Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2007, 10:52:50 AM
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All:
This thread is for discussion and articles treating the question of "Can't we all just get along?"
I open with one from the investment newsletter of Richard Russell.
TAC,
CD
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To my surprise, I received a slew of e-mails over the weekend all centered on whether quarterback Rex Grossman is Jewish or not. Along these lines, I have one interesting story. It concerns the great Jewish boxer, Bennie Leonard, considered by many the best lightweight boxer of all time. Bennie had lightening hands -- he scored 69 KOs out of his 157 fights, which is amazing for a lightweight. In his career during the 20s he was defeated only 11 times. Ring Magazine lists Bennie as number 8 in lists of the 80 best fighters of the last 80 years.
Back in the 40s there were a lot of Irish bars on 8th Avenue in New York. One chain was called the Blarney Stone. The Blarney was famous for having all sorts of free food at the bar, and many times I would drop in to the Blarney Stone for a ten cent beer and a hand full of meat balls. The Blarney was a tough place, and bar fights were commonplace.
At any rate, there's this famous story about Bennie Leonard. One day Bennie stopped in at an Irish bar on 8th Avenue. Bennie was drinking a beer when a fierce-looking Irishman stalked out to the middle of the bar, raised a fist and shouted, "Is there a Jew in the house?" There was a dead silence, and then Bennie walked up to the big guy and said, "Yeah, I'm a Jew." Where upon the big guy extended his hand and said, "I've always wanted to meet you, Mr. Leonard. This is a real pleasure. May I buy you a beer?" And that concludes my racial/religious stories, at least for a while.
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Wall Street Journal
D-Day in Little Rock
Eisenhower's civil rights showdown.
BY FRED BARNES
Thursday, March 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
In spring 1954, as the Supreme Court was deliberating on Brown v. Board of Education, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Chief Justice Earl Warren to a stag dinner at the White House. He seated Warren at the same table as John W. Davis, the lawyer who had argued against school desegregation before the court. Eisenhower proceeded to tell the chief justice what a "great man" Davis was.
As it happened, Eisenhower had authorized his Justice Department to file an amicus brief in the case opposing Davis and public-school segregation. And he specifically allowed his solicitor general, Lee Rankin, to tell the justices during oral argument that "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional. Yet he sympathized with the segregated South. "These are not bad people," he told Warren at the dinner. "All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big, overgrown Negroes." Warren was appalled.
To put it kindly, Eisenhower was ambivalent on civil rights. "Conservative by nature, he hoped that the advance of the civil rights movement would be gradual, allowing time for the South to change," writes Kasey S. Pipes in "Ike's Final Battle." Most of all, Eisenhower didn't want to lead a civil-rights crusade from the White House. "The only crusade he had ever wanted to lead was liberating Europe in World War II," Mr. Pipes says.
But when necessary--or when steps toward desegregation were relatively painless--Eisenhower acted. He broke the color barrier in the military by deploying black soldiers alongside whites to win the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945. As president, he integrated the schools and movie theaters in Washington, D.C., and federal installations around the country. Most important, he sent U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Ark., in September 1957 to escort nine black students into Central High School after days of violent protest. It was a defeat from which segregationist forces never recovered.
"Little Rock represented something else as well: the culmination of Eisenhower's own attitude toward racial justice," Mr. Pipes writes. "Ike had enjoyed the luxury of endorsing civil rights in broad terms, knowing full well that much of segregation law was a state and local matter. Little Rock ended that."
Two days after the Army troops arrived in Little Rock, Eisenhower decided to address the nation on prime-time television. This surprised his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, who had been prodding Eisenhower for years to act more boldly on civil rights. The president wrote most of the speech himself, including a passage, suggested by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, arguing that violent opposition to racial integration was weakening America's influence and prestige in the world.
In the speech, Eisenhower lauded the desegregation efforts of other Southern communities and their willingness to comply with federal law. This was a new tack for the president, who had refused to endorse Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's decision declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional. Nor had he denounced the murder of Emmett Till by racist thugs in Mississippi in 1955, despite pleas by the teenage boy's mother.
"He feared that moralizing from the bully pulpit would raise not only awareness, but also the collective blood pressure of the South," Mr. Pipes writes. "He saw no point in riling an already angry population. . . . To put it bluntly, Eisenhower had little interest in trying to change the minds of millions of Southerners."
But he had learned a lesson from Little Rock. His view had been, as Mr. Pipes puts it, that "segregationists and civil rights advocates were cut from the same cloth." In his dealings with Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, he learned otherwise.
Faubus betrayed Eisenhower. In the midst of the Little Rock crisis--as Arkansas's National Guard was blocking the nine black students from Central High--Faubus had agreed to meet the president in Newport, R.I. At the end of their 20-minute talk, Faubus gave the president the clear impression that he would change the National Guard's orders, requiring it to protect the black students as they entered Central High. But Faubus didn't follow through. Eisenhower felt double-crossed and told Brownell: "You were right. Faubus broke his word." The president then took the next step, dispatching the 101st Airborne.
Mr. Pipes is not a professional historian. He is a public-relations consultant and speechwriter who worked in the Bush White House from 2002 to 2005. But he has written a highly readable and credible account of Eisenhower's struggle with race and civil rights. While sympathetic, he doesn't sugarcoat Eisenhower's qualms about desegregation or excuse his unwillingness to move decisively before Little Rock.
Eisenhower famously regretted his appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. (Warren served in that role from 1953 to 1969.) Warren confronted Eisenhower about the president's feelings toward him when they flew together to Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965. Eisenhower explained that it was Warren's liberal rulings on national security that had upset him. He didn't mention Brown v. Board of Education, and understandably so: Years earlier Eisenhower had told an aide, privately, that he thought the Brown decision was wrong; by 1965, he had concluded that it was right.
Mr. Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and co-host, with Morton Kondracke, of "The Beltway Boys" on Fox News Channel. You can purchase "Ike's Final Battle" at the OpinionJournal bookstore here.
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Updated:2007-04-13 16:07:16
http://sports.aol.com/whitlock/_a/time-for-jackson-sharpton-to-step-down/20070411111509990001
Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step Down
Pair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus Incident
By JASON WHITLOCK
AOL
Sports Commentary
I’m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down.
Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.
We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That’s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.
We’ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.
Why?
If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.
Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won.
Have we at the level we should have? No.
Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.
Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.
Imus’ words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.
You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?
We’re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.
Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.
Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.
The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.
Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James.
Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she’s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer’s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you’d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all.
Maybe that’s the real crime. Imus’ ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker’s and Summitt’s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton’s, Stringer’s and Jackson’s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey?
None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good.
We can’t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s” is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.
We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton’s radio show and apologized. Imus didn’t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president’s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness.
Let it go and let God.
We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.
A man who doesn’t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him.
We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.
If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn’t act like it’s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That’s a (freaking) shame.
We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we’ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they’re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace.
It’s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They’ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.
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Stringer is reported to be writing a book.
Imus should get a big cut for all the attention he brought her and her team.
I wonder where he got that phrase from anyway. :wink:
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This is priceless. ROTFLMAO-- Marc
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EEOC Is Moving On; Fast Food and a Dicey Neighborhood Await
By Al Kamen
Friday, April 27, 2007; A21
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is in an uproar over a decision by Chair Naomi C. Earp to move its 500-employee headquarters from fine offices in downtown to a "developing" -- but not quite arrived -- area in desolate Northeast near the old Woodie's warehouse on New York Avenue.
At a hostile meeting yesterday to quell a growing rebellion, Earp told several hundred employees -- and others viewing on closed-circuit television -- that "the determining factor is price" in her decision and that employees "should not overreact to concerns about safety."
The agency has been at 18th and L streets NW since then-Chairman Clarence Thomas blocked Reagan administration efforts in 1989 to ship it to the suburbs. The downtown location also houses the Washington field office, which is where people go to file discrimination complaints.
But the current landlord didn't renew the lease, and Earp said she did not want to "pick a fight with" the General Services Administration over the location. So the employees -- mostly civil rights lawyers -- are out by July 2008.
Some employees surveyed the new neighborhood. They found, according to an e-mail Monday about their field trip, that across from the proposed headquarters there's a seven-acre empty lot with "lots of garbage, empty wine and liquor bottles, broken glass, and condoms ringing the perimeter of the (chain link) fence." The nearest business is a "dilapidated liquor store two blocks away."
There are also warehouses in the area and self-storage buildings and, across from the employee parking lot, another big vacant lot. There are a few small dilapidated buildings and a building under construction, the surveyors reported.
For lunch, instead of Luigi's, the Palm or several excellent Asian bistros near the current headquarters, there'll be only a McDonald's 3 1/2 blocks away and a Wendy's a block beyond that. For a change of pace, there's the upscale Chez Roi, also known as Roy Rogers, just four blocks away.
Some employees are disabled, opponents of the move note, and on dark winter evenings they would be especially vulnerable to criminals. The McDonald's parking lot, next door to the city's largest methadone clinic, was named in 2002 "as being one of the largest open-air drug markets in the region." "It is unclear whether this has improved," the employees said.
Still, the area is clearly changing. And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives headquarters is nearby, and those employees don't seem to be worried about crime.
"Give me a handgun and a bulletproof vest and an ATF windbreaker, and I wouldn't worry either," an unhappy EEOC official told us.
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Political Journal WSJ
Thought Crime
Finally, George W. Bush has found his veto sword.
After vetoing the Democratic supplemental budget, he has now threatened a veto of the Hate Crimes bill passed by the House last week. Constitutional scholars are rightly celebrating Mr. Bush's intervention.
Democrats passed the legislation to federalize hate crimes at the bidding of civil rights groups, feminists and gay rights activists. The bill amends the federal criminal code to prohibit willfully causing bodily injury to any person because of their race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.
The bill was inspired by detestable crimes like the murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard. But as Timothy Lynch, a legal expert at the Cato Institute, notes: "Every act of violence against a victim that would be protected by this new federal law is already a felony crime in every state in America. What's new here and inadvisable is the criminalization of the thought or motivation, not the deed itself."
The House bill creates a peculiar pecking order of victims, in which crimes against some groups in America are classified as more tolerable than crimes against others. As long as we're going down this road, some Republicans argued that Congress should at least make sure all definable groups receive hate crime protection -- not just those groups Democrats claim as their own voting blocs. Nonetheless, an amendment to protect members of the armed forces was defeated by the Democrats. An amendment to protect senior citizens was defeated, as was one to protect pregnant women. What about rich people? We know from the demented and hate-filled writings of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho that he loathed the wealthy.
For more than a decade the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been required to compile data on hate crimes. Curiously, although blacks are at least 30 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, blacks are three to five times more likely to be classified as victims of racially motivated crimes than whites. And the greatest hate motivated crime in America in decades, the 9/11 attacks, was somehow not classified as a hate crime. Perhaps too many of the thousands of victims were straight, white, men.
During one exchange in a Judiciary Committee markup, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas asked: "If a minister was giving a sermon, a Bible study or any kind of written or spoken message saying that homosexuality was a serious sin, and a person in the congregation went out and committed a crime against a homosexual, would the minister be protected from being charged with the crime of incitement?" Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama said "no." The Democrats voted down amendments protecting freedom of thought, religion, conscience and speech in America.
Mr. Gohmert notes that this legislation absurdly tells the criminal: "If you are going to shoot me, brutalize me or hurt me, please, please don't hate me. Make it a random, senseless act of violence."
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Boys on the Bus
A black school-bus driver lost her job "because she used the 'n-word' in front of a black student," the Des Moines Register reports:
Anita Anderson, 48, of Des Moines was fired two days after the incident on her bus. According to state records, Anderson was driving students from Monroe Elementary School when a boy became disruptive and belligerent.
Anderson testified at a state hearing on her request for unemployment benefits: "I kept asking him to sit down. And he kept on and on. He said he was going to bust me in my face."
After she told the boy he should not speak to her that way, Anderson muttered under her breath, she said.
"I was talking to myself," she testified. "I was driving, and I said the word. You know, the 'n-word.' But I wasn't talking to the student; I was just talking to myself."
Anderson testified that a girl behind her overheard the remark and told others on the bus. That prompted another outburst from the boy who had threatened her.
"That little boy kept saying, 'Oh, when we get to the bus stop my mom and dad is going to beat you down. Oh, we're going to bust you in your face,' " Anderson testified.
When she finished her route and returned to the bus garage, she was told that the student's mother had complained that the epithet was directed at her son.
There's no excuse for what Anderson said, and she said at an unemployment hearing that she regretted the remark:
"I just couldn't even explain to you how sorrowful I am that the word came out of my mouth," she said. "I'm a Christian. . . . I'm also an African American. I know how whites or Caucasians or different people perceive that word."
But the real question is, what are the authorities doing about the boy who repeatedly threatened a bus driver? Did his mother discipline him for his misconduct, and if not, why does she still have custody?
Opinion Journsl of the WSJ
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Michele Malkin lets fly on a black on white crime and asks why it hasn't made the news:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQ_iybMpZo
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Started to watch and then checked the link on the video:
Vanguard News Network - Virulently racist site
Their delightful logo:
No Jews. Just Right.
:x
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You post eludes me entirely SB Mig-- what are you talking about? :?
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I started watching the Malkin piece and about 2 seconds in an embedded icon appears on the lower right half of the youtube clip screen: www.govnn.com
Out of curiousity, I typed in the address and was directed to one of the more unappetizing websites I've come across in a while.
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Ugh. :x :x :x
No doubt they would have some choice things to say about Michele Malkin too , , ,
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-06-13jl.html
John Leo
Let the Segregation Commence
Separatist graduations proliferate at UCLA.
13 June 2007
Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later.
Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian–Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and Vietnamese commencements, and some talk of a Cambodian one in the future. Years ago, UCLA sponsored an Iranian graduation, but the school’s commencement office couldn’t tell me if the event was still around. The entire Middle East may yet be a fertile source for UCLA commencements.
Not all ethnic and racial graduations are well attended. The 2003 figures at UCLA showed that while 300 of 855 Hispanic students attended, only 170 out of 1,874 Asian-Americans did.
Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could attend the Asian, Filipino, and American Indian ceremonies, plus the mainstream graduation and the Lavender Graduation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students.
Graduates usually wear identity-group markers—a Filipino stole or a Vietnamese sash, for instance, or a rainbow tassel at the Lavender event. Promoters of ethnic and racial graduations often talk about the strong sense of community that they favor. But it is a sense of community based on blood, a dubious and historically dangerous organizing principle.
The organizers also sometimes argue that identity-group graduations make sense for practical reasons. They say that about 3,000 graduating seniors show up for UCLA’s “regular” graduation, making it a massive and impersonal event. At the more intimate identity-group events, foreign-born parents and relatives hear much of the ceremony in their native tongues. The Filipino event is so small—about 100 students— that each grad gets to speak for 30 seconds.
But the core reason for separatist graduations is the obvious one: on campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen arrive. Some schools have separate orientations for gays as well. Administrations tend to foster separatism by arguing that bias is everywhere, justifying double standards that favor identity groups.
Four years ago Ward Connerly, then a regent of the University of California, tried to pass a resolution to stop funding of ethnic graduations and gay freshman orientations. He changed his mind and asked to withdraw his proposal, but the regents wanted to vote on it and defeated it in committee 6–3.
No major objections to ethnic graduations have emerged since. As in so many areas of American life, the preposterous is now normal.
John Leo is the editor of the Manhattan Institute’s mindingthecampus.com.
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THEN AND NOW
WSJ
Racial Role Reversal
What the Scottsboro Boys and the Duke lacrosse players have in common.
BY JOHN STEELE GORDON
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman's limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.
The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South.
The two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.
On March 25, 1931, a group of nine young black men got into a fight with a group of whites while riding a freight train near Paint Rock, Ala. All but one of the whites were forced to jump off the train. But when it reached Paint Rock, the blacks were arrested. Two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were found on the train as well, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17. Unemployed mill workers, they both had worked as prostitutes in Huntsville. Apparently to avoid getting into trouble themselves, they told a tale of having been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks.
The blacks were taken to the jail in Scottsboro, the county seat. Because the circumstances of the women's story--black men attacking and raping white women--fit the prevailing racial paradigm of the local white population, guilt was assumed and the governor was forced to call out the National Guard to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the men on the spot. The nine were indicted on March 30 and, by the end of April, all had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death (except for the one who was 13 years old, who was sentenced to life in prison).
A year later, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of those on death row, except for one who was determined to be a juvenile. By this time, however, the "Scottsboro Boys" had become a national and even international story, with rallies taking place in many cities in the North. Thousands of letters poured into the Alabama courts and the governor's office demanding justice.
The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, provided competent legal help, and the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the defendants had not received adequate counsel. Samuel Leibowitz, a highly successful New York trial lawyer (he would later serve on the state's highest court) was hired to defend the accused in a second trial, held in Decatur, Ala. This turned out to be a tactical error, as Leibowitz was perceived by the local jury pool--all of them white, of course--as an outsider, a Jew and a communist (which he was not). Even though Ruby Bates repudiated her earlier testimony and said no rape had taken place, the accused were again convicted, this time the jury believing that Ruby Bates had been bribed to perjure herself.
Again the sentences were overturned, and in 1937--six years after the case began--four of the defendants had the charges dropped. One pleaded guilty to having assaulted the sheriff (and was sentenced to 20 years) and the other four were found guilty, once again, of rape. Eventually, as Jim Crow began to yield to the civil rights movement, they were paroled or pardoned, except for one who had escaped from prison and fled to Michigan. When he was caught in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to allow his extradition to Alabama.
It is now clear to everyone that the nine Scottsboro boys were guilty only of being black.
When the accuser in the Duke case charged rape, the district attorney--in the midst of a tough primary election--saw an opportunity to curry favor with Durham's black community and exploit the town-gown tension found in every college town. He ran with it, inflaming public opinion against the accused at every opportunity.
To be sure, there was no lynch mob, which happily is almost inconceivable today. But many Duke University students and faculty, and many members of the media (Nancy Grace of Court TV comes to mind), simply plugged the alleged circumstances into their racial paradigm--wealthy white college jocks partying and behaving badly with regard to a poor black woman--and pronounced the Duke boys guilty. Wanted posters went up on campus with pictures of the accused; 88 members of the faculty sponsored an ad in the college paper effectively supporting the posters; and the university president suspended two of the accused upon their indictment (the third had already graduated), cancelled the rest of the season for the lacrosse team, and forced the resignation of the team coach.
Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.
The district attorney won his election. But when the case fell apart and his almost grotesque malfeasance was exposed, he first resigned his office and ultimately was disbarred from the practice of law. Duke University has just settled with the three students it treated so shamefully for an undisclosed, but given the university's legal exposure, undoubtedly substantial sum. Meanwhile, the 88 members of the faculty have yet to apologize for a rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.
The country has come a long, long way in regard to race relations since 1931. But we have not yet reached the promised land where race is irrelevant. Far too many people are still being judged according to the color of their skin, not the content of their character, let alone the evidence.
Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).
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THE END IS NIFONG
by Ann Coulter
June 20, 2007
There is nothing so dangerous as a Southern liberal hoping to be invited to a Graydon Carter party.
As is now well-known, Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping a stripper, even as evidence piled up proving it never happened. In the weeks after an unstable stripper — or, since this is not a Hollywood movie, "a stripper" — accused the players of rape, Nifong stated on national TV: "I am convinced that there was a rape." He called the players "hooligans," contemptuously sneering that their "daddies could buy them expensive lawyers."
Envy is an emotion well-known for producing model behavior.
Revealing his own motives, Nifong said defense attorneys for the non-indicted players "were almost disappointed that their clients didn't get indicted so they could be a part of this spectacle here in Durham." Hello, Vanity Fair? Did you see where I talked about their "daddies"?
The Arianna Huffington of the legal profession might still have made his star turn at a Vanity Fair party, but for the fortuity of the defense lawyers discovering that he had tried to hide DNA evidence from the defendants, revealing that the stripper, Crystal Gail Mangum, had the DNA of four different men in or on her person, including the driver who took her to stripping gigs and enough other men to bring a class-action suit against her.
None of the DNA matched any Duke lacrosse players, who are starting to look like the only adult males in the Durham area who haven't had sex with Mangum.
Nifong has tried to portray himself as simply making "mistakes." This is absurd. Not even a half-wit like Nifong could have believed "something happened in that bathroom," as he said during his disbarment hearing last weekend. He was willing to send three innocent men to prison to improve his electoral viability in a heavily black district and to become a liberal hero in Manhattan salons.
Admittedly, Nifong studiously refused to take a peek at the evidence. On March 29, 2006, he told reporters he knew a rape had occurred based on — I quote — "my reading of the report of the emergency-room nurse." That report was not given to the police until April 5, 2006, making it the equivalent of the forged Nigerian letter Joe Wilson claims to have debunked eight months before it surfaced at the CIA.
But there were some facts even Nifong couldn't have missed.
He knew, for example, that the cab driver who picked up accused "rapist" Reade Seligmann had signed a sworn statement attesting to the fact that the accused was in his cab when the rape was allegedly taking place.
We know Nifong's office knew about the cab driver because the police soon picked him up on a 3-year-old shoplifting charge. The cabdriver claims that when the police came to arrest him, they asked "if I had anything new to say about the lacrosse case." When he said no, they arrested him. He was tried on the 3-year-old case and acquitted.
Nifong also knew that the second "exotic dancer" at the party called the rape allegation a "crock" and said she had been separated from Mangum for no more than five minutes all night. In other words, another stripper knew Mangum wasn't credible, but Nifong based his entire case on her — or rather on one version of her multiple stories.
We know Nifong knew about the second stripper's statement because his office was soon offering her favorable bail treatment for violating probation. She took the deal — and suddenly decided it was possible a rape had occurred.
Mangum had made similar accusations of gang rape 10 years earlier, but her own father denied it had happened and no charges were ever brought. We know Nifong knew about Mangum's prior false accusation because when he was asked about it, he responded: "All the facts are not yet known, and many of the so-called 'facts' that have been reported and commented on are simply wrong." As we now know, the only "wrong" facts circulating in the press were the ones Nifong had put there.
Nifong knew that Mangum made Tawana Brawley look like Billy Graham: She kept changing her story, altering the number of men who raped her, and was unable to identify her attackers.
Except one. Mangum confidently and repeatedly identified only one lacrosse player as one of her rapists: Brad Ross. Nifong knew this because Brad Ross promptly gave the police proof that he was at North Carolina State University with his girlfriend the night of the party.
This investigation wasn't a mistake — it was malice.
The media love to drone on about the explosive combination of "race and sex" — and they'll wait forever for a single non-hoax case to prove it! In fact, the truly explosive combination is "liberal" and "mediocrity."
Half-bright liberals think Hollywood fantasies are real life. And in Hollywood, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are never fabulously rich and successful. Conservative Christians like Tom DeLay are never savvy, influential congressmen. And handsome boys from good families are never nice.
Nifong was supposed to look like Gregory Peck — not like Bob Wexler! But it's the lacrosse players who look like Gregory Peck.
Second-rate liberals who went to mediocre schools and married mediocre women are burning with jealousy from their nondescript, mediocre jobs. So they use their government jobs to attack their betters and sneer about the players' "daddies."
Like so much injustice in America, this whole sick spectacle was the revenge of the mediocre against the successful. Stupid and envious is a bad combo platter.
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NY Times
The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
By DAVID MARGOLICK
Published: September 23, 2007
FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.
On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald.
Shortly before Mr. Armstrong’s concert, Mr. Lubenow’s editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview. Perhaps sensing trouble — Mr. Lubenow was, he now says, a “rabble-rouser and liberal” — his boss laid out the ground rules: “No politics,” he ordered. That hardly seemed necessary, for Mr. Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. “I don’t get involved in politics,” he once said. “I just blow my horn.”
But Mr. Lubenow was thinking about other things, race relations among them. The bell captain, with whom he was friendly, had told him that Mr. Armstrong was quietly making history in Grand Forks, as he had done innumerable times and ways before, by becoming the first black man ever to stay at what was then the best hotel in town. Mr. Lubenow knew, too, that Grand Forks had its own link to Little Rock: it was the hometown of Judge Ronald Davies, who’d just ordered that the desegregation plan in Little Rock proceed after Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and a band of local segregationists tried to block it.
As Mr. Armstrong prepared to play that night — oddly enough, at Grand Forks’s own Central High School — members of the Arkansas National Guard ringed the school in Little Rock, ordered to keep the black students out. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s meeting with Governor Faubus three days earlier in Newport, R.I., had ended inconclusively. Central High School was open, but the black children stayed home.
Mr. Lubenow was first told he couldn’t talk to Mr. Armstrong until after the concert. That wouldn’t do. With the connivance of the bell captain, he snuck into Mr. Armstrong’s suite with a room service lobster dinner. And Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow stuck initially to his editor’s script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.
Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.
Mr. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. “They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with happy music,” he had said. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?”
Mr. Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to get it in his own paper; nor would the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Mr. Armstrong could have said such things, put it on the national wire, at least until Mr. Lubenow could prove he hadn’t made it all up. So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he’d written. “Don’t take nothing out of that story,” Mr. Armstrong declared. “That’s just what I said, and still say.” He then wrote “solid” on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.
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Page 2 of 2)
The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said. A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of Mr. Armstrong’s records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.
Mostly, there was surprise, especially among blacks. Secretary Dulles might just as well have stood up at the United Nations and led a chorus of the Russian national anthem, declared Jet magazine, which once called Mr. Armstrong an “Uncle Tom.” Mr. Armstrong had long tried to convince people throughout the world that “the Negro’s lot in America is a happy one,” it observed, but in one bold stroke he’d pulled nearly 15 million American blacks to his bosom. Any white confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong, The Amsterdam News declared. Mr. Armstrong’s words had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb,” said The Chicago Defender. “He may not have been grammatical, but he was eloquent.”
His road manager quickly put out that Mr. Armstrong had been tricked, and regretted his statements, but Mr. Armstrong would have none of that. “I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,” he said the following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with “The Star-Spangled Banner” — this time, minus the obscenities.
Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness. There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van Cliburn’s manager refused to let him perform a duet with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen’s talk show.
But it didn’t really matter. On Sept. 24, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High School. Mr. Armstrong exulted. “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy,” he wired the president. “God bless you.” As for Mr. Lubenow, who now works in public relations in Cedar Park, Tex., he got $3.50 for writing the story and, perhaps, for changing history. But his editor was miffed — he’d gotten into politics, after all. Within a week, he left the paper.
Page 2 of 2)
The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said. A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of Mr. Armstrong’s records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.
Mostly, there was surprise, especially among blacks. Secretary Dulles might just as well have stood up at the United Nations and led a chorus of the Russian national anthem, declared Jet magazine, which once called Mr. Armstrong an “Uncle Tom.” Mr. Armstrong had long tried to convince people throughout the world that “the Negro’s lot in America is a happy one,” it observed, but in one bold stroke he’d pulled nearly 15 million American blacks to his bosom. Any white confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong, The Amsterdam News declared. Mr. Armstrong’s words had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb,” said The Chicago Defender. “He may not have been grammatical, but he was eloquent.”
His road manager quickly put out that Mr. Armstrong had been tricked, and regretted his statements, but Mr. Armstrong would have none of that. “I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,” he said the following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with “The Star-Spangled Banner” — this time, minus the obscenities.
Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness. There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van Cliburn’s manager refused to let him perform a duet with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen’s talk show.
But it didn’t really matter. On Sept. 24, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High School. Mr. Armstrong exulted. “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy,” he wired the president. “God bless you.” As for Mr. Lubenow, who now works in public relations in Cedar Park, Tex., he got $3.50 for writing the story and, perhaps, for changing history. But his editor was miffed — he’d gotten into politics, after all. Within a week, he left the paper.
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The Legacy of Little Rock
By SHELBY STEELE
September 25, 2007; Page A19
Fifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed -- in a single day -- 1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas's capital city.
Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas complains about President Eisenhower's use of federal troops to enforce integration in Little Rock, September 1957.
For weeks the entire nation had watched on television as a mob of angry white adults gathered each morning to prevent the nine black students from integrating Central High. It would come to be remembered as one of the ugliest and meanest white mobs of the entire civil rights era. And because of television -- then still a very new medium -- the horrible images of people galvanized by ferocious racial hatred were seared into the national consciousness.
Finally, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus succumbed to a kind of madness, if not to a perverse politics of racial hatred, and withdrew the National Guard from Central High, effectively turning the school over to the raging mob. The nine courageous black students, who had suffered so much to integrate the school, were withdrawn for their own protection. So, for a time, the authority of the mob prevailed over all governmental authority -- local, state and federal. And this was the provocation that pushed a reluctant President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops.
On this 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's troop deployment, the significance of the Little Rock crisis -- its place in history -- is much clearer. I believe it was the beginning of a profoundly different America.
For one thing, it foreshadowed the end of white supremacy as a legitimate authority. The Little Rock crisis was a conflict between two ideas of authority that had always been in tension in American life. The authority behind the Little Rock Nine came from that constellation of principles that define the American democracy -- the idea of individual rights, equality under the law and so on. But in America another authority had always been in play -- the atavistic authority of white supremacy, the idea that no less a power than God had chosen the white race to be ascendant over all other races. This was the authority behind the white mob in Little Rock. In taunting those nine black students, this mob was protecting a "divine right" against the ridiculous democratic notion that all men were created equal.
But the mob lost in Little Rock. Eisenhower enforced democratic authority over white supremacy. He made the point that these two authorities could no longer pretend to coexist in the public schools of even a Southern city. In this way the Little Rock crisis joined black Americans to a world-wide movement. The Mau Maus viciously fought this same nemesis in Kenya, Gandhi peacefully fought it in India, and the very first terrorist bombers fought it in Algeria. But in Little Rock the American government, overcoming two centuries of equivocation, broke off from white supremacy and took up the cause of black revolutionaries -- and so administered white entitlement a decisive defeat.
But the deeper historical importance of the Little Rock crisis follows from the simple fact that it was televised. It was, in fact, the first time that this still fledgling medium was able to make America into a community by rendering up a riveting real-life drama for the country to watch. Compelling personalities emerged, like the despicable and erratic Gov. Faubus, who kept flaunting federal authority like a little potentate. There was Eisenhower himself, whose grandfatherly patience with Faubus seemed to belie a sympathy with this racist's need to hold on to a fading authority. And there was the daily gauntlet that the black students were made to walk -- innocence face to face with evil. And, finally, there was great suspense. How would it all end? Would there by a military clash, another little civil war between North and South?
So Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Everyday for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative -- that they were not racist -- in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.
Of course, it was the special genius of the civil rights leaders of that era to elicit displays of white evil by confronting whites with black innocence -- often children and teenagers, neatly dressed and scrupulously groomed, aspiring only to what all humans aspire to, a decent education or the right to eat at a lunch counter. Still, these leaders couldn't elicit what wasn't there. White evil was there. And the greatest significance of the Little Rock crisis was that it put on display a distinct white moral inferiority.
This introduced a new accountability into white American life. Americans had always thought themselves a great people -- more solidly grounded in the morality of fairness than any other people. Moreover, it was Western culture that had evolved the kind of moral system that made Little Rock look so evil. But, in the end, all this meant was that the good citizens of Little Rock should have known better. Evil was evil. And, after Little Rock, white America began to become accountable for its racial evil.
But Americans have not been particularly good at integrating this kind of accountability. We are a nation with a powerful investment in the idea of our own fundamental innocence. Our can-do optimism and ingenuity are based on the faith that we are a decent, open, and generous people. This is our identity. And when we shame ourselves, as in Little Rock, there is an impulse to get busy; to do something big that redeems the shame and proves that its implications about us are false. This is, of course, a form of denial. In our busyness we may dissociate from the shame, but this is no proof that we have integrated its meaning.
For the most part, this is how white America came to handle its new accountability in the civil rights era. The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement. If freedom and opportunity and wealth had always been the special mandates of American life, suddenly redemption was added to the list. And, as the civil rights movement worked its way through many more Little Rocks, as a movement for women's equality burst forth, and as the Vietnam War came to be held against America, the idea of American evil expanded and, thus, redemption became more and more entrenched as a national mandate.
By the mid 1960s this mandate had already given us a new illiberal liberalism -- a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom. The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation. And today's "diversity" will fail because it, too, is only a denial -- a kitsch that gives us an image of an America shorn of Little Rocks.
But on this 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, it is important to remember that this evil did happen in America, and that no engineered redemption can make us innocent again. And we might also remember that it is better to be chastened than innocent. Innocents don't learn from their sins; the chastened are informed by them.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2006).
WSJ
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Choosing the category of race, culture and humanities for a follow up on crime in America's cities as unearthed in the Wisconsin self defense case from Milwaukee. I speculate that the aggressors and the victim in this case are black because the bad neighborhoods of Milwaukee are primarily black and because race is not covered in the story. If true, it means this tragic, concealed carry story is also about black on black crime. I would be thrilled to be corrected on that, but the major media has a ban on publishing race 'when it isn't part of the story'.
Illegalized self-defense was one factor. Another is our social system of bad incentives. Welfare payments cause dependency and perpetuate unproductive lifestyles. It's still happening today, a decade after 'welfare reform'. The dependency cycle hits blacks disproportionately, and crime is rampant in areas of unproductive density.
Wisconsin was a leader in welfare reform, but they only reformed one type of payment while dozens/hundreds of other federal, state and local programs continued to increase and perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Free health care, food stamps, and section 8 housing are enormous examples, while the payroll tax chops off a huge chunk of the incentive from those on the edge of becoming contributing members, making the jump even less attractive.
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This piece from today's WSJ addresses extremely inflammatory material.
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Intelligence Failure
"In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice" reads the headline on an article in yesterday's New York Times. The Times reports that some people are fretting about the implications of new discoveries about genetic differences between races:
The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal. . . .
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means "the egalitarian theory," that all races are equal, "is proven false."
Note that "the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal" is quite different from the notion "that all races are equal." The former is a moral principle, a premise about the basic dignity of every individual; the latter is an empirical presumption about group averages in measurable traits. Someone with an IQ of 80 is as human as someone with an IQ of 120; and this is so regardless of whether the average IQ of one race is different from that of another.
What worries people like those in the Times story is that racial differences in IQ or other traits seem to lend empirical support to racist theories. But those theories are qualitatively wrong, so that no empirical evidence could make them right. If all individuals are of equal dignity and worth regardless of IQ, then a group is not fundamentally superior or inferior to another group by virtue of differences in average IQ.
It seems that some very smart people mistakenly think that intelligence is a measure of fundamental worth. Maybe they're a little too impressed with their own brilliance.
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http://www.azcentral.com/12news/news/articles/racism112707-CR.html
9-year old suspended for 'hate crime'
Robert Anglen
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 27, 2007 03:05 PM
A Glendale elementary school principal has admitted to telling a 9-year old boy that it is OK to have racist feelings as long as you keep them to yourself.
“As we said to (the boy) when he was in here, in your heart you may have that feeling, and that is OK if that is your personal belief,” Abraham Lincoln Traditional School Principal Virginia Voinovich said in a tape-recorded parent-teacher conference.
The boy was suspended for three days this month for allegedly committing a “hate crime” by using the expression “brown people.” advertisement
In an interview Monday, Voinovich would not address her comments, first saying she didn't remember the incident, then demanding a copy of the recording and finally insisting that she could not talk about a student's discipline.
The circumstances of the boy’s suspension itself raise troubling questions about student discipline, interrogation and oversight at Abraham Lincoln.
According to school officials, the boy made a statement about “brown people” to another elementary student with whom he was having a conflict. They maintain it was his second offense using the phrase.
But the tape recording indicates this only came out after another parent was allowed to question the boy and elicited from him the statement that he “doesn't cooperate with brown people.”
After that was reported to the boy's teacher, he was made to stand in front of his class and publicly confess what he'd said.
The boy maintains that he never said it; that the words were put in his mouth by the parent who questioned him. That parent happens to be the mother of the student with whom he is having a conflict—and she happens to work for Abraham Lincoln as a detention-room officer.
The tape indicates that rather than just spouting off with racial invective, the boy was asked first why he didn't want to cooperate with brown people by the parent/school official.
In court, this might be called entrapment. Not to mention a conflict of interest.
Officials at the Washington Elementary School District, who are supposed to oversee Voinovich, wouldn't comment about the boy’s suspension. They said only the principal is qualified to talk about it.
Well, the boy’s mother is talking, and she is angry. She has also removed her son from the school.
“I want parents to know … that principals can abuse their powers,” Sherry Neve, 35, said. “Principals need to have pro-active supervisors. I want the parents to know that the principal was influencing my son in a way I wouldn't want him to be raised.”
Neve said school officials didn’t advise her of the incident until several days after they questioned her son. When Neve objected to the suspension during the conference, Voinovich told her that she didn't have any rights; that parents give up their rights to discipline when they send a child to school, the tape shows.
“If you don't want that, you can take him out of here,” Voinovich said tersely.
Neve insists that her son is not a racist and that he never differentiated a person's color until the school made it in an issue.
“We were raised to be color blind,” she said. “My children were raised the same way.”
But let's assume for a minute that the boy actually made the comment. Does this make him a racist and guilty of a hate crime? Or does it make him a confused 9-year-old in need of counseling?
Instead of taking an opportunity to educate the boy and get to the root of the problem, the principal taught him another lesson altogether: It's OK to feel like a racist as long as you keep your feelings to yourself.
Kids often say the darndest things. Apparently, so do principals.
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell
None of the Above
What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
by Malcolm Gladwell December 17, 2007
If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?
One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better.Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.
Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.
For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the word “moron.” “The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places,” he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.” To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.
This is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when he told an English newspaper recently that he was “inherently gloomy” about the prospects for Africa. From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability. In the controversy that followed, Watson was defended by the journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion. To erase the difference between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote, would probably require vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind of corrective genetic engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. “Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.
The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a “crisis of confidence,” Flynn writes in “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22), his latest attempt to puzzle through the implications of his discovery. “How could such huge gains be intelligence gains? Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q. tests were not good measures of intelligence.”
The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”
“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”
The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: “abstract.” Abstract could mean something like “whatever it was that was going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles back.” That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult, but it wasn’t: it merely required that we ask a slightly different set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions, and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone’s mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an abstraction, “the Unknown Soldier”—which allowed him legitimately and gleefully to answer “I have no idea” to almost every question. There were four of us playing. We gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father was teaching his three sons how to put on scientific spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let’s be clear about what this means. There’s a world of difference between an I.Q. advantage that’s genetic and one that depends on extended car time with Graham Gladwell.
Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in the I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again and again to the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil tests—and making sense of those scores, he tells us, is a messy and complicated business that requires something closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a philosopher.
For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them. The original WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as the WISC IV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.
This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to diagnose people as mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally taken to be the cutoff. You can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with that system. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But since kids—even kids with disabilities—score a little higher every year, the number of children whose scores fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the eighties. Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the percentage of kids labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya, Matthew Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of Americans labelled mentally retarded should have doubled.
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That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental disability is one of the most stigmatizing of all educational and occupational classifications—and yet, apparently, the chances of being burdened with that label are in no small degree a function of the point, in the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to sit for his evaluation. “As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”
Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.
Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.
The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis, Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.
There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else’s—coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles. “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse,” Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and effects. “It is not easy to view the history of their achievements without emotion,” he writes. That is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it.
Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend stalled—and the question was why.
Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.
Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.
That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly the kind of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.
Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in. ♦
CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.
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In response to the preceding post elsewhere, someone responded with this piece:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/report...g.html#Cochran
Overclocking
Gregory Cochran
There is a good chance that an odd cluster of hereditary neurological diseases among the Ashkenazi Jews is a side-effect of strong selection for increased intelligence. The idea is not really new, but the evidence has gotten stronger with time, and I have recently found some intriguing supporting data.. Four of these syndromes - Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher's, and mucolipidosis type IV - are recessive lysosomal storage diseases. The first three of these are caused by deficient variants of enzymes that break down sphingolipids, which play a role in neuron membrane structure and also as signaling molecules. Homozygotes, who have no working copy of the breakdown enzymes, become ill. Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick cause retardation and death in childhood, but Gaucher's disease is milder and more variable. The form common in Ashkenazi Jews does not cause brain damage, although there can be other problems with the spleen and bones. . Mucolipidosis type IV probably involves a defect in endocytosis. It causes retardation and death in early life.
Canavan disease is caused by mutations in the aspartoacylase gene. It is the only known genetic disorder caused by a defect in the metabolism of a small metabolite, N-acetyl-L-aspartic acid, synthesized exclusively in the brain in a cell-specific manner. It too is fatal in early life.
Familial dysautonomia is a recessive disease that results in abnormalities of the sensory and autonomic nervous systems. It does not cause retardation, but greatly shortens life.
Torsion dystonia is caused by a dominant gene with low penetrance.. The symptoms involve inappropriate contractions of muscles. In a mild case, that might mean a tendency to writer's cramp: in a severe case, it means uncontrollable contractions that leave your limbs twisted and useless. About 30% of the individuals with this gene have some noticeable symptoms, about 10% have very serious symptoms that can leave them in a wheel chair. The problem is not in the muscles, but in areas of the brain that control muscles. Torsion dystonia does not cause retardation... not hardly.
Each of these hereditary neurological diseases is more common among the Ashkenazi than in any other group, and in several of these syndromes, the great majority of all cases are found among the Ashkenazi, who make up less than 0.2% of the human race. ~4% of the Ashkenazi are carriers for Tay-Sachs, about 1% are carriers for Niemann-Pick, ~5% carry a Gaucher mutation, ~1% carry a mutation for mucolipidosis type IV, ~2% carry a Canavan mutation, ~3% carry the familial dysautonomia gene, and about 0.03% have the dominant torsion dystonia mutation. Altogether about 16% of Ashkenazi Jews carry one of these mutations.
Rare genetic diseases can become common in a group by chance, especially if that group does not mix much with others and if it has recently expanded from a small founding population.. Both of those conditions existed among the Ashkenazi, but that explanation probably does not work in this case, because for most of these diseases, more than one mutation of the same gene has become common in this population. That is the case for Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher's disease, mucolipidosis type IV, and Canavan disease. Only torsion dystonia and familial dysautonomia are caused by lone mutations. It would be incredibly unlikely for chance to greatly elevate the frequency of two or more mutations of the same gene. It would be even less likely to do this repeatedly in genes involved in closely related metabolic pathways. So somehow, natural selection, rather than chance, must have favored these mutations. If mutations that affect a particular organ or function give a reproductive edge in some environment, they can become common, even if they cause disease in double dose. The most famous example of this is the sickle cell mutation, which gives heterozygotes good protection against falciparum malaria and causes very serious problems in homozygotes. We know of a number of other malaria-protective mutations besides sickle-cell affecting red cells; Hemoglobin C, Hemoglobin E, G6PD deficiency, alpha- and beta- thalassemia, and Melanesian ovalocytosis. The malaria resistance mutations involve multiple common mutations of the same gene, and multiple mutations of closely related genes that affect the same physiological system - in this case the red cell. Among the Ashkenazi we find the same pattern, only the system affected is the central nervous system. Jared Diamond and others have suggested that these Ashkenazi hereditary neurological diseases might have given protection against tuberculosis, but this seems unlikely. These mutations are not common in other adjacent ethnic groups, and they modify molecules whose primary function is in the central nervous system. In some cases, such as Canavan disease, they are only found in the brain.
So a change in brain function, as the source of the fitness advantage in heterozygotes carrying these mutations, is the way to bet. That notion is not just based on this genetic and biochemical evidence: we start out already knowing that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than any other group, something like 110-115. What, other than natural selection, could cause this? We also know that for a long time they lived under very unusual conditions, conditions very favorable to this kind of evolutionary change. They had a very different job mix from their neighbors: none of them were farmers ('Scribe, banker, jeweler, shopkeeper'), and they almost never intermarried.
Some new evidence - new to me, anyhow - strengthens the case. It turns out that GM2-ganglioside, which accumulates in Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick patients, is a signal for dendrite growth. In homozygotes it causes inappropriate dendrite growth neurons. In heterozygotes, GM2-ganglioside levels would only be slightly elevated and might favor moderately increased dendrite growth - which might increase IQ. The build-up product in Gaucher's disease seems to caused increased axonal growth.
The story in torsion dystonia is more obvious Unlike most genetic diseases, it is dominant. You only need one copy of the mutant gene to have problems. That also means that any benefit must be large. When a recessive mutation is rare, there are many more carriers than homozygotes, and even a small advantage among heterozygotes can balance serious bad effects in the rare homozygtes. A dominant has to give a hefty advantage, even more so if it has any costs, which the torsion dystonia gene surely does. So if torsion dystonia is part of this Ashkenazi pattern of hereditary neurological disease and pays off in IQ, it must make a big difference, and that difference will probably show up in patients. ( Note that in diseases like Tay-Sachs, nobody even studies carriers. Doctors are not geneticists.) Apparently it does. I found several reports of materially increased IQ among Ashkenazi torsion dystonia patients. . The difference is apparently so striking that it is mentioned in the very first scientific article on the disease, by Flatau back in 1911. Many other physicians made the same observation. And if you think that plenty that being crippled makes you smarter, think again: nobody every said that about polio victims. Roswell Eldridge, in a small group of patients, found that the average IQ was 122, 10 points higher than their controls matched for age, sex, ethnic background, and school. . The same mutation has been seen elsewhere, but is very rare. In this group the payoff outweighed the trouble, while in every other human group it did not. We have found the gene (in 1997), which codes for an ATP-binding protein, but as yet I don't believe that we know exactly how it causes trouble or what it does normally. But I'll hazard a guess: the change accelerates some brain system tied to cognitive functioning - nearly redlines it, leaves it vulnerable to common insults in a way that can cause spectacular trouble. You might compare to overclocking a chip. Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don't.
