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Goodbye To My American Dream

This is what one young lady born in Trinidad has to say about her decision to leave America.  I think she is right on the mark and a courageous woman to speak out on this issue.

 Goodbye To My American Dream, By Tiffanie Drayton
 
On the day of college graduation, I told my friends and family the news: I was leaving the country I had lived in since childhood.  “I just need a change,” I told them, but they knew there was more. Was it some romance gone awry, they wondered? Some impulsive response to a broken heart? And I was running from heartbreak. My relationship with the United States of America is the most tumultuous relationship I have ever had, and it ended with the heart-rending realization that a country I loved and believed in did not love me back.

Back in the ’90s, my mother brought me from our home in the Caribbean islands to the U.S., along with my brother and sister. I was 4 years old. She worked as a live-in nanny for two years, playing mommy for white kids whose parents had better things to do. She took trips to the Hamptons and even flew on a private jet to California as “the help.” My mom didn’t believe that nanny meant maid, but she did whatever was asked of her, because she was thirsty. She had a thirst that could only be quenched by the American dream. One day, she thought, her children would be educated. One day, they might have nannies of their own.

That was our path. Get a “good education.” When the neighborhoods with quality schools became too expensive for my mom to afford as a single parent with three kids, we traversed the United States with GreatSchools.net as our compass. New Jersey, elementary school: decent, mostly Hispanic school, even though my gifted and talented program was predominantly Indian. Texas, middle school: “Found a great school for you guys,” my mom said while rain poured into our car through the open windows where the straps of our mattresses were tied down. It had an “A” grade and was 70 percent white. Florida, high school: “Hey, Tiffanie, you should have this egg. It’s the only brown one like you!” my classmate told me during AP biology. Philadelphia, Hawaii, North, South, East, West. Car, U-Haul, Greyhound, plane, train. New York City, private university: “I really want to write an essay on being the gentrifier,” one courageous young man pitched in a journalism class. I was one of only two people who were disturbed.

For a long time I survived by covering myself in the labels I’d accumulated over the years.  I plastered each one to my body with super glue as if they were Post-It note reminders that I was someone.  Sports fanatic (hot pink). Feminist, beautiful, writer, comedian, fashionista, friend (fuchsia, yellow, blue, purple, red, green). I hid behind them; they were my only shields.

Green covered my eyes when a childhood friend’s family banged down my front door and demanded their daughter get out of the house full of blacks. Blue protected my heart when my black peers ostracized my enjoyment of complete, complex sentences. Yellow blocked my ears when whispers floated through the air at my ex-white-American boyfriend’s home like haunted ghosts: I can’t believe he is dating a black girl. The words passed like a gentle breeze barely creating flutter.‬

I existed right there on the fringe of ugly, ignorant and uncultured. Black but not black enough for my positive attributes to be justified. “Where are you from?” potential dates asked when they met me. “I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” I said. “Oh, that’s why you are so beautiful and exotic — I knew you couldn’t be all black.”

“Black people don’t really  know how to swim,” my co-worker once told me when I worked as a swim instructor at my neighborhood’s pool. “What about me?” I asked. “Oh, you aren’t black. You’re from Trinidad,” she said.

“The black children don’t like to read very much,” I overheard one librarian discussing with another while I sat down reading a book a couple feet away. They passed right by me with smiles.
I was the model minority — absent, yet present. The yardstick to which other minorities were measured.  If I could finish high school and college, why couldn’t so many African-American people find their way out of their hoods and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If I could speak English without using a single ebonic slang, why do others call themselves “niggas”? If I managed to make it through 23 years without contracting an STD or getting pregnant, why do black women have the highest statistical risk of disease and teenage motherhood? Daddy America looked to me to prove that he did something right. After all, one of his children turned out all right. The others must simply be problem kids.

I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness.

In that empty, dark space I found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem.

Still, I count myself lucky. Where my open cuts remain, eventually scars will take their place and those scars will fade with time. For many, their wounds will never heal. Gunshots bore coin-size holes into their chests that will never close. Their chained wrists and ankles will continue to bruise. Their minds have collapsed under the weight of a failed education system.

I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their “post-racial” beliefs. A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made the right choice.” I think I did, too.
I have found freedom by leaving the land of the free.

