Radar]

Let's not belittle the atrocities of slavery by trying to redefine the word.

slav·er·y Audio pronunciation of "slavery" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (slv-r, slvr)
n. pl. slav·er·ies

1. The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.
2.

• A. The practice of owning slaves.
  B. A mode of production in which slaves constitute the principal work force.

3. The condition of being subject or addicted to a specified influence.
4. A condition of hard work and subjection: wage slavery.[/list]
The government considers itself the "owner" of us. It does so by claiming it can tell us what to do with our bodies, minds, and lives. Buy claiming it has any authority to tell people whom they may marry, what medicines they may take, whom they may have sex with, etc.

Also, slavery has always been the forceful taking of the fruits of someone's labor against their will. That is EXACTLY what income taxation is. It's the forceful taking of the fruits of our labor without our consent and against our will. If you don't think it's forceful, try not paying it and guys with guns will show up to take you away.

Most people in America work for 5-6 months as a slave to the U.S. Government.

Nobody who is alive today owes anything ot people who are the decendants of slaves. Every race has been enslaved at some point in history. How far back should we go? 200 years? 500? 1000? 2000?

[blue]

Let's not belittle the atrocities of slavery by trying to redefine the word.

Christ I agree with just about everybody in this thread, and that's kind of weird.

Still, damn good point tho SM.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Also, slavery has always been the forceful taking of the fruits of someone's labor against their will. That is EXACTLY what income taxation is. It's the forceful taking of the fruits of our labor without our consent and against our will. If you don't think it's forceful, try not paying it and guys with guns will show up to take you away.

Ah, but you have a choice. You can stop working and let the Gumint support you. Slaves have no choice, except death.

[Radar]

No, I have no choice either. If I don't work, I die. I will not accept money stolen from others by the government.

I own myself and my labor and it is mine to do with as I please. Nobody else on earth has any claim to it. I may sell some of my labor to someone else which is what I do if I take a job. The government is not entitled to any of what I earn. And whether or not working is a choice doesn't change that fact.

Rights and priviledges are opposites. A right is something you don't need permission to do. Selling my labor to whomever I choose is a right. Keeping all of what I get in exchange for my labor is a right.

Taxing income can never be a legitimate governmental power because we as individuals do NOT have the right to take one persons income to pay for the healthcare, education, charity, etc. of another person and we may therefore not give that power to government.

This brings up the question of whether or not government has the legitimate authority to tax at all. And to this question, the answer is yes. The government may make taxes but may not tax our rights or our income.

The government may create roads, and tax those who use the road. Or tax people who import goods, or use certain services, etc. But it may not tax our rights such as selling our labor in exchange for money. That is like taxing people for breathing, or thinking, or praying.

[wolf]

Originally posted by sycamore
Well yeah, but I'm referring to the US in this case.

Oh. You mean like WalMart?

[ladysycamore]

Let me just respond by saying that richlevy said just about everything that I wanted to say but in a better tone. I was about to break my promise of not discussing black culture/issues with other whites because it is getting to the point of madness trying to explain anything to half of them. Sorry if that "offends" anyone here, but it is what it is. I'm getting too damned old and impatient to be talking to grown adults that seem to want to "understand" but when "we" give an answer to questions, they are picked apart and underminded, so I say, what's the damned point? Plus, I just don't need the extra stress. :p Most of the time, I say if you want to understand black people, then ask black people, but sometimes...I just don't know anymore.

Oh and blue: I think I'm the only black here that posts on a regular. If there are any more, I don't know about them.

However, I will contribute this. It is a transcript of an interview with Tavis Smiley and Dr. Henry Louis Gates. I think I've posted this before, but it bears repeating as far as any "explaination" is concerned, and Dr. Gates expresses himself so well, IMO. Enjoy.

Transcript of the Tavis Smiey with Dr. Henry Louis Gates discussing his documentary, "America Beyond The Color Lines".