More generally, if this is what I think it is, all these Ashkenazi neurological diseases are hints of ways in which one could supercharge intelligence. One, by increasing dendrite growth: two, by fooling with myelin: three, something else, whatever is happening in torsion dystonia. In some cases the difference is probably an aspect of development, not something you can turn on and off. In other cases, the effect might exist when the chemical influence is acting and disappear when the influence does. In either case, it seems likely that we could - if we wanted to - developed pharmaceutical agents that had similar effects. The first kind, those affecting development, would be something that might have to be administered early in life, maybe before birth. while the second kind would be 'smart pills' that one could pop as desired or as needed. Of course, we have to hope that we can find ways of improving safety. Would you take a pill that increased your IQ by 10 or 15 points that also had a 10% chance of putting you in a wheel chair?
Gregory Cochran
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Some interesting history in this piece:
Mrs. Clinton Smears Ike
How desperate is Hillary Clinton in the face of the Obama juggernaut? So desperate that she is smearing a genuine war hero. And we seem to be the first to notice it.
The Politico's Ben Smith set off a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday when he noted that Mrs. Clinton, in an interview with Fox News's Major Garrett, seemed to be likening front-runner Barack Obama to Martin Luther King, and not in a good way:
[Mrs.] Clinton rejoined the running argument over hope and "false hope" in an interview in Dover this afternoon, reminding Fox's Major Garrett that while Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on behalf of civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson was the one who got the legislation passed. . . .
"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done."
Josh Marshall weighed in with a halfhearted defense of Mrs. Clinton. He quotes her at length:
"I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."
"It's an ambiguous statement," Marshall allows. "But her reference is to different presidents--Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, one of whom inspired but did relatively little legislatively and Johnson who did a lot legislatively, though he was rather less than inspiring. Quite apart from the merits of Obama and Clinton, it's not a bad point about Kennedy and LBJ."
Smith then defended his interpretation. What both of them missed was that passing mention about the Civil Rights Act being something "the president before had not even tried." In context, it is clear that this is a reference to the president before Kennedy--that is, Dwight Eisenhower--not to Kennedy himself, who did in fact propose civil rights legislation in 1963 but died before Congress could pass it.
This, however, is a smear against Ike, who was a much better civil-rights president than he typically gets credit for. As Bruce Bartlett explains in "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore):
In his January 10, 1957, State of the Union Address, Eisenhower renewed his request for civil rights legislation, which had passed the House but died in the Senate in the previous Congress due to Southern Democratic delaying tactics. . . .
Everyone knew that the critical fight on the civil rights bill would be in the Senate. . . . In that body, the key figure was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who represented the [former] Confederate state of Texas and had been installed in his position by Southern Democrats precisely in order to block civil rights legislation. Until the 1950s, Johnson's record of opposition to all civil rights legislation was spotless. But he was ambitious and wanted to be president. . . .
After dragging his feet on the civil rights bill throughout much of 1957, Johnson finally came to the conclusion that the tide had turned in favor of civil rights and he needed to be on the right side of the issue if he hoped to become president. . . .
At the same time, the Senate's master tactician and principal opponent of the civil rights bill, Democrat Richard B. Russell of Georgia, saw the same handwriting on the wall but came to a different conclusion. He realized that the support was no longer there for an old-fashioned Democrat filibuster. . . . So Russell adopted a different strategy this time of trying to amend the civil rights bill so as to minimize its impact. Behind the scenes, Johnson went along with Russell's strategy of not killing the civil rights bill, but trying to neuter it as much as possible. . . .
Eisenhower was disappointed at not being able to produce a better piece of legislation. "I wanted a much stronger civil rights bill in '57 than I could get," he later lamented. "But the Democrats . . . wouldn't let me have it."
Liberals criticized Eisenhower for getting such a modest bill at the end of the day. But Johnson argued that it was historically important because it was the first civil rights bill to pass Congress since 1875. "Once you break virginity," he said, "it'll be easier next time."
To put it mildly, LBJ was not a consistent advocate of racial equality. Bartlett (both in his book and in this article) quotes LBJ's explanation of why he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957:
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."
You can see where Mrs. Clinton, with her finger-to-the-wind approach to some of today's most pressing issues, might feel a certain kinship with LBJ. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that LBJ's presidency was a necessary condition for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. If Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, had won the 1960 election and LBJ had remained in the Senate as majority leader, it's easy to imagine the latter--with an eye toward the presidency in 1964 or '68--shepherding the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and the former signing it.
LBJ was, after all, a very effective legislator. Can the same be said of New York's junior senator? Oddly, Mrs. Clinton has chosen to compare herself to a deeply flawed president. Odder still, the comparison ends up underscoring her failure to measure up.
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The Color of Charity
February 4, 2008; Page A14
Just when we thought we'd heard everything from the diversity police, here they come trying to prescribe even the color of charity. The California Assembly last week passed a bill sponsored by state Representative Joe Coto to require foundations with assets of more than $250 million to disclose the race, gender and sexual orientation of their trustees, staff, and even grantees. Look for this to arrive in a legislature near you.
A Berkeley-based advocacy group called the Greenlining Institute hatched this idea because, allegedly, racial minorities aren't well enough represented in California policy debates. John Gamboa, Greenlining's executive director, blames foundations for failing to donate enough money to "minority-led" think tanks and community groups and businesses, and he hopes this legislation will "shame" them into giving more. What counts as a minority-led organization? According to Greenlining, the board and staff should both be more than 50% minority.
This certainly takes the spoils system of racial preferences to a whole new level. Heretofore the government has tried to enforce a pigmentation principle in government jobs and contracts, and in private employment through the threat of lawsuits. But this is about telling private citizens how to give their own money away.
Mr. Gamboa says these philanthropies have tax-exempt status, so the public has a right to this information. "Minorities are paying a little more in taxes but are not receiving their fair share of benefits," he says. This seems an odd claim, since so much private charity is targeted explicitly at minorities. But it makes sense once you understand that what he means is that not enough of this cash is channelled through certain minority-run activist groups, such as, well, his own. It's no accident that such ethnic lobbies as the Black Business Association and the Centro Legal de la Raza also love this idea.
There's also the little problem of accountability and donor intent. Private citizens typically establish foundations with specific charitable goals in mind -- such as wetlands conservation, or medical research, or even promoting free market ideas. If donors are suddenly supposed to allocate grants by the color or sexual lifestyle of the grantee, that donor intent will be distorted at the very least. Presumably we want money for cancer research to support the most promising research ideas, not to be based on whether the labs have a rainbow coalition of Ph.Ds. The goal is to cure cancer.
Paul Brest is a former NAACP attorney and president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, California's largest foundation. And in a letter to the state Assembly on Mr. Coto's proposal, he put it this way: "[Our] fundamental operating principle is to direct our resources to organizations that have the promise of making the greatest difference in achieving [our philanthropic] goals. Thus, we do not focus on the racial composition of our grantees, but rather on how to achieve measurable impact in improving the lives of the communities that our grant recipients serve."
Lest you think this idea is too wacky to go anywhere, it is also expected to pass the California Senate and could soon land on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk. The Greenlining staff is already lobbying House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel for Congressional hearings. Foundations and charities that don't want to start apportioning their donations by skin color, or between gays and heterosexuals, had better start describing this idea as the political shakedown it is.
WSJ
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Republicans And Blacks
By Thomas Sowell
April 10, 2008
If Senator John McCain needed to prove that he is a real Republican, he did it when he continued an old Republican tradition of utterly inept attempts to appeal to black voters.
Senator McCain was booed at a recent memorial on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In typical Republican fashion, he tried to apologize but the audience was not buying it and let him know it.
Why would Senator McCain choose a venue where his rejection was virtually guaranteed? Not only did he not get his message out, the message that came out through the media is that this black audience rejected him, which is readily portrayed as if blacks in general rejected him.
The Republican strategy for making inroads into the black vote has failed consistently for more than a quarter of a century. Yet it never seems to occur to them to change their approach.
The first thing that they do that is foredoomed to failure is trying to reach blacks through the civil rights organizations and other institutions of the black establishment. The second proven loser is trying to appeal to blacks by offering the same kinds of things that Democrats offer-- token honors, politically correct rhetoric and welfare state benefits.
Blacks who want those things know that they can already get them from the Democrats. Why should they listen to Republicans who act like imitation Democrats?'
These are not the blacks whose votes Republicans have any realistic hope of getting. Nor do the Republicans need the votes of all blacks. If just 20 percent of blacks begin voting Republican, the Democrats are lost.
The question then is how to have a shot at getting the votes of those blacks who are not in thrall to the current black "leaders" and who on many issues may be conservative.
First of all, you don't get their votes by approaching them from the left, when that is neither their orientation nor yours. Issuing stamps honoring Paul Robeson and Kwanzaa are not the way to reach those blacks whom Republicans have any realistic chance of reaching.
Trying to reach blacks through civil rights organizations that are totally hostile to your message is like a quarterback trying to throw a pass to a receiver surrounded by opposing defenders. That just leads to a lot of interceptions and touchdowns for the other team.
That is essentially what has been happening to the Republicans, as far as the black vote is concerned, for decades on end. Someone once said that a method which fails repeatedly may possibly be wrong.
The truth is something that can attract people's attention, if only for its novelty in politics. There is no need for Republicans to try to pose as saviors of blacks. Democrats do that and they have more experience doing it.
A sober presentation of the facts-- "straight talk," if you will-- gives Senator McCain and Republicans their best shot at a larger share of the votes of blacks. There is plenty to talk straight about, including all the things that the Democrats are committed to that work to the disadvantage of blacks, beginning with Democrats' adamant support of teachers' unions in their opposition to parental choice through vouchers.
>> Continued -- Page 1 2
The teachers' unions are just one of the sacred cow constituencies of the Democratic Party whose agendas are very harmful to blacks.
Black voters also need to be told about the tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists' severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.
The black population of San Francisco, for example, has been cut in half since 1970-- and San Francisco is the very model of a community of liberal Democrats, including green zealots who are heedless of the consequences of their actions on others.
Then there are the effects of tort lawyers in raising prices, liberal judges turning criminals loose and other influential Democratic Party constituencies whose effects on blacks are strictly negative.
Where should these and other messages be delivered to blacks, if not through the existing black organizations?
That message can be delivered as part of televised speeches addressing other major issues facing the country. It can be delivered as part of advertisements in the general media and separately in advertisements in newspapers, magazines and television programs with a black audience.
Logistics are not the problem. Insistence on following a repeatedly failed game plan is.
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Fair Enough?
Barack Obama's Rise Has Americans Debating
Whether Affirmative Action Has Run Its Course
By JONATHAN KAUFMAN
June 14, 2008
WARREN, Mich. -- Stan Sheyn, a white student who attends community college in this working-class Detroit suburb, supports Barack Obama for president. But he has no time for what he calls "double standards and propagation of victim mentality."
"The fact that a black man can run for the position of the President of the United States of America only corroborates that there is enough opportunity and equality for great things like that to happen," he says. "And that there is no need to create special advantages for any demographic group."
WSJ.COM FORUM
U.S. perceptions of race have changed considerably over the last half century. As a result, do you think race is over-emphasized or under-emphasized in the U.S. today? Do we still look closely at another person's race, or are we in an age where race matters less than it once did? And do you think affirmative action should continue to have a future in the U.S.? Share your thoughts.Electra Fulbright, a black small-business consultant in prosperous Southfield, Mich., couldn't disagree more.
"Obama's privileges and his accomplishments are minute compared to the black population at large," says Ms. Fulbright, who plans to vote for Sen. Obama. "When we talk about Obama, we are not talking about the average black American. There is injustice in this country, and until we correct it, we need affirmative action."
Few issues have been as incendiary in the workplace and on college campuses as affirmative action -- in large part because so many blacks and whites have been personally affected by affirmative action, in ways both good and bad.
Now, Sen. Obama's rise is prompting some whites to ask -- and some blacks to fear -- the question: Does America still need affirmative action, given that an African-American has made it to the top of American politics?
The question has been asked before, as other blacks have risen to high positions. But Sen. Obama's swift ascent to the verge of the presidency may have created a turning point in the debate.
Associated Press
Affirmative action has stirred controversy for decades, including this 2002 protest.
The issue of affirmative action is likely to dog Sen. Obama on the campaign trail as he seeks to win over white blue-collar voters in battleground states like Michigan. For many of these voters, affirmative action has been divisive since the 1970s. Ward Connerly, a prominent affirmative-action opponent, is seeking to place anti-affirmative action referendums on the ballot in Arizona, Nebraska and Colorado. Voters would be asked to ban "preferential treatment" of women and minorities in state university admissions, the filling of state-funded jobs and awarding of state contracts.
Favoring the Middle Class
White anger over affirmative action has diminished as the Supreme Court has systematically narrowed the scope of programs in colleges and the workplace. Still, the gap between black and white opinion remains wide.
More than half of blacks -- 57% -- say the country should make "every effort to improve the position of blacks and minorities, even if it means giving preferential treatment," according to a poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan Washington think tank that studies social attitudes. Just 27% of whites agree with that view. The same poll shows that nearly half of whites -- 48% -- believe the U.S. has "gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country." Far fewer African Americans -- 27% -- agree.
Opinions about affirmative action vary depending on how researchers word their questions; support tends to grow, for example, when the question describes the programs in more detail. But the Gallup polling firm says that regardless of the wording, all of its surveys on affirmative action show blacks overwhelmingly support it, while whites tend to be much more divided.
Sen. Obama's success has also stirred an uncomfortable debate within the black community over who has reaped the gains of affirmative action. Some argue the policies skew toward middle-class blacks instead of poor blacks, and have favored too many individuals like Sen. Obama -- people with a biracial background or the children of African and Caribbean immigrants, as opposed to blacks born in the U.S.
In a 2000 interview with the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Sen. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, said: "I have no way of knowing if I was a beneficiary of affirmative action either in my admission to Harvard or my initial election to the [Harvard Law] Review. If I was, then I am certainly not ashamed of the fact, for I would argue that affirmative action is important precisely because those who benefit typically rise to the challenge when given an opportunity."
Sen. Obama's newfound prominence has also prompted some successful blacks to wonder whether his achievements, and theirs, mean affirmative action should be modified to help poor and working-class whites.
"You have this traditional assumption that whites have made it and have it all -- that 'because I am black, I am disadvantaged,' and 'because I am white, I am advantaged,' " says Rev. Carlyle Stewart, who holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Northwestern and heads a large middle-class black church in Southfield, a short drive from Warren. "It may be time to broaden that discussion."
Sen. Obama "believes that no one can deny that our country has made tremendous progress in the past 50 years," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. "But the suggestion that somehow Senator Obama's campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation is just not realistic." He said Sen. Obama believes "affirmative action in universities today is appropriate only if race is one of many factors. The Supreme Court has made that clear."
Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain opposes "affirmative action plans and quotas that give weight to one group of Americans at the expense of another," says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. "Plans that result in quotas, where such plans have not been judicially created to remedy a specific, proven act of discrimination, only result in more discrimination and violate the concept of equality of opportunity."
Early Challenges
Affirmative action began in 1961, when President Kennedy issued an executive order declaring that federal contractors should "take affirmative action" to integrate their work forces.
The initiative broadened to include policies that favored women and minorities in hiring and promotion at work and in college admissions, the goal being to overcome past discrimination.
Many whites charged that this amounted to "reverse discrimination." In the landmark Bakke case of 1978, the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of affirmative action, declaring unconstitutional the use of some rigid quota systems. But it upheld the principle of affirmative action.
In 2003, a more-conservative Supreme Court again upheld the principle of affirmative action, but narrowed the interpretation still further, adding in a majority opinion, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." Opponents of affirmative action recently filed another suit challenging affirmative action in Texas.
Many economists and sociologists agree that affirmative-action programs have helped spur the growth of the black middle and upper classes, defined as households making more than $40,000 a year. Today, this group accounts for about 40% of black households, up from about 25% in 1970, according to U.S. Census figures. During that same period, the percentage of white households in the middle class and above has risen to about 60%, from just under 50%.
Affirmative action policies have helped blacks gain access to large corporations and top universities, studies have shown, and the presence of blacks in these places has encouraged others to follow. The number of African Americans at the country's top 50 colleges and universities has doubled in recent decades, according to Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University economist. Women have benefited, too, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when they began breaking into traditionally male-dominated fields.
A Leg Up for Whites
Michigan's Macomb County is home to many of the fabled "Reagan Democrats," the conservative working-class whites who left the Democratic Party largely over social issues including race in the 1980s. Here, life has been changed by affirmative action and the rise of the black middle class. In the past five years, the African-American population has doubled to about 6% from about 3%, in part as blacks have left Detroit for safer suburbs with better schools.
ROAD TO EQUALITY
Associated Press
Allan Bakke graduates from the U.C. Davis medical school after a Supreme Court ruling granted him admission in 1978
Key Events Involving Affirmative Action:
1961: President John F. Kennedy signs an executive order that instructs federal contractors to take 'affirmative action' to ensure against discrimination
1964: Civil Rights Act prohibits race-based discrimination by large employers. The Act forms the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a driving force in affirmative-action policies
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson issues an order requiring federal contractors to expand job opportunities for minorities
1971: President Richard M. Nixon issues an executive order directing federal agencies to develop specific program goals for national Minority Business Enterprise contracting program
1978: The Supreme Court rules in favor of a white man who was denied admission to medical school. The opinion upholds the use of race in choosing among qualified applicants but rules that inflexible quotas are unconstitutional
1986: The Supreme Court upholds a judicially ordered 29% minority 'membership admission goal' for a union that had intentionally discriminated against minorities
1995: President Bill Clinton asserts that affirmative action is still needed but calls for elimination of any federal program that creates quotasSuch changes make some whites here wonder why affirmative action is needed at all. "If blacks are living in the same houses that I am living in, and they can afford the same things I can afford, why shouldn't I have the same breaks as they do?" says Tony Licata, a professional photographer in Macomb County who is white and says he is leaning toward voting for Sen. McCain.
"Race should not be the deciding point about who gets what," says Jessalin Horne, a white working-class college student who plans to vote for Sen. Obama in the fall.
In conversations, many white blue-collar and middle-class workers in Macomb County said they blame competition from China, India and elsewhere for their job losses, not competition from blacks. But the economic battering that many poor and working-class whites have taken as Michigan's auto industry has shrunk makes some whites feel that it's their turn for a leg up.
"I have been a supporter of affirmative action, but it needs to be refocused -- other groups need to be included," says Marceia Lugo, a divorced white mother of three whose mother and ex-husband have left Michigan to look for work. Ms. Lugo says she backed Sen. Clinton but will now vote for Sen. Obama. "I am not black, so I don't know those issues. But I have been poor, and I have had to struggle, so I should get special treatment."
Wooed by Elite Colleges
A half-hour drive from Warren lies Southfield, Mich., a leafy, integrated middle-class and upper-middle-class suburb that is a testament to the impact of affirmative action. Barbara Talley, now a retired financial analyst and a Southfield resident, became one of the first black owners of a KFC franchise in the 1980s, after Rev. Jesse Jackson lobbied the company to sell more franchises to African Americans. Wanda Cook-Robinson, Southfield's black school superintendent, has been the first black in several teaching and administrative positions at area schools. "That wouldn't have happened without affirmative action," says Ms. Cook-Robinson.
Many blacks here don't want to lose the boost that they say affirmative action gives them. Stephen Kemp, a successful black funeral director in Southfield, sends his son to a $24,000-a-year private high school. His son, a junior, has been receiving letters from elite colleges wooing him to apply. "When they look at his application they see he is an African-American male -- he has so much opportunity," says Mr. Kemp, who himself attended the University of Michigan. "Brown called him yesterday."
Associated Press
President Lyndon B. Johnson turns to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the signing of the Civil Rights Act
Mr. Kemp thinks it is fine that his son gets special attention, because diversity on campus benefits whites as well as blacks. "If you are getting a true education, that has to reflect all kinds of people," he says.
The election, especially Sen. Obama's success in winning white voters, has Mary Donaldson thinking that affirmative action is likely to fade away in coming years as the country continues to change. "My son is 9 years old. Just because he is black, he can't think he's going to get special treatment," says Ms. Donaldson, who works at a pre-school in Southfield and supports Sen. Obama. "I don't want him to totally depend on something like that."
Twyla Griffin, who works for a health-care company and attends church in Southfield, says she thinks bias lives on. "It's fear -- 'this black boy is going to take my little white Johnny's job,' " says Ms. Griffin. Affirmative action, she says, simply levels a still-tilted playing field.
"It would be great if Obama made all the decisions for us, but there are a lot of people who still have decision-making power who are still a little prejudiced," says Marilyn Hobbs, an intellectual-property manager who supports Sen. Obama
James Jackson, a black banker and another Obama supporter, nods in agreement. He says he doesn't put his photograph on his business card like many of his white colleagues, because he thinks it will discourage white customers. "Race is a real issue still, no matter what happens in November," he says.
Write to Jonathan Kaufman at jonathan.kaufman@wsj.com
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People & Events: Robert Moton and the Colored Advisory Commission
In 1922, former President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft selected Robert Russa Moton to give the chief address at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. At the time, many considered Moton to be the most powerful African American in the country. In elite, white political and financial circles, his status was unparalleled.
In race relations, Moton advocated accommodation, not confrontation. He firmly believed that the best way to advance the cause of African Americans was to convince white people of black people's worth through their exemplary behavior. Never one to rock the boat, he didn't fight segregation or challenge white authority.
A protégé of Booker T. Washington, Moton had succeeded him as principal of Tuskegee Institute. From this position, Moton worked long and hard to win the trust of white politicians and philanthropists and secure donations for Tuskegee and other African American institutions and organizations.
His power in the country stemmed from the money he could raise from whites who appreciated his conservative views and methods. In addition to his access to leaders in Washington, Moton sat on the boards of major philanthropic organizations with the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Jr., and his influence was considerable. When Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, provided the funding to build more than 6,000 "Rosenwald" schools for rural Southern African Americans, Moton's skills were clearly in play behind the scenes.
Over the years, Moton's words and deeds impressed Herbert Hoover, who invited Moton to visit him anytime he was in Washington. However, during the Great Flood of 1927, it was Hoover who found himself calling on Moton for assistance. Secretary of Commerce during the Coolidge administration, Hoover had his eye on the presidency. When President Coolidge placed Hoover in command of all flood relief operations during the disaster, it seemed to be the perfect vehicle to raise his national profile and revive his reputation as the "Great Humanitarian."
Drawing on lessons he had learned feeding the starving European victims of World War I, Hoover swept into action. He cut through bureaucratic red tape, got aid to victims devastated by the flood and was dubbed a hero by the national press. There was only one thing that could tarnish Hoover's glowing image -- the treatment of African Americans in the Washington County levee camps. Hoover had visited the area and had approved the local flood relief committee's decision, under the leadership of Will Percy, to keep the African American refugees on the levee. But as conditions deteriorated in the camps, word slowly filtered North, and the scandal threatened to derail Hoover's presidential ambitions.
Hoover's friends urged him to get what they called "the big Negroes" in the Republican Party to quiet his critics, and Hoover turned to Robert Moton for the job. Hoover formed the Colored Advisory Commission, led by Moton and staffed by prominent African Americans, to investigate the allegations of abuses in the flood area.
The commission conducted a thorough investigation and reported back to Moton on the deplorable conditions. Moton presented the findings to Hoover, and advocated immediate improvements to aid the flood's neediest victims. But the information was never made public. Hoover had asked Moton to keep a tight lid on his investigation. In return, Hoover implied that if he were successful in his bid for the presidency, Moton and his people would play a role in his administration unprecedented in the nation's history. Hoover also hinted that as president he intended to divide the land of bankrupt planters into small African American-owned farms.
Motivated by Hoover's promises, Moton saw to it that the Colored Advisory Commission never revealed the full extent of the abuses in the Delta, and Moton championed Hoover's candidacy to the African American population. However, once elected President in 1928, Hoover ignored Robert Moton and the promises he had made to his black constituency. In the following election of 1932, Moton withdrew his support for Hoover and switched to the Democratic Party. In an historic shift, African Americans began to abandon the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and turned to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Democratic Party instead.
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The essay below was written by a Vietnamese immigrant, a fellow with a most unusual name. Kaitz currently teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco.
Obama's Anger
By Ed Kaitz
"The anger is real. It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."- Barack Obama
Back in the late 1980's I was on a plane flying out of New Orleans and sitting next to me was a rather interesting and, according to Barack Obama, unusual black man. Friendly, gregarious, and wise beyond his years, we immediately hit it off. I had been working on Vietnamese commercial fishing boats for a few years based in southern Louisiana the boats were owned by the recent wave of Vietnamese refugees who flooded into the familiar tropical environment after the war. Floating in calm seas out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I would hear tearful songs and tales from ex-paratroopers about losing brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers, and beautiful Vietnam itself to the communists.
In Bayou country I lived on boats and in doublewide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Wal-Mart and ate a lot of rice. When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.
They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope. "Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.
While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri , and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.
His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season: "We're owed and they aren't." In short, he concluded, "they're hungry and we think we're owed. It's crushing us, and as long as we think we're owed we're going nowhere."
A good test case for this theory is Katrina. Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and assorted white apologists continue to express anger and outrage over the federal response to the Katrina disaster. But where were the Vietnamese "leaders" expressing their "anger?" The Vietnamese comprise a substantial part of the New Orleans population, and yet is absent any report claiming that the Vietnamese were "owed" anything. This is not to say that the federal response was an adequate one, but we need to take this as a sign that maybe the problem has very little to do with racism and a lot to with a mindset.
The mindset that one is "owed" something in life has not only affected black mobility in business but black mobility in education as well. Remember Ward Churchill? About fifteen years ago he was my boss. After leaving the fishing boats, I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder I managed to get a job on campus teaching expository writing to minority students who had been accepted provisionally into the university on an affirmative action program. And although I never met him, Ward Churchill, in addition to teaching in the ethnic studies department, helped to develop and organize the minority writing program.
The job paid most of my bills, but what I witnessed there was absolutely horrifying. The students were encouraged to write essays attacking the white establishment from every conceivable angle and in addition to defend affirmative action and other government programs. Of the hundreds of papers that I read, there was not one original contribution to the problem of black mobility that strayed from the party line.
The irony of it all however is that the "white establishment" managed to get them into the college and pay their entire tuition. Instead of being encouraged to study international affairs, classical or modern languages, philosophy or art, most of these students became ethnic studies or sociology majors because it allowed them to remain in disciplines whose orientation justified their existence at the university. In short, it became a vicious cycle.
There was a student there I'll never forget. He was plucked out of the projects in Denver and given a free ride to the university. One day in my office he told me that his mother had said the following to him: "M. J., they owe you this. White people at that university owe you this." M. J's experience at the university was a glorious fulfillment of his mother's angst.
There were black student organizations and other clubs that "facilitated" the minority student's experience on the majority white and "racist" campus, in addition to a plethora of faculty members, both white and black, who encouraged the same animus toward the white establishment. While adding to their own bona fides as part of the trendy Left, these "facilitators" supplied M. J. with everything he needed to quench his and his mother's anger, but nothing in the way of advice about how to succeed in college. No one, in short, had told M. J. that he needed to study. But since he was "owed" everything, why put out any effort on his own?
In a fit of despair after failing most of his classes, M. J. wandered into my office one Friday afternoon in the middle of the semester and asked if I could help him out. I asked M. J. about his plans that evening, and he told me that he usually attended parties on Friday and Saturday nights. I told him that if he agreed to meet me in front of the university library at 6:00 PM I would buy him dinner. At 6PM M. J. showed up, and for the next twenty minutes we wandered silently through the stacks, lounges, and study areas of the library. When we arrived back at the entrance I asked M. J. if he noticed anything interesting. As we headed up the hill to a popular burger joint, M. J. turned to me and said:
"They were all Asian. Everyone in there was Asian, and it was Friday night."
Nothing I could do, say, or show him, however, could match the fire power of his support system favoring anger. I was sad to hear of M. J. dropping out of school the following semester.
During my time teaching in the writing program, I watched Asians get transformed via leftist doublespeak from "minorities" to "model minorities" to "they're not minorities" in precise rhythm to their fortunes in business and education. Asians were "minorities" when they were struggling in this country, but they became "model minorities" when they achieved success. Keep in mind "model minority" did not mean what most of us think it means, i.e., something to emulate. "Model minority" meant that Asians had certain cultural advantages, such as a strong family tradition and a culture of scholarship that the black community lacked.
To suggest that intact families and a philosophy of self-reliance could be the ticket to success would have undermined the entire angst establishment. Because of this, it was improper to use Asian success as a model. The contortions the left exercised in order to defend this ridiculous thesis helped to pave the way for the elimination of Asians altogether from the status of "minority."
This whole process took only a few years.
Eric Hoffer said:
"...you do not win the weak by sharing your wealth with them; it will but infect them with greed and resentment. You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, hope or hatred with them."
We now know that Barack Obama really has no interest in the "audacity of hope." With his race speech, Obama became a peddler of angst, resentment and despair. Too bad he doesn't direct that angst at the liberal establishment that has sold black people a bill of goods since the 1960's. What Obama seems angry about is America itself and what it stands for; the same America that has provided fabulous opportunities for what my black friend called "hungry" minorities. Strong families, self-reliance, and a spirit of entrepreneurship should be held up as ideals for all races to emulate.
In the end, we should be very suspicious about Obama's anger and the recent frothing's of his close friend Reverend Wright. Says Eric Hoffer: "The fact seems to be that we are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about. Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own."
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I am not sure the attitude is solely among blacks though.
Many of the immigrants from Asia work harder than we do. They think we are lazy, fat, wasteful and are quite proud of the fact that they work harder than we. In my field I am surrounded by Indians, Asians, and fewer Middle Easterners all day long. In NJ foreign born or children of foreign born physicians make up probably a third of all doctors and at least half of those in training.
I hear many of the Indian doctors say it - usually without intending for me to hear it. They always hush up when they notice I may have heard them say it, or if I ask them to clarify, but not out of offense but more out of curiosity.
Look at the winners of the spelling bees.
Look at the class leaders of schools.
Look at who sit in jails.
Many *white*, and Latino, and black kids are more interested in tatoos, body piercing, and looking and talking like they just got out of a three year stint from jail and that that is something to boast about.
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In America, hard work and education pays off. No matter how the left/professional race hucksters try to spin it, this is the indisputable truth.
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I am not an AMA member.
***AMA data suggest fewer than 2 percent of its members are black, and that fewer than 3 percent of the nation's 1 million medical students and physicians are black.***
I can tell you one thing. I don't know about past racism or present racism but the reason for the above *ain't* because of discrimination. Ask any Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Polish, Russian doctor or doctor in training today. The older Indians will have plenty of stories about how hard they had it when they first came off the boat. They were not received with love and open arms. Now look at how successful they are. I congratulate them. I have no sympathy for angry Blacks any more. They need new leadership. Jackson and Sharpton are leading them down the wrong roads.
Why can't we get rid of this "African-American" label. I don't want to be known as a Jewish-American or a second generation Russian-American or a white-American.
****AP
AMA apologizes to black doctors for past racism
By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Thu Jul 10, 4:27 PM ET
CHICAGO - Transplant surgeon Clive Callender has hurtful memories of being the only black doctor at medical meetings in the 1970s, met with stark silence when he pleaded for better access to transplant organs for blacks.
ADVERTISEMENT
So when the American Medical Association formally apologized Thursday for more than a century of policies that excluded blacks from a group long considered the voice of American doctors, it was belated, but still welcome.
"My attitude is not one of bitterness, but one of gratefulness that finally they have seen the error of their ways," said Callender, now 71 and a respected leader at Howard University Hospital in Washington.
It wasn't until the 1960s that AMA delegates took a strong stance against policies dating to the 1800s that barred blacks from some state and local medical societies.
Until then, AMA delegates had resisted pleas to speak out forcefully against discrimination or to condemn the smaller medical groups, which historically have had a big role in shaping AMA policy.
While the AMA itself didn't have a formal policy barring black doctors, physicians were required to be members of the local groups to participate in the AMA, said Dr. Ronald Davis, the group's immediate past president.
It's conceivable patient care suffered "to the extent that our practices may have impeded the ability of African-American physicians to interact collegially with white physicians," Davis said in an interview Thursday.
"That would certainly be another reason why we would have profound regret for our past practices," he said.
In statement on its Web site, the AMA apologized "for its past history of racial inequality toward African-American physicians, and shares its current efforts to increase the ranks of minority physicians and their participation in the AMA."
The apology is among initiatives at the nation's largest doctors' group to reduce racial disparities in medicine and to recruit more blacks to become doctors and to join the AMA.
AMA data suggest fewer than 2 percent of its members are black, and that fewer than 3 percent of the nation's 1 million medical students and physicians are black.
While that's based on a survey in which the race of more than one-third of doctors was unknown, several black physicians said the percentages ring true.
It's not the first time the AMA has apologized for its discriminatory history. In 2005, Dr. John Nelson, then AMA's president, offered a similar apology at a meeting on improving health care and eliminating disparities.
That came a year after the AMA joined the National Medical Association, a black doctors' group, and other minority doctors' groups in forming the Commission to End Health Care Disparities.
NMA leaders said AMA's history of discrimination has contributed to health disparities for blacks that continue today.
"These persistent, race-based health disparities have led to a precipitous decline in the health of African-Americans when compared to their white counterparts and the population as a whole," said Dr. Nedra Joyner, head of the board of trustees for the black doctors' association.
Dr. Nelson Adams, the group's president, called the apology courageous and AMA's vow to work to reduce racial disparities "extremely important."
Dr. Otis Brawley, the black chief financial officer of the American Cancer Society, also applauded the move.
"It is true that what the AMA did historically was awful," Brawley said. "There were AMA local chapters that actually had rules against black members well into the late 1960s, and policies that made blacks not feel comfortable well into the 1980s."
Brawley said he's never been an AMA member, but that the apology "certainly makes me much more interested in working with them."
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I don't know about past racism or present racism but the reason for the above *ain't* because of discrimination.
What do you think is the cause of the low percentiles?
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Influx of black renters raises tension in Bay Area
Email this Story
Dec 30, 3:24 PM (ET)
By PAUL ELIAS
ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP) - As more and more black renters began moving into this mostly white San Francisco Bay Area suburb a few years ago, neighbors started complaining about loud parties, mean pit bulls, blaring car radios, prostitution, drug dealing and muggings of schoolchildren.
In 2006, as the influx reached its peak, the police department formed a special crime-fighting unit to deal with the complaints, and authorities began cracking down on tenants in federally subsidized housing.
Now that police unit is the focus of lawsuits by black families who allege the city of 100,000 is orchestrating a campaign to drive them out.
"A lot of people are moving out here looking for a better place to live," said Karen Coleman, a mother of three who came here five years ago from a blighted neighborhood in nearby Pittsburg. "We are trying to raise our kids like everyone else. But they don't want us here."
City officials deny the allegations in the lawsuits, which were filed last spring and seek unspecified damages.
Across the country, similar tensions have simmered when federally subsidized renters escaped run-down housing projects and violent neighborhoods by moving to nicer communities in suburban Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.
But the friction in Antioch is "hotter than elsewhere," said U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Larry Bush.
An increasing number of poor families receiving federal rental assistance have been moving here in recent years, partly because of the housing crisis.
A growing number of landlords were seeking a guaranteed source of revenue in a city hard-hit by foreclosures. They began offering their Antioch homes to low-income tenants in the HUD Section 8 housing program, which pays about two-thirds of every tenant's rent.
Between 2000 and 2007, Antioch's black population nearly doubled from 8,824 to 16,316. And the number of Antioch renters receiving federal subsidies climbed almost 50 percent between 2003 and 2007 to 1,582, the majority of them black.
Longtime homeowners complained that the new arrivals brought crime and other troubles. In 2006, violent crime in Antioch shot up about 19 percent from the year before, while property crime went down slightly.
"In some neighborhoods, it was complete madness," said longtime resident David Gilbert, a black retiree who organized the United Citizens of Better Neighborhoods watch group. "They were under siege."
So the Antioch police in mid-2006 created the Community Action Team, which focused on complaints of trouble at low-income renters' homes.
Police sent 315 complaints about subsidized tenants to the Contra Costa Housing Authority, which manages the federal program in the city, and urged the agency to evict many of them for lease violations such as drug use or gun possession. Lawyers for the tenants said 70 percent of the eviction recommendations were aimed at black renters. The housing authority turned down most of the requests.
Coleman said the police, after a complaint from a neighbor, showed up at her house one morning in 2007 to check on her husband, who was on parole for drunken driving. She said they searched the house and returned twice more that summer to try to find out whether the couple had violated any terms of their lease that could lead to eviction.
The Colemans were also slapped with a restraining order after a neighbor accused them of "continually harassing and threatening their family," according to court papers. The Colemans said a judge later rescinded the order.
Coleman and four other families are suing Antioch, accusing police of engaging in racial discrimination and conducting illegal searches without warrants. They have asked a federal judge to make their suit a class-action on behalf of hundreds of other black renters. Another family has filed a lawsuit accusing the city's leaders of waging a campaign of harassment to drive them out.
Police referred questions to the city attorney's office.
City Attorney Lynn Tracy Nerland denied any discrimination on the part of police and said officers were responding to crime reports in troubled neighborhoods when they discovered that a large number of the troublemakers were receiving federal subsidies.
"They are responding to real problems," Nerland said.
Joseph Villarreal, the housing authority chief, said the problems in Antioch mirror tensions seen nationally when poor renters move into neighborhoods they can afford only with government help.
"One of the goals of the programs is to de-concentrate poverty," Villarreal said. "There are just some people who don't want to spend public money that way."
Tensions like those afflicting Antioch have drawn scholars and law enforcement officials to debate whether crime follows subsidized renters out of the tenements to the suburbs.
Susan Popkin, a researcher at the nonprofit Urban Institute, said she does not believe that is the case. But the tensions, she said, are real.
"That can be a recipe for anxiety," she said. "It can really change the demographics of a neighborhood."
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Obama, Race, and Affirmative Action
Will the Obama presidency be "conservative" on issues of race?
Cathy Young | January 27, 2009
In the first week after Barack Obama's inauguration, his administration is already dealing with issues and controversies that have nothing to do with race. Still, the cultural significance of a black man becoming President of the United States cannot be overstated, given the pain and the shame of this country's racial history. Even conservative Republicans such as National Review's Jonah Goldberg warn that conservatives who fail to appreciate the greatness of this event risk being hopelessly marginalized. Of course, one oft-overlooked irony is that on racial issues, the Obama presidency may boost a position commonly labeled conservative.
In recent years, affirmative action in the form of institutionalized race-, gender-, and ethnicity-based preferences in college admissions and employment has been the subject of intense debate. Defenders of such programs maintain that they are needed to counteract the effects of discrimination and other subtle barriers. Critics, including African-American conservatives such as writer Shelby Steele and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, argue that preferences have the pernicious effect of deepening racial divisions and stigmatizing the very people they are intended to help.
The movement against race preferences has led to successful voter initiatives banning such practices in the public sector in California, Washington, Michigan, and most recently Nebraska. The backlash from the traditional civil rights establishment and from many liberals has been ferocious. In a 1999 speech, Vice President Al Gore blasted advocates of "colorblind" policies who "use their 'color-blind' the way duck hunters use their duck blind—they hide behind it and hope the ducks won't figure out what they're up to." Last November, a ballot measure prohibiting differential treatment by race or ethnicity in government institutions lost narrowly in Colorado after a campaign that relied heavily on smear tactics, such as trumpeting the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement of the initiative.
Shortly before the inauguration, Ward Connerly, the African-American businessman who has led the drive to ban preferences, spoke at a Washington, D.C. conference of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars. Connerly, a Republican who has found himself labeled an Uncle Tom and worse, began by saying, "We are here in the nation's capital a few days before an event that will demonstrate something most of us in this room have always believed: that America is a fair country and that the colorblind vision works." He noted that he did not vote for Obama, but believed that he deserved to win and that his election was a step forward toward "not just getting beyond racial preferences but getting beyond race."
This hopeful outlook was echoed at the conference by another outspoken critic of preferences: author, scholar, and U.S. Civil Rights Commission member Abigail Thernstrom, who called Obama's election "a racial conversation-changer." That the leader of the free world is now an African-American man, Thernstrom said, must make it easier and more attractive to move past race consciousness and harder to justify preferences with arguments about the intractability of racism. "The younger generation is coming of age in a racially altered world," Thernstrom said; eventually, campus politics will have to catch up.
Are Connerly and Thernstrom too optimistic? A friend of mine who is in a Ph.D. program at a large state university believes it will take at least a generation for the academy to get over its racism fetish. In her view, many academics are far too invested in the idea of deeply entrenched American racism to be swayed by Obama's election; they may even dismiss it as irrelevant because Obama has a white mother and did not grow up in a ghetto. And activists and politicians are no less likely than academics to cling to their dogmas.
Indeed, a small controversy erupted last week when the benediction given at Obama's inauguration by the noted civil rights leader, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, seemed to stress enduring racism: "Lord...we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right."
Some conservatives took offense at the implication that blacks were still "asked to get back" and whites were still refusing to do right by minorities. Yes, it is disappointing that the benediction at the inauguration of our first African-American president sounded a note that would have been forward-looking fifty years ago. But, to put things in perspective, the Rev. Lowery is an 87-year-old veteran of the civil rights struggle. Says Thernstrom, "The Jim Crow South is still the world he lives in."
It remains to be seen what kind of leadership Obama himself will provide on potentially divisive racial issues. During his campaign, he came out against the ballot measures to outlaw preferences—but also suggested that affirmative action should focus on economic disadvantage rather than race.
Undoubtedly, quite a few people—most of whom do not have the excuse of the Rev. Lowery's age and experience—will insist that invidious racism remains ever-present and race-based preference is the only way to combat it. But perhaps such claims will find increasingly less receptive audiences in an age when the daughter of a white factory worker seeking admission to a top college may find herself competing against the daughter of a black President of the United States.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
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A bit glib here and there, but the questions raised deserve to be part of the conversation.
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BUCHANAN TO OBAMA
By Patrick J. Buchanan
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. 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 African-American 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 African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American 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 Rev. Al 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.
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By JAMES TARANTO
Attorney General Eric Holder ruffled some few feathers Wednesday, when he gave a Black History Month speech in which he described America as "a nation of cowards" when it comes to "things racial":
Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation's history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.
We are inclined to disagree with Holder's suggestion that everyday life is impoverished by an insufficiency of "frank conversations" about racial subjects. Often it is just plain sensible to put aside "matters that continue to divide us" and focus on common purposes or interests. What Holder desires sounds nightmarish to us: a cross between "No Exit" and "All in the Family," with none of the latter's wit.
Still, there is a grain of truth to Holder's infelicitous description of America as "a nation of cowards." The subject of race does make people uneasy, and for reasons that go beyond common sense and courtesy. An incident on the same day as Holder's speech illustrates the problem.
On Wednesday the New York Post published a cartoon by Sean Delonas depicting a pair of policemen and a the bullet-riddled body of a chimpanzee. As one of the cops holds a smoking gun, the other says, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
Reuters describes what happened next:
Hundreds of demonstrators rallied to boycott the New York Post on Thursday, branding the newspaper as racist for publishing a cartoon that appeared to compare President to a chimpanzee. Demonstrators led by civil rights activist Al Sharpton chanted "End racism now!" outside the parent company's skyscraper in midtown Manhattan and called for the jailing of Rupert Murdoch, whose international media conglomerate News Corp owns the Post. . .
.
Because Obama promoted the $787 billion economic stimulus that he signed into law on Tuesday, critics of the cartoon interpreted the dead chimp as a reference to Obama, who became the first black U.S. president on January 20. . . . "You would have to be in a time warp or in a whole other world not to know what that means," said demonstrator Charles Ashley, 25, a model who did not believe the cartoon was an innocent political joke.
Others said it made light of assassinating Obama, a possibility they said that worries many African-Americans.