Tiffanie Drayton is a freelance writer and graduate of The New School University. She hopes to one day return to an equal and racially tolerant America.

The Institutionalized Extortion of Heterosexual Men

by Joe Zamboni on July 5, 2013

Over the last few years, I have been increasingly wary of and doubtful about the motives of all women who wanted to have sex with me. There has been plenty of evidence to support this wariness. One woman, who I had not met prior to our brief discussion, without any apparent self-consciousness, proposed to have a child with me as soon as she heard the street on which I lived, a street with many expensive large houses overlooking a large body of water. When with another woman, after we had come back to my expensive house, which has several acres of gardens, just after our first date, and immediately after laying eyes on my property, she proposed that she would be my girlfriend. There had been no prior mention of any relationship, let alone sex.

To be seen by women as super-attractive and desirable just because I have significant financial resources disgusts me. It is objectification pure and simple. The last I heard, most women were strongly opposed to objectification, but their behavior shows that’s a lie. When I was not so well off, many women wouldn’t even give me the time of day. As I see it, American women are increasingly mercenary, or perhaps just significantly more willing to show their long-standing gold-digger inclinations. Some are even proud of what I am coming to appreciate is the intention to commit extortion.

I remember sitting in a restaurant at the Atlanta Airport, waiting for my connecting flight, and overhearing three middle-aged women talking at the next table. They made no effort to prevent those nearby from hearing them. They were all divorcees, and they were comparing how much loot they had extracted from their ex-husbands, as though it was a competition. They squealed with glee about the significant resources that they had gotten from their former mates. Nowhere in the discussion amongst these three was there any consideration of any adverse impact on those men. I was then shocked and dismayed that so many American women had become so blatantly money-hungry, heartless, and manipulative. Now I take it for granted.

More recently I have come to appreciate that Feminism has successfully changed American laws to establish the legalized extortion from heterosexual men, or at least from those men who are willing to have sex with a woman, and from those men who are still sufficiently reckless and clueless to marry an American woman. Yes, extortion technically is a crime, but through children and/or marriage, women can, and many do, legally engage in it. Consider the elements of the crime as defined by common law. Extortion is the: (1) present use of threat or force (2) of a future harm (3) to obtain money or resources (4) from another (5) with the intent to steal. We will take each of these five elements in turn, but I invite you, if you are an American, to consider the women in your life, and whether they too are engaged in some form of legalized extortion from men.

Regarding the use of (1) threat or force, consider false rape accusations. Without evidence or justification, a woman can unilaterally, and without any supporting evidence, have a man thrown in jail, can cause him to lose his job, and can cause him to lose his community reputation. Often used in retaliation for some perceived slight, such false rape accusations are a threat of force, a threat to get the power of the state to punish a man for doing what a woman doesn’t like. The very real possibility that a woman can do this, and get away with it, without being punished in any way, is an indication that she has the present power to threaten force. Thus, if they know what’s good for them, men had better not offend a woman, lest the woman call out the cops, and get these same men thrown into jail based on false rape accusations.

The same is true for claims of domestic violence. A woman, simply by calling the police, can bring the force of the state down on the man involved. Mandatory arrest laws require that the man be arrested. Never mind whether or not there actually was any domestic violence, and never mind who the perpetrator was. The power is held exclusively by the female, and if the male does not do as she wishes, the man will be made pay (if not financially, then certainly suffer via time in jail, being forced to move out of his own house, inconvenience to his life via an injunction, etc.).

A similar analysis applies to men who are behind in their child-support payments. As perverse as it may seem, a significant number of men who are behind in their child support payments are now thrown into jail. In some cases, their professional licenses and driver’s licenses are revoked. Never mind that these actions severely compromise their ability to pay child support. Logic is not the dominant motivation here. A display of power, and sending a strong message to men, that women control the power, that is the primary message that is being sent. And a showing of power is necessary as the first element of extortion.

Divorce-related child custody disputes provide another example. Women can, and in many cases actually do, falsely accuse the men of abusing their own children. The women, through these allegations, can cause men to be estranged and separated from their own children. Of course there are financial considerations here, such as the desire for more child support. The greater the percentage of time that the mother has the children, the more the child support will be. But taken from a wider perspective, it appears as though there is also an important message that is sent to men thereby, and that is that men had better comply with not only the desires of women, but also the dictates of the legal system.