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/...nscript.html#2
*Scroll down past the transcript of Al Sharpton (refrain please!) to get to the transcript of Henry Gates*

Other links to explore:

Dr. Cornell West: on Discrimination
http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/west.redis.discr.html

Tavis Smiley's interview with Bill Cosby (the first round of comments in May 2004):
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/...nscript.html#1

Michael Eric Dyson Commentary: Cosby's Comments (audio)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1912340

[Happy Monkey]

Originally posted by Radar
No, I have no choice either. If I don't work, I die. I will not accept money stolen from others by the government.

That's a choice.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Well, I scrolled past Sharpton (I really read it ) and came up with Colin Powell and Dr Gates.

Colin Powell: Got to get to our young people and tell them they can be successful. We have got to get to our young people and tell them Rosa Parks did not ride in the back of a bus and Martin Luther King did not die so you could call young girls bad names, so that you could act like a fool, so that you could put stuff up your nose, or that you could stick up somebody. Now, that is not acceptable. We've come too far to self-limit ourselves. So let me not hear any excuses about why you don't want to go to school or you go to a bad school. We all went to bad schools.

Gates: And what people say is that the problems are both institutional, or structural, on the one hand--meaning slavery for three centuries; a century of de jure segregation, right; institutional racism--but the problems are also behavioral, attitudinal. Nobody makes you get pregnant when you're 16. Nobody makes you not do your homework. Nobody makes you drop out of school. We need a Marshall Plan for our cities, like the National Urban League calls for every year. If we can rebuild Iraq, which remains to be seen, why can't we rebuild our inner cities? We need a federal jobs program to give people hope in the system again, but at the same time, we need a revolution in attitudes among our own people. We need to value education the way we did in the '50s. Being educated was the blackest thing you could be in the '50s. Look, we liked Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, but that wasn't Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. They weren't on the same level in the community as Thurgood Marshall and Dr. King were or Mary McLeod Bethune. We had our values straight. You know, we understood what was important, and what was important was education. If we got education, that was firing a bullet straight into the heart of George Wallace or Bull Connor or Orval Faubus. And now, Tavis, I read a result of a poll that was published in Washington a couple of years ago, inner-city black kids in Washington. It said, "List things white." You know what the top three were? Getting straight As in school, speaking standard English, and visiting the Smithsonian. If anybody had said that when we were growing up in the '50s--First of all, your mother would have smacked you upside your head, and secondly they would checked you into a mental institution. This is killing our people.

It sounds to me like they're both saying the same thing as Bill Cosby.

[wolf]

Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University says It's not my fault.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by ladysycamore

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/...nscript.html#2

Great link. Dr. Gates really nailed it. I just wrote a long response, but the Cellar ate it.

In short, I believe that if the class divide has really grown so great within the black community, then at least some of the effort needs to come from the community itself.

As a taxpayer, I believe that my responsibility is to pay for decent education for every child in this country. Changing attitudes towards education and providing mentoring to the next generation is something that needs to be addressed internally.

[OnyxCougar]

I agree with Lookout. I'm not part of the "we", because my father and all his ancestors are born and raised in the British Isles, my grandmother on my mom's side was first generation American from (then) Czechoslovakian (now Croatian) decent, and my grandfather was German.

How did I oppress the black man? How did my parents oppress the black man?
Answer is: ding ding ding! They didn't. I don't owe anyone anything except my family. And taxes.

So when I hear the cry about oh! I am so oppressed!! I feel like slapping them, just for the reasons the Cos spelled out. Everyone has an opportunity to be successful. My exhusband was born and raised in Detroit, started at McDonald's at 16 and graduated high school, was forced to drop out of college due to appendicitis, worked his ass off in the Air Force, retires in 3 years as a Senior Master Sgt., and while he isn't "well off", he's certainly not "oppressed".

You're only as "disadvantaged" as you choose to be. Instead of playing the victim role in Detroit, he cared about his education, cared about his life, and went out and did something with it. No, he'll never be president, he'll never be a senator, but that's because he doesn't want to be. Oppression is a mentality.