Why Whites Shouldn’t Hire Poor Blacks to Care for Their Kids
Poor people and Minorities Often have Good Reason to Resent Middle Class Whites, and this may prompt poor Minority Caregivers to harm White children, Elders and Patients in their Care
By
David Gottfried
Introductory Qualification:
The title of this Essay asserts that whites should not hire poor blacks to care for their kids. I do not mean that whites should never hire poor people, or black people or poor black people. There are plenty of poor people and black people whose work is exemplary. However, for the reasons stated in this essay, I believe that one must proceed with the utmost caution before hiring less privileged people to care for one’s children. Because I wanted to keep the title of this essay short it was bereft of any qualifications.
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Every couple of months, the media is flooded with reports about the low pay, hard working conditions and squalid status of caregivers, such as nurses’ aides, home attendants, nursing home employees and the like. I do not doubt that cleaning the soiled garments of senile elders and tiny tots for low pay can be a royal pain in the ass. However, it is high time we keep in mind that the caregivers are not the only people put upon. Very often, the elders, patients and children are harmed by this arrangement.
Poor or Minority care givers may be envious of wealthy people and whites and their envy can blossom into rampaging rage. That resentment may become especially intense if that poor care giver is neglecting her own children to spend time taking care of rich white kids or elders. Most of the time, the anger of poor and minority care givers does not result in violence of any sort.
However, I would wager very good money that in a very large proportion of cases, poor care givers insidiously and subtly, through a succession of noxious remarks and actions – or what the woke crowd calls “microaggressions” -- subvert and undermine the emotional well-being of middle-class whites in their care.
Bette Davis as The Nanny: A Working Class Brit driven by a Red, Robespierrean Mission to Kill Affluent Kids
The pitfalls of interclass childcare was adroitly addressed in “The Nanny,” a lively drama starring Bette Davis. Bette is a working-class Brit and single Mother, who did not have time to take care of her children, who made a living by taking care of rich kids. From afar, Bette Davis is a diligent, conscientious homemaker and surrogate Momma. On closer examination, we find that she killed a little girl in her care and planned to kill the girl’s brother. She did not set out to be an angel of death, but she was too tormented by her neglect of her own children to do right by the offspring of the affluent.
How Lillian Hellman’s Mammie/Nanny Alienated her from her fellow Jews and made her an Anti-Semite
In “An Unfinished Woman,” Lillian Hellman, who most confidantes and acquaintances describe as an acerbic, combative and not terribly loving person, gives us a love letter to her Black Mammie, Sophronia. According to Hellman, Sophronia could do no wrong. Although she had almost no formal schooling, she was wiser than any fancy white boy who had gone to the Ivy League. Sophronia could make the very best biscuits and fried chicken, keep the boogey man at bay, and dry your tears. Unfortunately, Sophronia very adeptly and surreptitiously alienated Hellman from her parents, her Jewish coreligionists and herself. Sophronia took Hellman to Church, and Hellman, consequently found it unseemly to enter a synagogue; it would be an affront to her dear Black Mammie. In her adulthood, Hellman’s strident leftist outlook sometimes contained more than a kernel of Anti-Semitic poison. I have always wondered whether her love affair with Sophronia made her a “radical chic” brat who hated her whiteness and her Jewishness.
How my Grandmother got black and blue marks, and lost the ability to walk, within one week of being admitted to the Menorah Nursing Home in Brooklyn, New York
As my Grandmother aged, her senility grew more severe. Her children opted to put her in a nursing home. Before she was shoved into a home, one of her brothers tried to persuade her children to change their minds. He pleaded, “Hire a good Jewish woman to look after her.” Of course, his pleas were to no avail. Among other things, few good Jewish women were available. Most Jewish women, like most educated women in America, had been indoctrinated with the dogma that traditional female roles were for losers, that taking care of the infirm was degrading, and that it was infinitely more important, rewarding and chic to be a “professional” 1 and to defend the right of a manufacturer to pollute the environment with carcinogens or to make advertisements convincing people to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and believe that they were ugly and had to spend a ton of money on plastic surgery to be loved.