You may ask “what about compassion for the fate of men?” There is none of that here, we have a systematic extortion process underway, where not only the woman gets money, but so do lawyers, psychologists, child support collection clerks, etc. This is a systemic government-supported racket with big money at stake. So forget about compassion for men, the institutionalized incentive systems that are now in place help to keep things the way they are.

The threat of force can also show up in allegations of sexual harassment at work. Even if men go their own way, and have nothing to do with women, they will in many cases be required to work with women. The threat of a sexual harassment complaint, and the very real possibility that the man could lose his job thereby, or have his reputation in an industry thereby tarnished, is a very real and serious threat. What about the prosecution of false accusers? Are you kidding? It’s just like false rape accusations, false domestic abuse allegations, and false child abuse allegations. The woman is virtually never prosecuted for her vengeful and/or extortionate display of power exerted in an effort to get the man to fork over the resources.

Many men ignorantly fail to see that they are living under a profound and serious threat that force will be used against them. For years I wondered why so many American men were acting like hopeless wimps when interacting with their wives. I was dismayed to note how they refused to stand-up for themselves, and refused to correct their wives when their wives were obviously in the wrong. Now I get it — they had at least unconsciously internalized the threat of force discussed here, and at least on some level they fully understood what they were up against. They dared not let people know they had any balls, that they might actually be able to stand up and be counted. Most slaves threatened with severe punishment do not generally stand-up for themselves.

Consider next the (2) future harm that a woman might do to a man. She could have him thrown in jail, could get him to pay her outrageous child support (entirely unrelated to actual child support needs), could get him to pay for another man’s child (paternity fraud), or could get him to pay lifelong or at least long-term alimony. She could force him to attend “anger management” classes (state-sponsored brainwashing as I see it). She could get him thrown in jail on criminal charges like rape, child abuse, stalking, or domestic violence. These future harms are exercised regularly, and both men and women are fully aware of how much more harsh the criminal justice system’s punishments are for men than they are for women. For example, as Bill Price has recently reported, American men are executed about 100 times more often then women. [Note 1]

The next element is the (3) money or resources obtained thereby. Most young women I know don’t want to be some high-powered corporate executive, or for that matter any other type of wage earner. Instead they want to stay home and have kids, and they want a man to make that possible by paying for her to live that lifestyle. On a basic level, it makes sense that women would want a man to provide resources so that her offspring can do well, but this fundamental old-fashioned motivation has been twisted for selfish monetary purposes, twisted to the point where it is no longer recognizable. The extortionate and forced transfer of money and resources from men to women is now at the expense of (a) male freedom, (b) male self-determination, and (c) basic human decency. The fact that men are thrown in jail for not paying child support, in many instances for not paying money they don’t have, that shows that this is not a system based on either a man’s ability to pay, or a policy intended to promote harmonious family arrangements. Thanks to misguided chivalry, the strident and ceaseless complaints of feminists, the compliant white-knight politicians who respond to the feminist demands, and the widespread greed of women, America’s legal system now provides for the institutionalized extraction of money and resources from heterosexual men.

Notice that this extraction (4) comes only from heterosexual men. These men are the sole target of the extraction process. Women, by and large, do not pay alimony, and they do not pay child support. Women do not, by and large, go to jail for domestic violence, stalking, or rape. Women are not generally accused of, nor do they generally lose jobs because of sexual harassment accusations. The heavy-duty punishments, directed at heterosexual men, are intended to make men pay. It’s as simple as that.

So, for example, if you never wanted a child with a particular woman who “got pregnant,” and you objected to becoming a father, it doesn’t matter. So what if she lied abut being on birth control? The woman is nonetheless supported by the legal system in collecting child support from you. Never mind that she can unilaterally get an abortion, or put the baby up for adoption, both without your permission. Nobody said this was fair. And let’s give up the myth that it’s about supporting children. That’s just the excuse used to legitimize the extortion. For example, a good number of men, who have proven with DNA evidence that they are not the fathers of certain children, are nonetheless forced by the courts to pay child support. [Note 2] You, the man, are going to be made to pay anyway. The man has absolutely no say in the matter.