Here we should note that News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal and this Web site. The Post is standing its ground, declaring in an editorial today:
To those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past--and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
The claim that the cartoon was a racist caricature of President Obama is awfully far-fetched. It played off a news item involving an actual chimp (a story with which we are thoroughly bored, so click here if you want to learn more about it). The president did not write the stimulus bill; indeed, he has been widely criticized for giving congressional Democrats too free a hand in crafting it. And anyone who is familiar with Delonas's surrealistic oeuvre knows that he is an equal-opportunity offender. His work is in the spirit of "South Park," not Stepin Fetchit.
All that notwithstanding, some will say that Delonas should have known better. We see their point, and we remember thinking a couple of years ago, upon seeing the umpteenth simian caricature of George W. Bush, that nobody had better do that if Sen. Obama becomes president. We were aware that that would constitute an invidious stereotype, in a way that it did not when the president was a person of pallor.
But what if someone is unaware of this? Suppose that a columnist or cartoonist is so innocent of racial prejudice that he has never even thought to make a connection between black people and lower primates? Such a person would be a racial kerfuffle waiting to happen. The moment he inadvertently employed an idea or image that carried offensive connotations, he would be pilloried as "insensitive."
Consider the paradox: Racial "sensitivity" requires not eradicating racial stereotypes but keeping them alive--and not only keeping them alive but remaining acutely conscious of them at all times. Delonas and his editors are under attack for seeing "chimp" and failing to think "black guy." Perhaps this is an editorial failing, but it is certainly not a moral one.
Which brings us back to Eric Holder. If Americans are shy about discussing race, a big reason is the culture of intimidation promoted by people like Al Sharpton in the name of racial sensitivity. "Frank discussion" requires a willingness to trust that one's interlocutor is acting in good faith. If Attorney General Holder is serious about promoting racial candor, let him use this incident to make the point. That would show a bit of courage on his part.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-unmasked-the-images-the-reveal-the-ku-klux-klan-is-alive-and-kicking-in-2009-1625732.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-unmasked-the-images-the-reveal-the-ku-klux-klan-is-alive-and-kicking-in-2009-1625732.html)
America unmasked: The images that reveal the Ku Klux Klan is alive and kicking in 2009
The USA has a new president but an old problem - and nothing typifies it like today’s Ku Klux Klan. The photographer Anthony Karen gained unprecedented access to the ‘Invisible Empire’
Words by Leonard Doyle
Saturday, 21 February 2009
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Klan members gather at a cross 'lighting' in Scottsboro, Alabama
Klan members gather at a cross 'lighting' in Scottsboro, Alabama
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These images show members of the Ku Klux Klan as they want to be seen, scary and secretive and waiting in the wings for Barack and his colour-blind vision for America to fail. Anthony Karen, a former Marine and self-taught photojournalist was granted access to the innermost sanctum of the Klan. He doesn’t tell us how he did it but he was considered trustworthy enough to be invited into their homes and allowed to photograph their most secretive ceremonies, such as the infamous cross burnings.
When he talks about the Klan members he has encountered he tends not to dwell on the fate of their victims. Karen’s feat is that he takes us to places few photojournalists have been before, into the belly of the beast. The scenes he presents portray a kinder, gentler Klan. The mute photographs present an organisation that is far less threatening than the hate group of our popular imagination. Consciously or otherwise, his photographs hold our imagination in their grip while doing double duty as propaganda for the extremist right, much as Leni Riefenstahl’s work did for the Nazis.
Today the Klan is a mere shadow of what it used to be and there are at least 34 differently named Klan groups. “They are a fairly low-rent bunch of people, many of whom use their local organisations as a way of raising money for themselves,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
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Photographs of the Klan folk in their hooded regalia aren’t all that rare. The archives of America’s newspapers contain plenty of front-page photographs of lynchings throughout the past century. Three years ago, James Cameron, the last survivor of an attempted lynching died, thankfully of natural causes.
The older generation of Black Americans grew up hearing about Klan lynchings whispered over the dinner table but never mentioned outside the home. At the Klan’s height, around the turn of the 20th century, some 30 to 40 lynchings a year were being recorded. It is believed that there were in fact many more unrecorded deaths, especially in the cotton-growing south where the deaths of black field-hands were often not recorded.
Karen’s photographs show an entirely different side of the far right. He presents a 58-year-old, fifth-generation seamstress he calls “Ms Ruth” and he has photographed her running up an outfit for the “Exalted Cyclops” or head of a local KKK chapter. She gets paid about $140 for her trouble. Karen tells us that she uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.
Karen’s images of the Klan and its supporters regularly appear on the recruiting websites of the far right. Out of context, the images of hooded Klansmen and their families tell us little of the real story – the inexorable rise in the number of extremist organisations in America.
The number of hate-crime victims in the US is also rising and as America’s middle and working class gets thrown out of work, the hate groups behind the crimes are flourishing. As people lose their homes to foreclosure and, without the benefit of a safety net, find themselves slipping into poverty, there is already a search for scapegoats underway. Immigrants from central and South America have become particular targets as the grim economic times take hold.
Anyone who doubts the capacity of the modern KKK for violence need look no further than the recent case of 43-year-old Cynthia Lynch of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had never been out of her home state before she travelled to Louisiana to be initiated into the Klan. She was met off the bus by two members of a group that calls itself the Sons of Dixie and taken to a campsite in the woods 60 miles north of New Orleans.
There, Lynch’s head was shaven and after 24 hours of Klan boot camp, including chanting and running with torches, she had had enough and asked to be taken to town. After an argument, the group’s “Grand Lordship”, Chuck Foster, is alleged to have shot her to death. He was charged with second-degree murder and is awaiting trial. Just as shocking is that the event happened in Bogalusa, a backwoods Louisiana town that was once known as the Klan capital of the US.
In the 1960s the Klan operated with impunity in Bogalusa and once held a public meeting to decide which black church to burn down next. Local Klan members were suspected of ambushing two black policemen in 1965, killing one and wounding the other. No one was ever tried for the crimes.
Despite all its notoriety the Klan has been a spent force for decades with nothing like the clout it once wielded. At its peak the KKK boasted four million members and controlled the governor’s mansions and legislatures of several states. Since the 1930s the KKK has been in a state of disorganisation and today it probably has 6,000 members. But the economic crisis is swelling their ranks and already, a month after the inauguration of the first black president, the tidal wave of interracial harmony that greeted Obama’s election is starting to recede.
“Things are certain to get worse,” says Potok. “The ingredients are all there: a dire economy that is certain to get worse; high levels of immigration; the white majority that is soon to turn into a minority and a black man in the White House.”
More than 400 hate-related incidents, from cross-burnings to effigies of President Obama hanging from nooses have been reported, according to law-enforcement authorities and Potok’s organisation, which files lawsuits against hate groups aimed at making them bankrupt.
Late last year, two suspected skinheads who had links to a violent Klan chapter in Kentucky were charged with plotting to kill 88 black students. They were then going to assassinate President Obama by blasting him from a speeding car while wearing white tuxedos and top hats. They were never going to succeed, given the huge security net around Obama, but the fact that they had planned such an outlandish attack may be a harbinger of things to come.
“There is a tremendous backlash to Obama’s election,” says Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, another white supremacist group. “Many people look at the flag of the Republic of New Africa that was hoisted over the White House as an act of war.
www.powerhousebooks.com
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First, WTF is the flag of the republic of new Africa? :?
Second, what's the number of black people murdered by white supremacists in 2008? How does that compare to the number of black people murdered by black people in 2008?
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WTF is the flag of the republic of new Africa?
I dunno, I suppose that is what the flag stands for now that Obama is in office.
(Not that I believe that)
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http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0219hm.html
Heather Mac Donald
Nation of Cowards?
So says Eric Holder, but what’s really cowardly is racial dishonesty.
19 February 2009
Attorney General Eric Holder, a Clinton administration retread, wants to revive Bill Clinton’s National Conversation on Race. (What’s next? Hillarycare?) Holder recently told his Justice Department employees that the United States was a “nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable,” Holder said. “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
Is he nuts? Leave aside for a moment Holder’s purely decorative call for a “frank” conversation about race. The Clinton-era Conversation also purported to be frank, and we know what that meant: a one-sided litany of white injustices. Please raise your hand if you haven’t heard the following bromides about “the racial matters that continue to divide us” more times than you can count: Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism. I will stop there.
Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation’s elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have “conversations about . . . racial matters”; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism—notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades—has been in a coma throughout his time there.
Education bureaucrats maintain an incessant harangue on white racism because they see the writing on the wall: most students are indifferent to race and just want to get along. If left to themselves, they would go about their business perfectly happily and color-blindly, and the race industry would wither on the vine. Thus the institutional imperative to remind black students constantly about their victimization and the white students about their guilt. Last month, the elite Phillips Academy at Andover proudly announced a student presentation on White Privilege: A History and Its Role in Education. Would the student have come up with such a topic on her own without the school’s educators deliberately immersing her in such trivial matters? Of course not.
But if Attorney General Holder is really sincere about wanting a “frank” conversation about race, he should put the following items on the agenda:
The American electorate. The country just elected its first black president. And it actually didn’t talk a lot about Barack Obama’s race during the election, thank heavens, because most Americans were more interested in the candidate’s ideas than in his skin color. There were undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t vote for Obama because of his race. I would guess that their average age was 75. There is no question that a great many geriatric Americans continue to harbor the rankest racism for blacks, but guess what? They’re not going to be around for much longer. Young people growing up in the last 30 years live on a different planet when it comes to racial attitudes—until the educrats start playing with their minds.
We might also talk about those legions of older, black Americans who have held on to their love of country and belief in its ideals, despite having been subjected to America at its worst. I have had the privilege to speak to many such individuals for my work, and they have broken my heart with their dignity and nobility. Rather than reflexively consulting professional race activists for insights into race in America, the media and politicians might for once seek some voices that contradict the mandatory “angry black male” trope.
Crime. Holder told his Justice Department employees that they had a special responsibility to advance racial understanding, according to the Associated Press. Uh-oh. Before and during Holder’s first stint at Justice, when he served as Clinton’s deputy attorney general, the department’s civil rights division specialized in slapping onerous federal consent decrees on police departments. Its assumption was that racial disparities in cops’ stop-and-arrest rates reflected police racism, not racial disparities in crime rates.
Before Holder and his attorneys revive that practice, they should study certain facts that remain taboo in the mainstream media. For instance, the homicide rate for black men between the ages of 18 and 24 is well over ten times that of whites. And disparities in other violent-crime rates are just as startling. In New York City, one of the nation’s safest large cities, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black during the first six months of 2008, according to victims and witnesses, though blacks make up only 24 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic perps, and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. The face of violent crime in cities is almost exclusively black or brown. That explains why someone might feel a sense of trepidation when approached by a group of black youths. That’s not racism; it’s the reality of crime. And it’s that reality that determines whom the police stop, frisk, and arrest.
Education. Commentators on NPR’s “black” show, News and Notes, recently groused about the lack of black policy experts on the Sunday talk shows but ignored the possibility that the education gap might have something to do with it. Blacks, they said, need to be twice as qualified as whites to get a job. Let’s look at the evidence. The black high school drop-out rate approaches 50 percent. On the 2006 SAT, the average score in the critical-reading section was 434 for blacks, 527 for whites, and 510 for Asians; in the math section, 429 for blacks, 536 for whites, and 587 for Asians; and in the writing section, 428 for blacks, 519 for whites, and 512 for Asians. America’s lousy showing in international math, science, and reading tests compared with Japan and Western Europe is influenced in large part by the low scores of blacks and Hispanics. If blacks and Hispanics performed at the level that whites do, the U.S. would lead all industrialized nations in reading and would lead Europe in math and science, according to a study published in the Phi Delta Kappan in 2005.
Likewise, after their first year of legal education, 51 percent of blacks labor in the bottom tenth of their class; two-thirds reside in the bottom fifth. Blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try. Until such achievement disparities are eliminated, any allegations of racial discrimination in the absence of proportional numbers of black policy wonks—or law partners, chemists, engineers, or investment bankers—is absurd, especially when the nation’s elite institutions are doing everything they can to recruit black students, professors, and employees. Perhaps Holder could confront the stigma against academic achievement among many black youth, who deride studying and staying out of trouble as “acting white.”
The family. Closing the educational achievement gap will be difficult as long as the black illegitimacy rate is nearly 71 percent, compared with a white rate of 26 percent. Taxpayers foot the bill for this family breakdown—when fatherless children who never learned self-control and self-discipline disrupt classrooms and prevent other children from learning, and when the same fatherless children get sucked up into gang life and fail to connect with the world of work and responsibility. Many poor single mothers work heroically to raise law-abiding sons, but the odds are against them.
When communities resist an influx of Section 8 housing-voucher holders from the inner city, say, they are reacting overwhelmingly to behavior. Skin color is a proxy for that behavior. If inner-city blacks behaved like Asians—cramming as much knowledge into their kids as they can possibly fit into their skulls—the lingering wariness towards lower-income blacks that many Americans unquestionably harbor would disappear. Are there irredeemable racists among Americans? To be sure. They come in all colors, and we should deplore all of them. But the issue of race in the United States is more complex than polite company is usually allowed to express. If Eric Holder wants to crank up our racial preoccupations even further, let him at least do so with a full airing of the facts.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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February 25, 2009
Eric Holder's Tragic Prison
By Ed Kaitz
Some years ago at a major university out west I was hired to teach minority students courses in expository writing. Most of my students were African-American. They were part of a "bridge program" at the university that allowed "provisional" students (those whose entrance scores were sub par) to demonstrate within a year that they could handle the academic regimen at the school.
I realized that most of the students had been accepted through an affirmative action policy, but I was committed to helping them make the grade. My strategy was simple: hitch their sense of self-respect and self-confidence to their performance in the class. In other words, help them to understand that self-esteem is a product of achievement.
There was one major problem with my strategy. Every one of my colleagues teaching in the same writing program was convinced that race, not achievement, was the basis for a minority student's self-esteem. This ideology pervaded the mentality of the entire staff -- black and white -- from the lowliest tutors to the director of the writing program. Students were persuaded by their progressive instructors to explore only one topic in their writing: white oppression. In fact, of the hundreds of essays and drafts that I read I cannot remember one essay that managed to stray from the central theme: minority = oppressed, white = oppressor.
There was one class period that I will never forget. During a break in my lecture I asked several of the students what they intended to choose as a major. Some of the students said "sociology" while others said "ethnic studies" or "communications." When I asked if anyone wanted to choose "engineering" as a major a student in the back of the room loudly declared that engineering was a "white" profession. When my jaw nearly hit the floor most of the students burst out in laughter. I had never heard anything like this. I quickly recovered however and quietly told myself that for the remainder of the class I was now going to play the student. I wanted to let these black kids teach me something I'd probably never forget.
For the next twenty minutes I stood at the chalkboard writing down the names of common professions. Next to the profession I let the students direct me to writing either "white" or "black" based on their perception of "correct" life choices for people of color. There was raucous laughter and the students were at the edge of their seats proclaiming their judgments in near unison. Mathematician? White. Architect? White. Athlete? Black. Musician? Black. Engineer? White. Chemist? White. Physicist? White. Journalist? (this one caused some confusion) Teacher? Black. Economist? White. Business? White.
After we had covered the board with our list, I asked the students to consider the possibility of crossing over to one of the "white" professions. The response was unanimous: such a compromise would render the student an "Oreo." The students believed that a black engineer, for example, was black on the outside but unfortunately white on the inside.
During the several years I taught in the minority writing program, foreign students would often be allowed to join the writing course in order to improve their English and composition skills. Of these the Nigerian students were by far my favorites. Their respect for scholarship, learning, and academic achievement was unmatched. Their essays ranged in interest from international affairs to advertising -- and the quality of their work was excellent.
What fascinated me was how the classroom dynamic changed with the addition of the students from Nigeria. The African-American students looked at the coal black Nigerians like they had landed from Mars. For their part, the Nigerians rarely showed any interest in the culture of the black students on campus.
After leaving the minority writing program and later graduate school with a doctorate in philosophy, I spent years at several other universities teaching courses that were attended by Hindus, Arabs, Persians, Chinese, Japanese and yes, more of the excellent Nigerians. Their majors ranged from economics to foreign languages. In fact, I cannot remember a sociology or ethnic studies major among any of them. The difference? The word "Oreo," for these non African American minorities, really meant a cookie. Race never threatened the freedom they enjoyed to be individuals.
The philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote that "the plight of the Negro in America is that he is a Negro first and only secondly an individual." When Attorney General Eric Holder recently called us a "nation of cowards" he was looking through a prism unknown to his Nigerian brothers. Holder, like Mr. Obama, is the product of an education system and a movement for black liberation that is blind to the virtues of individualism. These men and women are coddled products of an inexhaustible grievance industry that has the unfortunate effect of trapping eager and aspiring young black kids into severely limited life choices. Simply put, by saturating their worldview with color, men like Holder and Obama end up closing doors rather than opening them.
Eric Hoffer understood however that there was an advantage to the kind of race hysteria fanned by the grievance industry. Hoffer argued that individualism is a frightening proposition to many. Those who choose freedom and self-reliance must "grope for a purpose in life" and they are often condemned to "eating their hearts out over wasted opportunities." In short, when you're free, there's no one to blame but yourself. Success is built on the more mundane virtues of patience and perseverance. As for the race hustling elites however Hoffer had this to say:
"Grievance and extravagant hope are meat and drink to their souls, and there is a hero's garment to fit any size, and an imperishable alibi to justify individual failure."
Citizens of all colors are about to witness on a national scale what has been quietly fermenting for decades within the Ivory Tower: a crystallization of ethnic identity so rigid that dialogue becomes virtually impossible. This isn't the fault of those who have championed the philosophy of identity through achievement. It's the product of selfish elite race hustlers who rarely if ever had the patience and determination to grind away and "grope for a purpose in life" like many of their lower and middle class black brothers. Of all the evaluations I received from the black students at the writing program there is one I'll never forget: "Ed makes me want to succeed."
Instead of a dialogue on race Mr. Holder, why don't we discuss some of these topics: personal finance, starting a business, sports, history, philosophy, art, fishing, raising children, God, or one of my favorite topics, music.
In fact, one of America's greatest and most precious dialogues between black and white took place in a sound studio in New York City back in 1959. That was when the immortal jazz great Miles Davis defied some serious criticism coming from the black community and chose the white Bill Evans to accompany the famed group on piano. Why, the black community wondered, when there were so many great black jazz pianists, did Davis pick Evans? The answer is quite simple: Bill Evans was the best (sorry Art Tatum fans). The result? The best selling and most beautiful jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue.
Here's some advice for the Attorney General: Do you want Americans to make some great music together? Forget about skin color.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/eric_holders_tragic_prison.html at February 25, 2009 - 12:16:18 PM EST
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Good piece BBG!
Here's this on the white version of Oreos :lol:
http://www.wiggaz.com/index.php
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- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -
No Country for Black Men
Posted By Travis Rowley On February 27, 2009 @ 12:30 am In . Column2 02, . Positioning, Politics, Race Issues, US News | 44 Comments
The Coen Brothers’ 2007 film [1] No Country for Old Men revolves around the tale of several young men engaged in a violent race for a satchel of cash. Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging sheriff investigating the depressing trail of bloodshed, markings that inform the old man that the customs and morals that guided his generation have decayed even faster than he has. Jones ends up as a depiction of the anguish experienced by people left without a country they can call home.
Democrats remain on their quest to offer similar anguish to African-Americans, as liberals now embark on their fifth decade aimed at stripping these reliable party constituents of American nationalism.
Liberal mouthpieces have long emphasized a shameful American history, one marked by slavery and segregation. And they insist that, even today, a majority of Americans hold contempt for dark-skinned people. “Something is clearly wrong when the government’s most effective affirmative-action program is the preference people of color receive when entering not college, but the criminal-justice system,” proclaims one prominent progressive text titled [2] A Covenant with Black America — which goes on to say that there is “a multi-headed, multi-tentacled monster out there devouring blacks who live in certain neighborhoods.”
Such rhetoric has caused many African-Americans to experience feelings of anti-Americanism and national detachment. Blacks now see mirages of racism everywhere, albeit disguised by “code words” and “institutional racism.” The outrage last year over Barack Obama being referred to as “articulate” provided a powerful example of this paranoia.
Anger and hatred typically accompany blacks’ racial anxiety. Before the start of a game last year, the NBA’s [3] Josh Howard said to a live camera, “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is going on. I don’t celebrate this [expletive]. I’m black.” Denver Nuggets guard [4] Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to even stand for the national anthem, stating that the American flag was a “symbol of oppression” and that the United States had a long “history of tyranny.”
In Democratic circles, this is known as “patriotism.”
These are not so much black sentiments as they are liberal. But many blacks now subscribe to the anti-American wing of contemporary liberalism.
Last year Michelle Obama said that America was “just downright mean” and admitted, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” And any Google search of Jeremiah Wright provides a score of videos showing Barack Obama’s longtime pastor condemning America for practicing “state terrorism” and for “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” We find him referring to the United States as the “U.S. of KKK A.” and thundering, “Not God Bless America. Goddamn America!”
His all-black congregation cheers.
To be without a home is to live with pain. But this has been the Democratic scheme for decades — to promote government intrusion by convincing minorities that most Americans, especially Republicans, reject them. Republicans are racist and against affirmative action. Democrats care and will give you stuff.
The misinformation campaign has succeeded. Many black Americans now view racial solidarity as more important than black individualism. Each year a handful of notorious black leaders convene the State of the Black Union, calling all “brothers” to recognize the uniformed plight that all African-Americans endure. Liberals stripped blacks of their country. So they concocted a new one — the Black Union.
Because racial camaraderie has resulted in more than 90% of blacks predictably voting for Democrats, the advice to be more “inclusive” is oft delivered to the GOP. Replicate the way in which Democrats pander to minorities in order to attract blacks to the Republican Party.
But safeguarding the feelings of minorities by adhering to liberals’ politically correct pap is precisely the cause of blacks’ adoption of big-government, anti-American liberalism. Do Republicans really want to be associated with such a philosophy?
The advice is backwards. Blacks are the ones to make concessions. They must abandon their liberalism before the party of conservatism can consider their membership. A simple matter of principle.
Yet, in order to convince Republicans to alter their strategy, Los Angeles-based writer Chaise Nunnally recently [5] referenced the Don Imus controversy in which Imus referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes.” Even though Nunnally found the opinions expressed by conservatives involved in the debate “legitimate and defensible,” he thought “they also struck the wrong note in communicating with the black community on a racially sensitive topic.”
Nunnally’s counsel was to be more racially symbolic, recommending Republicans find “a more race-sensitive tack to woo black voters.” Join the left in their truth-stifling political correctness in order to trick blacks into voting for you.
That’s how much liberals respect minorities.
Republicans would be better off listening to black conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, who recently reminded his readers, “Most Americans’ principles are closer to those of the Republicans than to those of the Democrats. … [Republicans] won big when they stood for something and told the people what that something was. … Ronald Reagan was the classic example. But another example would be the stunning Republican victories in the 1994 Congressional elections. … Articulating the message of Newt Gingrich’s ‘contract for America’ was a key to that historic victory.”
Republicans win when they underline conservatism, not when they dilute their principles by pandering to special interests. They should leave such prostitution to the Democrats.
For black Americans addicted to Democrats’ coddling sense of self-pity and collectivism, they will find no such slavery within the Republican Party. Only when blacks finally recognize the big-government whip held in Democratic hands can the party of Lincoln help them regain their independence, sustain their dignity, strengthen their families, and recapture their country.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/no-country-for-black-men/
URLs in this post:
[1] No Country for Old Men: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477348/
[2] A Covenant with Black America: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCovenant-B
lack-America-Tavis-Smiley%2Fdp%2F0883782774&tag=pajamasmedia-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&a
mp;creative=9325
[3] Josh Howard: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091708dnspomavslede.112d818.html
[4] Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf: http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1007881/index.htm
[5] referenced: http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_chaise4_02-04-09_1DCS222_v15.3ff46f6.html
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/27/the-presidents-accidental-gift-on-race/?feat=article_top10_read
BREITBART: Obama's accidental gift on race
By Andrew Breitbart | Monday, July 27, 2009
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Less than a month after being confirmed as the nation's attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. called out the American people as "essentially a nation of cowards" for refusing to talk openly about race.
So, thank you, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama, for starting the long-awaited national discussion on black and white identity - while averting our attention from the cockamamie scheme to nationalize health care.
And kudos to the professor and the president for choosing Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department as the representative of the Caucasian-American side of this difficult and much-needed historic debate.
Poetry was at work as the archetypal racist white cop who, according to the admittedly fact-challenged president, "stupidly" arrested his "friend." Sgt. Crowley waged a swift and effective public relations campaign that quashed the racism meme that Mr. Gates was recklessly pushing.
Sgt. Crowley, as it happens, is the Cambridge police force's hand-picked racial profiling expert and was selected by a former black police commissioner. He also performed CPR on black basketball star Reggie Lewis, whose widow praised the public servant for doing everything he could to save her husband. Sgt. Crowley's own police department immediately jumped to his defense in a picture-perfect multiracial photo op and press conference.
Even though Mr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley are poised to put their individual grievances to rest - over a beer negotiated by the president of the United States - the scope of the problem that brought them international attention lingers, underscoring the need for continued robust public dialogue.
We're finally talking, Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama. Why stop now?
Of course, the attorney general is essentially right in his assessment. Much of America is petrified to bring up race, especially in public forums - the media, in particular. But for exactly the opposite reasons Mr. Holder, the Obama administration and the brain trust of modern liberalism assert.
Americans, especially nonblacks, are deeply fearful that the dynamic is predicated on an un-American premise: presumed guilt. Innocence, under the extra-constitutional reign of political correctness, liberalism's brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.
Think not? Ask the Duke lacrosse team, which had 88 of the school's professors sign a petition that presumed their guilt before their side of the story was known. Even though the white athletes were exonerated and the liberal district attorney who pushed the case was dethroned, disbarred and disgraced, the professoriate that assigned guilt to its own students still refuses to apologize.
Those signatories constituted 90 percent of Duke's African and African-American Studies Department, the subject-matter domain of Mr. Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West and other tenure-wielding, highfalutin, iambic-pentameter-filibustering race baiters, and 60 percent of Duke's women's studies department, another hotbed of victimology posing as intellectualism.
While the media was front and center in preparing for the public executions of the three Duke lacrosse players, they scurried away when they were proved innocent. The Democratic Media Complex, in its pursuit of Orwellian hate-crime legislation, reparations and sundry non-ameliorative resolutions to America's troubled racial past, pursues its victims with blood lust. But it cannot act in good faith to redeem those it has destroyed in countless rushes to judgment. (Richard Jewell, R.I.P.)
The mainstream media choose to flaunt story lines that make white America appear guilty of continued institutional racism, while black racism against whites is ignored as an acceptable disposition given our nation's history. This double standard provides a game board on which the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can thrive in perpetuity and ensures racial progress is slowed.
And that is why the Case of Sergeant Crowley vs. Professor Gates is so important. As is expected from professional race baiters, Mr. Gates instigated a public brouhaha over race. And Mr. Obama, a man who attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racist sermons for 20 years, used the bully pulpit to grant his friend a national platform to condemn a man for doing his job.
Sgt. Crowley, a proud and defiant public professional, played the moment perfectly and stopped his own assassination by media. Talk about a postmodern hero. Whether he likes it or not, Sgt. Crowley is a potent symbol of how the union has managed to become more perfect, a Rosa Parks of rush-to-judgment "reverse racism."
Now that the facts of the case show that his friend the professor was the man doing the racial profiling, the president wants to end the discussion.
Now we see what the attorney general meant when he spoke of cowards.
• Andrew Breitbart is publisher of the news portals Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv. His latest endeavor, Big Hollywood (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com), is a group blog on Hollywood and politics from the center-right perspective.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/27/must-see-cambridge-cop-says-she-wont-vote-for-obama-again-after-gatesgate/
Stand up people.
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Cambridge Police Profiling Still A Grim Reality for Harvard Faculty Assholes
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/07/cambridge-police-profiling-still-a-grim-reality-for-harvard-faculty-assholes.html
Guest Opinion
by Professor John Evans Evans-John
Harvard School of Harvard Faculty Asshole Studies
Harvard University
When I first learned of the arrest of my colleague Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates after he stood up to the fascist jackboots of a declasse, ill-educated Cambridge police officer, I was of course angered -- but scarcely shocked. L'Affaire Gates simply aired, in public, the dirty 100-thread-count table linen of an American culture where Harvard faculty assholes still face a daily struggle against profiling, abuse, and insolence.
It will come as no surprise that Skip's arrest was the talk of the Douchebag Room at the Harvard Faculty Club last Friday. I and a group of colleagues had assembled for our weekly lunch; I opted for their competently-prepared Ahi Tuna Tartare and an amusing glass of '05 Hospices de Beaune Premier Cru Cuvee Cyrot-Chaudron. I had noticed that the Franz Fanon Memorial Booth -- Skip's long-reserved lunch spot -- was uncharacteristically empty, and asked our waiter Sergio for an explanation.
"Professor Skeep, he no is come today," said Sergio. "I tink he is in the jail."
Our table exchanged knowing glances, for we knew immediately that Skip was only the latest victim of a system that singles out the Harvard faculty asshole for stigmatization and unequal justice. It is a system that all of us knew too well, and provided an opportunity for an open conversation about our shared experiences as Harvard faculty assholes in America while waiting for Sergio to bring the dessert cart.
One after one came the cascade of stark stories: the rolled eyes of our department secretaries. The Spanish language mockery of our office janitors. The foul gestures of drunken strap-hanging Red Sox lumpenproles aboard the MBTA. The frequent police stops on the highway to Cape Ann and Martha's Vineyard for "Volvoing While Asshole." And then there are the insulting media stereotypes, where we are routinely caricatured as pompous, effete, self-important, irrelevant elitists. All, I might add, by a motley collection of lowbrow inferiors, few of whom have ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. Let alone edit one.
Sometimes it even comes at the hand of self-styled "peers" from D-list state ampersand institutions. One colleague recounted the tale of his restroom confrontation with a Texas A&M professor at a national academic conference last year. After relieving themselves at adjacent urinals, my colleague noticed the oaf leaving hastily for the plenary session and decided to gently point out his hygienic forgetfulness. "A Harvard man washes his hands after urinating," he said. "And an Aggie don't piss all over his hands, asshole," came the reply.
A female colleague from the English department recalled a recent incident along the Charles River jogging path during her regular morning run. A confused passer-by rudely interrupted her progress and requested directions, as if my colleague were some sort of lowly campus guide or untenured adjunct. "Where does this street go to?" she demanded. Naturally, my colleague took the opportunity to correct her, noting that "at Harvard we do not end our sentences in prepositions."
"Okay, Where does this street go to, asshole?" barked the interloper. Needless to say, my colleague's daily morning runs have since been replaced with tear-filled visits to the Faculty Asshole Self Esteem Counseling Center.
For untold hundreds of Harvard faculty assholes such indignities are, sadly, still part and parcel of being "The Other." As Associate Director of the School of Harvard Faculty Asshole Studies, I have worked to institute policies to insure that Harvard maintains a nurturing environment for all assholes in our community, be they faculty, students, or alumni. Some progress has been made, such as Harvard's mandatory sensitivity and deference training program for all incoming freshassholes. But such internal programs do little to address the impertinence and discrimination we still face outside campus. Some have suggested that we involve the Cambridge Police Department in an educational outreach program, but in my experience the CPD is among the worst offenders.
Case in point: last winter I was slated to deliver the keynote address for an intradepartmental asshole colloquium at Lowell House. Running late, I temporarily parked along Plympton. As I emerged from my Audi, I discovered that I had captured the unwelcome attention of a CPD officer. "Hey Buddy, is that your car?" he barked.
"Why? Because I'm a Harvard faculty asshole in America?" I cleverly retorted.
"No asshole, because this is a snow route and you can't double park here," he sneered, concocting a flimsy excuse for his continued harassment. "You have to move it now."
"That's Professor Asshole to you, you fascist townie," I explained, tossing him the Audi's remote-start key. "Need a valet? Call your mother at the brothel."
It doesn't take an experienced asshole rights activist to tell you what happened next: my Audi was on its way to impound while I rode to the Cambridge Police Station in the unheated vinyl rear seat of Bull Conner's squad car. To add insult to injury, the desk officer refused my request for a dignified background bookshelf for my booking photos.
Thankfully the Constitution still allows even Harvard Assholes a bare modicum of human rights, so I used my allotted phone call to alert the Dean and the Faculty Grievance Committee to my plight. In those 35 excruciating minutes I wasted away waiting in that stark cell, I wrote the opening chapter of "Letters From a Cambridge Jail," my forthcoming scholarly magnum opus on the grim legacy of Asshole oppression in America.
Eventually my arrest record was expunged and I agreed to meet the loathsome arresting officer at President Faust's office for a conciliatory off-record "beer chat." As the University Counsel had predicted, the lure of free limitless alcohol proved irresistible to the simpleminded Irishman, and he was soon happily signing confessions of guilt and abject apologies. Still, even after he was fired, I was left to pick up the pieces of my shattered psyche.
As I recounted the details of that unpleasant encounter to my colleagues, a few wondered aloud if we were not better served by changing the system gradually. Then our eyes turned to the stately historic portraits of the Harvard faculty assholes who came before us, hanging in silent judgment on the Douchebag Room walls; Schlessinger, Galbraith, Leary, Cornel West, Alan Dershowitz, Theodore Kaczynski. Would these great assholes have accepted complicit silence in the face of crude police insolence? How will we be remembered by future generations of Harvard faculty assholes who will battle future generations of Cambridge police and parking enforcement officials? Where is Sergio with the damned dessert cart?
Some suggest that the election of President Obama proves that America's prejudice against Harvard assholes is a quaint relic of the past. But for those of us who live with it every day, the evidence shows the opposite. And it isn't just Harvard assholes suffering the cold, rude hand of uppity townie privilege. Other, if less endowed, asshole faculties suffer similar oppression; in the southern Lacrosse fields of Duke, in the west coast arugula farms of Stanford, at Northwestern, where ever Northwestern is.
No, we must not be silent. That is why I have used a portion of my class action windfall against the Cambridge Police department to produce a shocking new documentary film, "Asshole Like Me," detailing the courageous plight of the tenured Sphincter-American community. It premiers this Friday at the Science Center. Get your tickets now -- with free beer on tap, demand will be high!
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http://www.videosift.com/video/Chappelle-Black-white-supremacist
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Your Negro, My Macaca
Let’s not get into this smarmy business.
By Mona Charen
Welcome to America’s longest running hit show — the race farce, in which feigned shock and outrage lead to fawning apologies and bumbling explanations to all the wrong people. Taking offense has been reduced to low comedy in America, as hypocrites play out their assigned parts.
Sen. Harry Reid was quoted in a new book as enthusing in 2008 about Obama’s candidacy because he is “light skinned” and speaks without a “Negro dialect, unless he wants one.” Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post called it “beyond stupid” to use the word “Negro” in 2008. Liz Cheney labeled Reid’s words “fairly racist.” And Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele opened up to full throttle, calling on Reid to step down as majority leader.
Senator Reid understood his part in the drama. He apologized to the president and to “any and all Americans, especially African Americans, for my improper comments.” The majority leader then made personal calls to a number of African Americans who could, he hoped, offer remission of sins. Among these were reportedly Eleanor Holmes Norton, Donna Brazile, and . . . Al Sharpton.
Actually, if you read between the lines, it doesn’t look as though Reid phoned Sharpton but the other way around. The figure who became an American celebrity by attempting to frame innocent men for an invented racial attack, Sharpton issued a statement of forgiveness after noting that he and the leader had spoken. No Democrat in Harry Reid’s position would dare to refuse a call from Sharpton under these circumstances. Thus does Sharpton burnish his reputation as the “go to” guy for racial absolution. Deft.
Some Reid defenders have been at pains to point out that Reid was supporting Obama’s candidacy and that his words should be understood in that context. This is the part in the play when Democrats’ sins are washed clean because they favor the minimum wage, health-care reform, and card check. As Eleanor Holmes Norton put it, Reid gets a pass because he “has earned it with long support of civil rights and issues that matter most to African Americans.” President Obama applied the same standard, accepting Reid’s apology because he has shown “passionate leadership on matters of social justice” and because the president “knows what’s in Harry’s heart.”
With due respect to the Republicans, who simply could not help themselves in the face of this big fat opportunity to play turnabout, this is not seemly. It’s true and glaringly obvious that the Democrats have honed this hair-trigger race sensitivity into a political tool that shoots only right, not left. It’s so true that no one gave Trent Lott the benefit of the doubt about what was in his heart when he said something boneheaded in praise of the 100-year-old Strom Thurmond. It’s true that one word, “macaca,” which no one had ever heard of before (and may or may not have had racial connotations), was enough to sink Republican senator George Allen. And it’s true that countless honorable conservatives have been unjustly smeared as racists because they disapprove of affirmative action or oppose the teachers’ unions.
But let’s not get into this smarmy business.
Senator Reid used the word “Negro.” It’s out of date, but is it now offensive? Is it the new “N” word? Just a blink of an eye ago, “black” was the preferred locution. Jesse Jackson decided it should be “African American,” and the country went along. But the slower adopters (even your humble columnist, who prefers less orotund expressions) sometimes still say “black.” How long until that becomes a sin?
As for Obama’s being light-skinned, it’s certainly possible that his complexion made him more acceptable to some vestigial racists. For Reid to notice that is not to endorse it. And finally, the president’s lack of a “Negro dialect, unless he wants one,” was clearly an important asset. Most Americans expect their president to speak standard English. Black (there I go again) speech in America ranges from James Earl Jones to gangsta rap, and it was clearly an advantage that Barack Obama was articulate. When he chooses to adopt a black style, he does it a whole lot more authentically than Hillary Clinton managed in her embarrassing South Carolina appearance at a black (did it again) church. Remember “I ain’t noways tired”?
Republicans are right, so right, that if Mitch McConnell had said what Reid said, there would be a prolonged scandal. And they are right that political differences should not be turned radioactive by the malicious charge of racism. But it’s enough to point this out.
Don’t join in.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzM0MjU0YTU3NjMzZGQ2ZjJhMjM0YmJkOTRlMjM0MTU=
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This is an ideal "teachable moment" to illustrate the racism and hypocrisy of the left.
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Indeed.
BTW, I am feeling very prescient with my post of August 18 :lol:
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February 25, 2009
Eric Holder's Tragic Prison
By Ed Kaitz
Some years ago at a major university out west I was hired to teach minority students courses in expository writing. Most of my students were African-American. They were part of a "bridge program" at the university that allowed "provisional" students (those whose entrance scores were sub par) to demonstrate within a year that they could handle the academic regimen at the school.
I realized that most of the students had been accepted through an affirmative action policy, but I was committed to helping them make the grade. My strategy was simple: hitch their sense of self-respect and self-confidence to their performance in the class. In other words, help them to understand that self-esteem is a product of achievement.
There was one major problem with my strategy. Every one of my colleagues teaching in the same writing program was convinced that race, not achievement, was the basis for a minority student's self-esteem. This ideology pervaded the mentality of the entire staff -- black and white -- from the lowliest tutors to the director of the writing program. Students were persuaded by their progressive instructors to explore only one topic in their writing: white oppression. In fact, of the hundreds of essays and drafts that I read I cannot remember one essay that managed to stray from the central theme: minority = oppressed, white = oppressor.
There was one class period that I will never forget. During a break in my lecture I asked several of the students what they intended to choose as a major. Some of the students said "sociology" while others said "ethnic studies" or "communications." When I asked if anyone wanted to choose "engineering" as a major a student in the back of the room loudly declared that engineering was a "white" profession. When my jaw nearly hit the floor most of the students burst out in laughter. I had never heard anything like this. I quickly recovered however and quietly told myself that for the remainder of the class I was now going to play the student. I wanted to let these black kids teach me something I'd probably never forget.
For the next twenty minutes I stood at the chalkboard writing down the names of common professions. Next to the profession I let the students direct me to writing either "white" or "black" based on their perception of "correct" life choices for people of color. There was raucous laughter and the students were at the edge of their seats proclaiming their judgments in near unison. Mathematician? White. Architect? White. Athlete? Black. Musician? Black. Engineer? White. Chemist? White. Physicist? White. Journalist? (this one caused some confusion) Teacher? Black. Economist? White. Business? White.
After we had covered the board with our list, I asked the students to consider the possibility of crossing over to one of the "white" professions. The response was unanimous: such a compromise would render the student an "Oreo." The students believed that a black engineer, for example, was black on the outside but unfortunately white on the inside.
During the several years I taught in the minority writing program, foreign students would often be allowed to join the writing course in order to improve their English and composition skills. Of these the Nigerian students were by far my favorites. Their respect for scholarship, learning, and academic achievement was unmatched. Their essays ranged in interest from international affairs to advertising -- and the quality of their work was excellent.
What fascinated me was how the classroom dynamic changed with the addition of the students from Nigeria. The African-American students looked at the coal black Nigerians like they had landed from Mars. For their part, the Nigerians rarely showed any interest in the culture of the black students on campus.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/eric_holders_tragic_prison.html at February 25, 2009 - 12:16:18 PM EST
Trimmed to save space and highlight the point I caught. I went to school in 2 different areas, I transferred just after hitting high school. In one area kids were kids, black, white, asian, etc. were all treated the same, and generally performed according to their individual apptitudes. some of us were better with "things" others with "ideas" or "doers" or singers. It was an Individual thing. Later on when I got down to SoCal and started high school, I found it strange that in some cases people were grouping themselves by skin color rather than interests. I had had classes on racism, but the big city school I attended is what really educated me. To me, all of the people choosing to group strictly by skin color were racists. This article drives the point home, the students here are the racists, not the teacher. The teacher is all into letting the individuals decide what they want to do, he is not saying "that is not a proper black job" it is the black students doing that to themselves. Another aspect of the Harry Chapin song "roses are red", even if he is a typical long haired hippy freak type, that does not mean he cannot find truths and make a point about them in his own way!
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http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2011/02/the-new-one-drop-rule-from-tragedy-to-farce.html
February 09, 2011
The New "One-Drop Rule": From Tragedy to Farce
One of the more interesting bits of knowledge that has emerged from the Psychoanalytic study of the mind over the last century is that unconscious conflicts can often be expressed in two diametrically opposed outcomes. The classic example is of the young child's hatred toward a new baby who displaces him form the center of his mommy's universe. The child would like to kill the baby (loving feelings toward a sibling develop much later and sometimes never develop at all) and often makes aggressive actions toward the intruder. There is a reason that wise parents do not leave 2 year olds alone with newborn siblings.
**Must read.
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"There IS a thread dedicated to matters of race, and if this conversation goes any further, lets take it there; so I will limit myself to stating that I think it self-apparent that racism is FAR less a problem than it used to be. Look at the positions of power held by Colin Powell, Condaleza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama, Holder, and many, many others. Look at the lack of issue when interracial couples are protrayed on TV and in the movies.
Certainly race-baiting remains-- look at the tactics of the progressives, the Pravda media, the Dem Party, but arguably that is a sign of desperation.
If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you weren't a racist, vote against him in 2012 to prove you aren't an idiot."
Racism has greatly improved in mainstream white America, however the left and their allies in minority communities have become much more racist and do so without condemnation, creating a blatant double standard.
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The Pravdas of the MSM being some of those allies , , , IMHO ultimately this dynamic contains the seeds of its own destruction if we "Question boldly. Hold on to our Truth. Speak without fear." (Glenn Beck) , , , This forum comes to mind :-D
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"There IS a thread dedicated to matters of race, and if this conversation goes any further, lets take it there; so I will limit myself to stating that I think it self-apparent that racism is FAR less a problem than it used to be. Look at the positions of power held by Colin Powell, Condaleza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama, Holder, and many, many others. Look at the lack of issue when interracial couples are protrayed on TV and in the movies.
Certainly race-baiting remains-- look at the tactics of the progressives, the Pravda media, the Dem Party, but arguably that is a sign of desperation.
If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you weren't a racist, vote against him in 2012 to prove you aren't an idiot."
Racism has greatly improved in mainstream white America, however the left and their allies in minority communities have become much more racist and do so without condemnation, creating a blatant double standard.
I'm a paramedic. The racism among police and fire is extraordinary. That is the main reason why I see more racism now than when I was a kid. Public servants, at least in my city, have terrible attitudes.
Even if it has improved overall, I think a lot of it is due to rules about it. People don't want to get sued or fired for running their mouths, but it hasn't been that long sense a fellow EMT told me race traders should be killed. Maybe the rules of society have changed but I don't think people have changed much.
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CW,
To what do you attribute this?
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CW,
To what do you attribute this?
I think the success of the civil rights movements, mostly African American and Homosexual, simultaneously make whites feel threatened while removing guilt for their lower standing in society. It helps white men feel that they need to "attack back" while letting them feel like they shouldn't feel bad for their opinions, sense they have lost the ability to effectively oppress these other groups in their daily lives.