So my Grandmother was sent to a nursing home. Although my Grandmother’s verbal ability had collapsed, her motor skills were largely intact. Indeed, they were so intact that she still cleaned and did housework. After she went into the nursing home, she drove the nurses mad by walking around the filthy ward attempting to straighten-up the pig stye.
The nursing and housecleaning staff, almost entirely black, were furious. She was getting in their way, and the energy that characterized her cleaning underscored the extreme indolence and idleness of the nursing home’s employees. The Home’s employees liked their patients quiet and motionless and hopefully lying in their beds, too weak to raise a protest, and preferably rotting in their excrement .
So they tied my Grandmother to her bed. Within days, she was incontinent, incapable of walking and resigned to an expedited, miserable, and solitary death.
I will concede that I never saw the nursing staff attack her, but I did see her chained to her bed. I think I know why they were so cruel.
My senile Grandmother no longer could censor her speech; she uttered whatever words came into her head. And on the very first day as a patient, she continually said “Shvatza” upon seeing so many black nurses. Shvatza means dark or black in Yiddish, and at that time, the late 70’s, most black Americans wanted to be called black. But the term shvatza often provoked blacks to fisticuffs and worse. And for using this term, her jailors made her lose the ability to walk, and she no longer even dared to speak.
How I was Reared, in Part, by an Old, Ignorant, Bigoted Black Couple
My Mother was a working, single Mother. She needed someone to look after me. She sought and obtained the services of an elderly black couple. Mr. Jordan was the superintendent of our apartment house; Mrs. Jordan was, presumably, his wife. They lived with two elementary school kids who were, supposedly, their children. (However, I think those kids were their grandchildren.)
The Jordans did a lot of talking. As they talked, they expounded upon their philosophy of life, which was hard-bitten, dour and staunchly conservative. We often think that blacks are left wing, but they often support left wing candidates only because leftwingers are pro black. Their veneer of liberal political inclinations is very shallow. Very simply, poor black Southerners, just like poor White Southerners, grew up in the poor, defeated, depressive and grossly psychopathological South, a religious duchy filled to the brim with the Calvinist yen to damn, persecute and send deviates to hell.
The Jordans wasted no time in teaching me to think like Jerry Falwell Junior. They told me that Jewish people like me would all starve in a depression because we were weak and could only eat rich, fancy food, which of course was why we insisted on eating Kosher food. They told me that smart white people were basically a bunch of sissies, and they told me that I was part sissy. They told me that I would never be able to be a ball player or a surgeon because I had weak hands that shook. And they of course had the wildest notions about politics: They told me that the Great Depression came about because President Hoover was from California, favored California and made everybody buy oranges from California, and not Florida, which was why their home state of Florida suffered the depression which soon engulfed the whole nation. Because I knew them, I can easily understand how stupid propaganda, disseminated by Trump supporters, depressed the black vote in Michigan and defeated Hillary Clinton: Trump’s agents told black people that Clinton’s middle name was Rothman, that Rothman was similar to Rothschild, and that since the Rothschilds were famous, rich Jewish bankers, and since the names Rothman and Rothschild were sort of similar, Hillary Clinton was a Zionist agent working for Jewish bankers.
Of course, my remarks here are based on anecdotes. The absence of any studies to buttress my notions does not mean that my ideas are without merit. After all, given the miasma of Stalinoid thinking that pervades academia – witness the recent Congressional Hearings in which the elegant female presidents of our most elite institutions were too chicken shit to condemn speech that called for the genocide of Jews – the possibility that a university would study the psychological effects of black care givers on middle class white people is about as remote as the possibility that an elephant could pass through the eye of a needle.
The term professional has been ridiculously diluted over the years. Initially, professionals referred to doctors, lawyers and clergymen, Period. Nowadays, any pretentious prig and sheister who doesn’t get his hands dirty on the job considers himself a professional.