Which brings us to the place where there is an (5) intention to steal behind all this. At some point in the past, I imagine some men and women, with good intentions, wanted to enter a partnership where they both contributed to raising a family. More recently in history, men got a job, and women stayed home and took care of the kids. That separation of duties may have made some sense in 1950, but it no longer does. While men are legally obliged to keep being the providers, women are no longer required live up to their side of the bargain. Instead, men are legally required to support women in their efforts to do whatever the hell they want with their lives (via tax dollars at the very least, for example having children on their own without any involvement of a man). The current arrangement is way beyond a lopsided allocation of gender-based financial responsibility, it is now outright extortion of heterosexual men. Under the current system, no matter what the woman does, men are forced to pay.

The Twisting Of Natural Impulses: It is natural, and I believe on some deeper level innate in heterosexual men, to want to give and support women and the family. But the current legal system has gone way beyond the desire to give and support. It has used that inclination, that desire, that deeper urge, and twisted it into something so draconian and oppressive, that for an increasing number of men who dispassionately and clearly see what is happening, all desire to give to a woman or “her” offspring (as she often puts it) evaporates.

A desire to give to the family, in mutuality, as a matter of choice, as a contribution to the welfare of the family — that could be a wonderful thing. But when this giving becomes a slavery-like institution, as it now has become in America, men are increasingly abandoning it, and with good reason. The statistics indicate what’s happening, and the laments from the women of child-bearing age, such as “where have all the good men gone?” are just another indication of the male abandonment of the family that’s now underway. Marriage rates in the USA in 2009 were 6.8 per 1000 people. This rate has steadily declined since 1970, at which point it was 10.6 per 1000 people. Note that 1970 was around the time when feminist lies and propaganda became well-entrenched in the American legal system. [Note 3]

In this case, the “good men,” as the women refer to them, are the men who are willing to put themselves in the saddle of husband and provider, with all the legal fetters that go along with that. There are still some brave (“ignorant” might be a better term) men who are willing to put themselves, their assets, their careers, and their reputations, at great risk, in the statistically unreasonable hope that the women they chose won’t call out the sheriff and have them manacled and bound into some sort of an institutionalized payment arrangement (divorce asset splits, alimony, and child support are the most widely employed mechanisms). These “good men” desperately need to get the message discussed herein.

It is perverse that the most illogical and primitive part of man, his innate desire for sex, partnership, and love with a woman, is used for, and played upon to effect, this institutionalized extortion. Men have historically been driven by instinct and hormones in this place, but they desperately now need to use their logical brains to understand what is really happening. So long as men don’t use a detached, rational, and objective perspective to see the institutionalized extortion that’s underway, they will continue to fall prey to the ploys of women surrounding marriage and children.

Institutionalized Abuse: Feminism has brought with it the illogical notion that women can do no harm, and when this myth is combined with nearly unchecked power, abuse will be the result. We see this same result in many areas, not just the institutionalized extortion of resources from men as discussed above. Consider a 2010 US Department of Justice study that examined the sexual abuse of teenagers in detention (juvenile halls, group homes, etc.) [Note 4]. This study surveyed 8,700 juveniles housed in 326 facilities, representing about 25% of the nation’s youth living in such detention facilities. Among the 10% of youths who admitted to being sexually abused, 92% said the abuse was perpetrated by females. That’s not a typo — that’s 92%.
Lovisa Stannow, the executive director of California-based non-profit Just Detention International, which advocates for the elimination of prison rape, had a very insightful comment about this same study. She said, “When you have an extreme power differential and absolute unchecked power, bad things start happening. When you combine this with a culture where sex abuse by females on males isn’t taken seriously, then you have the perfect set-up for women with all this power to get away with it.”

The same conclusion applies to the institutionalized extortion of resources by women from heterosexual men. It’s about time that more of us American men honestly acknowledged what’s happening to us. It’s about time that we older American men started honestly and fully informing the younger American men what the deal is with women and the legal system. We older men need to do this informing before it is too late — that is before the younger men get married, get a woman pregnant, or move in with a woman.