The fact that black comedians, priests, and musicians are so public and open about their opinions makes white feel like they can vent their bad attitude. The fact that gay rights movement has been so publicized makes it easier for straight men to identify homosexuals that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. It is harder for gay men to hide and easier for allegedly straight men to feel threatened, so they take their shots.
The success of black people in promoting themselves reminds whites that they are a part of the group. Whites think that if blacks get a bigger share of the pie, they will get less, because there isn't enough to go around. Even though whites have much more, they don't want to share. White people think that because they only benefit passively from their father's and father's father's crimes, they don't hold any responsibility, and resent losing any part of it.
I think the increase in racism among blacks is due to the stacking of more and more frustration. The collapse of the traditional family, generational poverty and the difficulty succeeding in education sense their parents were uneducated and they go to underfunded school, problems on top of problems, they see that they could come up but find it practically impossible. Black on black violence is in part due to self loathing, and therefor hating other people that look like yourself. Racism towards whites is due to seeing other people with so much more, or being angry that so many of their own people can't get ahead.
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Smartass tangent in defense of the English language:
a) I suspect you mean "race traitors" not "race traders"; and
b) "since" not "sense" in paragraph 4 ("because" would be a better choice of word btw, "since" is better used for time than causality.
Yip!
PS: From where are you?
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Smartass tangent in defense of the English language:
a) I suspect you mean "race traitors" not "race traders"; and
b) "since" not "sense" in paragraph 4 ("because" would be a better choice of word btw, "since" is better used for time than causality.
Yip!
PS: From where are you?
Sorry about the English. I scored in the 11% when I took my GED test back in the day (;
Normally I try harder to catch it, but I'm doing my calculus 3 work in another window. Talking about racism is my mental break.
I'm from Dayton, OH - which explains some of my opinions. DYT is one of the most segregated cities in the country. The town of 8000 I live in now has zero black kids in the high school, despite being within 5 miles of down town. The suburb I grew up in, Moraine, had a sign up into the 90's telling blacks to keep out after dark. When my parents got their first black neighbors, they were harassed by their other neighbors - though I think he was a sheriff and had some ability to keep people off his lawn.
Edit - here is a news story about how we are less segregated than we used to be: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/dayton-suburbs-less-segregated-since-2000-data-says-1031697.html
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Entirely possible that where you live is tilting your perceptions. In the big picture however I think the improvment has been dramatic and the prognosis good.
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Well, I hope you're right sir.
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www.daybydaycartoon.com/2002/11/04/
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I have patient who is from Thailand. She went on a sightseeing tour of Egypt and when she came back we spoke. She enjoyed many of the sights very much but would not go to see the "mummies". She explained as a Buddhist that she thought that such displays desecrated the dead. This report reminds me of her feelings about this:
http://news.yahoo.com/researchers-tribes-clash-over-native-bones-160144542.html
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I agree with them. I don't go to museums or to exhibits like "Bodies." I think grave robbing out of curiosity about the person buried there is sick.
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Yes there is a sort of dishoner for the dead in this.
Yet I am fascinated by the history of mankind and it unfortunately the only thing left to study of previous generations are the gravesites.
I don't think it is a morbid curiousity that motivates. It is a study of us I suppose.
Than again grave robbing for money has gone on forever. Not good.
Do we really learn anything that helps mankind do better in the future from all this archeology? I haven't given it much thought or know the answer.
Perhaps if we did that would be some sort of moral justification for this. Otherwise I think you are right and it is morally wrong.
I guess mummy exibits serve no purpose other than to make tourist dollars.
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All:
This thread is for discussion and articles treating the question of "Can't we all just get along?"
Moved from the Santorum Topic Page per Crafty's request.
Crafty said,
"I think the real solution here is for people to be free to be gay and other people to be free to be grossed out by it, with or without God's blessing.
Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate."
Crafty, could you elaborate on your thought that "people should be allowed to discriminate".
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/school-tells-mom-to-declare-son-a-racist-after-he-asks-classmate-are-you-brown-because-you-come-from-africa/
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Marc, now that you have more time, given Winter Camp is over (it sounded excellent) I hope you have time to address your general comment....
Crafty said,
"I think the real solution here is for people to be free to be gay and other people to be free to be grossed out by it, with or without God's blessing.
Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate."
Crafty, could you elaborate on your thought that "people should be allowed to discriminate".
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For the record, although I post this article, I consider the book's hypothesis to be drivel. That said there is something here worthy of reflection.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/books/michelle-alexanders-new-jim-crow-raises-drug-law-debates.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120307
Drug Policy as Race Policy
Garry McCarthy, a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, did not expect to hear anything too startling when he appeared at a conference on drug policy organized last year by an African-American minister in Newark, where he was the police director.
But then a law professor named Michelle Alexander took the stage and delivered an impassioned speech attacking the war on drugs as a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow — and received a two-minute standing ovation from the 500 people in the audience.
“These were not young people living in high-crime neighborhoods,” Mr. McCarthy, now police superintendent in Chicago, recalled in a telephone interview. “This was the black middle class.”
“I don’t believe in the government conspiracy, but what you have to accept is that that narrative exists in the community and has to be addressed,” he said. “That was my real a-ha moment.”
Mr. McCarthy is not alone. During the past two years Professor Alexander has been provoking such moments across the country — and across the political spectrum — with her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which has become a surprise best seller since its paperback version came out in January. Sales have totaled some 175,000 copies after an initial hardcover printing of a mere 3,000, according to the publisher, the New Press.
The book marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America. Today, Professor Alexander writes, nearly one-third of black men are likely to spend time in prison at some point, only to find themselves falling into permanent second-class citizenship after they get out. That is a familiar argument made by many critics of the criminal justice system, but Professor Alexander’s book goes further, asserting that the crackdown was less a response to the actual explosion of violent crime than a deliberate effort to push back the gains of the civil rights movement.
For many African-Americans, the book — which has spent six weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list — gives eloquent and urgent expression to deep feelings that the criminal justice system is stacked against them.
“Everyone in the African-American community had been seeing exactly what she is talking about but couldn’t put it into words,” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, an educational advocacy group in Chicago that has been blasting its 60,000 e-mail subscribers with what Mr. Jackson called near-daily messages about the book and Professor Alexander since he saw a video of her speaking in 2010.
The book is also galvanizing white readers, including some who might question its portrayal of the war on drugs as a continuation of race war by other means.
“The book is helping white folks who otherwise would have simply dismissed that idea understand why so many people believe it,” said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It is making them take that seriously.”
“The New Jim Crow” arrives at a receptive moment, when declining crime rates and exploding prison budgets have made conservatives and liberals alike more ready to question the wisdom of keeping nearly 1 in 100 Americans behind bars. But Professor Alexander, who teaches at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, said in an interview that the more provocative claims of her book did not come easily to her. When she first encountered the “New Jim Crow” metaphor on a protest sign in Oakland, Calif., a decade ago, she was a civil rights lawyer with an impeccable résumé — Stanford Law School, a Supreme Court clerkship — and was leery of embracing arguments that might be considered, as she put it, “crazy.”
Professor Alexander, who is black, knew that African-Americans were overrepresented in prison, though she resisted the idea that this was anything more than unequal implementation of colorblind laws. But her work as director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California, she said, opened her eyes to the extent of the lifelong exclusion many offenders face, including job discrimination, elimination from juries and voter rolls, and even disqualification from food stamps, public housing and student loans.
“It’s easy to be completely unaware that this vast new system of racial and social control has emerged,” she said. “Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no ‘Whites Only’ signs. This system is out of sight, out of mind.”
In conversation, she disputes any suggestion that she is describing a conspiracy. While the title is “provocative,” she said, the book contains no descriptions of people gathering secretly in rooms.
“The main thrust,” she said, “is to show how historically both our conscious and unconscious biases and anxieties have played out over and over again to birth these vast new systems of social control.”
Whatever Professor Alexander’s account of the origins of mass incarceration, her overall depiction of its human costs is resonating even with people who disagree with her politics.
Rick Olson, a state representative in Michigan, was one of the few whites and few Republicans in the room when Professor Alexander gave a talk sponsored by the state’s black caucus in January.
“I had never before connected the dots between the drug war, unequal enforcement, and how that reinforces poverty,” Representative Olson said. “I thought, ‘Gee whiz, let me get this book.’ ”
Reading it, he said, inspired him to draft a bill decriminalizing the use and possession of marijuana.
The Rev. Charles Hubbard, the pastor at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, a mostly white evangelical congregation in Garland, Tex., said he had started carrying the book with him everywhere and urges fellow pastors to preach about it, though he acknowledged it could be a tough sell in Texas.
“I think people need to hear the message,” he said. “I don’t think Anglo folks have any idea how difficult it is for African-American men who get caught up in the criminal justice system.”
Mr. Hubbard said he was particularly impressed by how “well-documented” Professor Alexander’s book is. But to some of the book’s detractors, including those deeply sympathetic to her goal of ending mass incarceration, its scholarship falls short.
In an article to be published next month in The New York University Law Review, James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender, calls mass incarceration a social disaster but challenges what he calls Professor Alexander’s “myopic” focus on the war on drugs.
Painting the war on drugs as mainly a backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, Professor Forman writes, ignores the violent crime wave of the 1970s and minimizes the support among many African-Americans for get-tough measures. Furthermore, he argues, drug offenders make up less than 25 percent of the nation’s total prison population, while violent offenders — who receive little mention in “The New Jim Crow” — make up a much larger share.
“Even if every single one of these drug offenders were released tomorrow,” he writes, “the United States would still have the world’s largest prison system.”
To Professor Alexander, however, that argument neglects the full scope of the problem. Our criminal “caste system,” as she calls it, affects not just the 2.3 million people behind bars, but also the 4.8 million others on probation or parole (predominately for nonviolent offenses), to say nothing of the millions more whose criminal records stigmatize them for life.
“This system depends on the prison label, not just prison time,” she said.
In a telephone interview, Professor Forman, a son of the civil rights leader James Forman, praised the book’s “spectacular” success in raising awareness of the issue. And some activists say their political differences with Professor Alexander’s account matter less than the overall picture she paints of a brutal and unjust system.
Craig M. DeRoche, director of external affairs at the Justice Fellowship, the advocacy arm of Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry founded by the former Nixon aide Charles Colson, said he rejected the political history in “The New Jim Crow” but still considered it essential reading for conservatives.
“The facts are the facts,” he said. “The numbers are the numbers.”
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Perhaps it should be considered why we have such a disproportionate number of offenders from certain demographic groups.
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Adding this video gem from 'politics' http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=943.msg60936#msg60936 to the race thread by request:
http://www.therightscoop.com/1990-thomas-sowell-explains-derrick-bell/
Sowell: "...[Bell] also said that by black, he does not mean skin color, he means those who are really black, not those who think white and look black. And so what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position."
Harvard law student Barack Obama made his early mark championing the cause of Prof. Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School's first black professor.
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Have not read this yet, but it could be interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/They-Were-White-Slaves-Enslavement/product-reviews/0929903056/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
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While JDN awaits my thoughts on the matter with varying degrees of patience, I toss out this article from the WSJ to start our intellectual juices flowing:
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577283380383835556.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Can Britain Tolerate Christians?
Nondiscrimination laws become a morass of claims and counterclaims..
By ANNE JOLIS
London
Fifteen years ago, hoteliers Peter and Hazelmary Bull made some mocking headlines when reporters noticed their stodgy guest policy: No double rooms for unmarried couples. "You have got to have principles," Mrs. Bull told the Mirror at the time, under the headline "You Couldn't Make It Up."
The Bulls had been turning away unwed mini-breakers from their Cornish guesthouse since 1986, and no one had sued them for it yet. It was, after all, no crime to be the least-cool B&B in England.
That appears to have changed. Last month a British appeals court upheld a £3,600 ($5,800) fine against the Bulls, who in 2008 turned down Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy for a double room despite their being joined in a civil partnership. The British government has recognized such unions since 2005; the Bulls, born-again Christians, do not. Messrs. Hall and Preddy sued on the grounds that their rights had been violated under the U.K.'s 2007 Equality Act, which bars sexual-orientation discrimination in the provision of services.
The Bulls hope to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court and, if that fails, to the European Court of Human Rights. British law currently exempts some religious institutions from some nondiscrimination laws, but commercial guesthouses don't count. While the Bulls are perfectly entitled to be Christian in private, their business is a "service and public function" under British law because they offer their services to the "public."
Mike Judge of the Newcastle-based Christian Institute, which has funded the Bulls' legal battle, says the couple is seeking a new exemption providing "reasonable accommodation or expansion" for enterprises such as their own. "The equality law has been framed such that, by giving an exemption to a religious organization, it suggests you can exercise religious liberty only within religious organizations," says Mr. Judge.
That's true enough, though Britain's equality and nondiscrimination rules already have more loopholes than a coherent principle can bear. A case in point involves British Airways, a private business that has had better luck enforcing its standards under Britain's patchwork of rights, responsibilities and opt-outs.
In a dispute now headed to the European Court of Human Rights, the British government has backed British Airways in having enforced a long-standing dress code that kept front-office employees from wearing visible religious symbols. Check-in attendant Nadia Eweida refused to submit to the code in 2006, insisting on visibly wearing her crucifix and declining a job for the same pay away from customers. She was subsequently placed on unpaid leave for six months until BA relaxed its policy in 2007.
British courts rejected Ms. Eweida's demand that BA repay her lost wages, and she is now arguing before the European court in Strasbourg that the U.K. government failed to protect her right, recognized both by Britain and the European Union, to religious nondiscrimination in the workplace. Here the government's argument rests on its judgment of what Christianity does and does not demand of its adherents, and it concludes that wearing symbols such as crucifixes doesn't constitute the "practice" of a religion, but merely "behavior or expression that is motivated or inspired by religion or belief," which is not always protected.
Less tortured is the government's secondary point, which is that BA is a private company and the government has "no positive obligations to ensure that a private employer permitted Ms. Eweida to wear a visible cross." The government's filing says that Ms. Eweida's rights, under both British and European protections, were satisfied because she was "free to resign and seek employment elsewhere."
But just as no one forces crucifix-wearing Christians to work for secular-sensitive airlines, nothing compels same-sex couples to seek accommodations at Christian-run properties. In the Bulls' case, however, the government's position comes down to the fact that no one forces Christians to open businesses.
In this morass of rights claims and counterclaims, British Christians may be forgiven for seeing a larger assault on their values and traditions. Yet lost in the country's increasingly awkward debates over religious versus sexual freedoms, and the competing sensibilities of this or that protected group, is an even more puzzling discrepancy over when any private business is allowed to set potentially discriminatory standards. So far the U.K. has respected some such rights in relation to a business's employees, but not its customers.
Even that latitude may soon narrow, as Prime Minister David Cameron's government attempts damage control among its Christian supporters over Ms. Eweida's case. A Downing Street spokesman this week suggested that if the European court finds against Ms. Eweida, the government may look into new protections for religious workers against private standards such as dress codes.
That might satisfy devout Britons for a while, as would a new carve-out for religious business owners such as the Bulls—at least until the next time anyone's convictions, mores, practices or habits conflict with anyone else's in the country. Meanwhile, these small victories will only further muddle companies' freedoms to dispose of their resources as they see fit—regardless of faith, sexual orientation, or ever-changing estimations of political expedience.
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
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Economist Walter Williams writing at Townhall.com, March 21:
It's not unreasonable to ask how valuable the variously labeled liberal, Democratic or progressive agenda has been to black Americans and whether blacks should proceed in political lock step with this agenda.
According to an American Community Survey, by the U.S. Census Bureau, the top 10 poorest cities with populations more than 250,000 are Detroit, with 33 percent of its residents below the poverty line; Buffalo, N.Y., 30 percent; Cincinnati, 28 percent; Cleveland, 27 percent; Miami, 27 percent; St. Louis, 27 percent; El Paso, Texas, 26 percent; Milwaukee, 26 percent; Philadelphia, 25 percent; and Newark, N.J., 24 percent.
The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations. Some of them—such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia—haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. What's more is that, in some cases for decades, the mayors of six of these high-poverty cities have been black Americans. . . . I'm not stating a causal relationship between poverty and Democratic and/or black political control over a city. What I am saying is that if one is strategizing on how to help poor people, he wants to leave off his list of objectives Democratic and black political control of cities.
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Sharpton and Obama Prostituting Martin Shooting
The shooting and subsequent death of 17 year old Trayvon Martin is the story of a tragic waste of life – both his and that of the neighborhood watch captain who shot and killed him. It now appears that there are questions about the chain of events that led to the shooting, but that is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what we know for a fact.
What we know is that two families and a community are suffering and being ripped apart because of the incident. It is also a fact that race mongers and the anti-gun cabals will attempt to use this tragic situation as currency to further their disastrous agendas.
I am in no way downplaying or attempting to minimize the gravity of the situation. But it is a fact, that the lawyers giving their opinions, the prosecutors being used on various news programs to take sides, those lining up to cry racism, Obama, and Al Sharpton are not helping things, they are deliberately fanning the flames of discord and grief for television ratings and personal gain.
As I said, this is a tragic situation for all concerned, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the sinful duplicity of Sharpton and Obama. These days Sharpton runs from me like a dog running from scalding water and Sean Hannity is typically there to hold his hand. But I want Sharpton to answer a couple questions for me.
He is coming to Florida to lead a rally, and do what he does best, foment discord – but where was he when the black New York undercover Detectives, Rodney J. Andrews and James V. Nemorin, were brutally murdered execution style by Ronell Wilson who is black? Why didn’t Sharpton lead protests or a march in their honor, to show their families and children that New York appreciated their work their to get machine guns off the streets that were being sold by Hispanic and black thugs? I made a promise to myself that I would never forget those two brave officers – but for Sharpton they never existed.
Where was Sharpton when Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, were kidnapped, brutally tortured, raped, and murdered in 2007? Newsom and Christian had been guilty of enjoying a dinner date and minding their own business, when they were carjacked and bound, then taken to a rented home and horrifically raped, sodomized, beaten, tortured, for hours. According to the testimony of the Knox County Acting Medical Examiner Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan at the subsequent trial of Eric Boyd, Newsom was repeatedly sodomized with an object and then blindfolded, gagged, arms and feet bound and his head covered. Barefoot, he was either led or dragged outside the house to a set of nearby railroad tracks. He was shot in the back of the head, the neck, and the back, and his body then set on fire.
Channon’s death came only after hours of sexual torture, medical examiner Mileusnic-Polchan testified. Channon suffered horrific injuries to her vagina, anus and mouth. She was not only raped but savaged with “an object,” possibly a broken chair leg, the doctor testified. She was beaten in the head. Some type of chemical was poured down her throat, and her body, including her bleeding and battered genital area, likely scrubbed with the same solution – all while Channon was alive, the forensic expert said. She was then “hog-tied,” with curtains and strips of bedding, her face covered tightly with a small trash bag and her body stashed inside five large trash bags before being placed inside a large trash can and covered with sheets. Channon died slowly, suffocating, the medical examiner said. Didn’t Sharpton, Obama, the race whores think this young couple was worthy of the wall to wall coverage? Didn’t Obama and Sharpton think what was done to them by four black males and an 18 year-old black female warranted their condemnation?
Furthermore, we were told the murders of Christian and Newsom were not racially motivated, they were called a random act. If what happened to that couple was a random act, how in the good name of heaven above can Sharpton, the media, the lawyers and Obama call the Martin shooting racist? Oh, I know, the victims were white.
Where was Obama and where was Sharton in 2010 when 41 people were shot in 50 hours in Chicago? Seven of the shootings took place in two hours – 41 people were shot in 31 incidents, including four homicides – didn’t Obama and Shapton think they should have injected themselves in that hellish two day period? I guess not black on black doesn’t get ratings or pay well.
I don’t remember a march or cries of racism when an 16 year-old and 19 year-old black teens shot and wounded a 18 year-old black teen in front of his home, then casually walked up, and stood over him firing until he was dead. The incident happened earlier this month, but maybe Shaprton, Obama, and the media whores were busy that morning or maybe it wasn’t of interest because the perps weren’t white.
It’s a fact, neither Sharpton, Obama, or any of the media whores were doing 24/7 programming with cries of racism, in 2011 when a 12 year-old New Hampshire white girl was brutally beaten, her jaw injured, her teeth knocked out, and suffered a concussion. The reason the two black youths savagely attacked, was because she refused to be their girlfriend – which is a non-graphic way of saying they wanted her to be their girlfriend for sexual purposes. They called her a “fat ho, lesbian bitch, and c**t, for a month before the beating took place. The two black children were referenced as “bullying” the little girl. I would think Obama would have been all over this travesty, after all, one of the boys was from Kenya and the other from Somalia. Sharpton, as mentioned was no where to be found. The McLaughlin Middle School did absolutely nothing to protect the little girl, even after threats of violence to her were reported.
Also this month, a 13 year-old white boy was beaten, doused with gasoline, and set on fire, as the two black youths responsible told him: “this is what you deserve, you get what you deserve, white boy.” All of this on his doorsteps as he arrived home from school. At least the Kansas City, Missouri Police are attempting to charge the black youths with a hate crime.
What’s worst, but from my experience not surprising, is that the incident may have been precipitated by little boy’s teacher, Mrs. Karla Dorsey – when she allegedly responded to his raising his hand to answer a question during black history month with: “What would you know about it? You’re not our race.”
The boy’s mother discovered that this is not an isolated incident, but, a pandemic pattern of racial bullying and intimidation by black children and by black teachers. Need I mention what it would be like if there were even a suggestion of such a thing happening to a black student. I strongly recommend you read the entire account here: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/45082 – read what black teachers are doing to these white children, and determine for yourself if the actions of the one teacher was the primary causal factor in the little boy being set on fire.
MSNBC ran headlines saying the racism of Rush Limbaugh and GOP candidates was responsible for the lethal consequences in the death of Trayvon Martin. But somehow, just like Sharpton, Obama, and the other media whores ignored the incidents I’ve just mentioned. The incidents I mentioned are not isolated occurrences, they are a small mention of a larger pandemic.
The neighborhoods I’ve lived in, people who looked out of place or suspicious were watched, and it wasn’t unusual for security or the police to be called to check them out. It wasn’t racism, it was security. People felt safe to go for walks late at night in those neighborhoods. The people who came in and out, either lived there, were visiting, making a delivery, or doing yard work or the like.
But this weekend, here in Florida, Sharpton and every other race monger, will be marching and protesting, instead of letting the legal system take its course. The problem with their behavior is that their condemnable racism, gives credibility to supremacist groups who are looking at the same thing I am, but painting it to their advantage. They are positing themselves as the last hope of white America, drawing frightened and angry people into their ranks.
We can end that, but we cannot do it with Sean Hannity giving shelter to Sharpton‘s damnable antics and Obama fomenting division.
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Weird. It's almost like Obama is a hard core racial leftist that attended a racist church for 20 years or something.....
I'm sure JDN is very proud of him.
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(http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/032612.jpg)
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**Feel Obama's post-racial healing.
(http://i.cdn.turner.com/dr/teg/tsg/release/sites/default/files/assets/zimmermanshirt.jpg)
If Obama had a son, he'd probably look like THIS.
If I didn't know better, I'd think Obama and his operatives were deliberately fueling racial animosity to distract from his abject failure as a president.
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http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/europe_battles_hate_crimes_against_christians
Europe battles hate crimes against Christians
Béatrice Stevenson | 27 March 2012
What was the most vilified religion in Scotland in 2010-2011? Not Islam – only 2.1 percent of religious hate crimes were directed against Muslims. Not Judaism – only 2.3 percent were directed against Jews. According to a report by the Scottish government, 95 percent of all religious hate crimes were directed against Christians.
"These statistics show the shameful reality of religious hate crime in Scotland,” the Minister for Community Safety, Roseanna Cunningham, declared last year. “Like racism, this kind of behaviour simply shouldn't be happening in a modern Scotland but sadly, it seems there are still those who think hatred on the basis of religion is acceptable.”
Christians are also the targets of most religious hate crimes in France. A report released last year showed that 84 percent of cases of religious vandalism had targeted Christian sites in 2010 – an increase of 96 percent in two years. Two hundred and fourteen cemeteries were vandalized, along with 272 chapels, 26 war memorials and 10 crosses.
Christian monuments are not the only targets. Earlier this month the hacker group Anonymous crashed the Vatican website, leaving a message: “Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organization spreads around the world."
The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, an Austrian NGO, documents the growing problem of Christian persecution in Europe in a recently-released annual report.
According to its director, Dr Gudrun Kugler, all Christian denominations in Europe face “a broad phenomena of intolerance and discrimination caused by those who reject and disrespect Christianity as a whole: radical lobbies which have gone overboard, seeking to limit the practice of the Christian religion and with it fundamental rights and freedoms.”
Is she over-dramatising the issue? Dr Kugler responds that many religious leaders and politicians in Europe have been hitting the alarm bell.
Last year Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a senior Russian Orthodox prelate with a PhD from Oxford, warned that there is a “basic danger of attempting to use religious diversity as an excuse to exclude signs of Christian civilization from the public and political realities of the continent, as though this would make our continent friendlier towards non-Christians.”
And a Muslim government minister in the UK, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, admitted that Christianity was under siege by militant secularism in a landmark speech earlier this year.
“I see it in United Kingdom and I see it in Europe: spirituality suppressed; divinity downgraded… at its core and in its instincts [militant secularism] is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity and failing to understand the relationship between religious loyalty and loyalty to the state.”
Dr Kugler admits that the hardships faced by European Christians are minor compared to the daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment and torture in countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. But, she says, “History teaches to address injustices before they become a slippery slope towards even greater injustices.”
Dr Kugler says that the growing intolerance and discrimination take several forms.
Human rights violations and discrimination. Christian are being denied the right to educate their children when there is a conflict between the parents’ convictions and state required sex education. The Catholic Church had to shut down adoption agencies in the UK because they were being forced to accept same-sex couples as adoptive parents.
Workplace discrimination. French pharmacists are required to sell the “morning after” pill which causes an early abortion. Midwives and nurses in Scotland must oversee abortions. Workers in the UK are threatened with dismissal for wearing crosses.
Marginalization and negative stereotyping. The media is constantly projecting hostile images of Christians and Christian values. The Norwegian killer Andres Breivik was instantaneously and wrongly called a “Christian fundamentalist” even though he had no connections with any mainstream Christian churches. Last July the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe even passed a resolution to “encourage the media not to spread prejudices against Christians and to combat negative stereotyping”.
Hate crimes. Violence against Christian sites and clerics is becoming more common. Churches, shrines and cemeteries are often torched or desecrated. “It is indisputable that hate crimes against Christians occur in the OSCE region,” Janez Lenarčič, of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, told a conference in Rome last year. “Such attacks instil fear, not just in the individuals they target directly, but also in the wider community, particularly where the Christian community in question belongs to a minority.”
But if most European countries are at least nominally Christian, isn’t it ridiculous to talk about a vilified minority? Wrong, says Dr Kugler. It is not nominal Christians who are getting the sharp end of the stick, but people who take the precepts of Christianity seriously. And these are a minority.
CONT.
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April 15, 2012 - 12:27 pm- by Victor Davis Hanson
<http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/bio/>
Polls show that the Trayvon Martin case has split the country apart over
perceptions of race and justice, in ways that may dwarf the polarities
of the O.J. Simpson trial days of 1994. Or does the new friction simply
reflect an ongoing erosion in relations since 2009? Or is it all hype,
and things are still about as they were?
This tension was not supposed to have increased with the election of
Barack Obama, who ran on “healing” and “unity,” and who was proclaimed
by supporters as ushering in a new post-racial age.
Here I list a few random examples of the new racial furies and conclude
with the two irreconcilable narratives.
*The Trayvon Martin Tragedy*
Hollywood director Spike Lee tweeted what he thought was George
Zimmerman’s address, in hopes, apparently, that vigilantes might
assemble there. Ex-boxer Mike Tyson called for George Zimmerman’s death;
the New Black Panther Party put a “dead or alive” bounty on his head,
confident that there would never be a state or federal charge of
conspiracy to commit a felony lodged against them. I think all these
examples were more or less open calls for violence.
Many of the publicly reported “facts” of the yet to be tried Martin case
really were in error and in error by design. Indeed, George Zimmerman
was not white; he really did have head injuries; he did not employ a
racial epithet on tape; he did not voluntarily profile on tape Martin as
a “black”; there was indeed an altercation; Mr. Martin was not a
preteen, tiny, and a model student; Zimmerman did not outweigh Martin by
100 pounds.
But such constructs were all necessary for the narrative of a white
Germanic-sounding vigilante, who, after uttering racial slurs, executed
a little African-American boy, then lied about a fight and injuries, and
got off due to a racist police department and by extension a racist
America. We don’t know what happened (murder, manslaughter,
self-defense?), only that the above narrative did not happen. Most agree
that when one party is shot, killed, and was not armed, then the
evidence must be carefully reviewed to substantiate a self-defense plea;
the objection is not to the review but to the prejudging of the review
and public threats.
*The Race Establishment*
The problem with the race establishment is not its acrimony per se, but
(a) that the acrimony is frozen in amber around 1960, with no
acknowledgment of some 50 years of federal action and three new
generations of Americans, and (b) the inordinate time invested in
blaming “them” rather than spent on introspection on how to achieve
parity with a majority culture in the manner of other minorities’
successes. Or at least that is how I perceive the growing anger at the
Sharpton/Jackson/Black Caucus nexus.
One day, Rev. Wright, the president’s former pastor, is once again
railing against Jews and whites; while on the next, Louis Farrakhan
tours the country warning of the dangers of racial intermarriage and
declaring Jesus a black man. No one rebukes such overt hatred. Revs.
Jackson and Sharpton, as is their wont, flew to the center of the Martin
case controversy, to be photographed and to “organize.” Al Sharpton is
now rebooted from the days of his involvement in the Crown Heights and
Freddy’s Fashion Mart cases. No one wishes to remember his derogatory
comments about homosexuals, Jews, and Mormons, much less the Tawana
Brawley matter in which he lost a defamation case after falsely accusing
a state prosecutor of being one of the assailants. He has a nightly
MSNBC show where he reports on his earlier daytime heroics; in some
sense, he has eclipsed Jesse Jackson as the black community’s premier
civil rights leader. I say that without irony but based on the official
praise from the country’s leading officials.
Attorney General Eric Holder lauded the defamer of state prosecutors
“for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to
speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine
a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must
fulfill,” and said of the ongoing Trayvon Martin case: “I know that many
of you are greatly — and rightly — concerned about the recent shooting
death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young man whose future has been
lost to the ages.” Holder’s “lost to the ages” quote bookends the
president’s comment that Martin resembled the son he might have had.
Whether those editorials will influence the jury pool in Florida no one
knows, but I cannot remember a president and attorney general
editorializing about a local criminal case before it has even gone to
trial. If before the O.J. trial Bill Clinton had said that Nicole
Simpson looked like the daughter he might have had, or had Janet Reno
said Nicole was lost to the ages, well, fill in the blanks.
Holder himself almost seems to enjoy expressing his racial passions
(e.g., “cowards,” “my people,” his allegations of racism against
congressional overseers in the Fast and Furious inquiry, his accusations
of racial profiling against the Arizona immigration law, which he
confessed that he had not yet read, etc.). He chose not to prosecute the
New Black Panther Party for voter intimation. Nor, apparently, has he
much concern with the latter’s bounty on Zimmerman–or its radio
station’s calls for a race war. If John Ashcroft had said anything
similar, or had even Alberto Gonzales, proverbial hell would have broken
loose.
*From the Very Top*
This attention to racial division is not new with this increasingly
desperate administration. Before a Latino audience, President Obama
blasted congressional Republicanism and soared with the following
statement: “America should be a place where you can always make it if
you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where
they come from, should have a chance to succeed.” The “look like”
formula was popular and used also by First Lady Michelle Obama, who had
also complained about a description of her White House infighting,
written by a /New York Times/ reporter: “That’s been an image that
people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack
announced, that I’m some angry black woman.” None of these comments was
helpful in erasing away the old “never been proud,” “raise the bar,” and
“downright mean country” campaign tropes of 2008.
When Rick Perry referred to “a big black cloud that hangs over America —
that debt, that is so monstrous,” charges of racism flew. Chris Matthews
referred to Perry’s support of federalism with the quip “this is going
to be Bull Connor with a smile.” At some point, every Republican nominee
was alleged to be waging a racialist campaign, as we heard that
Gingrich’s food stamp references were racist and still more about the
segregationist past of Romney’s Mormon Church.
In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on
“young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women . . . to stand
together once again.” Shortly before the November 2010 congressional
elections, Obama told an audience that Republicans “are counting on
black folks staying home.” Before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama
affected the supposed accent of black America in emphasizing shared
race: “Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We’ve got
work to do.” Was “we” the black community or all of America? He appealed
to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 elections, but instead
to “punish our enemies”—and not to fall prey to the Republicans’
“cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.” Conservatives,
remember, wished, according to the president, to round up Latino
children while eating ice cream. There is now an African Americans for
Obama campaign group, and Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith warns us that
he has Obama’s back.
All this is not quite new. Obama stereotyped the Cambridge Police
Department as having “acted stupidly” for detaining Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates. He allegedly complained that racial bias explains
much of the Tea Party opposition to his own administration, and used the
derogatory “tea-baggers” sexual slur to characterize the protests. After
Rev. Wright, the clingers speech, and “typical white person,” one would
have thought that Obama would have tended to avoid the question of
racial tensions.
Members of the Black Caucus have talked a lot about the Trayvon Martin
case, calling it an “assassination” and a “murder” and alleging that
Zimmerman shot Martin down like “a dog.” This too is not new in the age
of Obama. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said debt arguments showed racial
animosity toward Barack Obama. Rep. Barbara Lee accused Republicans in
racist fashion of trying to deny blacks the vote. Rep. Andre Carson
claimed that the Tea Party wished to lynch blacks from trees. Rep.
Charles Rangel alleged that Rick Perry’s job creation in Texas was “one
stage away from slavery,”
Post-racial icons like Morgan Freeman blasted opposition to Obama with
“It’s a racist thing.” Whoopi Goldberg blurted out, “I’m playing the
damn [race] card” over Obama’s sinking polls.
*Why?*
I could go on and on, but one gets the message. So why the anger at this
point and not, say, in 2007, when the evil Bush was president and Obama
was but a weak senator and a dubious presidential candidate? For eight
years there were African-American secretaries of state. Bush, through
his African AIDS initiatives, saved millions of blacks who had no access
to medicine. Minorities were visible in his cabinet. No one objected to
the fact that Obama garnered 96% of the black vote, or thought much
about it when, in the bitter Democratic primaries, the Clintons alleged
that race was used to whip up support against them. So why, then, the
anger now, when things should have improved even more?
And I do not mean just African-American anger. To read comments
following these stories on the Internet is to enter the world of white
counter-rage at a level I have never seen. We talk of black accusations
of racism, but they are earning a counter-response that is equally
scary, with some irate and others wearied to the point of quietism and
isolation. The lurid Drudge Report weekly posts videos of
African-American teens flash mobbing or attacking and beating whites, in
not so subtle reminders that in terms of violent crime blacks commit
roughly 50% of the offenses, while making up only 11-13% of the
population, and are 7-8 times more likely to harm whites than vice
versa. Indeed, 94% of all blacks who are murdered each year die at the
hands of blacks. The more Eric Holder emphasizes racial distinctions,
the more he seems oblivious to the fact that he is alienating far more
than he is encouraging.
*What Is It All About?*
Two racial narratives without much hope of a compromise seem behind
these different views:
A) The current black leadership believes in the following narrative: Due
to the wages of past American racism and well over a century of Southern
chattel slavery, blacks have been damaged in ways still underappreciated
by whites. Thus, true equal opportunity and justice will take decades
more of instruction, recompense, affirmative action, and set-asides to
achieve real fairness. Whites say that they are not racist, but daily
they do or say things that to others seem very racist. One can be
destructively racist without the overtness of Jim Crow.
When blacks employ the N-word, or a Rev. Wright uses racist language, or
the Black Caucus (or Black Panther Party) employs incendiary vocabulary
that would earn their white counterparts ostracism, all that is a false
equivalence. One must see this apparent asymmetry as a faux-asymmetry,
given the hurt in the black community that suddenly in 2012 cannot quite
be held to the same standards as the inheritors and present
beneficiaries of privilege. If 50% of the black community has achieved
near parity in the half-century since the civil rights reforms, 50% have
not, largely due to the unwillingness of the majority culture to invest
the necessary resources and alter attitudes to finish the job of racial
parity. Therefore continued federal reparatory action is necessary until
100% parity is achieved, to paraphrase Eric Holder. If black crime is
inordinately high, it is largely because of either present racism or the
legacy of racism or both, and continues on due to the general neglect of
the white majority, who objects only when the violence spills into their
own enclaves. As for other minorities, they have suffered from white
racism and may have transcended it, but slavery was a special case and
left an imprint on the American psyche that explains the sensitivity of
black/white relations in ways unlike other racial and ethnic polarities.
*Versus*
B) The counter-narrative is just as uncompromising. It runs I think as
this: We live in a multi-racial society now, where almost every minority
group has genuine claims on past exploitation, from the Holocaust to the
frontier wars to the internment. But after a half-century of hyphenation
and racial identity politics, and a trillion dollars spent on federal
race-based programs, it is time to move beyond race and evaluate
Americans on their behaviors and talents, without worry whether any
particular group statistically does better than another–especially given
that race itself in the 21st century is problematic with intermarriage
and the waves of new immigrants. If we do not, our future is Rwanda,the
Middle East, or the Balkans.
Millions of so-called whites are now adults who grew up in the age of
affirmative action, and have no memory of systemic discrimination. To
the degree some avoid certain schools, neighborhoods, or environments,
they do so only on the basis of statistics, not profiling, that suggest
a higher incidence of inner-city violence and crime. Most in this
generation assume that a B+ white student in state college has none of
the chances to get into law school, medical school, or graduate programs
that a B- African-American student enjoys. If the black leadership were
to preach a more balanced message of both monitoring race-based
discrimination while addressing more vigorously endemic pathologies in
the inner cities (such as illegitimacy, absentee fatherhood, drug use,
crime, violence, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism), most racism would
eventually disappear—as black crime rates, graduation rates, or
illegitimacy rates matched those of the general public. Liberal whites
and black elites profile as much as anyone (consider where they live,
where they put their children in schools, and the fact that they
associate with those quite distant from the inner city).
The phenomenal success of Asians, Punjabis, Armenians, Arabs, Latin
Americans, and other supposedly non Anglo-Saxon groups is proof that the
majority culture holds no one back on the basis of skin color. The crux
for every group is culture, not skin color. Unfortunately, “racism” has
become a careerist tool that leads to political and professional
advantage when the charge is leveled; if there are indeed two black
Americas, then the elite often uses the plight of the non-elite as
arguments for its own claim to exemptions from criticism and often
advantages in admissions and hiring.
Those two narrative don’t match and won’t, and so race relations have
gotten only worse—as Barack Obama and Eric Holder well know. They do not
seem to care or feel there is advantage to be had in the new polarity.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-trayvon-martin-case-and-the-growing-racial-divide/?singlepage=true
Once upon a time – 2005 to be specific – Academy Award Nominee *Roger L.
Simon* got together with *Charles Johnson* (the blogger behind Little
Green Footballs) and *Glenn Reynolds* (the blogger behind Instapundit)
to create a new blog that would shed light on issues important to
Americans through insightful reporting, commentary and analysis. The
mainstream media tried to dismiss them as disgruntled people blogging in
their pajamas. They rejected the evaluation but adopted the name, and
Pajamas Media was born.
What began as an online blog site in 2005 has grown into the must-read
website you are visiting today. Renamed *PJMedia* in 2011, this is the
place where you will find news delivered in its most insightful form.
Read the exceptional reporting of our influential bloggers including
*Victor Davis Hanson*, *Michael Ledeen*, *Claudia Rosett*, *“Spengler”
David Goldman* and many more. And check out our lineup of PJ Columnists
including *Zombie*, *Barry Rubin*, *Roger L. Simon* and *Stephen Green*
where their take on a story is often comical but always right to the
heart of the matter.
Don’t miss the *PJ Tatler* for breaking news and gossip from inside the
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At last count, 1.4 million unique visitors come to www.PJMedia.com
<http://www.pjmedia.com/> each month and consume 20 million page views
of our content. And those big numbers keep getting bigger. We want to
count you in that number too. So, enjoy today’s visit, and come back often.
There’s one more big idea we want to share with you.
Beyond covering and commenting on the news, PJ Media is on a mission. We
call it *voices from a free America*.
Our voices work to …
• keep speech free in our society and media,
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Add your voice to ours.
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A mistake not corrected is another mistake. - anon
-
Thomas Sowell, black conservative, on a roll again about race and the Zimmerman Trayvon story. (Could also go under Media Issues) Two excerpts:
"the repeated references to Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic." Zimmerman is half-white. So is Barack Obama. But does anyone refer to Obama as a "white African"?
All these verbal games grow out of the notion that complexion tells you who is to be blamed and who is not. It is a dangerous game because race is no game."
....
"The last line in most of the transcripts shown on TV was that of the police dispatcher telling Zimmerman not to continue following Trayvon Martin.
That became the basis of many media criticisms of Zimmerman for continuing to follow him. Only later did I see a transcript of that conversation on the Sean Hannity program that included Zimmerman's reply to the police dispatcher: "O.K."
That reply removed the only basis for assuming that Zimmerman did in fact continue to follow Trayvon Martin. At this point, neither I nor the people who assumed that he continued to follow the teenager have any basis in fact for believing that he did or didn't.
Why was that reply edited out by so many in the media? Because too many people in the media see their role as filtering and slanting the news to fit their own vision of the world. "
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/04/24/who_is_racist_113933.html
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Interesting points!
Please copy this on the Self Defense Law thread as well. TIA
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Thomas Sowell, black conservative, on a roll again about race and the Zimmerman Trayvon story. (Could also go under Media Issues) Two excerpts:
"the repeated references to Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic." Zimmerman is half-white. So is Barack Obama. But does anyone refer to Obama as a "white African"?
All these verbal games grow out of the notion that complexion tells you who is to be blamed and who is not. It is a dangerous game because race is no game."
On a personal note I guess I can relate to this half and half thing or whatever. Being of mixed race or mixed nationalities (1/2 German & 1/2 Samoan) really confused people where I grew up (Belleville, IL) to break it down simply, due to my features and light skin some Caucasian people saw me as something other than white because of my features & they would ask if Im Indian, Eskimo or something else. Even though my features were different but my skin was "white" some African Americans just saw me as "white." Believe me I got crap from both sides. I also decided to tell people I was Hawaiian because I got tired of saying Im German / Samoan or just Samoan because no one knew where Samoa was.
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As part of my apparently Sisyphean mission to get people to use the subject line I have taken the liberty of filling yours in for you :lol:
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Thomas Sowell, black conservative, on a roll again about race and the Zimmerman Trayvon story. (Could also go under Media Issues) Two excerpts:
"the repeated references to Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic." Zimmerman is half-white. So is Barack Obama. But does anyone refer to Obama as a "white African"?
All these verbal games grow out of the notion that complexion tells you who is to be blamed and who is not. It is a dangerous game because race is no game."
On a personal note I guess I can relate to this half and half thing or whatever. Being of mixed race or mixed nationalities (1/2 German & 1/2 Samoan) really confused people where I grew up (Belleville, IL) to break it down simply, due to my features and light skin some Caucasian people saw me as something other than white because of my features & they would ask if Im Indian, Eskimo or something else. Even though my features were different but my skin was "white" some African Americans just saw me as "white." Believe me I got crap from both sides. I also decided to tell people I was Hawaiian because I got tired of saying Im German / Samoan or just Samoan because no one knew where Samoa was.
LOL, my bad! Thank you Guro Crafty!
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http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/16/warrens-story-falls-apart/print/
Warren’s Story Falls Apart
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On May 16, 2012 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 28 Comments
The wheels have finally fallen off Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s diversity wagon. The reliably leftist Boston Globe has issued a retraction of Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee Indian. “Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in the May 1 Metro section and the accompanying headline incorrectly described the 1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee,” the paper writes. “The document, alluded to in a family newsletter found by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, was an application for a marriage license, not the license itself. Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven.” The original story? A headline piece in the Sunday Metro section. The correction? The third item on the correction page, typically buried deep in the paper. The larger issue? The transparent efforts of a biased media to maintain the fiction as long as possible.
The Globe’s original story, published on May 1st, reported that a document proved Warren’s claim. “A record unearthed Monday shows that US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has a great-great-great grandmother listed in an 1894 document as a Cherokee, said a genealogist at the New England Historic and Genealogy Society.” The same day the Boston Herald reported that “the Harvard Law professor’s campaign last night finally came up with what they claim is a Cherokee connection–her great-great-great-grandmother.” ABC News also did a May 1st report, noting that genealogist Chris Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Association ”set out to hunt down Warren’s ancestry last Thursday. In less than a week, he discovered documents citing an 1894 marriage record that lists Warren’s great-great-great grandmother, O. C. Sarah Smith as Cherokee, meaning that Warren is 1/32nd Native American.”
