We would have had a black president years ago if African-Americans had been less pushy [View All]

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Funny how people trust their erroneous gut sense of how things should work more than real history.

The self-styled "reasonable" DU argument about gay rights is that accommodation, compromise, gratitude for past progress and generally keeping your mouth shut are the keys to civil rights progress.

I can construct a model of human nature and society where that would be true but it has little resemblance to the real world.

Being a middle-aged white fellow from an extremely liberal family, I have tons of first-hand experience from the 1960s and 1970s of how very progressive, well-meaning white liberals talked about civil rights among themselves. The suburban liberal viewed every impolite, insufficiently patient or deferential black gesture as a threat to civil rights. If only they weren't so pushy! Don't they realize that change would come faster if they were less strident and ungrateful? This view was commonplace among real liberals... not closet racists, but very serious white people with a sincere hunger for social justice and racial equality.

That is human nature. Everyone thinks the struggle of the moment would go faster if "they" were less pushy even though no past struggles seem to have ever been won using the reasonable crowd's idea of what works. We all want a world that makes sense and is full gold stars for good behavior so it is natural to wish that rights are granted to the likable but history shows that rights are granted to the OBNOXIOUS. Rights are denied to the polite, the acquiescent, the patient.

JFK and MLK had some real disputes about instances where JFK felt that soft-peddling and compromise would advance the cause faster. JFK sincerely believed that MLK was threatening the goal by pushing too hard. Who turned out to be right?

If it is so damned obvious that strident single-minded and uncompromising stances retard progress could someone provide a list of colonies that gained independence faster by not demanding it? Would women have gained the vote a generation earlier if Suffragettes hadn't laid down their lives by throwing themselves under carriages? Did those self-immolating monks actually prolong the Vietnam war? (Watch FOG OF WAR to see McNamara talk about how the self-immolation of one disturbed individual at the Pentagon essentially broke his spirit on Vietnam.) And the starting point of the gay rights movement was the Stonewall Riot, not the "Stonewall discussion among people of good-will of matters upon which reasonable people can disagree."

The bottom line is that nobody today (except a few closet racists) would claim that black pushiness and self-centered "whining" set back civil rights.

The seemingly "reasonable" view is always the conventional wisdom at the time, and a forgotten embarrassment after the fact.