On May 4th the New York Times took it a step further, claiming that Republican opponent Scott Brown’s questioning of Warren’s assertion “is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy,” and that “Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment.” Writer Kevin Noble Maillard, a law professor enrolled as a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, offer his own take on the controversy. “For the Cherokee Nation, Warren is ‘Indian enough;’ she has the same blood quantum as Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker,” he wrote.
The meme, “Warren is 1/32 Cherokee” continued to be promoted by several different news outlets, most of which did nothing more than regurgitate the original story, absent any independent fact-checking. These included CBS News, the Huffington Post and the Associated Press. The most hilarious assertion regarding Warren’s claim came courtesy of the Washington Post’s David Treuer. In a column entitled, “Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.,” Treuer makes the absurd claim that “an Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice.” He further excuses Warren’s assertion, contending that “to be a woman from Oklahoma of working-class upbringing — and to want not only to walk the halls of power but to help build them — you have to press whatever advantage you have. Doing so might seem distasteful to those who’ve never had to do it because they were born into privilege and power.” In other words, lying is acceptable — as long as one’s lower class and purported ethnicity qualifies one to do so.
Despite the mainstream media pile-on, it didn’t take long to prove that Elizabeth Warren’s assertion was nothing more than wishful thinking. Breitbart.com was apparently willing to do something most other news organizations were unwilling to do: conduct an actual investigation of Warren’s assertion. They reviewed original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and spoke with Logan County Court clerk ReJeania Zmek. Breitbart discovered that the original May 12, 1894 marriage license and the corresponding May 13, 1894 certificate of marriage of William J. Crawford, great-great-grand uncle of Elizabeth Warren, and Mary E. (Long) Wolford contains a column for the race of the bride and the groom — but both of them left it blank
Zmek offered another indication that something was amiss. “In modern times we keep marriage license applications,” she said. “The way they’re issued now, you do the application, then you do the license. We currently do keep records of marriage license applications.” Yet she revealed that this practice didn’t begin until 1950.
Zmek then revealed (probably inadvertently) why many Americans consider mainstream media claims of even-handed reporting beneath contempt. She confirmed to Breitbart that “no other news organization had contacted her to date on any national topic or to inquire about the validity of this purported 1894 Logan County, Oklahoma marriage license application or anything related to the 1894 marriage of William J. Crawford.”
Such “errors of omission” might be acceptable were it evenly applied to both sides of the political spectrum. Yet one need only compare the Washington Post’s recent effort to portray Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney as an anti-gay bully based on a single incident that happened 47 years ago with the mainstream media’s calculated incuriosity regarding large portions of president Obama’s life, which still remain off the record almost four years into his time in office. Furthermore, as the Journolist scandal of 2008 reveals, leftist media members coordinated efforts to keep Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary rhetoric from damaging the president during that election run.
Elizabeth Warren can continue to insist that she is part Cherokee, whether based on dubious assertions, like her grandfather having “high cheekbones,” or ridiculous rationale such as the claim that she did so “in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.” And the leftist media can continue to protect her by asserting that she didn’t use such claims to advance her career. But the fact remains that the University of Pennsylvania, who listed her as a minority in a “Minority Equity Report” from 1987 to 1994, and Harvard University, who listed her as a diversity hire in 1996, were more than willing to do so based on nothing more than hearsay. And the mainstream media, as well as the New England Historic Genealogical Association, which is now saying that “the original [marriage license] application cannot be located” were also willing to take Warren at face value, or base their entire assertions of proof on an unsubstantiated March 2006 family newsletter quoting an amateur genealogist.
Yet it remains to be seen if the people of Massachusetts will be as flexible regarding the truth on election day next November. Undoubtedly they will base their votes for either Republican Scott Brown or Warren on a number of issues. Warren might want to hope that personal credibility isn’t one of them.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/16/warrens-story-falls-apart/
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Woof All:
A ways back JDN pushed me to flesh out a passing comment I made about "right to discriminate". The subject being an explosive one, full of opportunities to be taken the wrong way and life being short, invariably there have been other things to do first.
However I now have and share here what I regard as well-reasoned and well-written by a friend of mine for whose IQ, education, and patriotism I have great respect. Though he no longer practices, his having been an attorney informs what he writes here.
Marc
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The US Constitution is the contract by which the federal government was granted certain specific powers. All other powers were retained by the States and the People. This is no different than any other type of contract under which the parties to the contract possess only those powers granted them under the terms of the contract. The fact that you and I might have a specific business contract for a specific project does not give either of us the power to force the other to behave in certain ways in matters that are not specifically delineated in the contract.
The US Constitution was not written or amended in order to force individuals to behave in certain ways except in those specific instances where it explicitly says so. The primary example of this type of provision is the 13th Amendment that prohibits slavery. That amendment was directed specifically at the behavior of slavery from the People, the States and the federal government. Contrast the language of the 13th Amendment with the language of the 14th Amendment that is directed specifically at the States. The due process and equal protection clauses begin, “No State shall …” If you recall, the Civil Rights laws in 1868 and 1964 negated State laws that authorized racial discrimination under the authority of the 14th Amendment because persons of all races born or naturalized in the US are citizens of the US and of the State in which they reside. (That was a specific rejection of the Dred Scott decision that said that because Scott was born of slave blood in Virginia, he was not a citizen of the US or of the non-slave States in which he resided after his birth.) But again, these laws technically struck down State Jim Crow laws that made racial discrimination lawful and permitted State and local governments to require it.
Anti-discrimination laws go much further than the US Constitution. They grant preferences to certain groups. They criminalize certain personal behavior. They prohibit individuals from making certain choices on the basis of the behavior of the persons against whom the individual wishes to discriminate. I believe that people should discriminate based upon behavior – not race. If we cannot discriminate based upon behavior, then society will move towards anarchy. I believe that those laws are beyond the reach of the federal government.
And where would the power of the federal government end? Should anyone’s vote for Obama and against Romney be invalidated because it was based upon anti-Mormonism? Should any vote for a gay marriage referendum be invalidated because it was based upon the voter’s belief that the influence of traditional organized religions should be eliminated?
People have the right to make decisions for reasons that others deem stupid or bad. The federal government does not have the power to force people to think or act in one certain way. And the core of the social contract called the US Constitution are the words in our Declaration of Independence that point out specifically that all governmental authority comes from the consent of the governed – not some other source whether that source be a divine right or an elite university education.
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Crafty, thank you for returning to this question. It is an excellent post and a good beginning. Much of what your friend says is well-reasoned and I agree. However I found the following paragraph a bit misleading.
"Anti-discrimination laws go much further than the US Constitution. They grant preferences to certain groups. They criminalize certain personal behavior. They prohibit individuals from making certain choices on the basis of the behavior of the persons against whom the individual wishes to discriminate. I believe that people should discriminate based upon behavior – not race. If we cannot discriminate based upon behavior, then society will move towards anarchy. I believe that those laws are beyond the reach of the federal government."
A "behavior" is usually defined as "an observable activity in a human or animal."
For example, I don't like rude boorish people so I tend to avoid them. Also, I don't like people who constantly criticize America. I can and do discriminate/avoid them based upon their behavior. It's legal.
However, behavior is not the issue. I can terminate anyone, including an African American for incompetence, however I should not be able to terminate an African American simply because I don't like blacks. Race, color, gender, creed are the basis of wrongful discrimination. That's wrong. Especially in public. It's not a behavioral issue.
Discrimination has no place if you believe,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
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Women's equal opportunity law in sports.... The Ann Meyers Drysdale story.
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-pugmire-qa-20120625,0,6717823.story
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Cute story that a big Olympic star in a BIG money sport could get a break, but fhe unintended consequence of Title IX is that local girls here can no longer play for the University.
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JDN:
I suspect his comment about prohibiting discrimination based upon behavior to be a reference to anti-gay discrimination.
As for the rest, agreed that one should discriminate based upon behavior not group membership (though worth noting is that we all know of the burdens of a lawsuit alleging discrimination in response to firing someone for behavior and/or a class action suit alleging disparate impact) but you have yet to address the asssertion that the Constitution does not grant the power to make such discrimination illegal.
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Cute story that a big Olympic star in a BIG money sport could get a break, but fhe unintended consequence of Title IX is that local girls here can no longer play for the University.
"the local girls can no longer play for the University". Why not if they are good enough? It they are not good enough, they can play for a smaller college. Or even on Club teams.
"BIG money sport"? Women's Basketball? You must be kidding. :? Nearly all women's sports lose money including Basketball.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-05/sports/30039309_1_program-revenue-national-championship-game
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... but fhe unintended consequence of Title IX is that local girls here can no longer play for the University.
"the local girls can no longer play for the University". Why not if they are good enough? It they are not good enough, they can play for a smaller college. Or even on Club teams."
Or they can just to hell but what I wrote was that they can not play Div I for the local land grant University because of Title IX. The state taxpayer pays instead for world class players from foreign countries to take those spots. In my daughter's sport, a 3 time state champion plays 6th (last) singles. How many local girls do you think are better than that?
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I don't mean to intrude, but I must confess to not seeing the logic of blaming Title IX on this. There are many local land grant colleges with many sports which feature male athletes from other states. Is Title IX to blame for Big 12 and Big Ten recruiting football players in the South? And, colleges and universities have been recruiting international talent for years. Of course, many of those were for academic scholarships....
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Probably the thought of rape and pillage by divisions of gays would frighten the Iranians more than airstrikes. I am not against gays living their lives left alone but this is out of control:
****Pentagon To Hold First-Ever Gay Pride Event Tuesday
By Elizabeth Flock
June 25, 2012 RSS Feed Print
In this July 16, 2011 photo, two women, both active duty sailors in the Navy who gave their names as Nikki, left, and Lisa, kiss as they march in the Gay Pride Parade in San Diego.
Less than a year after the Defense Department's "Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy toward gay and lesbian service members was repealed, the Pentagon says it will hold its first-ever Gay Pride event Tuesday.
The event is likely to be a more toned-down version of the Gay Pride parades that take place every June in cities around the world—sans the flags, wigs, beads and boas. (Though some have suggested rainbow camo or berets.)
Instead, the Pentagon has planned a somber-sounding panel discussion entitled "The Value of Open Service and Diversity," according to a Defense Department press release.
The event will also have a keynote speaker: the Pentagon's top lawyer Jeh Johnson, who co-chaired the 2010 study on how a DADT repeal might affect combat operations, housing and other issues, according to the Washington Post.
Johnson, along with co-chair U.S. Army Gen. Carter Ham, concluded in the study: "While a repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' will likely, in the short term, bring about some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention, we do not believe this disruption will be widespread or long-lasting."
Several months after the report, in December 2010, DADT was repealed.
As Gay Pride events took place across the country this month, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued his own Pride Month message to gays and lesbians in the military, saying he was "very proud of how we implemented repeal" of DADT. "Diversity is one of our greatest strengths," he said.
Elizabeth Flock is a staff writer for U.S. News & World Report. You can contact her at eflock@usnews.com or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
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I don't mean to intrude, but I must confess to not seeing the logic of blaming Title IX on this. There are many local land grant colleges with many sports which feature male athletes from other states. Is Title IX to blame for Big 12 and Big Ten recruiting football players in the South? And, colleges and universities have been recruiting international talent for years. Of course, many of those were for academic
Intrusions always welcome!
Blame seems so negative, I am just saying there is an unambiguous cause and effect relationship. Title IX causes the full rides to.be offered in non-revenue women's sports and the full rides cause those spots to be taken by player better than available locally. Some might find that to be a good thing. I'm just saying it's a fact.
Schorlarships in men's revenue sports are not caused by Title IX, they are limited by it. The local policy choice may have the same effect, but I don't see the parallel to Title IX.
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I don't mean to intrude, but I must confess to not seeing the logic of blaming Title IX on this. There are many local land grant colleges with many sports which feature male athletes from other states. Is Title IX to blame for Big 12 and Big Ten recruiting football players in the South? And, colleges and universities have been recruiting international talent for years. Of course, many of those were for academic
Intrusions always welcome!
Schorlarships in men's revenue sports are not caused by Title IX, they are limited by it. The local policy choice may have the same effect, but I don't see the parallel to Title IX.
Thanks... I like your spirit, DMG. What you say about scholarships in men's sports is only sort of true. For example, the NCAA limited the number of scholarships for football not because of Title IX, but because of programs like Oklahoma having something like 90 scholarship athletes and winning 50 games in a row. It is true that sports such as wrestling (a sport I love, by the way) have cut scholarships, or even the program all together. However, it is also true that many of the non-revenue women's sports (which, as JDN correctly points out is pretty much all of them), there would be no scholarships for the women to play them, no matter where they are from.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/christian-student-expelled-over-her-views-on-homosexuality-loses-lawsuit-against-ga-university/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/christian-student-expelled-over-her-views-on-homosexuality-loses-lawsuit-against-ga-university/
I don't think the title is accurate. Shewas expelled not for her views, but for the expression of these views. We don't what she said, or how we said it (according to the article). There as long been the view that not all speech is protected. Libel, slander, "fighting words," "hate" speech all fall into that category. Not only can you not falsely yell fire in a crowded theater, you also can't incite a riot. Without knowing what she said, we can't really know if the action of the university is cause for alarm.
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While your point is technically accurate, my intuitive sense of things is that it is less likely than her expressing that she was with the Bible on the subject and getting slapped down by the progressive thought police.
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OK, but when I went to a state school I saw many discussions in class that were fruitful and often based, by one or more party, on their view of the Bible. Not one of them got expelled.
There was one expulsion though; a neo Nazi who later when on a two state killing spree.
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But here she was studying to become a counselor and she hewed to her views while counseling.
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But here she was studying to become a counselor and she hewed to her views while counseling.
And the ACA has particular national standards that a counselor is required to meet. And, she wanted to be a school counselor. Do you think that her unwillingness to counsel homosexuals, etc. might have inhibited her abilities to meet the students' needs?
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"Unwilling to counsel" or "Willing to counsel according to biblical values"?
I think an interesting question/dilema is presented here. On one side we have the point you are making. On the other there is the exclusion from counseling of those with biblical values. Myself I come down on the side of diversity in counseling options :lol: though I suspect that most gays will not be choosing her.
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I suspect that most gays will not be choosing her.
How many counselors do you think a school has, especially in these trying economic times? And, how much choice do you think a student in school has about choosing a counselor?
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So, wouldn't that really be a choice to be made by the school?
Why is this woman to be denied the degree she needs to qualify for a Christian school?
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Because she doesn't meet the professional standards of the profession. You can't be a practicing attorney without passing a bar exam. You have to have take be certified to be an accountant or a nurse, or a .... It is the professional standard. She did NOT meet the standard.
Also, each college or university makes its own rules about what classes must be taken and passed to earn a degree. You know how much being a 1L sucks. You had to take those classes.
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So, Christians can't be counselors, even in Christian schools?
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That is NOT what I said.
If the Christian school would like to make a hire that does not meet the professional standard, then her case she could be hired.
There ARE Christian counseling degrees. She wasn't enrolled in one. http://www.allpsychologycareers.com/counseling-degree/christian-counseling-degrees.html
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"Because she doesn't meet the professional standards of the profession"
OK, please educate me (no snarkiness intended): To what is the "professional standard" applied? Are you saying that professional standards don't apply to Christian schools?
Also remaining is why she is excluded from acquiring the education? -- Wouldn't certification arguably be a separate question?
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Dr. David Kaplan, the chief professional officer for the ACA, said he's not surprised that Keeton's case is in the appeals court but that her actions are a direct violation of ACA standards.
"The ACA code of ethics is not about asking anybody to change their beliefs," Kaplan said. "Counselors clearly have the prerogative to have whatever religion they want. One of the points that gets lost in all of this stuff, from the Keeton side, is our clients are more important than we are ... We are there for them. They are not there for us."
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/education/2011-06-24/keeton-has-appealed-judges-ruling
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"Because she doesn't meet the professional standards of the profession"
OK, please educate me (no snarkiness intended): To what is the "professional standard" applied? Are you saying that professional standards don't apply to Christian schools?
Also remaining is why she is excluded from acquiring the education? -- Wouldn't certification arguably be a separate question?
She isn't being excluded from her education. She is refusing to follow the curicculum. Every professional, graduate or undergraduate program has the right to have required classes (or perhaps a menu of classes). You can't get a law degree without a Constitutional Law class, even if your plan is to practice family law... or leave law for the high paying world of stick fighting. The program offered a remediation class. She originally said she would take it, and then refused to do so.
Let me ask you this: if there was a religion that did not believe that 2+2=4, that algebra and geometry were the tools of the devil, and that calculus was heretical because Isaac Newton, not God, invented it, would you be railing so hard that that a practitioner of that faith system was denied a math degree? Or might you suggest that the believer major in something else?
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I'm not getting "refusing to follow the curriculum" from this-- to me it reads that she refused to be, to use the old communist term, "re-educated":
"Here’s how the situation unfolded. The university‘s program apparently stressed that students couldn’t discriminate against others based on any indicators, including sexual orientation. But Keeton, citing her religious views, refused to alter her engagement with gay students and clients (clearly, these views impacted her relations with these individuals). It’s not clear exactly what Keeting said inside or outside of the classroom that created such a stir, but this is certainly an interest First Amendment case to continue watching.
"While the school argues that Keeton deserved to be dismissed, the former student says that she, in fact, was the victim of discrimination — especially considering the fact that she was kicked out of the program explicitly over her personal beliefs.
"She was initially put on probation and was told that she would need to follow a “remediation plan” to remain in good standing with the university. This plan, though, included sensitivity training, writing papers about tolerance and the lessons she had learned and attendance at gay pride events. Naturally, Keeton refused to comply and she was removed from the program."
I'm not persuaded by your math analogy. 2+2=4, that is not a matter of opinion. The question presented here is.
My thought process is rather simple. People are free to be gay. Other people are free to make of it what they will.
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I'm not getting "refusing to follow the curriculum" from this-- to me it reads that she refused to be, to use the old communist term, "re-educated":
I'm not persuaded by your math analogy. 2+2=4, that is not a matter of opinion. The question presented here is.
My thought process is rather simple. People are free to be gay. Other people are free to make of it what they will.
The university‘s program apparently stressed that students couldn’t discriminate against others based on any indicators, including sexual orientation. But Keeton, citing her religious views, refused to alter her engagement with gay students and clients (clearly, these views impacted her relations with these individuals).
And you don't understand that she violated the terms that the university set up. Before she got to the program. And that she is not the only person subject to this requirement. And that this is true no matter what religion she follows (or if she doesn't follow)?
2+2=4 is not opinion, nor is it fact.
"Other people are free to make of it what they will." This is also not fact.
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Being surprised that there was no reply, Guro, I went back and read my post. For reasons I am unsure of, two links I thought I had included were not present on my prior post. My apologies, as I think the lack of links makes the reply snarky, which was not intended.
"2+2=4 is not opinion, nor is it fact." Intended link: http://virgil.azwestern.edu/~dag/lol/TwoPlusTwo.html; bonus, as an apology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo4NCXOX0p8 (13x7=28)
"Other people are free to make of it what they will." This is also not fact. http://definitions.uslegal.com/b/belief-action-distinction/
Again, with apologies.
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In that you are quite the opposite of snarky, I confess I was surprised-- thanks for following up! I don't have the time right now, but I will get back this in a day or three.
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Agree or Disagree; what a nice informative "dinner conversation" this has been.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/us/a-leaders-renunciation-of-ex-gay-tenets-causes-a-schism.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120707
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I don't have the time right now, but I will get back this in a day or three.
Just a reminder...
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BD, quoting me, responded:
"Other people are free to make of it what they will." This is also not fact. http://definitions.uslegal.com/b/belief-action-distinction/
MARC:
Oh, I fully get that-- but my sentence which you quote needs to be read as part of the paragraph in which it is found.
"My thought process is rather simple. People are free to be gay. Other people are free to make of it what they will."
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I read the whole thing, but it still isn't true. People have the right to have their opinions, but they don't have the unlimited right to act on them (which I think you mean since you say "make", which implies, I think, an action toward the gay person, especially with the addition of "of it what they will"). The point is, she didn't just have the opinion, she acted on it. And, without knowing what was said, you can't know that her removal from the program was unwarranted.
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Well, as best as I can tell neither of us know what she "did".
That said, I stick with my POV. I think people should be allowed to choose with whom they associate.
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Well, as best as I can tell neither of us know what she "did".
That said, I stick with my POV. I think people should be allowed to choose with whom they associate.
Agreed. but only one of us has decided the merits of the decision.
I also agree that there is a free choice with whom to associate. Nothing I said should be read as contrary to that view. But, that is also different that merely allowing people to act as they will, without limits.
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"While your point is technically accurate, my intuitive sense of things is that it is less likely than her expressing that she was with the Bible on the subject and getting slapped down by the progressive thought police."
BD: "I also agree that there is a free choice with whom to associate. Nothing I said should be read as contrary to that view. But, that is also different that merely allowing people to act as they will, without limits."
So you oppose discrimination laws?
And subject to the limits of the rights of others, what is wrong with people acting as they will?
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"free choice with whom to associate"
Already asked another way, but to Crafty and to Bigdog, does that freedom of association include who you choose to work for your company and who you choose to live in your property (housing rental)?
The President can form a group called African Americans for Obama but I cannot form a housing complex called Christian Housing. Why and why not?
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I really struggle with this because of the unique history of horrors towards black Americans. To say that people can hire whom they choose puts one directly in harm's way of being stained, slimed, and slandered as a vile hate monger in favor of Sheriff Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses.
But note-- Sheriff BC was STATE discrmination-- and THAT violates the Constitution! In other words, arguably part of the answer with regard to the pre-Civil Rights black experience in the Deep South consists of simply eliminating government sponsored and/or imposed discrimination
Much of the problem now however comes from using the black experience and our legal response to it as a model for any and every group which underperforms the mean and the legal construct of "disparate impact". Things have gotten so wildly out of hand that now ultimately yes, I think people should be allowed to employ and rent to whom they wish.
Where in the Constitution is the Congress empowered to pass laws against personal discrimination? Arguably through interstate commerce, which I could accept-- if interstate commerce were defined as it was by our Founding Fathers-- but what we have now is headed towards Orwellian doublespeak.
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"While your point is technically accurate, my intuitive sense of things is that it is less likely than her expressing that she was with the Bible on the subject and getting slapped down by the progressive thought police."
BD: "I also agree that there is a free choice with whom to associate. Nothing I said should be read as contrary to that view. But, that is also different that merely allowing people to act as they will, without limits."
So you oppose discrimination laws?
And subject to the limits of the rights of others, what is wrong with people acting as they will?
We are moving beyond the specific discussion that flowed from a specific example, and I don't want to extend my vantage point from that example too far.
I oppose some "discrimination" laws, yes. For example, as I have noted previously, I do not understand the legitmacy, purpose or usefulness of a designated "hate" crime. The very purpose of allowing judges to have some sentencing judgement is to allow for all the particulars of a case (age; brutality; number of previous convictions; etc.). One of the particulars could be reason for the crime, based on race, gender, sexuality, and the like. No need for an automatic +10 years.
I disagree that blacks are underperforming. There is a disadvantage that comes with skin color. On a socio-economic scale, almost everything was legally skewed against blacks until the late 1960's. People talk about 40 years (or 150 if they like to pretend that the Civil War ended legal inservitude) like it was a long time ago. It wasn't. It was two generations. It takes time to accumulate wealth. It takes time for blacks to climb corporate ladders. It takes time for them to build on careers of their parents. 3 generations of Bush's have been active politically. Mitt Romney's father was governor before a formal end to segregation. It takes time to build social capital. We can talk all we want about a post-racial America, but until 6 years ago I lived in a city in which the most popular pizza delivery store wouldn't deliver to the black neighborhoods.
As for Guro's point about the Commerece Clause, I think it is (mostly) interpreted in the manner in which the Founders, in particular Madison, intended. The difference isn't the interpretation, it is the commerce. In 1790, commerce was much more local. Family farms, local industry, etc. was much more common. In a world in which Anheuser Busch is owned by a European Company, but the headquarters is in St. Louis, but it is bottled and distributed throughout the country and sold in stores like Walmart (which is headquarted in Arkansas and has stores nation and world wide), where does local commerce begin and end? In 1790, there was no interstate highways, no nationwide train, trucking and airline industry, no FedEx, Amazon or....
As for association, there is no constitutional guarantee to it. Take a look. It does not appear in the first amendment. That it is a recognized right is thanks to a judicial construct. Who is to say that the judicial construct of freedom of association is any more or less legitimate than the protections afforded a traditionally legally disadvantaged group (especially one that was the subject of three constitutional amendments in the hopes of equalizing the playing field)?
And, I am not sure that any freedom to "association" recognized by the courts relates to employment or renting. I AM sure that laws passed by Congress, and signed by presidents, and upheld by courts do prevent employment discrimination based on gender, race, religion, creed and the like.
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I would suggest that Freedom of Association is to be found in the Ninth and that the question presented here is exactly what enumerated power is being exercised by the Congress to impose association?
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I would suggest that Freedom of Association is to be found in the Ninth and that the question presented here is exactly what enumerated power is being exercised by the Congress to impose association?
To tax???? Oh, I crack me up!
A possible list, all taken from those powers enumerated in Article I, section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To:
provide for the ... general Welfare;
regulate Commerce ... among the several States (see my post above);
make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
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1) "Where in the Constitution is the Congress empowered to pass laws against personal discrimination? Arguably through interstate commerce, which I could accept-- if interstate commerce were defined as it was by our Founding Fathers-- but what we have now is headed towards Orwellian doublespeak."
2) General Welfare: I'm having a hard time thinking the legislative intent of the authors of the C. was for Congress to have the power to tell people e.g. whom they must employ.
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Congress doesn't tell people who they must employ. Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit.
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Well if you have a sufficent number of employees and their make up of race, religion, ethnic origin, and LGBT varies from the statistical mean, you have the EEOC or some rejected prospect saying "Disparate impact!" I remember one SCOTUS case from law school (Duke vs. Griggs Power or soemthing like that) which held that intelligence tests were racially discriminatory! WTF!?! Doesn't the holding reduce to saying that blacks are stupider?!?
I'm fed up with this sort of excrement! The whole discimination thing has become an industry, a vehicle for government meddling, and parasitic lawsuits!!!
If people are left to their own devices things will work out-- probably sooner than if culture wars are set off by trying to force things on people.
Taking the gay issue. It is being worked out by the culture as a whole and legal meddling simply provokes unnecessary culture wars. It is being worked out be free individuals in their own lives developing their own understandings with those around them.
This is the Tao.
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You don't think that culture and law are related? For example, as law afforded protection to those who "out" themselves, it becomes easier to be "out." This, in turn, increases the likelihood that more people know someone who is gay (or admitting to be gay), which in turn makes them more likely to be part of that cultural shift... and vote, and least in part, on the politicans' willingess to protect gay right, by passing laws.
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This is a nice post by Bigdog: "Congress doesn't tell people who they must employ. Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit."
I think it comes closer to describing how the laws ought to be (if congress was authorized that power in the constitution) than how they are. Also it is the agencies, more so than congress, who write the devil into the details.
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"Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit."
If this were true, then we would not have the whole "disparate impact" line of attack. Tangential perhaps, but perhaps worth noting nonetheless, is that one of the accelerators of the housing bubble was the "Community Reinvestment Act" which pushed banks into making mortgage loans to unworthy non-white individuals lest the banks be accused of racism.
"Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit."
While this might have been a reasonable compromise, I note that, having seen where the logic of this all seems to wind up, I am going a step further and now say that one's workday is a major part of one's life. Whom one hires should be by whatever criteria one wishes.
I'll grant a certain acceleration of cultural change as a result of law, but I also assert such actions have a backlash--- especially when courts overrule initiatives and laws. A very good case can be made I think, that peaceful change is better than change imposed by force, and that the various ways liberal fascism uses the laws to impose its values on everyone (e.g. Roe v. Wade) is leading to a profound schism in American society.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/us/a-california-bill-would-legalize-third-and-fourth-parent-adoptions.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120714
:roll: :x :cry:
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http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=84&load=7163
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/memo-reveals-dept-of-justice-directed-to-hire-people-with-intellectual-disabilities/
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http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/11285
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Supporters of racial preferences like to employ the rhetoric of opportunity and a hand-up for the disadvantaged. But most of the time their real motive is simply favoritism by skin color, regardless of background, as was brutally exposed in Wednesday's Supreme Court oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas.
In defending preferences, UT's lawyer Gregory Garre had pointed out in a written brief that "The African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas" has a harder time getting into the university if he doesn't finish in the top 10% of his high school class.
"Now, that's your argument?" asked Justice Samuel Alito. "If you have—you have an applicant whose parents are—let's say they're—one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part—is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1% of earners in the country" and the "parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let's say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?"
Mr. Garre replied by saying no, and then elaborated that "Because, Your Honor, our point is, is that we want minorities from different backgrounds. We go out of our way to recruit minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds."
Justice Anthony Kennedy: "So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all."
Mr. Garre: "No, Your Honor, what counts is different experiences."
Justice Kennedy: "Well, that's the necessary—that's the necessary response to Justice Alito's question."
Mr. Garre: "Well, Your Honor, what we want is different experiences that are going to—that are going to come on campus."
Justice Kennedy: "You want underprivileged of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So that's race."
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The Hidden Campus Crisis
Placing unprepared students in challenging academic environments derails their lives and careers..
By TREVOR BUTTERWORTH
Few issues at the crossroads of constitutional law and policy are quite as fraught with cultural and racial tension as affirmative action, which is why it is important to stress that "Mismatch" isn't about intelligence or IQ or even, in a sense, academic ability; it is about academic preparation, the Achilles' heel of American education.
The problem is the simple math that results from a deficient K-12 educational system for minorities: There just aren't enough academically prepared black and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Hispanic students to fill America's top colleges at the median level of academic preparation, a level that is determined mostly by Asian and white applicants. To remedy this problem, administrators add the equivalent of 100 points or more to the SAT scores of many minority applicants. Administrators tend to call this policy affirmative action, because surveys show that Americans of all races approve of affirmative action. But it is actually a system of racial preferences, which surveys show that Americans of all races overwhelmingly reject.
In the view of Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.—respectively, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles and a distinguished legal journalist—the current system of preferences does discriminate against Asian and white students. But that isn't what most disturbs the authors. The real cost, they say, is that years of "happy talk" about the educational value of diversity have obscured a terrible fact: If you place students who are less academically prepared in classes where most of the students are more academically prepared, the gap will be punishing and possibly humiliating to the less prepared students. Professors will teach to the middle of the class. Those toward the bottom—particularly in the sciences—will struggle to keep up.
The ordeal of mismatch first became apparent in the mid-1990s, with data from students pursuing majors in science, technology, engineering or math—so-called STEM majors. Blacks at Ivy League colleges, it turned out, aspired to pursue STEM subjects slightly more than whites, but they ended being half as likely to finish with a STEM degree. Research by Dartmouth psychologists Rogers Elliott and A. C. Strenta, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, concluded that the underlying feature of the dropout rate wasn't race but academic preparation. If a student entered an Ivy with an SAT score under 550 in math, he was only a fifth as likely to graduate with a STEM degree as a student whose SAT score was over 700.
The key to understanding this disparity wasn't absolute academic preparation but relative preparation. "A freshman physics class at Dartmouth," Messrs. Sander and Taylor write, "would presume that students were comfortable with calculus and fairly complex, realistic models of natural phenomena; a freshman physics class at Fisk—or at the University of Tennessee—would probably start with algebraic approaches." Historically black colleges, in fact, were producing far greater numbers of black STEM graduates than the Ivies.
Mismatch
By Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.
(Basic, 348 pages, $28.99)
In short, a system of racial preferences was placing students with the strongest scientific ability at the institutions where they were least likely to achieve their goals. As one black Dartmouth graduate told Messrs. Sander and Taylor about her experience in biochemistry, "It is not until you meet the best that you realize that you are in a whole other playing field. At first I thought I could handle it, but then as freshman year rolled along, I got hammered academically. People in my class had had science since grammar school, but I wasn't even introduced to science until my sophomore year of high school. . . . I had never developed the skills I needed to achieve." Like many others in her position, she switched to a humanities major.
The Elliott-Strenta research, published in 1996, met with silence from the academic establishment, as did research in succeeding years that deepened their theory. But this all changed when Mr. Sander analyzed the troubling performance of many black law-school students at UCLA in the late 1990s. About half of them, he found, ended up in the bottom 10th of the class and achieved only a 50% pass rate in bar exams, compared with 90% for whites. The reason? Many had been admitted with large racial preferences. Though a mismatched undergraduate might switch to an easier major without punishing anything more than his dreams, failing the bar exam could ruin a career.
"Orwellian" is one word that "Mismatch" uses to describe the energetic—and frequently unedifying—attempts to refute Mr. Sander's research after it was published in 2005. A troubling legacy of the assault, given that colleges are supposed to exist to increase our sum of knowledge, is that administrators have become increasingly reluctant to release the core data by which their admissions policies can be judged. Nevertheless, Messrs. Sander and Taylor have marshaled a formidable amount of evidence to substantiate the mismatch theory, and while this makes the narrative dense at times, the payoff is persuasiveness.
The authors also take in the bigger picture, by looking at "the breadth of mismatch" in the larger university culture. They describe the psychological effects of preferences ("mismatch can derail lives"), the echo chamber of "happy talk" in the media, the complicated judicial reasoning surrounding affirmative action, and the results of Proposition 209 in California, where universities ignored what they described as positive academic results and began implementing "holistic" policies to keep up minority enrollment. Such shifts play a role in the current Supreme Court case involving the University of Texas. For all its academic analysis and argument, "Mismatch" is very much in the tradition of the muckraking that Lincoln Steffens did a century ago when he took on the corruption in American cities; indeed, the book could be titled "The Shame of the Colleges."
Mr. Butterworth is a contributor to Newsweek and editor at large for STATS.org.
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Where is the outrage?
http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2012/10/12/florida-passes-plan-for-racially-based-academic-goals/
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.
The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.
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Where is the outrage?
http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2012/10/12/florida-passes-plan-for-racially-based-academic-goals/
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.
The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.
October 21, 2012
A Socialist Agenda Behind Florida's New Race-Based Education Standards?
M Catharine Evans
You may never have heard of Amy Wilkins, but she played a major role in the Florida public school system's recent changes in standards of student achievement.Wilkins started out as a community organizer and former worker with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), and is now VP for an education nonprofit with ties to former CDF personnel.
The grandniece of civil rights icon and NAACP president Roy Wilkins has done a 180-degree turn from pushing unreasonably high benchmarks for evaluating schools based on testing outcomes [No Child Left Behind in 2002] to recently setting the guidelines for the state of Florida's new separation of standards according to subgroups including black, Latino, and special needs.
Amy's pedigree has made her one of the most influential education lobbyists in Washington. In 2001 she broke with black leaders and became one of the few liberals to back tougher testing standards for all students in low-performing schools.
The liberal Brookings Institution in 2001 questioned why Democrats including Wilkins wanted to ramrod NCLB through when it didn't make sense:
But jettisoning the tough but fatally flawed standards for judging school performance has been a lot harder than Kress expected -- thanks to the influential congressional Democrats and left-leaning education organizations who have come around to thinking that testing is a way to force educators to focus on disadvantaged and minority students.
Over a decade later, Wilkins is now Vice President for Government Affairs and Communication for the Education Trust, an organization that is a leader in the campaign to lower academic standards for minorities. Apparently, her understanding of what works has evolved into a contradiction of her original stance.
Amy Wilkins of The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group for low-income and minority students, said Florida officials could have described the interim plan in a "less inflammatory way." But she said it's wrong to criticize the plan, which her group designed. [snip]
She called it "a sensible, ambitious goal" that doesn't sugarcoat the neediest students' low proficiency levels. For instance, while it seeks only 74% reading proficiency for African-American students, it notes that only 38% were proficient last year, far fewer than white students, at 69%. It pushes for 36% more African-American students to become proficient in five years, vs. only 19% more white students.
Wilkins said about 20 states have adopted similar guidelines to qualify for waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind law. Such guidelines demand "more improvement, and faster improvement, for the kids who are furthest behind. If people focused on that... we might get a little further without the fireworks."
Wilkins and many other stakeholders in the education reform movement have little or no direct experience teaching or managing schools. Yet, self-styled reformers such as Wilkins advocate sweeping policy changes which affect students, parents, and anyone else impacted by education.
In a February 2012 interview with NPR, Wilkins was asked about the need to oust bad teachers from the classroom.
Well, yeah, I mean, there are some people who are perfectly wonderful human beings who don't belong in a classroom -- including me, right. I should not be a teacher, but I think I'm still a pretty good person. But yeah, there are -- there is a group of teachers who probably ought not be in the classroom.
She also told the host that a master's degree "doesn't matter" and adds nothing to student achievement. Why should a state submit to changes in its policies made by someone with little skin in the education game other than that of being a social activist?
Employing separate standards for subgroups makes absolutely no sense unless activists like Wilkins intend to suppress black students' achievement levels to further their socialist agenda.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/a_socialist_agenda_behind_floridas_new_racebased_education_standards.html
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In some ways, this article could be placed many places on the forum. Guro, if you think there is a better place, please feel free to move it.
This is incredibly crappy.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/25/wisconsin-gop-campaign-worker-hospitalized-after-apparent-gay-bashing-assault/
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This thread seems good to me for this. Ufortunately it does not surprise.
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-racist-and-the-diversity-czar/?singlepage=true
The Racist and the Diversity Czar
Grouping Asians together for the purpose of fostering “diversity” in America is insulting.by
Ying Ma
October 30, 2012 - 10:07 pm Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case challenging the use of racial preferences in the university admissions process. The case has led supporters and opponents to engage in a heated national debate about the merits of affirmative action, but few have noticed that one of the best reminders of the policy’s absurdities actually comes from the territorial conflicts currently raging in Asia.
In the world of affirmative action, Asians-Americans, along with other races, are lumped together as a single group that receives, or are excluded from, employment, education, contracting, or other positions. In the real world, however, the people of Asia not only are not interchangeable tokens; they have numerous reasons not to like each other. Grouping Asians together for the purpose of fostering “diversity” in America is not only ignorant but also insulting.
In recent months, nasty territorial squabbles over islands in the South China Sea have sparked widespread and at times, violent protests featuring one Asian nationality against another. China stands at the center of Asia’s simmering tensions. Just last month, anti-Japanese protests broke out in over 100 Chinese cities. Protestors ransacked Japanese stores, disrupted work at factories, burned Japanese flags, threw bottles, eggs, and apples outside of the Japanese embassy in Beijing, and called for the annihilation of Japan. Numerous Japanese stores in China closed temporarily, and Japan’s top manufacturers—such as Panasonic, Canon, and Toyota—halted production. Since then, consumer boycotts against Japanese cars in China have led to plunging sales for Japanese automakers.
These protests raged over the Japanese government’s September 11 purchase from private ownership of various disputed islands claimed by China and administered by Japan. Tokyo had intended for the “nationalization” of the islands, called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, to prevent further escalation of bilateral conflict, but it only reminded Chinese citizens of Japan’s naked land grab in China before and during World War II.
Unfortunately for Japan, the Chinese are not the only ones protesting against it. Citizens of Taiwan, a former colony of Japan that also claims the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, have staged what Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou has called “patriotic” demonstrations against Japan. During the last week of September, a flotilla of nearly 80 Taiwanese fishing boats, escorted by coast guard ships, even traveled to the disputed area to assert their historic fishing rights and “protect” the islands.
Meanwhile, the South Koreans have chimed in as well. They, too, have an ongoing dispute with Japan over a small (though different) group of islands in the South China Sea. They, too, have staged protests and proclaimed that they have not forgiven Japan for its war-time sins, especially the transgression of forcing South Korean women to serve as sex slaves to Japanese soldiers.
If this is not enough conflict, Vietnam and the Philippines have each engaged in tense standoffs with China as well. They, too, have overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea and have historically clashed with China over various disputed islands. And just this month, the South Korean coast guard fired a rubber bullet at a Chinese fisherman and raided his boat, which they claimed had illegally entered South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea. The fisherman subsequently died from his injuries.
These political, territorial, and ethnic quarrels dominate the headlines in Asia. Other ongoing conflicts—such as India and Pakistan’s deep-seated bilateral animosity, China’s refusal to renounce the use of force to reunify with Taiwan, or North Korea’s hostilities toward South Korea and Japan—similarly evoke raw emotions and offer no easy solutions. This does not mean that all Asians despise each other or that they will not be able to peacefully resolve their conflicts. But the complexities of Asia’s political landscape or cultural heritage simply do not matter to diversity czars in America, who count yellow people against black, white, and brown folks as mere statistics.
One statistic, 37.2%, reflects the freshmen Asian enrollment in 1995 at the University of California, Berkeley, an institution that aggressively practiced racial preferences before voters in California banned the practice in 1996. Another statistic, 46%, shows Asian freshmen enrollment at Berkeley in 2012, a level of participation that the university’s bean counters, when unencumbered by state law, considered to be too high.
In other words, modern racial divvying not only ignores the inherent political, cultural, and historical differences within different ethnic groups, it caps their success as a race as well. Ironically, old-fashioned racists usually discriminate this way as well—for instance, by referring to Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese alike as “Chinamen.”
Today, diversity czars feel no shame when they lump ethnicities together and pit different races against each other. Whatever the Supreme Court decides in Fisher v. University of Texas, this country would do well to end the sordid business of racial classification and preferences sooner rather than later.
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Not sure I follow the logic here.
By way of analogy, the fact that there is tribal warfare in Africa does not mean that there was/is not discrimination against blacks in the US.
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"Black" is an construct, as is "Asian" or "white". There is no such thing as "Asian" in asia, there are distinct ethnicities and nations. Ask a Filipino how he likes being lumped in with Japanese into one group. I doubt many would be happy with the idea. I know how the majority of Han Chinese feel about sharing anything with Japanese.
People aren't crayons to be sorted by color.
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I am wondering if once Obama has the opportunity to pack another liberal or two on the Supreme Court will be see slavery reparations law suits move forward.
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look up slavery reparations on wikipedia and than link to the number 11 footnote.
It is a NYT article from Obama's notorius friend and Harvard professor who was made nationally famous for getting into the roe with the police officer a few years back; Henry Gates. Of interest he claims Obama's feelings about reparations are ambigious. Obama is for it in theory but does not think it practical.
Interestingly he gives us a history lesson about slavery responsibility on BOTH sides of the Atlantic. He points out that some African Kings and Kingdoms were very complicit in actually providing the blacks to the whites for monetary gain. 4 to 500 thousand Blacks were brought to the US while 12 to 13 million were sold overseas around the world. The US was really only a small percentage of the total of recipient of blacks sold into slavery.
And members of their own race sadly sold them to the whites. I was not really aware of the extent of this. What all men, white black, asian will do to one another for money is part of history of humanity from day one. Always was, always will be.
I cannot link it here because of network issues.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/25/net-us-usa-internet-profiling-idUSBRE8AO01M20121125
From the article:
Instantcheckmate.com, which labels itself the "Internet's leading authority on background checks," placed both ads. A statistical analysis of the company's advertising has found it has disproportionately used ad copy including the word "arrested" for black-identifying names, even when a person has no arrest record.
Latanya Sweeney is a Harvard University professor of government with a doctorate in computer science. After learning that her own name had popped up in an "arrested?" ad when a colleague was searching for one of her academic publications, she ran more than 120,000 searches for names primarily given to either black or white children, testing ads delivered for 2,400 real names 50 times each. (The author of this story is a Harvard University fellow collaborating with Professor Sweeney on a book about the business of personal data.)
Ebony Jefferson, for example, often turns up an instantcheckmate.com ad reading: "Ebony Jefferson, arrested?" but an ad triggered by a search for Emily Jefferson would read: "We found Emily Jefferson." Searches for randomly chosen black-identifying names such as Deshawn Williams, Latisha Smith or Latanya Smith often produced the "arrested?" headline or ad text with the word "arrest," whereas other less ethnic-sounding first names matched with the same surnames typically did not.
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What is the actual rate of arrests for "Ebony" vs. that of "Emily"? Exactly the same, or is there a discernable difference?
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/major-hasan-syndrome-at-the-los-angeles-police-department/?singlepage=true
‘Major Hasan Syndrome’ at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department?
Once again, incompetence and even criminal behavior get ignored for the sake of diversity.by
Jack Dunphy
Bio
November 28, 2012 - 12:00 am Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people (and, lest we forget, an unborn child) and wounding 29 others at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009, had raised a number of red flags suggesting a disposition for committing, or at the very least having sympathy for, acts of Islamic terror prior to his massacre. The signs were ignored due to political correctness.
There is a price to be paid for the “inclusiveness” and “diversity” we’re all supposed to be so proud of. We can be thankful the price is seldom as dreadful as it was at Fort Hood, but sometimes the cost is a level of criminality less horrific but disturbing all the same.
Witness the case of Bernice Abram, a captain with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The Los Angeles Times has reported that since April of last year, Capt. Abram has been on paid administrative leave after being caught in a sting that revealed her relationship with Dion Grim, a suspected drug dealer.
According to the Times, a Sheriff’s Department detective was listening to wiretapped phone calls Grim had made when he recognized Capt. Abram’s voice on the line. In the ensuing sting, Capt. Abram was advised of a purported drug investigation being conducted near Grim’s home. Minutes later, as investigators listened in, Abram phoned Grim and warned him about the operation. She was immediately placed on paid leave, as was her niece, a civilian jail employee, who is accused of illegally accessing law enforcement databases on behalf of Grim.
Together, Abram and her niece have collected about $300,000 in salary since being put on leave, says the Times.
The Times took care to note that Abram was a “respected captain with more than 150 deputies under her command.” To that characterization a question must be raised: respected by whom? Concerns about Abram’s relationship with Grim had arisen long before she was ensnared in the sting. Indeed, she had made no secret of her willingness to help Grim get through previous brushes with the law, going so far as to order him released from custody after he was arrested on a drug charge, and securing the release of his car from the impound lot without his having to pay the customary fees. Abram even picked Grim up from jail herself. She also used her position to fix traffic tickets issued to Grim and his sister.
It is inconceivable that Abram’s conduct wasn’t widely known among the rank and file deputies, both at her own station and at the one near where Grim lived. It is also inconceivable that word of her questionable ties to Grim did not reach people above her in the chain of command, people who in theory should have been able to correct her behavior.
So why did it take such a flagrant act of subverting her own department’s objectives before action was taken against her? Everyone knows the answer to that: Abram was given a pass because she is a black female working in an organization that values “diversity” more than competence, and even, to at least some extent, more than adherence to the law.
Just as Major Hasan’s superiors in the Army turned a blind eye to his descent into jihadism lest they be branded as intolerant, Capt. Abram’s superiors in the Sheriff’s Department were content to ignore her relationship with a criminal for fear of stirring the wrath of this or that group of racial grievance-mongers. That she so boldly interfered with the prosecution of criminal cases against her friend the drug dealer, even to the point of asking others in the Sheriff’s Department to act on her behalf, is an indication of the freedom she felt in flouting the law and the Sheriff’s Department’s regulations. She knew no one would dare touch her.
Lest my friends in the Sheriff’s Department accuse me of picking on them, my own Los Angeles Police Department is not immune to Major Hasan Syndrome.
Back in 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that Maurice Moore, a black LAPD deputy chief, was for at least seven years laundering money for his drug trafficker son, who orchestrated the scheme from inside federal prison. Just as disturbing, the FBI informed then-LAPD Chief Bernard Parks about their suspicions as to Moore’s involvement in the criminal enterprise. Parks, who is also black, declined to take any action against his subordinate. Moore was allowed to retire without facing any departmental charges, and the statute of limitations precluded prosecution on most of the allegations against him.
Mr. Parks was denied a second term as police chief in 2002. But today, he serves on the L.A. city council.
“I don’t understand why this [investigation] was managed the way it was,” wrote Thomas Lorenzen, at the time an LAPD commander who wrote the department’s report on the Moore case. “If it would have been your average police officer, it would have been utterly different.”
Indeed it would have, as can be said of any number of incidents involving high-ranking officers whose ability to check this or that box on the diversity paperwork has saved them from demotion, termination, or prosecution.
Sometimes Major Hasan Syndrome serves to obscure not criminality, but the much, much more commonly observed incompetence. Off the top of my head, I can think of four LAPD captains, all of whom owe their current positions to belonging to one or more “under-represented classes,” and all of whom have performed poorly in every position and at every rank since the day they were hired. Nonetheless, they have continued to earn promotions even after demonstrating monumental malfeasance.
One was the key figure in a lawsuit in which officers were awarded millions of dollars in damages, mostly owing to her mismanagement of the division she commanded. She’s been promoted twice since then. Another, the subject of laudatory news stories chronicling her rise in the LAPD, has so poorly run her current command that crime in that part of town is up almost 20 percent from last year’s levels, by far the largest increase in the city. We can expect her to be promoted to commander any time now.
So we await to hear what will become of Capt. Bernice Abram. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has declined to prosecute her on the grounds that there is insufficient proof that she knew Dion Grim was involved in any crime when she tipped him off to the investigation in his neighborhood. And maybe there isn’t, but the L.A. Times reports that the FBI continues to investigate her, even as she continues to draw her captain’s salary for doing nothing.
Perhaps, like former LAPD Deputy Chief Maurice Moore, she’ll be able to ride out the investigation until the statute of limitations expires, and then quietly retire.
But that’s just a small price to pay for “diversity,” right? And it pales in comparison with the price the Army paid for ignoring Major Hasan’s murderous predilections. But note well the rubbish that came spilling out of the mouths of people we had hoped knew better after the Fort Hood massacre. “Workplace violence,” it was called, as insulting a use of Orwellian language as has ever been seen. But perhaps the most galling was General George Casey, the Army’s top commander, who uttered this timeless gem of politically correct hokum:
Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.
At least Capt. Abram and her accused drug-dealing friend haven’t killed anyone, at least not that we know of. But even if they had, would some hack politician or careerist cop out there say it was merely the price of “diversity” in the Sheriff’s Department? Someone would. You just know someone would.
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'Stop Being So Anglo' San Francisco's Möbius strip of discrimination
By JAMES TARANTO
"Allegations of racism and other discrimination against San Francisco Housing Authority Executive Director Henry Alvarez are flying in lawsuits filed by his subordinates," the San Francisco Examiner reports. It's a man-bites-dog story inasmuch as Alvarez is black and his accusers are white--the reverse of the usual race-discrimination stereotype.
In one lawsuit, Tim Larsen, a lawyer who works for the authority, alleges that Alvarez "told him to 'stop being so Anglo' and that he 'did not have enough kink in his hair,' " reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The Examiner adds that "Alvarez allegedly asked Larsen to climb a telephone pole to cut down some dangling shoes. When Larsen questioned why he was being asked to do the task when it was clearly not in his attorney job description, Alvarez allegedly replied, 'you and I are like Captain Kirk and Spock; you will never escape me.' "
Then there's this: "Larsen . . . claims Alvarez denied him a promotion based on his race, . . . admitting he would have granted the promotion 'if you had more melatonin in your skin,' according to court documents filed last month. The suit surmises that Alvarez actually was referring to 'melanin,' a hormone that determines skin pigment."
Sounds more like Archie Bunker than anyone from "Star Trek."
When we read about this case, it reminded us of another one, which we wrote about back in 2007. As the Chronicle reported then, San Francisco was defending "an affirmative action program for minority and female contractors," even though a 1996 ballot initiative banned all such racial preferences by governments in California. A state appeals court had just ruled in the city's favor, "saying a history of discrimination may justify preferential treatment despite California's Proposition 209."
This seemed odd to us:
[San Francisco] claims that its own employees have a history of "long-standing and pervasive discrimination" against female and minority contractors--even though for 23 years, city policy has required discrimination in favor of women and minorities.
If the city's claim is true, why doesn't it just fire the wayward employees? It could replace them with women and minorities and kill two birds with one stone.
That case, known as Coral Construction v. San Francisco, is still going on. In August 2010, it reached the state Supreme Court, which sustained the appellate court's ruling. The justices "said San Francisco could try to show that it had intentionally discriminated in the past and that the bidding preferences were needed to level the playing field," reported the Chronicle.
According to a blog post last month by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, a pretrial hearing in the case was scheduled for Nov. 16. PLF's Meriem Hubbard tells Best of the Web Today that it has since been postponed until Jan. 17.
Here's how the PLF post sums up the case:
Essentially, the city must convince the court that (1) it has been so powerless and inept that it has been unable to force itself to comply with federal and state constitutional prohibitions against discrimination; or (2) despite governing over a geographical area heralded for its progressive politics, tolerance, and diversity, the city has for decades deliberately enacted and enforced contracting procedures with the intent to discriminate against every category of racial and ethnic minorities and women."
To put it another way, San Francisco's argument is that two wrongs make a right: that it should be permitted to engage in racial discrimination because it has engaged in racial discrimination.
But wait. According to the lawsuits against Alvarez, there is "a pattern of alleged inappropriate and illegal behavior," in the Chronicle's words, some of it racially motivated and directed against whites. Moreover, as we noted in 2007, antiwhite discrimination in the form of "affirmative action" has been official city policy since at least 1984.
If San Francisco prevails in the Coral Construction case, the logic of its argument would dictate that its history of discrimination against whites justifies future discrimination against minorities. When you sanction discrimination in order to remedy discrimination, you make of the law a Möbius strip.
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http://www.youtube.com/5723michael
NSFW!!!
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Jamie Foxx has done some serious high quality work as an actor. The author of this piece takes him to task for some things he has said recently.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/13/jamie-foxx-and-the-rise-of-black-bigotry/
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I'm having a hard time figuring this out. The media and others report it as racial, African Americans versus the Somalis. Where do they think Somalia is and what race do they see? It looks to me like local blacks' intolerance of minority, immigrant blacks - for being different? Authorities will be reviewing surveillance footage.
A parent commented: "You can't throw kids in a building and expect them to get along," she said. "It's a challenge for all of our students to live amid such rich diversity."
My two cents: With a 50% graduation rate, how about we throw them into books and more math tests in place of the time we spend celebrating our rich diversity.
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/191259371.html
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/story/21199424/south-high-school-locked-down-after-food-fight-escalates-to-brawl
http://kstp.com/article/stories/S2932193.shtml?cat=1
http://www.kare11.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=2165842137001&odyssey=mod|tvideo|news
Maybe their congressman Keith Ellison can bridge this gap and end the violence with smart liberalism, like Rahm did in Chicago.
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I've said it before and I will say it again, multiculturalism has never worked.
In every instance in history, societies that have been multicultural, have at one point or another led to either the death of the weaker groups, the group's expulsion, or assimilation (through being bred into), the stronger group.
Nature dictates that there is no such thing as getting along. It doesn't mean that people are basically racist or hate each other. It just means that people intuitively seek to protect their subset.
Darwin and others were right.
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http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=517&load=8066
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Incarceration rates for black Americans dropped sharply from 2000 to 2009, especially for women, while the rate of imprisonment for whites and Hispanics rose over the same decade, according to a report released Wednesday by a prison research and advocacy group in Washington.
The declining rates for blacks represented a significant shift in the racial makeup of the United States’ prisons and suggested that the disparities that have long characterized the prison population may be starting to diminish.
“It certainly marks a shift from what we’ve seen for several decades now,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, whose report was based on data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Justice Department. “Normally, these things don’t change very dramatically over a one-decade period.”
The decline in incarceration rates was most striking for black women, dropping 30.7 percent over the ten-year period. In 2000, black women were imprisoned at six times the rate of white women; by 2009, they were 2.8 times more likely to be in prison. For black men, the rate of imprisonment decreased by 9.8 percent; in 2000 they were incarcerated at 7.7 times the rate of white men, a rate that fell to 6.4 times that of white men by 2009.
For white men and women, however, incarceration rates increased over the same period, rising 47.1 percent for white women and 8.5 percent for white men. By the end of the decade, Hispanic men were slightly less likely to be in prison, a drop of 2.2 percent, but Hispanic women were imprisoned more frequently, an increase of 23.3 percent.
Over all, blacks currently make up about 38 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons; whites account for about 34 percent.
More than 100,000 women are currently incarcerated in state or federal prisons. The overall rate of incarceration varies widely from state to state, as does the ratio of blacks to whites and Hispanics.
But the trend is clear, Mr. Mauer said, adding that no single factor could explain the shifting figures but that changes in drug laws and sentencing for drug offenses probably played a large role. Other possible contributors included decreasing arrest rates for blacks, the rising number of whites and Hispanics serving mandatory sentences for methamphetamine abuse, and socioeconomic shifts that have disproportionately affected white women.
Alfred Blumstein, an expert on the criminal justice system at Carnegie Mellon University, said his own findings from research he conducted with Allen J. Beck of the Bureau of Justice Statistics also indicated that the rate of incarceration for blacks was declining compared with that for whites.
“A major contributor has been the intensity of incarceration for drug offending,” Dr. Blumstein said, “and that reached a peak with the very long sentences we gave out for crack offenders, stimulated in large part by the violence that was going on in the crack markets.”
But crack cocaine has become far less of an issue in recent years, he noted, a fact reflected in revisions of federal sentencing laws. And inmates serving time for crack offenses are now emerging from prison, “so there would be a disproportionate black exodus from prison that as a result would be reflected in a lowering of the incarceration-rate ratio,” he said.
Mr. Mauer said that especially for black women, the drop in incarceration compared with whites was “all about drug offenses.”
In New York State, for example, where the overall prison population has dropped substantially, for women “virtually the entire decline was a decline in drug offenses,” he said. Increasingly severe drug laws and stiff sentences for drug offenses resulted in disproportionate numbers of black women going to prison, he said, “and now they are disproportionately benefiting from reductions in that area.”
“We’re not going to see necessarily the same level across all 50 states, but the patterns are there,” he said.
One thing that has not changed, Mr. Mauer said, is that incarceration rates for women as a whole continue to increase at a higher rate than those for men.
“All we’ve seen is a shifting in which women are locked up,” he said.
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Are We Equal?
By Walter E. Williams · March 27, 2013
Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal -- or should be equal -- is foolhardy and creates mischief. Let's look at it.
Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men's intelligence has far greater variability. That means that though there are many more male geniuses, there are also many more male idiots. The latter might partially explain why more men are in jail than women.
Watch any Saturday afternoon college basketball game and ask yourself the question fixated in the minds of liberals everywhere: "Does this look like America?" Among the 10 players on the court, at best there might be two white players. If you want to see the team's white players, you must look at the bench. A Japanese or Chinese player is close to being totally out of the picture, even on the bench. Professional basketball isn't much better, with 80 percent of the players being black, but at least there's a Chinese player. Professional football isn't much better, with blacks being 65 percent. In both sports, blacks are among the highest-paid players and have the highest number of awards for excellence. Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting.
By contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of the NHL's ice hockey players. But don't fret about black NHL underrepresentation. State underrepresentation is worse. Most U.S. professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts. Not a single U.S. professional hockey player can boast of having been born and raised in Hawaii, Mississippi or Louisiana. Any way we cut it, there is simply no racial proportionality or diversity in professional basketball, football and hockey.
A more emotionally charged question is whether we have equal intelligence. Take Jews, for example. They are only 3 percent of the U.S. population. Half-baked theories of racial proportionality would predict that 3 percent of U.S. Nobel laureates are Jews, but that's way off the mark. Jews constitute a whopping 39 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. At the international level, the disparity is worse. Jews are not even 1 percent of the world's population, but they constitute 20 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners.
There are many other inequalities and disproportionalities. Asian-Americans routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT, whereas blacks score the lowest. Men are 50 percent of the population, and so are women; yet men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. I'm personally wondering what whoever is in charge of lightning has against men. Population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their respective populations is black. By contrast, in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentages in the general population. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Cervical cancer rates are five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women.
Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we'd be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality's being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/290977-boehner-no-excuse-for-youngs-wetbacks-comment
From the article:
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said there was "no excuse" for the comment, in which Young described Latino workers on his family farm as "wetbacks" in a radio interview Thursday.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/290977-boehner-no-excuse-for-youngs-wetbacks-comment
From the article:
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said there was "no excuse" for the comment, in which Young described Latino workers on his family farm as "wetbacks" in a radio interview Thursday.
We will not judge people by the moisture content of their skin, nor by the validity of their documents.
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Pedophilia Is A Sexual Orientation Under CA Bill
February 7, 2013
http://www.rethinksociety.com/government/pedophilia-is-a-sexual-orientation-under-ca-bill/
California Congresswoman, Rep. Jackie Speier CA (D), wants to federalize a state law to prohibit counseling to change a person’s sexual orientation. That doesn’t sound that extreme, but pedophilia is a sexual orientation according to this bill as well.
Under the bill’s language, a mental health counselor could be sanctioned if there was an attempt to get a pedophile or gay individual to change his behavior or speak negatively about their behavior as it relates to sexuality.
The bill calls on states to prohibit efforts to change a minor’s sexual orientation, even if the minor requests it, saying that doing so is “dangerous and harmful.” The text of the legislation doesn’t specifically ban “gay” conversion therapy. Instead, it prohibits attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation. “Sexual orientation change efforts’ means any practices by mental health providers that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation,” the bill says.
Republicans attempted to add an amendment specifying that, “pedophilia is not covered as an orientation.” However, the Democrats defeated the amendment. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) stated that all alternative sexual lifestyles should be protected under the law, and accordingly decided that pedophilia is a sexual orientation that should be equally as embraced as homosexuality.
“This language is so broad and vague, it arguably could include all forms of sexual orientation, including pedophilia,” said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute. “It’s not just the orientation that is protected—the conduct associated with the orientation is protected as well.”
Who Cares If Pedophilia Is A Sexual Orientation?
It also means that, if pedophilia is a sexual orientation, that discrimination laws also apply to pedophiles. That means you cannot block a pedophile from being a preschool teacher or any other high-risk occupation.
Recently, a United States District Court Judge, William Shubb, sided with Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) by granting their plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against the legislation, which is known as California SB 1172.
“Because the court finds that SB 1172 is subject to strict scrutiny and is unlikely to satisfy this standard, the court finds that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims based on violations of their rights to freedom of speech under the First Amendment,” wrote Judge Shubb.
“This victory sends a clear signal to all those who feel they can stifle religious freedom, free speech, and the rights of parents without being contested,” said PJI President, Brad Dacus. “We at PJI are ready to fight this battle all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.
“This will be a long, grueling battle with tremendous consequences for generations to come. We are grateful to those who are willing to support us in this critical time to preserve our freedoms and protect our children,” he continued.
Thankfully, for the time being, this legislation has been blocked, but many questions still remain. This bill establishes a dangerous precedent for normalizing the behavior of pedophiles while stripping parents of their rights and peace of mind.
One can certainly make the argument that homosexuals are “born that way,” and we generally would not dispute that. However, when we have legislators that want to extend the “born that way” defense to pedophiles, this crosses a very dangerous line.
Whether a pedophile is born that way or not, it still does not make their behavior acceptable in any way. If so, then you could declare rapists are “born that way.” They can’t help that they need to rape! Poor them!
Let’s be real.
Sex between an adult and a child too young to understand what is going on is not the same thing as sex between two consenting adults. The operative word here is “consenting.” Children—by both law and basic common sense—cannot “consent.” If Jackie Spier had a son or daughter, and an adult “had consensual sex” with him or her, we do not believe that what she would be so adamant about protecting them.
What liberals conveniently ignore is the fact that all societies who participated in pedophilia—such as the Hittites, Canaanites, Greeks, and Romans—eventually caved in on themselves due to corruption and depravity. Further, let’s not also forget that their favorite form of entertainment was watching people get torn to shreds by lions, hacked to death, and burned alive.
Recognizing sexual ‘orientation’ is walking a razor’s edge. Unlike gay-oriented legislation, pedophilia has victims who must be protected. We don’t put pedophiles in prison to make them stop being pedophiles; we put them there because they threaten the safety of the most vulnerable people in a society.
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http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2013/04/05/diversity-gone-wild-lifeguards-who-cant-swim/
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We are talking about government licenses and definitions here, not comparing humans to animals.
Cats and Dogs and Marriage Laws
by Stephen J. Heaney Witherspoon Institute, Princeton NJ
A fellow walks up to the dog-licensing clerk and demands a license for his cat. The clerk points out that there is no such thing as a cat license, and thus he has no need of a cat license. Noting the man’s confusion, she explains that dogs and cats are different kinds of animals. Dogs tend to wander off and get lost, dig up other people’s yards, bite people, get into garbage, and leave their droppings in inconvenient places; cats generally do not do these things. Licensing would be pointless, for the government doesn’t need the same control over cats as it does over dogs.
The customer feels unaffirmed in his choice of a cat, and demands that the government recognize that his cat is just as important as a dog. Oh, but it’s not a question of importance, the clerk insists; it’s just that cats and dogs are quite different, and there is no government interest in licensing cats. He pesters her for so long that, eventually, the clerk, in sheer frustration, grabs a form, crosses out the word “dog” and writes in the word “cat” in crayon. The customer goes away pleased.
Unexpectedly, some of the man’s cat-owning friends soon follow suit. This raises concern for the licensing administrators. They really cannot justify taking money to license cats, yet it seems many people are made quite happy by having their choices validated. Finally, it occurs to someone that, since dogs are four-legged furry mammals with tails and claws, and cats are four-legged furry mammals with tails and claws—and after all, this really is the only set of characteristics that matters—then the obvious thing to do is to redefine “dog” so that it includes cats.
This decision is not without its detractors. Some sticks-in-the-mud point out that the definition is so broad that it also includes bears, rabbits, gerbils, and ferrets, not to mention the incredibly obvious fact that cats simply are not dogs, and that redefining them does not change this fact, and that changing definitions based on policy preferences will only lead to problems. These arguments fall on deaf ears. The city council makes it official, redefining “dog” to include cats. Why cat owners feel affirmed by having their cats renamed “dogs” remains a mystery.
Several more cities take up the call to rename cats “dogs,” but most towns resist because, as they point out, it’s simply not true that cats are dogs. The state legislature is besieged with efforts to rename cats as dogs. The state has always left policy choices about cats and dogs to local deliberations, but is now in an awkward position. It runs several venues that admit dogs but not cats; it has compensation policies that are differently affected by ownership of cats rather than dogs.
No state legislator or administrator has ever thought it necessary to define “dog,” since everyone knows what a dog is, and what a dog is has not changed in the entire history of humankind or caninekind. It is also plain as the nose on everyone’s face that dogs are not cats, and vice versa.
Failure to define the term, though, will only lead to confusion about employee compensation and mischief at state-run venues. The legislators recognize a simple fact: No matter how one defines “dog,” it cannot be the case that both definitions are true. Either “dog” will be defined according to its observable operations, or it will be defined according to its nonessential outward appearance. They decide to go ahead and define “dog” in the “traditional” way, according to the reality of dogs and cats, such that cats are excluded.
More at link: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/04/9716/
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Professor Vermes. Born Jewish in Hungary and became a priest to escape Nazism later studied the Dead Sea Scrolls has a fascinating view of Jesus.
His scholarship in this area helped transform long held dogma about Jesus. OF course there will always be debate. And there will always be mystery.
He puts more emphasis on the fact that Jesus was Jewish. That the Jews did not kill Jesus (though some of them may not have minded the Romans doing it).
Most of all he admires Jesus for being a genius and closer to spiritual truth then anyone but nonetheless he was still a man:
http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21578017-geza-vermes-jew-ex-priest-and-translator-dead-sea-scrolls-died-may-8th-aged
I recall being offended by Ann Coulter comment on Donny Deusch stating that Christianity is an improvement on Judaism. After reading this article I would prefer that both religions are great with wonderful teachings we can all learn and hope to live by.
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Op-Ed Columnist
Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: May 22, 2013 7 Comments
Why do Republicans keep endorsing the most extreme and hyperbolic African-American voices — those intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves? That idea, which only a black person could invoke without being castigated for the flagrant racial overtones, is a trope to which an increasingly homogeneous Republican Party seems to subscribe.
Charles M. Blow
The most recent example of this is E.W. Jackson, who last weekend became the Virginia Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor in the state.
In a video posted to YouTube in 2012 titled “Bishop E.W. Jackson Message to Black Christians,” Jackson says:
“It is time to end the slavish devotion to the Democrat party. They have insulted us, used us and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies: ‘Unless we support the Democrat party, we will be returned to slavery. We will be robbed of voting rights. The Martin Luther King holiday will be repealed.’ They think we’re stupid and these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.”
He continues:
“Shame on us for allowing ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder. We belong to God. Our ancestors were sold against their will centuries ago, but we’re going to the slave market voluntarily today. Yes, it’s just that ugly.”
(Jackson also took swipes at the gay community and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan.)
The Democrat Plantation theology goes something like this: Democrats use the government to addict and incapacitate blacks by giving them free things — welfare, food stamps and the like. This renders blacks dependent on and beholden to that government and the Democratic Party.
This is not completely dissimilar from Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments, although he never mentioned race:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.
Star Parker, a Scripps Howard syndicated columnist, failed Republican Congressional candidate and author of the book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It,” argued in an article in 2009 on the conservative Web site Townhall:
“A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind-sets from ‘How do I take care of myself?’ to ‘What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?’"
Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R. I., put it more bluntly in an editorial on the Ashbrook University Web site in 2002:
“For the modern liberal Democratic racist as for the old-fashioned one, blacks are simply incapable of freedom. They will always need Ol’ Massa’s help. And woe be to any African-American who wanders off of the Democratic plantation.”
That last bit hints at the other part of Democrat Plantation theology: that black Democrats and white liberals are equal enforcers of enslavement.
A 2010 unsigned article published on the Web site of the conservative weekly Human Events reads:
“If black Americans wish to be Democrats, that is their choice — or is it? Despite the fact that Democrats enjoy the support of over 90% of black America, the other 10%, those who dare to ‘stray from the plantation,’ have been routinely vilified — by other black Americans.”
The article continued:
“The not-so-subtle message? Support liberal dogma — or face social ostracism.”
Dr. Ben Carson, who delivered a speech blasting the president during the National Prayer breakfast this year and quickly became a darling of the right (The Wall Street Journal declared: “Ben Carson for President”), said of white liberals in a radio interview:
“They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”
(Carson also got in trouble for comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. He later apologized for those comments, “if anybody was offended.”)
Unfortunately, the runaway slave image among many black Republican politicians is becoming ingrained and conservative audiences are applauding them for it.
Herman Cain, for example, built an entire presidential campaign on slave imagery.
C. Mason Weaver, a radio talk show host, failed Republican Congressional candidate from California and author of the book “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation,” said of President Obama at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Washington: “You thought he was saying was ‘hope and change’; he was saying was ‘ropes and chains,’ not ‘hope and change.’ ” Weaver continued: “Decide today if you’re going to be free or slaves. Decide today if you’re going to be a slave to your master or the master of your own destiny.” Weaver would repeat the “rope and chains” line on Fox and Friends that year.
The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Tea Party member and occasional Fox News guest, even made a movie called “Runaway Slave,” in which he says that America should “run away from socialism, run from statism, run away from progressivism.”
While these politicians accuse the vast majority of African-Americans of being mindless drones of the Democrats, they are skating dangerously close to — if not beyond — the point where they become conservative caricatures.
The implication that most African-Americans can’t be discerning, that they can’t weigh the pros and cons of political parties and make informed decisions, that they are rendered servile in exchange for social services, is the highest level of insult. And black politicians are the ones Republicans are cheering on as they deliver it.
Now who, exactly, is being used here?
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Thanks CCP for posting. The people Blow attempts to rip make more sense than the columnist.
"The Democrat Plantation theology goes something like this: Democrats use the government to addict and incapacitate blacks by giving them free things — welfare, food stamps and the like. This renders blacks dependent on and beholden to that government and the Democratic Party."
The data mining people on the campaign know that in large numbers, not for all, this is true. Did Blow or his newspaper ever investigate the campaign for exploiting that? ACORN and community organizing in the day of Barack Obama's involvement in it was EXPLICIT in their support for "welfare rights", never supporting economic liberty or prosperity through free enterprise.
"Herman Cain, for example, built an entire presidential campaign on slave imagery."
Herman Cain had a Master's degree in Computer Science, rose to the highest levels in business based on performance, not tokenism, served as Director of the Kansas City Fed and built his campaign on a tax reform plan that, if implemented, would have cut the black unemployment rate in half and same for every other demographic, without spending an additional dime on plantation welfare programs.
Why do these vacuous, liberal, NY Times opinion writers need to rely on lies and false premises to make their point? If you must mislead to make a point, maybe your point is wrong.
I would note however that if 98% of blacks are voting Dem, the other 2%, including some mentioned by Blow, have turned out to be some of the smartest and most courageous people in our country. I notice he didn't take on Thomas Sowell, or try try to debate Walter Williams on welfare economics, and had to twist Carson's views in order to slam him.
With Romney, it wasn't based on race Romney himself has said that statement was COMPLETELY wrong. http://www.usatoday.com/story/onpolitics/2012/10/05/obama-romney-47-election-2012/1614755/
Blow's real point is that liberals feel quite threatened by the rise of a small number of black conservatives and take every occasion they can to put them down.
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Doug wrote:
"Blow's real point is that liberals feel quite threatened by the rise of a small number of black conservatives and take every occasion they can to put them down"
Yes. Doug did you read Obama's speech at Morehouse? If one reads it one would think parts of it (at least) was written by a Herman Caine or Thomas Sowell. I don't for the life of me understand why Blacks vote Democratic Party. Why there own party hijacked by globalist, statist America hating liberals is giving *their* country away. I could understand when in the past they didn't feel like a full fledged part of our society. But now they are coming into their own. And what do they do? Support the party that is giving it all away. Lets give it away to all the illegals. Lets give it away to the EU. Lets tax all the oil and gas companies in the US and give it to all the poor countries, lets keep spending funny money so we are so much in debt no one will have anything. If Blacks were upset about not being a full participant in the American Dream then don't vote for a party that is destroying the American Dream.
Some Blacks did not like Obama's speech.
It was interesting to see some of the criticism of Obama's speech by some Blacks. They are tired of being lectured about young Black men not taking responsibility and instead blaming white racism for everything.
Some Blacks have asked so what can the Republican Party do for us?
How about a free country with real equal opportunity and individualism?
Here is his speech:
The Wall Street Journal SubscribeLog InU.S. Edition U.S.
Barack Obama gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black college in Atlanta, on May 19.
Below is the transcript of the speech:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Morehouse! (Applause.) Thank you, everybody. Please be seated.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love you!
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I love you back. (Laughter.) That is why I am here.
I have to say that it is one of the great honors of my life to be able to address this gathering here today. I want to thank Dr. Wilson for his outstanding leadership, and the Board of Trustees. We have Congressman Cedric Richmond and Sanford Bishop — both proud alumni of this school, as well as Congressman Hank Johnson. And one of my dear friends and a great inspiration to us all — the great John Lewis is here. (Applause.) We have your outstanding Mayor, Mr. Kasim Reed, in the house. (Applause.)
To all the members of the Morehouse family. And most of all, congratulations to this distinguished group of Morehouse Men — the Class of 2013. (Applause.)
I have to say that it’s a little hard to follow — not Dr. Wilson, but a skinny guy with a funny name. (Laughter.) Betsegaw Tadele — he’s going to be doing something.
I also have to say that you all are going to get wet. (Laughter.) And I’d be out there with you if I could. (Laughter.) But Secret Service gets nervous. (Laughter.) So I’m going to have to stay here, dry. (Laughter.) But know that I’m there with you in spirit. (Laughter.)
Some of you are graduating summa cum laude. (Applause.) Some of you are graduating magna cum laude. (Applause.) I know some of you are just graduating, “thank you, Lordy.” (Laughter and applause.) That’s appropriate because it’s a Sunday. (Laughter.)
I see some moms and grandmas here, aunts, in their Sunday best — although they are upset about their hair getting messed up. (Laughter.) Michelle would not be sitting in the rain. (Laughter.) She has taught me about hair. (Laughter.)
I want to congratulate all of you — the parents, the grandparents, the brothers and sisters, the family and friends who supported these young men in so many ways. This is your day, as well. Just think about it — your sons, your brothers, your nephews — they spent the last four years far from home and close to Spelman, and yet they are still here today. (Applause.) So you’ve done something right. Graduates, give a big round of applause to your family for everything that they’ve done for you. (Applause.)
I know that some of you had to wait in long lines to get into today’s ceremony. And I would apologize, but it did not have anything to do with security. Those graduates just wanted you to know what it’s like to register for classes here. (Laughter and applause.) And this time of year brings a different kind of stress — every senior stopping by Gloster Hall over the past week making sure your name was actually on the list of students who met all the graduation requirements. (Applause.) If it wasn’t on the list, you had to figure out why. Was it that library book you lent to that trifling roommate who didn’t return it? (Laughter.) Was it Dr. Johnson’s policy class? (Applause.) Did you get enough Crown Forum credits? (Applause.)
On that last point, I’m going to exercise my power as President to declare this speech sufficient Crown Forum credits for any otherwise eligible student to graduate. That is my graduation gift to you. (Applause.) You have a special dispensation.
Now, graduates, I am humbled to stand here with all of you as an honorary Morehouse Man. (Applause.) I finally made it. (Laughter.) And as I do, I’m mindful of an old saying: “You can always tell a Morehouse Man — (applause) — but you can’t tell him much.” (Applause.) And that makes my task a little more difficult, I suppose. But I think it also reflects the sense of pride that’s always been part of this school’s tradition.
Benjamin Mays, who served as the president of Morehouse for almost 30 years, understood that tradition better than anybody. He said — and I quote — “It will not be sufficient for Morehouse College, for any college, for that matter, to produce clever graduates — but rather honest men, men who can be trusted in public and private life — men who are sensitive to the wrongs, the sufferings, and the injustices of society and who are willing to accept responsibility for correcting (those) ills.”
It was that mission — not just to educate men, but to cultivate good men, strong men, upright men — that brought community leaders together just two years after the end of the Civil War. They assembled a list of 37 men, free blacks and freed slaves, who would make up the first prospective class of what later became Morehouse College. Most of those first students had a desire to become teachers and preachers — to better themselves so they could help others do the same.
A century and a half later, times have changed. But the “Morehouse Mystique” still endures. Some of you probably came here from communities where everybody looked like you. Others may have come here in search of a community. And I suspect that some of you probably felt a little bit of culture shock the first time you came together as a class in King’s Chapel. All of a sudden, you weren’t the only high school sports captain, you weren’t the only student council president. You were suddenly in a group of high achievers, and that meant you were expected to do something more.
That’s the unique sense of purpose that this place has always infused — the conviction that this is a training ground not only for individual success, but for leadership that can change the world.
Dr. King was just 15 years old when he enrolled here at Morehouse. He was an unknown, undersized, unassuming young freshman who lived at home with his parents. And I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t the coolest kid on campus — for the suits he wore, his classmates called him “Tweed.” But his education at Morehouse helped to forge the intellect, the discipline, the compassion, the soul force that would transform America. It was here that he was introduced to the writings of Gandhi and Thoreau, and the theory of civil disobedience. It was here that professors encouraged him to look past the world as it was and fight for the world as it should be. And it was here, at Morehouse, as Dr. King later wrote, where “I realized that nobody — was afraid.”
Not even of some bad weather. I added on that part. (Laughter.) I know it’s wet out there. But Dr. Wilson told me you all had a choice and decided to do it out here anyway. (Applause.) That’s a Morehouse Man talking.
Now, think about it. For black men in the ’40s and the ’50s, the threat of violence, the constant humiliations, large and small, the uncertainty that you could support a family, the gnawing doubts born of the Jim Crow culture that told you every day that somehow you were inferior, the temptation to shrink from the world, to accept your place, to avoid risks, to be afraid — that temptation was necessarily strong.
And yet, here, under the tutelage of men like Dr. Mays, young Martin learned to be unafraid. And he, in turn, taught others to be unafraid. And over time, he taught a nation to be unafraid. And over the last 50 years, thanks to the moral force of Dr. King and a Moses generation that overcame their fear and their cynicism and their despair, barriers have come tumbling down, and new doors of opportunity have swung open, and laws and hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks just like you can somehow come to serve as President of these United States of America. (Applause.)
So the history we share should give you hope. The future we share should give you hope. You’re graduating into an improving job market. You’re living in a time when advances in technology and communication put the world at your fingertips. Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any generation of African Americans that came before it.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have work — because if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that too few of our brothers have the opportunities that you’ve had here at Morehouse.
In troubled neighborhoods all across this country — many of them heavily African American — too few of our citizens have role models to guide them. Communities just a couple miles from my house in Chicago, communities just a couple miles from here — they’re places where jobs are still too scarce and wages are still too low; where schools are underfunded and violence is pervasive; where too many of our men spend their youth not behind a desk in a classroom, but hanging out on the streets or brooding behind a jail cell.
My job, as President, is to advocate for policies that generate more opportunity for everybody — policies that strengthen the middle class and give more people the chance to climb their way into the middle class. Policies that create more good jobs and reduce poverty, and educate more children, and give more families the security of health care, and protect more of our children from the horrors of gun violence. That’s my job. Those are matters of public policy, and it is important for all of us — black, white and brown — to advocate for an America where everybody has got a fair shot in life. Not just some. Not just a few. (Applause.)
But along with collective responsibilities, we have individual responsibilities. There are some things, as black men, we can only do for ourselves. There are some things, as Morehouse Men, that you are obliged to do for those still left behind. As Morehouse Men, you now wield something even more powerful than the diploma you’re about to collect — and that’s the power of your example.
So what I ask of you today is the same thing I ask of every graduating class I address: Use that power for something larger than yourself. Live up to President Mays’s challenge. Be “sensitive to the wrongs, the sufferings, and the injustices of society.” And be “willing to accept responsibility for correcting (those) ills.”
I know that some of you came to Morehouse from communities where life was about keeping your head down and looking out for yourself. Maybe you feel like you escaped, and now you can take your degree and get that fancy job and the nice house and the nice car — and never look back. And don’t get me wrong — with all those student loans you’ve had to take out, I know you’ve got to earn some money. With doors open to you that your parents and grandparents could not even imagine, no one expects you to take a vow of poverty. But I will say it betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do. (Applause.)
So, yes, go get that law degree. But if you do, ask yourself if the only option is to defend the rich and the powerful, or if you can also find some time to defend the powerless. Sure, go get your MBA, or start that business. We need black businesses out there. But ask yourselves what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood. The most successful CEOs I know didn’t start out intent just on making money — rather, they had a vision of how their product or service would change things, and the money followed. (Applause.)
Some of you may be headed to medical school to become doctors. But make sure you heal folks in underserved communities who really need it, too. For generations, certain groups in this country — especially African Americans — have been desperate in need of access to quality, affordable health care. And as a society, we’re finally beginning to change that. Those of you who are under the age of 26 already have the option to stay on your parent’s health care plan. But all of you are heading into an economy where many young people expect not only to have multiple jobs, but multiple careers.
So starting October 1st, because of the Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as Obamacare — (applause) — you’ll be able to shop for a quality, affordable plan that’s yours and travels with you — a plan that will insure not only your health, but your dreams if you are sick or get in an accident. But we’re going to need some doctors to make sure it works, too. We’ve got to make sure everybody has good health in this country. It’s not just good for you, it’s good for this country. So you’re going to have to spread the word to your fellow young people.
Which brings me to a second point: Just as Morehouse has taught you to expect more of yourselves, inspire those who look up to you to expect more of themselves. We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses. (Applause.)
I understand there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: “Excuses are tools of the incompetent used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.” Well, we’ve got no time for excuses. Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil — many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did — all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned. (Applause.)
Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them. And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too. (Applause.)
You now hail from a lineage and legacy of immeasurably strong men — men who bore tremendous burdens and still laid the stones for the path on which we now walk. You wear the mantle of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and Ralph Bunche and Langston Hughes, and George Washington Carver and Ralph Abernathy and Thurgood Marshall, and, yes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These men were many things to many people. And they knew full well the role that racism played in their lives. But when it came to their own accomplishments and sense of purpose, they had no time for excuses.
Every one of you have a grandma or an uncle or a parent who’s told you that at some point in life, as an African American, you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by. I think President Mays put it even better: He said, “Whatever you do, strive to do it so well that no man living and no man dead, and no man yet to be born can do it any better.” (Applause.)
And I promise you, what was needed in Dr. Mays’s time, that spirit of excellence, and hard work, and dedication, and no excuses is needed now more than ever. If you think you can just get over in this economy just because you have a Morehouse degree, you’re in for a rude awakening. But if you stay hungry, if you keep hustling, if you keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same — nobody can stop you. (Applause.)
And when I talk about pursuing excellence and setting an example, I’m not just talking about in your professional life. One of today’s graduates, Frederick Anderson — where’s Frederick? Frederick, right here. (Applause.) I know it’s raining, but I’m going to tell about Frederick. Frederick started his college career in Ohio, only to find out that his high school sweetheart back in Georgia was pregnant. So he came back and enrolled in Morehouse to be closer to her. Pretty soon, helping raise a newborn and working night shifts became too much, so he started taking business classes at a technical college instead — doing everything from delivering newspapers to buffing hospital floors to support his family.
And then he enrolled at Morehouse a second time. But even with a job, he couldn’t keep up with the cost of tuition. So after getting his degree from that technical school, this father of three decided to come back to Morehouse for a third time. (Applause.) As Frederick says, “God has a plan for my life, and He’s not done with me yet.”
And today, Frederick is a family man, and a working man, and a Morehouse Man. (Applause.) And that’s what I’m asking all of you to do: Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man. (Applause.) Be the best husband to your wife, or you’re your boyfriend, or your partner. Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.
I was raised by a heroic single mom, wonderful grandparents — made incredible sacrifices for me. And I know there are moms and grandparents here today who did the same thing for all of you. But I sure wish I had had a father who was not only present, but involved.
Didn’t know my dad. And so my whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father was not for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle where a father is not at home — (applause) — where a father is not helping to raise that son or daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man.
It’s hard work that demands your constant attention and frequent sacrifice. And I promise you, Michelle will tell you I’m not perfect. She’s got a long list of my imperfections. (Laughter.) Even now, I’m still practicing, I’m still learning, still getting corrected in terms of how to be a fine husband and a good father. But I will tell you this: Everything else is unfulfilled if we fail at family, if we fail at that responsibility. (Applause.)
I know that when I am on my deathbed someday, I will not be thinking about any particular legislation I passed; I will not be thinking about a policy I promoted; I will not be thinking about the speech I gave, I will not be thinking the Nobel Prize I received. I will be thinking about that walk I took with my daughters. I’ll be thinking about a lazy afternoon with my wife. I’ll be thinking about sitting around the dinner table and seeing them happy and healthy and knowing that they were loved. And I’ll be thinking about whether I did right by all of them.
So be a good role model, set a good example for that young brother coming up. If you know somebody who’s not on point, go back and bring that brother along — those who’ve been left behind, who haven’t had the same opportunities we have — they need to hear from you. You’ve got to be engaged on the barbershops, on the basketball court, at church, spend time and energy and presence to give people opportunities and a chance. Pull them up, expose them, support their dreams. Don’t put them down.
We’ve got to teach them just like what we have to learn, what it means to be a man — to serve your city like Maynard Jackson; to shape the culture like Spike Lee; to be like Chester Davenport, one of the first people to integrate the University of Georgia Law School. When he got there, nobody would sit next to him in class. But Chester didn’t mind. Later on, he said, “It was the thing for me to do. Someone needed to be the first.” And today, Chester is here celebrating his 50th reunion. Where is Chester Davenport? He’s here. (Applause.)
So if you’ve had role models, fathers, brothers like that — thank them today. And if you haven’t, commit yourself to being that man to somebody else.
And finally, as you do these things, do them not just for yourself, but don’t even do them just for the African American community. I want you to set your sights higher. At the turn of the last century, W.E.B. DuBois spoke about the “talented tenth” — a class of highly educated, socially conscious leaders in the black community. But it’s not just the African American community that needs you. The country needs you. The world needs you.
As Morehouse Men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider; know what it’s like to be marginalized; know what it’s like to feel the sting of discrimination. And that’s an experience that a lot of Americans share. Hispanic Americans know that feeling when somebody asks them where they come from or tell them to go back. Gay and lesbian Americans feel it when a stranger passes judgment on their parenting skills or the love that they share. Muslim Americans feel it when they’re stared at with suspicion because of their faith. Any woman who knows the injustice of earning less pay for doing the same work — she knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.
So your experiences give you special insight that today’s leaders need. If you tap into that experience, it should endow you with empathy — the understanding of what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, to know what it’s like when you’re not born on 3rd base, thinking you hit a triple. It should give you the ability to connect. It should give you a sense of compassion and what it means to overcome barriers.
And I will tell you, Class of 2013, whatever success I have achieved, whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs, and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy — the special obligation I felt, as a black man like you, to help those who need it most, people who didn’t have the opportunities that I had — because there but for the grace of God, go I — I might have been in their shoes. I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family. And that motivates me. (Applause.)
So it’s up to you to widen your circle of concern — to care about justice for everybody, white, black and brown. Everybody. Not just in your own community, but also across this country and around the world. To make sure everyone has a voice, and everybody gets a seat at the table; that everybody, no matter what you look like or where you come from, what your last name is — it doesn’t matter, everybody gets a chance to walk through those doors of opportunity if they are willing to work hard enough.
When Leland Shelton was four years old — where’s Leland? (Applause.) Stand up, Leland. When Leland Shelton was four years old, social services took him away from his mama, put him in the care of his grandparents. By age 14, he was in the foster care system. Three years after that, Leland enrolled in Morehouse. And today he is graduating Phi Beta Kappa on his way to Harvard Law School. (Applause.) But he’s not stopping there. As a member of the National Foster Care Youth and Alumni Policy Council, he plans to use his law degree to make sure kids like him don’t fall through the cracks. And it won’t matter whether they’re black kids or brown kids or white kids or Native American kids, because he’ll understand what they’re going through. And he’ll be fighting for them. He’ll be in their corner. That’s leadership. That’s a Morehouse Man right there. (Applause.)
That’s what we’ve come to expect from you, Morehouse — a legacy of leaders — not just in our black community, but for the entire American community. To recognize the burdens you carry with you, but to resist the temptation to use them as excuses. To transform the way we think about manhood, and set higher standards for ourselves and for others. To be successful, but also to understand that each of us has responsibilities not just to ourselves, but to one another and to future generations. Men who refuse to be afraid. Men who refuse to be afraid.
Members of the Class of 2013, you are heirs to a great legacy. You have within you that same courage and that same strength, the same resolve as the men who came before you. That’s what being a Morehouse Man is all about. That’s what being an American is all about.
Success may not come quickly or easily. But if you strive to do what’s right, if you work harder and dream bigger, if you set an example in your own lives and do your part to help meet the challenges of our time, then I’m confident that, together, we will continue the never-ending task of perfecting our union.
Congratulations, Class of 2013. God bless you. God bless Morehouse. And God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)
Barack Obama, Morehouse
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http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas052313.php3#.UaI3HiLD-Cg
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From CCP: "Doug did you read Obama's speech at Morehouse? If one reads it one would think parts of it (at least) was written by a Herman Caine or Thomas Sowell. I don't for the life of me understand why Blacks vote Democratic Party. Why there own party hijacked by globalist, statist America hating liberals is giving *their* country away. I could understand when in the past they didn't feel like a full fledged part of our society. But now they are coming into their own. And what do they do? Support the party that is giving it all away. Lets give it away to all the illegals. Lets give it away to the EU. Lets tax all the oil and gas companies in the US and give it to all the poor countries, lets keep spending funny money so we are so much in debt no one will have anything. If Blacks were upset about not being a full participant in the American Dream then don't vote for a party that is destroying the American Dream. "
As is his way, he speaks out of both sides of his mouth to cover all bases, but the big applause line was that blacks have to work twice as hard [because America will always be a filthy, white, racist nation].
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In fact, blacks don't have to work twice as hard: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/mr_president_blacks_dont_have_to_work_twice_as_hard.html
Pres. Barack Obama never had Martin Luther king's dream that people would be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. Obama's dream was that he could double the black unemployment rate and they would double their turnout rate for him in return, because they would need him twice as much, and he would win 12 swing states, keep the jet and all the power and the perks. Blacks are more useful to him as victims and dependent on government.
When did Barack Obama work twice as hard as whites or anyone else? In the Choom Gang? At Occidental? At Columbia? Were his grades higher than all other to get into Harvard Law? Did he work twice as hard to become Law Review Editor? As Illinois State Senator? What bills did he author as Junior U.S. Senator from Illinois? What was his attendance record? Did he finish his first term? Pay his dues more than anyone ever has to become President? What had he accomplished in January 2009 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? What a joke. What has he accomplished even now? He got elected, that's it.
Out in the real world, it is the opposite. Democrats had high hopes for this clean articulate (half) black man. Republicans are craving that too, looking at Condoleeza Rice, Allen West, Herman Cain, Dr. Benjamin Carson, and so many others, searching for greatness, especially in a black man or woman. Same in medicine, the business world, academics, diplomacy, grad schools, everywhere, at least that's how it is in my view.
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"but the big applause line was that blacks have to work twice as hard"
Being from a socioeconomically lower home, community, poor performing public schools is certainly a disadvantage. Yet it is for anyone from those situations no matter what race or group they want to categorize themselves as - such as quarter northwest pacific southern Asian, Congolese, Jamaican, mixed decent or whatever.
Didn't stop the SOloDaD@#$%^&*() O'Brien from going to Harvard like the rest of her family and achieving fame and fortune despite no good White people who just want to move on off of the subject of race did it?
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Banning Background Checks
The EEOC says that screening for felonies is discriminatory.
Are criminal background checks racist? That's the startling new legal theory that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unveiled this week in lawsuits against employers. It's another example of how President Obama's appointees are using regulation to achieve policy goals they can't get through Congress.
On Tuesday the EEOC accused retailer Dollar General DG -0.04%and a U.S. unit of German car maker BMW BMW.XE +1.26%of violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by using criminal checks as part of their employment decisions. The logic? Blacks have higher conviction rates than whites, and therefore criminal checks discriminate against blacks.
The EEOC alleges that BMW discriminated against blacks because it screened contractors in South Carolina for convictions for "Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations," and more blacks than whites are convicted of those crimes.
The suit says 70 black BMW contractors and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire them. The suit seeks redress, such as hiring the plaintiffs, back pay, legal costs and more, but only for the black contractors.
In its Dollar General suit, the agency says that 10% of blacks and 7% of non-black applicants failed the retailer's criminal screening. The EEOC calls that three-percentage-point difference a "gross disparity" that is "statistically significant" enough to qualify as discrimination.
We would have thought that criminal checks discriminate against criminals, regardless of race, creed, gender or anything else. Such criminal checks are legal and have long been part of the hiring process at many companies. You can argue that criminals deserve a second chance in life, or even a third or fourth, but business owners and managers ought to be able to decide if they want to take the risk of hiring felons.
The EEOC suit is part of the Administration's larger effort to redefine racism in America by using statistics, rather than individual intent or evidence. The Justice and Housing Departments have rewritten their rules and punished banks and counties like Westchester, N.Y., based on disparate statistical measures of lending and zoning. The EEOC signaled its plans in April last year when it rewrote its enforcement strategy, declaring that "an employer's evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact."
Mull that one over. Even if a company has a racially diverse workforce, it can still be sued if its applicant pool doesn't meet the EEOC's statistical tests. So a retailer that decides it would rather not have proven thieves manning its cash registers could be guilty of racism if the convicted thieves in its applicant pool are disproportionately minority.
Jacqueline Berrien, a former NAACP attorney who is now EEOC chairman, has been waiting for a Democratic majority on the five-member commission to gin up this agenda. Outlawing credit checks in hiring may be next on the agenda. The next three years are going to be a full-employment opportunity for labor lawyers, if not for the rest of America.
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Supreme Court Weighs Cases Redefining Legal Equality
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: June 22, 2013
WASHINGTON — Within days, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a series of decisions that could transform three fundamental social institutions: marriage, education and voting.
Abigail Fisher is challenging affirmative action, saying the University of Texas should not classify people on the basis of race.
Edith Windsor is challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
The extraordinary run of blockbuster rulings due in the space of a single week will also reshape the meaning of legal equality and help define for decades to come one of the Constitution’s grandest commands: “the equal protection of the laws.”
If those words require only equal treatment from the government, the rulings are likely to be a mixed bag that will delight and disappoint liberals and conservatives in equal measure. Under that approach, same-sex couples who want to marry would be better off at the end of the term, while blacks and Hispanics could find it harder to get into college and to vote.
But a tension runs through the cases, one based on different conceptions of equality. Some justices are committed to formal equality. Others say the Constitution requires a more dynamic kind of equality, one that takes account of the weight of history and of modern disparities.
The four major cases yet to be decided concern same-sex marriage, affirmative action in higher education and the fate of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which places special burdens on states with a history of racial discrimination.
Formal equality would require that gay couples be treated just like straight couples when it comes to marriage, white students just like black students when it comes to admissions decisions and Southern states just like Northern ones when it comes to federal oversight of voting. The effect would be to help gay couples, and hurt blacks and Latinos.
But such rulings — “liberal” when it comes to gay rights, “conservative” when it comes to race — are hard to reconcile with the historical meaning of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, adopted in the wake of the Civil War and meant to protect the newly freed black slaves. It would be odd, said David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago, for that amendment to help gays but not blacks.
“What’s weird about it would be the retreat on race, which is the paradigm example of what the 14th Amendment is meant to deal with,” he said, “coupled with fairly aggressive action on sexual orientation.”
But actual as opposed to formal racial equality has fallen out of favor in some circles, Professor Strauss said. “One thing that seems to be going on with these historically excluded groups,” he said, “is that they come to be thought of as just another interest group. Blacks seem to have crossed that line.”
Justice Antonin Scalia appeared to express that view during the argument in February in the voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96. “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements,” he said, “it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”
Gay men and lesbians have yet to achieve formal legal equality. They are not protected against job discrimination in much of the nation, may not marry their same-sex partners in most of it and do not have their marriages recognized by the federal government in any of it. The fact that they are asking for equal treatment may help their cause in the cases challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which for purposes of federal benefits defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and Proposition 8, the California voter initiative that banned same-sex marriage there.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested in March that ordinary politics would sort things out. “As far as I can tell,” he told a lawyer challenging the federal marriage law in United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, “political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.”
In the three months since that argument, three more states have adopted same-sex marriage, raising the total to 12, along with the District of Columbia.
Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, said the two different conceptions of equal protection are animated by different concerns. One is skeptical of government classifications based on race and similar characteristics, whatever their goals. The other tries to make sure that historically disfavored groups are not subordinated.
“Under Jim Crow,” Professor Yoshino said, “both horses ran in the same direction.” Southern states enacted laws that drew formal distinctions, and those distinctions oppressed blacks.
“These days,” Professor Yoshino said, “the two horses are running in opposite directions.”
Consider the case of Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was denied admission to the University of Texas. She says the university, an arm of the state government, should not classify people on the basis of race because that violates a colorblind conception of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Defenders of the university’s affirmative action program say the purpose of the classification must figure in the equal protection analysis. “What we’re really trying to do is try to make sure there aren’t castes in our society, and we will try to lift up castes,” Professor Yoshino said.
A formal conception of equality helps Ms. Fisher in her case, Fisher v. University of Texas, No. 11-345. A dynamic one helps the university.
Whichever side loses a major Supreme Court case is likely to say the decision was an example of judicial activism. That term can be an empty insult, but political scientists try to give it meaning. They say a court is activist when it strikes down a law as unconstitutional. There is a chance the court will be activist in that sense twice this week.
It may strike down central provisions of the federal marriage law and of the Voting Rights Act. Should that happen, said Pamela Harris, an adviser to the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown’s law school, “the left will be saying out of one side of its mouth, ‘How dare you strike down the considered judgment of Congress in the Voting Rights Act?’ ” In the same breath, she said, liberals will add, “But great job on DOMA.”
There is another possibility: one or more of the cases could fizzle, said Walter E. Dellinger, who served as acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and filed an influential brief in the Proposition 8 case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144. It argued that the failure of officials in California to appeal the judgment against them deprived the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to decide the case, and it was discussed at the argument in March.
Mr. Dellinger said all four remaining blockbuster cases suffer from plausible procedural flaws that could lead to their dismissal. “I’ve never heard of this before,” he said of such an end-of-term possibility.
An effort to harmonize all of the court’s big decisions may in the end prove impossible. “It’s hard to imagine somebody happy with everything they do, except Justice Kennedy,” Professor Strauss said, referring to the member of the court at its ideological center, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
That may be just as well for the court’s reputation. In giving something to liberals and something to conservatives, as it often does, Professor Strauss said, “the court has avoided putting itself in a position where either side wants to declare war on them.”
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"there are more African-Americans in the corrections system today—in prison or on probation or parole—than there were enslaved in 1850. As of 2004, more black men were denied the right to vote because of a criminal record than in 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, giving blacks the right to vote."
Posted under race because he makes that his focus. My view is that America's underclass and inner city problems disproportionately hit people of color but are not uniquely racial problems.
This a long and very interesting article written by a former spiritual adviser to President Obama. His observations, awareness of the problem and historical data are quite good. This is perhaps the biggest problems in America, tied to so many other challenges. Imagine our economy if America's underclass suddenly got up and participated full time in the economy. His keen insights, including failure of the war on drugs, however completely ignore the number one cause of the problem.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/06/19/obama-s-former-spiritual-advisor-joshua-dubois-on-the-fight-for-black-men.html
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Doug:
Though there is much I think it misses, that was an interesting article. Thanks.
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"He completely ignore the number one cause of the problem."
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"Though there is much I think it misses, that was an interesting article. "
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The main theme of ACORN, community organizing, most inner city programs and Obama's path to political power, including his reelection with 98% of black vote, is 'welfare rights'. How can we pay more people, deserving our not, to be unproductive.
Pres. Obama never pivoted off of that to inspire personal responsibility, economic achievement or even self-sufficiency. In his view, that message belongs to his opponents.
Number one cause of the troubles experienced by inner city black males is not drug law, but ubiquitous welfare. The government became the provider making the husband obsolete and unnecessary. Losing that role, the black male too often wanders off into either trouble or idleness.
The problem is not racial IMO. It affects people of all races and plenty of black males choose to live wonderfully productive work lives full of success. But this problem does afflict blacks disproportionately.
The elephant in the room is that our perverted welfare system is hurting the recipients even worse than it hurts those who are footing the bill.
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From Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, June 24:
While I find the theory advanced by the University to justify racial discrimination facially inadequate, I also believe that its use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity. I suspect that the University's program is instead based on the benighted notion that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities. . . . The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.
Slaveholders argued that slavery was a "positive good" that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. See, e.g., Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837, in P. Finkelman, Defending Slavery 54, 58–59 (2003) ("Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually . . .")
. . . A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. They argued, for example, that separate schools protected black children from racist white students and teachers. See, e.g., . . . Tr. of Oral Arg. in Bolling v. Sharpe, O.T. 1952, No. 413, p. 56 ("There was behind these [a]cts a kindly feeling [and] an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted . . .")
. . . Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.
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http://www.upworthy.com/watch-a-teacher-make-her-3rd-grade-kids-hate-each-other-for-the-best-reason-imaginable-2
Not yet learned here: http://www.reagancoalition.com/articles/2013/20130628004-nc-wm.html
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I trust my credentials around here as being to the right of Attila the Hun are in good order, but it seems to me this fellow may have a point:
http://www.blacklegalissues.com/Article_Details.aspx?artclid=7dfdbe0461
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I trust my credentials around here as being to the right of Attila the Hun are in good order, but it seems to me this fellow may have a point:
http://www.blacklegalissues.com/Article_Details.aspx?artclid=7dfdbe0461
The quotes and actions cited are quite cringeworthy, however I find the outrage very selective.
http://datechguyblog.com/2013/07/01/alec-baldwin-he-is-the-very-model-of-a-modern-media-liberal/
Alec Baldwin: He is the very Model of a Modern Media Liberal
by Datechguy | July 1st, 2013
Mel Gibson? Career over. Paula Deen? Career over. Alec Baldwin? Will host SNL for the 17th time.
— ConservativeLA (@ConservativeLA) June 30, 2013
Why does Baldwin get a pass, because he can (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan) sing this song:
I am the very model of a modern Media Liberal,
I’ve information vegan, and organic and Earth-centrical,
I know all of the Kennedys, can quote court fights historical
From Roe v. Wade down to Prop eight, in order categorical.
I’m very well acquainted, with the need to tax the richest man,
I grasp John Maynard Keynes, and of State-spending I’m a real fan,
About Obamanomics I am teeming with a lot o’ news, (hmmm lot o’news…)
With many cheerful stats to show Recovery is not a ruse!
Media Chorus: With many cheerful stats to show Recovery is not a ruse
With many cheerful stats to show Recovery is not a ruse
With many cheerful stats to show Recovery is not is not a ruse.
I’m good with Krugman’s thought: indeed, I understand his calculus;
I know each species whose survival may indeed be grave at risk
In short, in matters vegan, and organic and Earth-centrical
I am the very model of a modern Media Liberal,
Media Chorus: In short, in matters vegan, and organic and Earth-centrical,
He is the very model of a modern Media Liberal,
I know our mythic history, Marg’ret Sanger to Obama;
I follow all pop music and the best of Cable Drama,
I understand quite clearly global warning’s threat and dire purview
And laugh at every quip that shows the ignorance of W!
I’m comf’rtable with lyrics all Nicki Minaj has put to pen
But hear sublim’nal racism in all that Rush could ever ken
I see so very surely that Bill Clinton is a feminist (feminist, feminist??? ah why not.)
Unlike that Sarah Palin, who is simply just completely dense.
Media Chorus: Unlike that Sarah Palin, who is simply just completely dense.
Unlike that Sarah Palin, who is simply just completely dense.
Unlike that Sarah Palin, who is simply just completely completely dense.
I can detail the nature full of Occupy’s most noble cause
And tell you that The Teaparty is astroturf, with many flaws:
In short, in matters vegan and organic and Earth-centricial,
I am the very model of a modern Media Liberal,
Media Chorus: In short, in matters vegan, and organic and Earth-centricial,
He is the very model of a modern Media Liberal,
I know that G-m foods are bad for all the tragic poor to eat
I can’t abide a restaurant unless it serves organic meat
I know that an abortion is a right most constitutional
And citizens with firearms is strictly just militianal
I see Islamophobia each soul that’s pure quite right eschews
and, as we know, our problems come from Christians and religious Jews,
I clear see why conservatism is a racist strategy – (strategy hmmm)
You’ll say a better Liberal has never been on your TV
Media Chorus: You’ll say a better Liberal has never been on your TV
You’ll say a better Liberal has never been on your TV
You’ll say a better Liberal has never been on your TV
I know the State of Israel’s the mirror of South Africay
And Say we must recall all troops right back inside the USA
In short in matters vegan and organic and Earth-centricial,,
I am the very model of a modern Media Liberal!
Media Chorus: In short, in matters vegan, and organic and Earth-centricial,
He is the very model of a modern Media Liberal!
Want to get a media pass on any and every offense? Learn to live this song. Any questions? (My thanks to James Marley for his invaluable help & critique)
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I (and I trust I may presume "we") hold myself (ourselves) to a higher standard than the progressives.
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I (and I trust I may presume "we") hold myself (ourselves) to a higher standard than the progressives.
That's a low bar. I just enjoy pointing out the epic hypocrisies and bigotry of the left.
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Your path to happiness is wide open. :-D
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http://ace.mu.nu/
Network News Broadcasts Devote 33 Minutes to Ancient Paula Deen Slur, Only 8 Minutes to Just-Happened Alec Baldwin One
—Ace
Why do they continue to maintain this ludicrous lie?
A Good Morning America newsreader actually addressed the question of bias without noting that he himself, and his colleagues, are actually responsible for that bias. He acted as if it were something just floating in the air he had nothing to do with:
On Saturday and Sunday, Good Morning America noticed a double standard and allowed another four minutes and 41 seconds. On Monday, News reader Josh Elliott wondered, "Do you see, now, a double standard? Because Hollywood has been noticeably silent with regard to Alec Baldwin." With no self-awareness, he added, "I find the silence, though, to be deafening."
Hollywood has been silent? Yes of course they have; they're not reporters and they all have a stake in the proposition that Hollywood misbehavior should not be widely reported.
What about the alleged news media?
The Washington Post says "some allege" a double standard, but apparently are not able to carry the ball any further:
Of course, some allege a double standard — that Baldwin is given a pass because of his liberal politics for the same kind of jerk behavior that nearly ruined conservative star Mel Gibson."
But then they quote Democratic activist Hillary Rosen:
We asked Hilary Rosen, the Washington media strategist who has been friends with Baldwin since college. "What he said was disgusting," she told us. "But I think he has a deeper reservoir of good will among folks because he’s been a progressive ally and fighter for progressive causes for years, and that’s the genuine side of him."
Two points:
First: Why ask a Democratic activist about why there is bias in the media?
Second: They offer this explanation as if it disproves bias-- failing to notice that the explanation of Baldwin's reservoir of goodwill among progressives proves, rather than disproves, an obnoxiously blatant progressive bias in the media.
The Washington Post concludes that there is no double standard, it's just that Baldwin so frequently uses racist and homophobic slurs that people just accept this as part of the big lug.
Really? That's the explanation? That he's so consistently hateful that the supposedly super-tolerant media just gives him a pass?
Why not just admit the truth?
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Just what did Baldwin say?
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Just what did Baldwin say?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/02/18/Baldwin-Racist-Rant
Alec Baldwin's Racist Rant Against Ex-Cop Photographer
by Larry O'Connor
18 Feb 2013
Isn't it great to be Alec Baldwin? When you're Alec Baldwin you can do or say pretty much anything and there are no repercussions. You can even call a member of the media a "coon" and a "crackhead" and still be celebrated by Hollywood and by the Left because... well... because you're Alec Baldwin and you're a liberal.
The New York Post reports on the incident that occurred Sunday morning involving the "30 Rock" star and a Post reporter and photographer:
Baldwin had first been approached by a Post reporter while walking his dogs outside his East 10th Street pad at around 10:50 a.m. He was asked for comment on a lawsuit against his wife, Hilaria, involving her work as a yoga instructor.
The “30 Rock’’ star grabbed the reporter, Tara Palmeri, by her arm and told her, “I want you to choke to death,” Palmeri told police, for whom she played an audiotape of the conversation.
He then called G.N. Miller — a decorated retired detective with the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau and a staff photographer for The Post — a “coon, a drug dealer,’’ Miller’s police statement said.
Let's recount Baldwin's behavior so there's no misunderstanding.
A credentialed reporter for one of the oldest American newspapers asks a public figure a question on a public street. The person grabs the reporter (a young woman) by the arm and tells her he wants her to "choke to death." He then turns to the credentialed photographer for the same newspaper (who happens to be black) and calls him a "coon" and a "crackhead."
Later, on Twitter, Baldwin continued the racially charged verbal attack on the photographer, erroneously calling him "Ralston": (Tweets have since been deleted)
“Ralston claims he’s ex NYPD!! That can’t be!!! Ex NYPD don’t become crackhead, ex jailhouse paparazzi!”
Until now, mainstream media outlets have given their liberal loverboy a pass for his obnoxious and offensive behavior because it is usually directed towards a Republican politician or against the hated "paparazzi" whom most reporters like to pretend they are better than. But now the vitriol and hate is directed at the New York Post. We know most elite media establishments believe they are superior to the Post, but if they pause for just a moment, they might hear the cautionary words of pastor Martin Niemöller ringing in their subconscious...
First they came for the paparazzi, and I didn't speak out because I was not a paparazzi.
Then they came for the bloggers...
Then they came for the Post...
(Photo credit: G.N.Miller/New York Post)
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352611/when-thuggery-comes-home-c-jay-nordlinger
A word about Alec Baldwin — who let loose on a journalist the other day. (Perfectly understandable.) He wrote — he tweeted — “I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna f***…you…up.” (I’m adding asterisks here.) He continued, “If put my foot up your f***ing ass, George Stark” — this is gibberish, but I’m quoting accurately — “but I’m sure you’d dig it too much.”
Anderson Cooper, the CNN star, said — tweeted — “Why does #AlecBaldwin get a pass when he uses gay slurs? If a conservative talked of beating up a ‘queen’ they would be vilified.” (A conservative, or any other individual, in our modern English, is a “they.”)
Why does Baldwin get a pass? Was Cooper’s question rhetorical or does he really not know? He no doubt knows, and his tweet suggests as much: Baldwin gets a pass because he’s on the left. And to be on the left is to be forgiven all, or almost all.
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"Coon"?!?
Whoa , , , :-o
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"I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white." - Thomas Sowell
...
Column concludes: "The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/09/who_is_racist_119139.html#ixzz2YlQAh5cJ
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http://www.examiner.com/article/media-blackout-georgia-man-killed-black-on-white-hate-crime-attack
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Race Hustlers and Double Standards
Zimmerman, Deen and Racism in Black and White
By Mark Alexander • July 11, 2013
"There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue ... if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice..." --John Adams (1775)
This week, while reviewing a new comprehensive national survey of racism from Rasmussen Reports, I was struck by this finding: "Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way."
That study is an interesting backdrop for the trial by jury of former Neighborhood Watch organizer George Zimmerman, and the trial by Leftmedia of now former-Emmy Award-winning Food Network host Paula Deen. It is not my purpose to defend Zimmerman or Deen, but they are both current case studies in racist political agendas -- and these should be fully exposed.
Additionally, the Deen case opens the door wide for an inquiry into double standards -- if only a real journalist in the White House press corps would step through it and ask one question -- but more on that in a moment.
In the case of Zimmerman, he admitted to the self-defense shooting of a black youth, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012.
At the time, Martin's death got a total of four paragraphs in the Orlando Sentinel. It may have deserved more coverage but according to the most reliable eyewitness, Martin had Zimmerman on the ground and it appeared to be another non-news self-defense shooting -- not a racially motivated murder.
But a month after the Zimmerman/Martin altercation, Barack Hussein Obama and his NeoCom cadres decided to exploit the case as a re-election rallying cry for his most loyal constituency, "the black vote."
Obama's race-baiting political hustlers descended on Sanford with a mission: Make George Zimmerman a poster-boy for racist hate-crimes.
Indeed, the Democrat Party long ago mastered the art of divide-and-conquer politics of disparity in order to sustain the allegiance of blacks. Indeed, more than 95 percent of black voters support Democrats. Were it not for the votes of this most devoted constituency, Democrats would be hard-pressed to win more than a few statewide elections -- much less a presidential election.
And not only did the "usual suspects" show up to stir the racial pot, but we can now add Obama's Justice Department to the list of Executive Branch agencies promoting his political agenda.
According to documents obtained by the non-partisan group Judicial Watch, DoJ authorized expenditures to send its so-called "Community Relations Service" personnel to Florida, and tasked them with organizing and promoting protests around the state for the prosecution of George Zimmerman.
Ahead of Obama's public comments about the case, the DoJ operatives were "deployed to Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies," and "to provide support for protest deployment" and "technical assistance to ... event organizers." Ostensibly, they were sent to serve as "peace keepers," but their mission and activities were nothing more than a thinly veiled component of Obama's political campaign agenda.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton concludes, "These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman. My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations."
Good guess!
Once the race hustlers and DoJ had plowed the Florida fields, Obama, the consummate racial agitator, nationalized the Zimmerman/Martin case by sowing this seed: "This is a tragedy, uh ... uh and when I think about this boy, uh, I think about my own kids, uh ... I think that all of us need to do some soul searching to figure out how something like this happened. ... If I had a son he would look like Trayvon, and, uh, you know, I think [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans, uh, are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves."
Obama's entry into the fray, and the predictable Leftmedia feeding frenzy painting this incident as a hate crime (racially tagging Zimmerman as "white Hispanic" to imply a white-on-black hate crime), elevated the case from a simmering local conflict to a boiling national brawl.
In contrast to the Zimmerman/Martin case, recall that in 2009, after Islamist radical Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 soldiers and wounded 29 others at Ft. Hood, Texas, yelling "Allahu Akbar!" as he gunned them down, Obama was quick to counsel the nation, "We don't know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts."
Ironically, in the same weekend that Obama made this incident part of his re-election strategy, he refrained from any comment on the unmitigated violence in his hometown of Chicago, where, in just 48 hours, 10 people were murdered and at least 40 others were seriously injured. Most of the victims were 15-30 years of age and the assailants were black or Latino. One of the dead was 6-year-old Aliyah Shell, who was murdered while playing on the front porch of her home in the Little Village neighborhood.
All of the Chicago violence occurred, and continues to occur, under the watch of Obama's former chief of staff, now-Mayor Rahm Emanuel. But the daily slaughter of blacks by other blacks is not a political rallying point for the Left's black constituents, because their political agenda depends on blacks believing they are "victims," not victimizers.
But another black leader did have the courage to condemn the hatred in Chicago. In 1968, Martin Luther King went to Chicago, and amid the racial strife of that era, declared, "This is the most tragic picture of man's inhumanity to man. I've been to Mississippi and Alabama and I can tell you that the hatred and hostility in Chicago are really deeper than in Alabama and Mississippi." King added, "Those who are associated with 'Black Power' and black supremacy are wrong."
Not much has changed in Chicago, but Obama, et al., are focused on their political strategy in Florida -- now a 2014 midterm election rallying point.
Of course, Obama's Leftmedia cadres rigorously observe his "code of silence" concerning black-on-white racist crimes. Their silence is deafening when it comes to indisputable black-on-white hate crimes -- whether they be the most heinous rape/torture/mutilation/murders of a young white couple, or the race-motivated murder of a white man by four black gangbangers just last week.
So, with all the heat being generated by the Zimmerman/Martin case, how does the persecution of Paula Deen open the door for some challenging questions about racism and double standards?
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-sugarmann/nras-ted-nugent-jokes-abo_b_3586175.html
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/14/DOJ-investigate-Zimmerman
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Another twist was a female lawyer on cable today suggesting those who criticize the verdict are really discriminating against women because the jury and judge were all female.
:?
There seems no end to this by who those intent on turning this small town trial into spearheads for any variety of national political agendas or money making campaigns from marketers, medias, attorneys, race baiters, politicians, book writers, and possibly book deals, or fifteen minutes of fame from jurors.
Everyone has their own opinion and mine is manslaughter would have been the closet to fit the circumstance. It does bother me a 17 child walks to the store for soda and candy and gets killed on the way home while taking a shortcut. Zimmerman did start the whole think.
That said turning this into a the civil rights issue of the century is just beyond my logic.
It remains to be seen how harassed will Zimmerman be and for how long. On one hand he will suffer pushback forever. On the other hand this might be a money making opportunity for him.
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http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/07/trayvon-martins-involvement-in-local-burglaries-covered-up-by-media-school-police-prosecutors/
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http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/07/trayvon-martins-involvement-in-local-burglaries-covered-up-by-media-school-police-prosecutors/
Perhaps it is good in our system that this information was covered up from the jury in their deliberations, and perhaps good that juveniles have some protection against public and permanent records of their youthful indiscretions. However, it would be nice if the public and community agitators were more aware that this victim did not just look like the people who committed the burglaries but had himself done so and was very possibly scoping out new targets, just as it allegedly looked to Zimmerman.
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Exactly.
I don't agree with the following 100%, (I think it makes perfect sense for companies to have dropped Paula Deen) but overall it makes sense to me:
http://mobile.wnd.com/2013/07/black-racism-killed-trayvon-and-paula-deens-career/
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http://gawker.com/soul-singer-attacked-on-stage-for-dedicating-song-to-tr-785398779
Not 100% clear that she was reacting to his dedication, for all we know she was an ex- of his.
Anyway, I saw the Chambers Brothers several times at the Fillmore East, including a New Year's Eve. They were very good and they were very positive people in a groovy Christian kind of way. Nothing angry about them at all. I'm sorry to see this happen to him.
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The Truth About Trayvon
By EKOW N. YANKAH
Published: July 15, 2013
THE Trayvon Martin verdict is frustrating, fracturing, angering and predictable. More than anything, for many of us, it is exhausting. Exhausting because nothing could bring back our lost child, exhausting because the verdict, which should have felt shocking, arrived with the inevitability that black Americans know too well when criminal law announces that they are worth less than other Americans.
Lawyers on both sides argued repeatedly that this case was never about race, but only whether prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not simply defending himself when he shot Mr. Martin. And, indeed, race was only whispered in the incomplete invocation that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin. But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details.
The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that “reasonable doubt” is not, in every sense of the word, colored.
Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his too-short life was defined by his race. I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.
But because Mr. Martin was one of those “punks” who “always get away,” as Mr. Zimmerman characterized him in a call to the police, Mr. Zimmerman felt he was justified in following him. After all, a young black man matched the criminal descriptions, not just in local police reports, but in those most firmly lodged in Mr. Zimmerman’s imagination.
Whether the law judges Trayvon Martin’s behavior to be reasonable is also deeply colored by race. Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation.
Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter.
This is about more than one case. Our reasons for presuming, profiling and acting are always deeply racialized, and the Zimmerman trial, in ignoring that, left those reasons unexplored and unrefuted.
What is reasonable to do, especially in the dark of night, is defined by preconceived social roles that paint young black men as potential criminals and predators. Black men, the narrative dictates, are dangerous, to be watched and put down at the first false move. This pain is one all black men know; putting away the tie you wear to the office means peeling off the assumption that you are owed equal respect. Mr. Martin’s hoodie struck the deepest chord because we know that daring to wear jeans and a hooded sweatshirt too often means that the police or other citizens are judged to be reasonable in fearing you.
We know this, yet every time a case like this offers a chance for the country to tackle the evil of racial discrimination in our criminal law, courts have deliberately silenced our ability to expose it. The Supreme Court has held that even if your race is what makes your actions suspicious to the police, their suspicions are reasonable so long as an officer can later construct a race-neutral narrative.
Likewise, our death penalty cases have long presaged the Zimmerman verdict, exposing how racial disparities, which make a white life more valuable, do not undermine the constitutionality of the death sentence. And even the most casual observer recognizes the painful racial disparities in our prison population — the new Jim Crow, in the account of the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Our prisons are full of young, black men for whom guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was easy enough to reach.
There is no quick answer for the historical use of our criminal law to reinforce and then punish social stereotypes. But pretending that reasonable doubt is a value-free clinical term, as so many people did so readily in the Zimmerman case, only insulates injustice in plain sight.
Without an honest jurisprudence that is brave enough to tackle the way race infuses our criminal law, Trayvon Martin’s voice will be silenced again.
What would such a jurisprudence look like? The Supreme Court could hold, for example, that the unjustified use of race by the police in determining “reasonable suspicion” constituted an unreasonable stop, tainting captured evidence. Likewise, in the same way we have started to attack racial disparities in other areas of criminal law, we could consider it a violation of someone’s constitutional rights if, controlling for all else, his race was what determined whether the state executed him.
I can imagine a jurisprudence that at least begins to use racial disparities as a tool to question the constitutionality of criminal punishment. And above all, I can imagine a jurisprudence that does not pretend, as lawyers for both sides (but no one else) did in the Zimmerman case, that doubts have no color.
Ekow N. Yankah is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.
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The Truth About Trayvon
By EKOW N. YANKAH
Published: July 15, 2013
THE Trayvon Martin verdict is frustrating, fracturing, angering and predictable. More than anything, for many of us, it is exhausting. Exhausting because nothing could bring back our lost child, exhausting because the verdict, which should have felt shocking, arrived with the inevitability that black Americans know too well when criminal law announces that they are worth less than other Americans.
**B.S. Zimmerman never should have been charged. There was a reason this case was never presented to a grand jury. The prosecution had no case and they knew it. Race had nothing to do with that. It was the racial industrial complex that pushed this into the courts.**
Lawyers on both sides argued repeatedly that this case was never about race, but only whether prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not simply defending himself when he shot Mr. Martin. And, indeed, race was only whispered in the incomplete invocation that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin. But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details.
The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that “reasonable doubt” is not, in every sense of the word, colored.
Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his too-short life was defined by his race. I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.
**Were casually dressed white teenagers the descriptions given of the suspects of the burglaries in Zimmerman's neighborhood?**
But because Mr. Martin was one of those “punks” who “always get away,” as Mr. Zimmerman characterized him in a call to the police, Mr. Zimmerman felt he was justified in following him. After all, a young black man matched the criminal descriptions, not just in local police reports, but in those most firmly lodged in Mr. Zimmerman’s imagination.
**And why is that? Is the black crime problem just a racist fever dream?**
Whether the law judges Trayvon Martin’s behavior to be reasonable is also deeply colored by race. Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation.
**If a 17 year old white thug was smashing a black man's head into the concrete, and reasonably fearing serious bodily injury or death, the black man drew a lawfully concealed handgun and shot and killed the white thug, then the law is the same. And that scenario shouldn't go to trial either.**
Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter.
This is about more than one case. Our reasons for presuming, profiling and acting are always deeply racialized, and the Zimmerman trial, in ignoring that, left those reasons unexplored and unrefuted.
What is reasonable to do, especially in the dark of night, is defined by preconceived social roles that paint young black men as potential criminals and predators. Black men, the narrative dictates, are dangerous, to be watched and put down at the first false move. This pain is one all black men know; putting away the tie you wear to the office means peeling off the assumption that you are owed equal respect. Mr. Martin’s hoodie struck the deepest chord because we know that daring to wear jeans and a hooded sweatshirt too often means that the police or other citizens are judged to be reasonable in fearing you.
We know this, yet every time a case like this offers a chance for the country to tackle the evil of racial discrimination in our criminal law, courts have deliberately silenced our ability to expose it. The Supreme Court has held that even if your race is what makes your actions suspicious to the police, their suspicions are reasonable so long as an officer can later construct a race-neutral narrative.
Likewise, our death penalty cases have long presaged the Zimmerman verdict, exposing how racial disparities, which make a white life more valuable, do not undermine the constitutionality of the death sentence. And even the most casual observer recognizes the painful racial disparities in our prison population — the new Jim Crow, in the account of the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Our prisons are full of young, black men for whom guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was easy enough to reach.
There is no quick answer for the historical use of our criminal law to reinforce and then punish social stereotypes. But pretending that reasonable doubt is a value-free clinical term, as so many people did so readily in the Zimmerman case, only insulates injustice in plain sight.
Without an honest jurisprudence that is brave enough to tackle the way race infuses our criminal law, Trayvon Martin’s voice will be silenced again.
What would such a jurisprudence look like? The Supreme Court could hold, for example, that the unjustified use of race by the police in determining “reasonable suspicion” constituted an unreasonable stop, tainting captured evidence. Likewise, in the same way we have started to attack racial disparities in other areas of criminal law, we could consider it a violation of someone’s constitutional rights if, controlling for all else, his race was what determined whether the state executed him.
I can imagine a jurisprudence that at least begins to use racial disparities as a tool to question the constitutionality of criminal punishment. And above all, I can imagine a jurisprudence that does not pretend, as lawyers for both sides (but no one else) did in the Zimmerman case, that doubts have no color.
Ekow N. Yankah is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.
**A law professor should aquaint himself with the legal topic at hand before beclowning himself, then again, he probably specializes in litigating for the racial industrial compex.**
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The angry protests over these deaths should start any minute now......
Four Children Gunned Down in Chicago During Zimmerman Trial
July 15, 2013 - 4:40 PM
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By Melanie Hunter
Blood stains and a make shift memorial for 18-year-old Jamal Jones is seen where police found him with gunshots wounds to the shoulder and chest over the past weekend, on Chicago's Southside, Monday, June 17, 2013 (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
(CNSNews.com) – In the 20-day period of the George Zimmerman trial, four minors – three teens and a five-year-old boy - were gunned down in Chicago, according to Homicide Watch Chicago, a Chicago Sun-Times publication, which details every murder that takes place in the city.
On June 28, five-year-old Sterling Sims was killed in a double murder that also claimed the life of his mother, 31-year-old Chavonne Brown. Both were shot in their apartment, and police believe the motive was robbery.
On July 1, 16-year-old Antonio Fenner was gunned down on the sidewalk next to the body of a 32-year-old man who had gang ties. No arrests were made, and no suspects have been named. Fenner’s mother believes her son was in the wrong place at the wrong time, because no one in her family knew the other victim or what Fenner’s association was to him.
On July 3, 14-year-old Damani Henard was murdered outside a high school. His body was found next a bicycle.
On July 9, 15-year-old Ed Cooper was shot and killed while spending time with friends at the park. A gunman got out of a black van and began firing as the boys ran away. Cooper was shot in the street and continued running to a vacant lot where he died.
Zimmerman was charged with killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Fla., who was walking through a gated community on his way home from the convenience store. Zimmerman argued that he acted in self-defense.
The trial began on June 24 and ended on July 13 with Zimmerman’s acquittal.
.. - See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/four-children-gunned-down-chicago-during-zimmerman-trial
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http://www.althouse.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-told-you-this-3-weeks-ago-but-drudge.html
July 16, 2013
I told you this 3 weeks ago, but Drudge flashes it today: Rachel Jeantel says she warned Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman could be a gay rapist.
Drudge has the transcript of last night's Piers Morgan interview on CNN:
MORGAN: You felt that there was no doubt in your mind from what Trayvon was telling you on the phone about the creepy ass cracka and so on, that he absolutely believed that George Zimmerman, this man, you didn't know who he was at the time, but this man, was pursuing him?
JEANTEL: Yes.
MORGAN: And he was freaked out by it?
JEANTEL: Yes. Definitely after I say may be a rapist, for every boy, for every man, every -- who's not that kind of way, seeing a grown man following them, would they be creep out?... And people need to understand, he didn't want that creepy ass cracker going to his father or girlfriend's house to go get -- mind you, his little brother was there. You know -- now, mind you, I told you -- I told Trayvon it might have been a rapist."
Here's my post from June 27th, with embedded video from Jeantel's testimony. I said (boldface added):
You assume that there's no way he'd say "cracker" if he didn't see him as white? But he didn't say "cracker." He said "creepy ass cracker." I understand the use of "ass" as an intensifier connected to the adjective "creepy." Creepy-ass cracker, as in very creepy cracker.
But "ass" could go with "cracker" — "ass-cracker." The conversation continued, according to Jeantel: "So... he told me the man was looking at him, so I had to think it might have been a rapist."
Why rapist? A man raping a man? How common is that as a fear? But it was the first thing Jeantel thought to say after he said creepy-ass cracker/creepy ass-cracker. The term "ass cracker" could easily mean a man who rapes a man, especially one who goes after a teenaged boy....
The word "creepy" makes special sense if you reinterpret the "ass" to go with "cracker." Martin said a man was following him, looking at him. He might have thought Zimmerman was a man out looking for sex and was watching him for that reason. What conversations had Martin had in the past with Jeantel about worries of this kind. She "had to think it might have been a rapist."...
Why didn't Martin take Jeantel's advice and run home? The rapist/ass-cracker theory makes sense of Martin's decision to go after Zimmerman. If he saw Zimmerman as a sexual predator, he might think confrontation was a good idea or even an important step: These creeps in the neighborhood need to know that I'm not their prey. It's not enough to run inside daddy's house. My manhood must be established here and now or I can't walk free around here anymore.
Call out the gay rights activists. In this interpretation, it was a gay-bashing!
ADDED: Thanks to Irene for nudging me to post this. It was right there in the testimony, and the defense lawyers — who were pretty astute about hearing cues and following up — missed this.
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Interesting interpretation, though not wanting to get one's ass cracked seems to me like a concern that could elevate one's adrenaline , , ,
Anywayy , , , http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/baltimore-group-of-blacks-beat-hispanic-man-yelling-this-is-for-trayvon
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Interesting interpretation, though not wanting to get one's ass cracked seems to me like a concern that could elevate one's adrenaline , , ,
Anywayy , , , http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/baltimore-group-of-blacks-beat-hispanic-man-yelling-this-is-for-trayvon
It seems that Zimmerman was being "PROFILED". :roll:
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I confess to not being deeply read in Booker T. Washington, but I do know that
a) He was an extraordinary American;
b) an amazing scientist;
c) a man whose political views later came to be derided by some as "Uncle Tom", defended by others as what was realistic in his time.
That said, these words ring true to me:
http://conservativeblkwoman.blogspot.com/2008/05/booker-t-washington-on-race-pimps.html
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"Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter."
http://rochester.ynn.com/content/top_stories/490556/roderick-scott-claims-self-defense-in-teen-s-shooting/
Updated 12/15/2009 05:53 PM
Roderick Scott Claims Self-Defense in Teen's Shooting
By: YNN Staff
A Greece man charged with shooting a 17-year-old to death testified at his own trial Tuesday.
Roderick Scott told the court he shot Christopher Cervini in self-defense.
Scott is charged with manslaughter in the April 4 shooting across the street from his home on Baneberry Way in Greece.
Scott told the court he confronted Cervini and other person as they broke into a neighbor's car. The other person ran away, but Scott said Cervini ran at him.
Scott already had his gun drawn. He said he told Cervini to stop, but the teen kept coming, so he shot him twice.
"I thought he did very well on the stand. I don't think the cross examination touched him one bit. I think he was very consistent and had been consistent from the beginning...that the only reason he shot his gun is because Chris Cervini was charging at him," said Scott’s lawyer, John Parrinello.
“I don't know how you can not see that, especially when you're in fear for your life. You're going to notice every movement, how they're positioned, how they're coming at you...how you feel threatened. He can't point to anything conclusively as to how this person was a threat other than running down the driveway," said Julie Finocchio, prosecutor.
The prosecution claims Cervini was actually shot from behind.
Lawyers will make their closing arguments in the case Wednesday. Jury deliberation is set to begin Thursday.
Closer Look at Tuesday's Testimony
When Roderick Scott took the stand in his own defense Tuesday, he told the jury that neighbors alerted him before April 4 that break-ins had been occurring in the neighborhood.
He also spoke about his work history, which includes Johnson & Johnson, and Kodak, which sold his division to J&J.
Scott said on April 4, he was sleeping on the couch, because he and his girlfriend had a disagreement. In the early morning he awoke and heard voices. He looked out the front door to see what was going on outside.
He testified he saw three individuals who were in his driveway, saw them walk out and cross the street, then walk up to a neighbor's vehicle, pulling on the latch and handles of the neighbor's truck. He then went upstairs, told his girlfriend Tracy that someone was breaking into a vehicle, and told her to call 911. He grabbed his pistol, for which he has a permit, "to protect myself" then went outside.
Scott said his intent was "to stop or detain the criminals," not to shoot anyone. He walked down the driveway and over to 39 Baneberry Way. He saw one person standing on a sidewalk, and some rummaging going on inside a vehicle, which had the dome light on.
At that point, Scott testified he pulled his handgun out of the holster, and chambered a round. "I wanted to protect myself and I intended to," Scott said.
He walked toward the individual, who started to walk away toward Manitou Road. He did not tell that individual to stop. It's believed that individual was Brian Hopkins.
At this point, Scott was a foot or so off the sidewalk, and he saw someone rustling around inside the vehicle at 39 Baneberry. He testified he clearly saw two individuals. He drew his pistol and assumed the a shooter's stance. "I didn't know what I was up against, or if they were armed," Scott said.
He told the individuals to stop, that his girlfriend had called 911, and that he had a gun. The individuals stopped, and a few seconds passed. Scott says the teens were talking, then one of them ran around the front of the truck. The other ran down the driveway toward him, screaming. Scott warned him he had a gun, then shot him.
He assumed the boy may have been armed.
"I felt if he got to me he would try to kill me or hurt me," Scott testified.
After the shooting, Scott said Cervini, who was running at him, kept running, passed by him, and fell face-first onto the ground.
Scott went back into the house, had his girlfriend call 911 and spoke to the 911 operator.
The police took him to the station on Island Cottage Road, where he was held for hours, before being transported to jail. Neither the two 911 calls Scott made, nor the videotaped statements he made to police, were played in court.
Scott testified that he never refused to talk to the police, and that everything he told the police was no different than what he testified to in court.
When prosecutor Julie Finocchio cross-examined Scott, she began by discussing Scott's apparent expertise with guns, and his frequent visits to a gun club for target practice. Finocchio also brought up Roderick Scott's involvement in three different styles of martial arts, and his participation in competitions.
Then Finocchio asked Scott, after he grabbed his gun and went outside, and he didn't go back indoors, "You didn't just go back inside and wait for the police?"
"No," said Scott.
"You decided you were going to handle the situation," said Finocchio.
"No," replied Scott. He told Finocchio he was going to go across the street to tell his neighbor someone was trying to break into the truck. On the way there, Scott said he saw something - a person walking on the sidewalk. Scott pulled the gun out of its holster and chambered a round.
Prosecutor Finocchio handed Scott the gun in court, and told Scott to chamber it, which he did, in just a second.
Defense Attorney John Parrinello said that the prosecutor kept interrupting Scott's answers, and he asked for a mistrial three times in a row during this testimony, which was denied each time.
Scott told Finocchio he could not recall how the person who was coming at him was positioned – whether he was facing him or not.
Finocchio then played a portion of a videotaped statement that Scott made to police, in which he said the person who ran at him was facing him directly all along. Finocchio suggested discrepancies in what Scott told investigators versus what he told the court.
"Having seen no weapon and guessing maybe he has one, you decide to shoot," said Finocchio.
"Correct," said Scott, calmly.
Before Scott testified Tuesday, Parrinello asked the judge to strike the testimony of James Cervini, saying it is riddled with inconsistencies.
Referring to his client, Parrinello said, "This arrest was a rush to judgement."
But Judge David Egan denied the motion. James Cervini is Chris Cervini's cousin.
Parrinello also asked for an order of dismissal, saying there is no proof that Scott intended to hurt Cervini. "There's no doubt, Christopher Cervini died by his own hand, his own conduct," said Parrinello.
That motion was also denied.
The day's first defense witness was Kenneth Tisdale, a friend and co-worker of Scott's, who also lives in Greece. Tisdale testified that on April 2, he and Scott played basketball at a park in Greece, and that Scott was banged up during the game, and was limping the next day at work.
Tisdale's prior arrest for soliciting a prostitute was brought up by the prosecution.
http://rochester.ynn.com/content/top_stories/490926/jury-finds-roderick-scott-not-guilty/
Updated 12/18/2009 10:41 PM
Jury Finds Roderick Scott Not Guilty
By: Mike Hedeen
Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April.
"I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it's still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over."
As deliberations dragged on over two days and the jury asked for testimony to be read back, Scott admits he didn't know how it would all turn out.
"I was nervous of course,” he said. “You never know what direction this whole thing is going to turn, so I have no idea. But it worked out and I feel that justice (was) served today."
Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner.
"The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."
Scott says he acted in self defense when he confronted Cervini and two others saying they were stealing from neighbors cars. He told them he had a gun and ordered them to freeze and wait for police.
Scott says he shot Cervini twice when the victim charged toward him yelling he was going to get Scott.
"How can this happen to a beautiful, sweet child like that?” asked Cervini’s aunt Carol Cervini. “All he wanted to do was go home. And then for them to say, he was saying, 'Please don't kill me. I'm just a kid,' and he just kept on shooting him."
Scott says the last seven months have been difficult for him and his family. If he could go back to the events in the early morning hours of April 4, there are things he says he would do differently.
"If it meant a person not losing their life, absolutely,” he said. “Would I still have tried to stop what was going on? That I would have done. But if I knew ahead of time that I could do something to help somebody from losing their life, I don't want anyone to lose their life."
Scott says the first thing he was going to do was go home and get a good night sleep. When asked if he'll continue living in his current home, which is just one street away from the Cervini's, he said “for the time being.”
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LOS ANGELES — The police here were preparing for another night of protests on Tuesday, and community activists were working to maintain the peace after anger over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin turned violent in South Los Angeles on Monday night.
Protests Follow Zimmerman Acquittal
Mayor Eric Garcetti, center, and Police Chief Charlie Beck, left, were among Los Angeles leaders who urged nonviolence in demonstrations on Tuesday. More Photos »
Readers’ Comments
A group of about 150 mostly young people broke away from a peaceful demonstration on Monday in the Crenshaw district, long home to many of the city’s black residents. Protesters ran through the streets, blocking traffic, hitting cars, assaulting pedestrians and ransacking businesses, the police reported.
Hundreds of police officers in riot gear descended on the area to quell the unrest. Fourteen people were arrested, the police said, half of them juveniles.
Two decades after the acquittal of white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King sparked deadly riots in the same part of the city, residents and public officials agreed that the more muted anger over the Zimmerman verdict — and the much smaller outbreak of violence — showed how much, and how little, has changed.
“Twenty-one years ago we witnessed what could happen when there’s a reaction to a verdict,” Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor who represents South Los Angeles, said at a news conference on Monday night. “Similar sentiments are being expressed here in this space, but the response of the L.A.P.D. is qualitatively different.”
Many in the neighborhood, while remaining wary of law enforcement officials, agreed that relations between black residents and the Police Department had vastly improved. The police allowed the demonstration to continue until the violence began.
“The police did a top-notch job,” said Trebien Bellows, 46, a lifelong neighborhood resident. “Before things got crazy, they jumped right on it.”
Despite his praise for the police, Mr. Bellows said he understood the frustration expressed by the group that broke away from the protest in outrage. Young black people continue to be perceived as threats and targeted by the police, he said, and the Zimmerman case showed how they often paid with their lives.
“What happened after the peaceful protest was basically just kids lashing out,” he said. “Young African-American and Latino kids, they’re the ones being targeted.”
Darnell M. Hunt, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studied the 1992 riots, said that five years after the election of the country’s first black president, race relations are at a critical point.
When Barack Obama was elected, he said, crowds gathered in Leimert Park to celebrate. “They really did see it as a new day in terms of race, and most importantly for black youth, who for generations never seriously thought they could become president,” Dr. Hunt said.
Now, the same community is protesting instead of celebrating. “People were hoping their view of justice would be served, and it wasn’t,” Dr. Hunt said. “They’re having a hard time believing in the American dream and the idea that African-Americans had finally become full-fledged citizens.”
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a speech Tuesday at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Orlando, Fla., condemned Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. “It’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” he said.
The unrest in Los Angeles followed consecutive nights of largely peaceful protests in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington. In Oakland, Calif., demonstrators blocked traffic along Interstate 880 for a brief period during the afternoon rush Monday before authorities cleared the road.
The protesters made varied demands. Some wanted the federal government to prosecute Mr. Zimmerman. Others hoped for an overhaul of the entire American justice system.
“This is much bigger than just this one trial,” said Oriana Sly, 20, of Los Angeles. She carried a sign that read “Justice for Trayvon” as she marched up Crenshaw Boulevard here on Sunday night. “People of color have not received our fair share with the American justice system.”
On Monday night, however, some protesters’ frustration boiled over. They stormed a Walmart and other stores. They ran through the streets, blocking traffic and jumping on stopped cars, kicking them and dancing on the hoods. A television news crew was attacked.
As the city’s new mayor, Eric Garcetti, called for calm on the streets on Tuesday, he acknowledged the echoes from the Rodney King riots, but insisted the city had come a long way.
“This is a different moment in time; we can see how much change for the better the city has enjoyed since 1992,” Mr. Garcetti said. “For somebody born after 1992, they just see the world the way it is before them. I think the importance of seeing this through the youth’s eyes is to see what’s left undone.”
“Our work isn’t finished here,” he added. “It wasn’t finished in 1965. It wasn’t finished in 1992. It is not finished in 2013.”
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Updated 12/18/2009 10:41 PM
Jury Finds Roderick Scott Not Guilty
By: Mike Hedeen
Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April.
"I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it's still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over."
As deliberations dragged on over two days and the jury asked for testimony to be read back, Scott admits he didn't know how it would all turn out.
"I was nervous of course,” he said. “You never know what direction this whole thing is going to turn, so I have no idea. But it worked out and I feel that justice (was) served today."
Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner.
"The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."
Scott says he acted in self defense when he confronted Cervini and two others saying they were stealing from neighbors cars. He told them he had a gun and ordered them to freeze and wait for police.
Scott says he shot Cervini twice when the victim charged toward him yelling he was going to get Scott.
"How can this happen to a beautiful, sweet child like that?” asked Cervini’s aunt Carol Cervini. “All he wanted to do was go home. And then for them to say, he was saying, 'Please don't kill me. I'm just a kid,' and he just kept on shooting him."
Scott says the last seven months have been difficult for him and his family. If he could go back to the events in the early morning hours of April 4, there are things he says he would do differently.
"If it meant a person not losing their life, absolutely,” he said. “Would I still have tried to stop what was going on? That I would have done. But if I knew ahead of time that I could do something to help somebody from losing their life, I don't want anyone to lose their life."
Scott says the first thing he was going to do was go home and get a good night sleep. When asked if he'll continue living in his current home, which is just one street away from the Cervini's, he said “for the time being.”
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/17/larry-elder-goes-off-on-piers-morgan-during-explosive-race-debate-youre-making-black-people-feel-as-if-they-are-under-siegeits-an-outrage/
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second post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=shODnGQJ6FU
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http://www.nbcnews.com/id/45755883/ns/msnbc-the_last_word/vp/52504919#52504919
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon-martin-killing-and-the-myth-of-black-on-black-crime.html
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon-martin-killing-and-the-myth-of-black-on-black-crime.html
What a steaming pile of journolistism. I'll take it apart when I get time.
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Be gentle with him GM. Not only is he a nice guy, he engages with reason.
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The one and only Zo on all this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UbR9TkKatu0
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"Be gentle with him GM. Not only is he a nice guy, he engages with reason."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon-martin-killing-and-the-myth-of-black-on-black-crime.html
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From the article: "There’s no such thing as “black-on-black” crime. Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders."
He is making a point, but the point isn't the one stated. Of course there is black on black crime. 94% of crime on blacks is black on black, his own stat, and there is WAY too much crime on blacks. I think the point he is making is that America is not as racial as we may think it is and the crime is not racial. Conservatives I think are pointing out the same thing, that this crime is not born out of racial difference. People don't steal a bike or wallet from someone because of the victim's race. They steal because they want what the other person has, don't care about right from wrong. They see the opportunity and give it a shot. Murder is more personal, hence the familiarity. Drug, gang and turf wars and love gone bad probably explain most of it. Random shootings are the exception.
Back to the article: "it’s hard to disentangle this from the stew of hyper-segregation (often a result of deliberate policies), entrenched poverty, and nonexistent economic opportunities that characterizes a substantial number of black communities. Hence the countless inner-city anti-violence groups that focus on creating opportunity for young, disadvantaged African-Americans, through education, mentoring, and community programs."
FYI to the 'mentors': One thing has lifted more people out of poverty more than all other forces combined in the history of human civilization, economic freedom. These mentors and program designers ought to give that a shot in the predominantly black portions of America's inner cities to which this author refers. Whites living in that culture have the same problems; it's not racial. Our current policy and message is the exact opposite, teach people to demand and take more. See the Obama re-election for example, selling 'welfare rights' to welfare recipients, along with the scare message that the opponents want to 'take' these great programs away from you.
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Rumor: Zimmerman to change name to Ben Ghazi so people will stop talking about him.
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Rumor: Zimmerman to change name to Ben Ghazi so people will stop talking about him.
At this point, what difference would it make?
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/race-baiting-and-lies-in-america.htm
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/race-baiting-and-lies-in-america.htm
Perhaps the best thing he's ever written. I say that having greatly appreciated his work.
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/race-baiting-and-lies-in-america.htm
Perhaps the best thing he's ever written. I say that having greatly appreciated his work.
Yes. That was a great read. Also Chapter One of his own book describing his own incident:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/danger-close-chapter-one.htm
A link to the Bill Whittle piece referred to by Michael Yon:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-lynching/
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If you can't get through to the Whittle piece via PJ Media, here it is on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ebu6Yvzs4Ls
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/note-for-non-americans-on-race-relations-in-the-usa.htm
Note for Non-Americans on Race relations in the USA
22 July 2013
Having spent about twenty years in dozens of countries, I have some idea about how we are viewed abroad. When it comes to race, many people look at America as black and white. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. We are a bunch of mixed breeds.
One of my siblings recently got a genetic test. We are all over the map, including a trace from Sub-Saharan Africa. Apparently I have black grandmother or grandfather in my tree. Mostly it turns out we apparently are Northern European, but still we are mutts. My incredible wife is darker than many so called African Americans.
Insofar as "white" culture in America, there is no definite white culture that most whites belong to. Many whites are with some form or another of black, Asian, or Hispanic culture, and the inverse is true. Keeping in mind there is no "Asian" culture any more than there is a "white" or "black" or "Hispanic" or "European" or "Thai." We truly are mixed up with each other, which is one of our primary strengths.
Do you know how many cultures there are in Thailand? There are so many that I do not even have an idea. There must be a hundred, and even more if we count fusions. Just as Europeans -- I spent about six years in Europe -- often think America is black and white, we project the same onto other countries.
There must literally be thousands of "Indian" cultures. The varieties are tantamount endless. It would take most people a year just to memorize the names of the languages, dialects, and peoples of India. Indian banknotes are inscribed with about 15 major languages.
There are many "white" cultures in America. I do not know how many. I have traveled extensively to 48 states and it became confusing. A white man from the mountains of Western North Carolina has a completely different culture than a white man from Manhattan. On language, the man from the mountains will understand the dialect of the man from Manhattan, but the Manhattan man might not understand a word the mountain man says. A Russian immigrant will have a dramatically different culture than an Austrian immigrant. All will be lumped as “white.”
I relate with "black" culture in my hometown much closer than with some of the "white" cultures I encountered in the USA. I have far more in common with black kids I started first grade with than with a white man from Budapest.
I understand blacks on a cultural level in my hometown because we grew up together seven days per week for years on end, but some of the "white" American cultures I have encountered were foreign to me. We spoke the same language but I did not always understand where they were coming from. For instance, the idea that a man should flee his home and not protect his family during a home invasion is utterly foreign. I have no idea what planet they got that from.
During my US travels, I found that both many of the blacks and whites in Baltimore were fantastically racist to the point I thought it was kooky. Same down in Miami and over in Los Angeles. Especially racist were many of the blacks who would treat me like an enemy, when I was thinking, "Man, if you get hit by a car, I will pull you out of the street. Why are you acting like this???"
Insofar as "black culture," again, there is no specific black culture that all subscribe to. Blacks are all over the map on cultures. Some blacks are fantastically racist, while others just take people for what they are. Gullah speakers in South Carolina have little in common with folks from inner-city Detroit and Jamaicans in Miami.
I see racism in every country I go, which is nearly 70 so far. America is downright tame by comparison with racism in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The United States has huge and vibrant media and communications base that can magnify and blast our every freckle out to the universe, largely in English.
English is an official language in about 80 countries and territories with hundreds of millions of speakers. This is important: when big news hits in Japanese language, few people will see it because there is no global focus on Japan, and their media is in Japanese, so only a trickle leaks out, while big news in America generally is a global event.
America is not black and white, and not all blacks hate whites. We got along pretty well in my hometown. There was racism, sure. We saw it plenty. Believe it or not it was usually instigated by blacks but not always. I am specifically referring to my generation in my town. In previous generations it is clear that racism was more instigated by whites.
More interestingly, millions of immigrants today were not around during the slavery and years of severe oppression. They had nothing to do with it. A Norwegian or Russian who immigrates today was not around during those times yet if he is involved in some tragedy involving a person deemed as black, most assuredly many people will lump him with the slave owners.
Chinese, Koreans, and Indians who immigrate to America will, when push comes to shove, be lumped in with whites, though they had zero involvement with historical grievances that are being pathologically dragged down the roads of America.
Many immigrants see the situation more clearly for what it is than do many native born Americans. These immigrants share no guilt or guilt complex. They are more likely to call it excuse-making.
Many of these immigrants came from backgrounds that make previous US oppression look like playground fights and yet they thrive and move on, which gets them lumped with whites, just as Chinese tend to succeed around the world which in part creates anti-Sino feelings with much violent precedent in many countries. Chinese often are called “The Jews of Asia” because they succeed, and as pejorative striking two with one stone.
George Zimmerman himself was born in Peru to a Peruvian mother, and reportedly is also of mixed African decent from his mother’s side. But this matters mostly only to severe racists.
This may sound confusing to non-Americans, which again is my target audience for this dispatch. Many Americans know most or all of this and more.
To add to the mix and to explain more why emotions have been running wild in the Zimmerman-Martin case, Zimmerman’s first problem after the shooting is his name. Zimmerman is a common Jewish name, and so not only was he seen as white (sight unseen), but a Jew.
Anyone who has spent much time travelling around America knows that anti-Semitism lives, especially among black cultures.
We know that anti-Semitism is entrenched deeply among many peoples globally. Among American blacks anti-Semitism must be among the highest.
To be sure, I saw plenty of anti-Semitism in Europe, and in the UK, and of course in the Middle East. I personally know American whites who are anti-Semitic.
Yet the severest anti-Semitism I have seen in Europe or North America came from American blacks, some of who seem as anti-Semitic as Iraqi Arabs.
It is no coincidence that our special relationship with Israel began to tank the day Obama stepped into the Oval office. Israel is loaded with Zimmermans and if Obama were viewed as cozy with Jews or Israel that would undermine his base.
George Zimmerman had a packaging problem. Some people would side for or against him because he is half-white, and millions of others would side against him because he is “Jewish.” In fact, he is Catholic, yet there is no doubt he would lose net support with a Jewish name.
This means many whites in America and abroad who may have otherwise sided with Zimmerman based on the facts, likely would jump ship because they wrongly saw him as Jewish, and so would not check the facts so that they could go with a narrative that leads to their desired endstate.
There is yet another complicating factor: Guns.
Most people realize that guns are as charged a topic in America as is racism. This topic brings out severe emotions. To say to many Europeans or Americans that you own guns is tantamount to saying you are a Satanist.
“Castle” and “stand your ground” laws that allow homeowners and others to defend themselves are seen as barbaric. “How dare you shoot someone just because three young men approached you and your wife and daughters on a dark night and said give me your money and keys! (And wife and daughters.)”
Vice President Joe Biden himself, on national television, said that he gave his wife Jill the advice that if someone breaks into their home, go out to the balcony with the double barreled shotgun and fire two shots into the air. Any combat troop or law officer will say that is about the worst advice imaginable. The list of reasons why this is terrible advice would be longer than this dispatch.
Millions of Americans want all guns swept off the streets. Anyone who uses one, even in self-defense, will be taken as a savage and used as a sacrificial lamb when possible. Obama wants the guns. Zimmerman the white Jew (really half Latino and Catholic) used a gun to defend himself. He was a perfect political tool for Obama.
This was a recipe for madness, especially so among Americans who will often loquaciously comment or articles and then admit they did not bother to read the contents.
There was a joke in Afghanistan – factually based – that if you say something three times to Afghans it becomes “true.” The first person who says something three times is right. The new truth becomes entrenched. “These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for.”
From a propaganda perspective, whoever got there first owned the message.
Millions of Americans are similar, and millions of Americans are not sufficiently literate to read this dispatch. If you are a foreigner whose first language is not English, and you understand this dispatch, your reading comprehension is no doubt as high or higher than most Americans.
If Zimmerman’s name was Gonzales, a typical Latino name, there is a high probability few of us would have heard of the case.
One of the best ways to ameliorate this severe racism is to stop accepting the race card without proof. When racism happens, we must call it out no matter who displays it, including the President.
We must stop accepting the race card as a coupon that can be exchanged for gold, and start remembering that two lynchings do not make a right.
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Recommended by my friend Walter: http://overbear.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-killed-trayvon-martin/
We are in the process of getting him registered for the forum; I look forward to his participation here.
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Recommended by my friend Walter: http://overbear.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-killed-trayvon-martin/
We are in the process of getting him registered for the forum; I look forward to his participation here.
I'm pretty sure a gunshot wound killed Trayvon Martin.
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Agreed that Walter's article does not apply to the facts of the Z. case, but is there any merit in its central point?
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The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment
Black leaders weren't so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority.
By SHELBY STEELE
The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.
On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren't so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, "You won't call the tune here. We will work within the law."
(Martin Luther King Jr. sits in a jail cell at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama in October 1967)
Today's black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and '60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager.
This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).
The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.
Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.
Related Video
Political Diary editor Jason Riley on why black civil rights leaders focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility. Photo: Getty Images
The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.
The purpose of today's civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a "poetic truth." Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one's cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: "America is a racist nation"; "the immigration debate is driven by racism"; "Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon." And we say, "Yes, of course," lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.
In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.
The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.
And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment's mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.
One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?
There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today's civil-rights leadership.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2007).
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Contrast this:
From Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963:
I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
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Another post:
While waiting for Walter to appear (or perhaps more accurately, for our webmaster to register him) here's this http://www.christianpost.com/news/black-pastor-speaks-frankly-to-blacks-about-trayvon-martin-100545/
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"Agreed that Walter's article does not apply to the facts of the Z. case, but is there any merit in its central point?"
What was the central point? That the author of that blog traded one form of racist thinking for another? I'm pretty sure MLK Jr. didn't want to be compared to a thug like Trayvon.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/294726/media-and-black-homicide-victims-heather-mac-donald
The Media and Black Homicide Victims
By Heather Mac Donald
March 29, 2012 7:00 AM
Cable mogul Evan Shapiro had a stunningly clueless Trayvon Martin entry on Huffington Post yesterday asking: Why doesn’t the media cover more black crime victims?
Shapiro, the president of indie cable broadcaster IFC, should pose the same question to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and every member of the black protest establishment: Why don’t you protest more black crime victims? The answer would be the same in all cases: Because the only black victims who interest the race industry and its mainstream media handmaidens are blacks who have been killed by “white” civilians, including honorary whites like Martin’s killer George Zimmerman, or blacks who have been killed or offended by the police (black officers will do here in a pinch).
Unfortunately, there are very few such victims. Ninety-three percent of all black homicide casualties from 1980 to 2008 were killed by other blacks, and are thus of no interest whatsoever to today’s race advocates, because they fail to support the crucial story line that blacks remain under siege by a racist white power structure.
The coverage of New York City’s West Indian Day Parade in September 2011 exemplifies this rule. The New York Times and other local outlets spilled an enormous amount of ink on an altercation between a black city councilman, Jumaane Williams, and the New York Police Department. Williams had tried to cross a police line, and, when he was not allowed to pass, got into a scuffle with some officers. He was then handcuffed and held until the police verified his identity. The city’s Public Advocate, a New York State Assemblyman, and Williams charged the police with racism, claiming that the treatment of Williams exemplified the “siege mentality” with which the police treat black men in New York City. To this day, the Williams detention is regularly mentioned by the New York Times in its constant coverage of the alleged racism of the NYPD.
What else happened on that parade day in 2011? A black-on-black bloodbath:
In the pre-dawn celebrations known as J’ouvert that open the parade, one man was fatally shot, crowds were sprayed with gunfire, and several people were stabbed. A shooting at a McDonald’s at 6 am triggered a stampede. The police repeatedly had to break up mobs that formed after gunfire. . . .
Later that day, a shootout near the parade route killed its intended victim as well as a 55-year-old mother who had been standing nearby; the two police officers who responded to the murders were also shot. Police also arrested someone in the vicinity of the parade who shot off several rounds without hitting anyone. The day’s violence would have likely been even worse had officers not removed 15 guns from spectators; each of those potentially life-saving stops would undoubtedly be condemned as racial profiling by the ACLU and its backers in the City Council and in Albany.
Previous West Indian Day Parades were hardly more pacific; the violence includes a man shot in the leg in 2007; another leg shooting and a stabbing in 2006; a man shot to death in 2005; and in 2003, a stabbing in the neck and someone who, from his perch on a parade float, shot into a group of spectators and killed one of them.
None of this violence was given the intense and loving press treatment accorded to the detention of Jumaane Williams. In fact, it was barely mentioned at all, even though, arguably, it is more serious to be shot dead than to be briefly detained by the police. Nothing prevented Al Sharpton from protesting the killings and stabbings that day. However, only Councilman Williams falls into the favored category of, in this case, black victim offended by the police, and so his detention was the only event that day worth noting.
On Halloween 2010, five-year-old Aaron Shannon Jr. was playing in his family’s backyard in his Spiderman costume in South Central Los Angeles. Two gangbangers from the Kitchen Crips, seeking to avenge a previous gang shooting, shot randomly towards some houses and killed Shannon, also wounding the boy’s grandfather and uncle. Sharpton, Inc., was perfectly free to make the names of Shannon’s killers, Leonard Hall Jr., 21, and Marcus Denson, 18, as infamous as that of George Zimmerman. But the race baiters never showed up. The killing aroused not the slightest interest from them because it was useless in aiding the white racism conceit. And so no one outside Shannon’s immediate circle remembers today who Hall and Denson are, even though Shannon was at least as innocent as Trayvon Martin (whose image as combined Eagle Scout-St. Francis of Assisi has in any case come under some stress of late, information, that, if true, is not irrelevant to assessing Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.)
We know the names of virtually every unarmed black civilian shot by the New York Police Department in recent years — Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell — as well we should. To the extent that botched police tactics or training contributed to these tragic killings, the incidents are rightly publicized so that they can be prevented from reoccurring. Here’s the difference between these killings — they are a tiny handful — and the routine black-on-black killings that occur by the dozen every day across the country. The officers who mistakenly shot their victims thinking they were facing a deadly threat set out that morning to protect people, often in minority neighborhoods, not to injure anyone. A significant number of black-on-black shootings, however, like many shootings among all races, are done in cold blood.
Here’s another difference between police killings of blacks, white-on-black killings, and black-on-black killings: Sheer numbers. There were nine civilian victims of police gunfire last year in New York City; there were several hundred black homicide victims in the city, almost all shot by other blacks or Hispanics, none of them given substantial press coverage. Nationwide, in 2005, there were 2,646 black victims of other blacks, compared to 349 black victims of whites or Hispanics. The relative rates of interracial killings are wildly skewed towards black on white killings: There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of civilian black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of civilian white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. Yet to read columnists such as the Times’s Charles Blow or to listen to the professional racial extortionists, it is the police and whites who are the biggest threat to blacks, not other blacks.
A further prudential reason why the routine black gangbanger victim gets so little coverage: He is not particularly appealing. Though he had the misfortune of being the victim that day, he could just as easily have been the perpetrator the next day. That is true of many white-on-white homicides as well.
Shapiro, of course, has another explanation for the absence of coverage of most black crime victims: The media is too white, especially in its upper ranks. The “stunning under-representation of minorities at the TOP of our national and local news organizations creates an institutional lack of empathy for minority victims of violent crime,” he writes. Has he noticed that Trayvon Martin is not exactly being ignored? As soon as the media got wind of the story, it ran with it. When Amadou Diallo was shot by four NYPD officers in 1999, the New York Times ran three and a half articles a day on the incident for several months.
If Sharpton protested outside the jail cell of the routine robber or gunman in East New York with as much zeal as he devotes to allegedly racist whites or to the police, if he ever stigmatized black killers of blacks, the phony problem of “racial profiling” might go away, since it is merely an epiphenomenon of black crime. Protesting or covering black crime, however, would require bringing out some uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that the homicide rate among black males of the ages of 14 to 24 is nearly ten times that of white and Hispanic young males combined. Evan Shapiro mentions the elevated rates of black homicide victimization but somehow neglects to include the black homicide commission rate. His column flawlessly exemplifies the ignorance of the Hollywood elites regarding today’s racial realities.
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You have your hands full here Walter :-D
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http://www.althouse.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-family-rescued-by-george-zimmerman.html
July 23, 2013
"The family rescued by George Zimmerman after a rollover crash in Florida are terrified they will become targets for hate mobs."
"Mark and Dana Michelle Gerstle told friends they do not want to talk publicly about Zimmerman for fear they will be accused of portraying him as a hero — and face a backlash from those who consider he got away with murder. 'They are very grateful to Zimmerman for what he did, but they do not want to get involved,' said a friend, who asked not to be named."
This is a great origin story for a superhero. This is why he needs a costume... with a mask... if he wants to roam around finding people who need help and rushing to the rescue.
Who was that masked man? people will ask.
The answer will be: He was that man that all the important people called a racist, and they wanted to see him put away for a long, long time, but the jury — following the judge's instructions to adhere to truth, justice, and the American way — acquitted. He left the courthouse a free man, and determined to continue in the guardian role that led to branding him as a racist and knowing that anyone he ever helped would simultaneously be hurt by the linkage to the man known as racist, he put on that mask.
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New Black Panther Party Finds Way to Inject Anti-Semitism into Zimmerman Case
July 15, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield 25 Comments
When Attorney General Eric Holder intervened to exempt the New Black Panther thugs from voter intimidation charges, it only emboldened them to stage scenes like these.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwvWYiDvLZc&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwvWYiDvLZc&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active
During a 2012 interview on the streets of Jacksonville, Fl., one of the leaders of the New Black Panthers, Mikhail Muhammad, told a group of reporters that Trayvon Martin has “been assassinated by a wicked white beast.”
Muhammad went on to call Zimmerman a “no good Jew.”
The press conference was held to call attention to the $10,000 bounty the New Black Panthers have placed on the head of George Zimmerman, who is now awaiting the jury’s ruling.
Muhammad explained that the Panthers were “mobilizing 10,000 men, black men in the ‘tri-states’ of Georgia, Florida and Alabama.”
Zimmerman is actually Catholic. Both the father and the son. But it’s telling that Muhammad’s mind quickly goes to the Jewish question. The NBPP is not just racist, it’s reflexively anti-Semitic. And while it’s easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, the very fact that Holder’s people intervened to protect it against voter intimidation charges show how high in Obama Inc. its support goes.
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http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/10/03/photos-barack-obama-appeared-and-marched-with-new-black-panthers-in-2007/
Shocking Photos: Barack Obama Appeared and Marched with New Black Panthers in 2007
by
Bryan Preston
October 3, 2011 - 7:01 am
Breitbart has the story and the photos, which raise questions about a number of things including why the Department of Justice closed its investigation of the New Black Panthers in 2009 — after it had already won that case. PJ Media led the coverage of the DOJ’s dismissal of this case, when J. Christian Adams resigned from the Department over the dismissal and told the story here. Was closure of that case a quid pro quo for the Panthers’ public support of Obama in 2007 and 2008?
New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.
The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.
In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.
The images, presented below, also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.
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Among those appearing with Obama was Shabazz, the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s and then mocking their widows in this video (7:20 – 8:29).
Injustice [J. Christian Adams' book, which will be released Tuesday] includes a disturbing photo of Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.
There are even more photographs.
I have learned that Regnery initially received approval from a person who took pictures of the events in Selma to publish these additional photographs in Injustice.
After the photographer wrote Regnery reversing his permission to include the photographs in Injustice, the images were removed from the photographer’s Flickr account. Yet we were able to capture them before they disappeared.
The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.
In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.
The New Black Panthers are a radical Muslim black separatist group that, among other things, supported threats of violence against cartoonists in Denmark for their depictions of Muhammad. Members of the group engaged in overt voter intimidation in 2008 in Philadelphia, and the Obama-Holder Department of Justice later dropped the case against them after it had won that case. The Panthers endorsed Obama in 2008, an endorsement that was posted on and later scrubbed from his campaign web site.
I’d say that this is far more relevant than an anonymously painted rock out in West Texas. This is the current president choosing of his own free will to accept support from and appear with some very radical and racist figures, during his rise to power. The New Black Panthers’ militant radicalism and racism are impossible to ignore. A “Malik Shabazz” (not exactly a common name) has appeared numerous times on White House visitor logs since Obama’s inauguration; the White House has insisted that it’s not the same Malik Shabazz who leads the New Black Panther movement but has not produced the alternative Malik Shabazz. Added to the fact that Barack Obama sat in the pews of radical racist pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, borrowing the title for one of his books from him and citing Wright as a mentor, we get a picture of a man who at the very least allied himself with very radical elements when it suited him. And that man is the president of the United States.
And we have a picture of a mainstream media, obsessed with race when it suits them, not asking Obama a single question about this event in Selma or his other links and associations with radicals from the beginning of his political career, to the present.
J. Christian Adams’ book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, is due out Tuesday, October 4. PJ will publish an excerpt of Injustice tomorrow as well.
Update: This is one of several photos in the book that President Obama must address. It’s close to impossible to overstate how noxious a character Shabazz is. Among other things, he led the NBPP’s protests at the Danish embassy in Washington DC during the Muhammad cartoon controversy, siding with the extremists who falsified some of the cartoons and turned those cartoons into a cause for violent riots. Obama’s appearance with Shabazz shows either a total lack of judgement, or reveals something about Obama’s character and beliefs that the nation has a right to know about and assess.
(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/10/nbpp-obama.jpg)
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/11/New-Black-Panther-on-Trayvon-We-were-not-contaced-by-the-Justice-Department
New Black Panther: Never Contacted by Obama DOJ over Zimmerman Threats
by Lee Stranahan11 Jul 2013
The Obama Department of Justice made no attempt to stop blatant threats against George Zimmerman, according to one of the people who helped make those threats.
Despite issuing a widely publicized threat against Zimmerman last year, the New Black Panther Party was never contacted by the Department of Justice according to a statement from a NBPP spokesman.
Breitbart News spoke exclusively to Brother James J. Muhammad, the National Director of Education for The Ordinary People Society New Black Panther Party. He said, "We were never contacted by the Justice Department. We were never contacted to calm down."
Brother Muhammad was one of the people directly calling for the "capture" of George Zimmerman last year. As Breitbart News reported on March 24, 2012:
Several dozen supporters of the group known by its acronym NBPP -- unrelated to the revolutionary Black Panther Party active in the 1960s-1980s -- meanwhile protested for the third time this week at the police headquarters in Sanford, Florida.
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," leader Mikhail Muhammad told the Orlando Sentinel. "We don't hate anyone, we hate injustice."
Activists had called for the mobilization of 5,000 black men to capture Zimmerman. And Muhammad said the NBPP was receiving donations from black entertainers and athletes, with a goal to collect $1 million by next week.
Yesterday, Judicial Watch confirmed what Breitbart News had originally reported seventeen months ago. A small group within the Justice Department known as the Community Relations Service (CRS) was in Sanford in March and April of 2012, facilitating racially charged marches, rallies, and protests against George Zimmerman.
The statement by the New Black Panther Party that the DOJ never contacted them is a critical point because some defenders of the Obama Department of Justice's involvement in the Trayvon Martin story have tried to claim that CRS was merely keeping the peace. This is their mission statement:
The Community Relations Service is the Department's "peacemaker" for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, and national origin.
Despite that stated mission, the CRS and the Justice Department apparently did nothing at all to even address the most obvious conflict arising from racial issues -- the widely publicized, racially charged threat against George Zimmerman. One would think that the "peacemaker" for reducing conflicts and tensions would put the people who issued a Wanted Poster high on their priority list.
When asked to confirm, Brother James Muhammad told Breitbart News, "We were not contacted by the Justice Department and have never been asked by the Justice Department to cool it, calm down, or not move forward."
In this video, spokesman Makhail Muhammad said of Zimmerman in March 2012:
George Zimmerman was not a police officer. He was a community volunteer. But he had a passion to harass black males in that community. So, now today his father wants to talk about death threats. At least his son is still alive to talk about death threats. But what about Trayvon? He's not alive to talk about death threats. And I got to say this, Goddamnit, he should be fearful for his life. You can't keep killing black children, killing our children all over America. And we're supposed to take it easy? Supposed to play nice about it?
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http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/07/10/newly-released-documents-detail-the-department-of-justices-role-in-organizing-trayvon-martin-protests/
Newly Released Documents Detail the Department of Justice’s Role in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests
DOJ deployed obscure section to play role in Florida protests. Also read: Justice for Trayvon, Race-Hustler Style, by J. Christian Adams
by
Bryan Preston
July 10, 2013 - 9:29 am
Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained documents proving that the Department of Justice played a major behind-the-scenes role in organizing protests against George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012.
Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOJ on April 24, 2012. According to the documents JW received, a little-known DOJ unit called the Community Relations Service deployed to Sanford, FL, to organize and manage rallies against Zimmerman.
Among JW’s findings:
•March 25 – 27, 2012, CRS spent $674.14 upon being “deployed to Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.”
•March 25 – 28, 2012, CRS spent $1,142.84 “in Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.”
•March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent $892.55 in Sanford, FL “to provide support for protest deployment in Florida.”
•March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent an additional $751.60 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31.”
•April 3 – 12, 2012, CRS spent $1,307.40 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.”
•April 11-12, 2012, CRS spent $552.35 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies related to the fatal shooting of a 17 year old African American male.” – expenses for employees to travel, eat, sleep?
JW says the documents it obtained reveal that CRS is not engaging in its stated mission of conducting “impartial mediation practices and conflict resolution,” but instead engaged on the side of the anti-Zimmerman protesters.
On April 15, 2012, during the height of the protests, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “They [the CRS] helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police Chief Bill Lee according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” The paper quoted the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for protestors, as saying “They were there for us,” after a March 20 meeting with CRS agents.
Separately, in response to a Florida Sunshine Law request to the City of Sanford, Judicial Watch also obtained an audio recording of a “community meeting” held at Second Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Sanford on April 19, 2012. The meeting, which led to the ouster of Sanford’s Police Chief Bill Lee, was scheduled after a group of college students calling themselves the “Dream Defenders” barricaded the entrance to the police department demanding Lee be fired. According to the Orlando Sentinel, DOJ employees with the CRS had arranged a 40-mile police escort for the students from Daytona Beach to Sanford.
“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations.”
Organizing such protests falls well within both President Barack Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s wheelhouses. Obama was a “community organizer” in his career prior to elective politics, a position that uses protests and street theater, along with threats, to obtain concessions from businesses and other political opponents. Holder has accused America of being a “nation of cowards” for not discussing racial issues enough. He also described black Americans as “my people” during a congressional hearing.
As the Zimmerman trial winds down, the threat of race riots should he be acquitted has risen.
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/07/busted-left-wing-plant-at-houston-pro-zimmerman-rally-is-far-left-activist/
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/07/busted-left-wing-plant-at-houston-pro-zimmerman-rally-is-far-left-activist/
July 24, 2013
http://www.althouse.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-could-tell-she-was-lefty-from-way-she.html
I could tell she was a lefty from the way she wrote the ampersand.
Here's a woman at a pro-Zimmerman rally, giving the pro-Zimms bad PR:
(http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/523x541xracist-proud-plant.jpg.pagespeed.ic.WSQN4eNot9.jpg)
Was anyone fooled by that? I hope not, but Renee Vaughan — an Austin activist — is getting reamed for her evil prank. Instapundit says:
Her name is Renee Vaughan. Her employer, the Texas Campaign For The Environment, has also apologized. Nonetheless, I hope the picture of her standing with a sign reading "We’re Racist And Proud" winds up being tagged to both....
It's a harsh consequence to become — for all time, on the web — Renee "Racist and Proud" Vaughan. She's apologized — sorry she got busted. You know how apologies are. But I doubt that she'd be sorry if her trick had worked and amplified the legend of the racism of Zimmerman and his defenders.
It's entirely fitting that her name should be forever linked to the motto "Racist and Proud," because that isn't a lie. It's true. It is racist to press the racism template onto the Zimmerman story, and it is done with full intent to stimulate feelings of race-based anxiety in vulnerable minds. That is heartless and evil.
Remedial reading: "How to write ampersands by hand." Images here. Most useful comparison:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Et-handwriting.svg/700px-Et-handwriting.svg.png)
Left and right. Learn your American shibboleths.
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http://www.nas.org/articles/how_academe_turned_zimmerman_into_a_racist
How Academe Turned Zimmerman into a Racist
Jul 24, 2013 |
Peter Wood
I first heard of Trayvon Martin via a posted comment on an article I had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education in early March 2012. In retrospect that seems significant. The comment from some anonymous academic came a few days after the shooting and a month before President Obama observed in a Rose Garden talk, “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” In fact, academics from the start helped to drive the polarizing racial narrative that became inseparable from the Trayvon Martin case. And in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict, academics have continued the effort to poison public opinion.
Margaret Burnham, a professor of law at Northeastern University, for example, called the verdict “unreliable and unfair,” cited Zimmerman for “racial profiling,” faulted the local police investigation, criticized the “stand your ground law” (although it played no role in the trial), and compared the case to the Emmett Till lynching and other gross miscarriages of justice from the 1930s and 1940s. Burnham explains:
Race explains the results, which is not to say any single actor bore animus toward Trayvon Martin, but to recognize that had he not been a black male he would likely be alive today. That makes the Zimmerman case painfully and eerily familiar to those of us who study civil rights legal history.
Burnham provides what amounts to the finished draft of the fable that my Chronicle commenter had only begun to assemble. The comment itself has disappeared into the ether, but as best I can recall it, the writer was attempting to score the point that America is a profoundly racist society. He wrote in high academic dudgeon to the effect of, ‘Don’t speak to me of American values. A society in which this takes place is rotten to the core.’
The narrative that quickly took shape was that of a white guy stalking and then shooting down a black teenager in cold-blood, and the police haplessly doing nothing. Their failure to arrest the perpetrator, George Zimmerman, on the spot, was the ingredient that turned an ordinary homicide into an indictment of America. Racial injustice was once again unfolding according to a well-known script.
The Script
That view of what happened, of course, still has many partisans, not least President Obama, as well as a wide swath of the nation’s media. But let’s keep the professoriate’s role in focus. The academy has been profoundly complicit with the promotion of a mistaken and socially destructive framing of Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal. The sheer number of statements by academics is far too large to permit anything like a comprehensive summary, but we can look at some representative examples:
Claire Potter, professor of history at the New School for Public Engagement, wrote on the Chronicle’s “Tenured Radical” blog, “At Tenured Radical we, like so many others, are appalled and heartbroken at last night’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in [the] murder of Trayvon Martin. Between Shelby v. Holder and this travesty, it feels like we are spinning back in time.” She provided links to help readers “to find a rally or Trayvon Martin protest near you.”
Michele Goodwin, professor of law at the University of Minnesota, writing on another Chronicle blog, “Brainstorm,” gave a version of the false but widely repeated narrative back in March 2012: “a white male” who “stalked the youth” and “gunned him down.” She also attributes to Zimmerman (falsely) a racial epithet he supposedly made in speaking to the 911 dispatcher, and makes the “screams for help”--which witnesses say were Zimmerman’s--into “Martin’s last words.”
Rutledge M. Dennis, professor of sociology at George Mason University, is offering a course “Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics,” which looks at the Martin case in the context of “how racial and cultural politics were driving forces in the public debates and controversies surrounding such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, Robert Williams in North Carolina, Emmett Till in Mississippi, Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Martin Luther King in Georgia...”
Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, likewise depicts Martin as a racial victim: “the defense consistently employed racial stereotypes and played on racial knowledge to turn the victim into the predator and the predator into the victim.” He proceeds into a roll call of victims of racial injustice:
The verdict did not surprise me, or most people I know, because we’ve been here before. We were here with Latasha Harlins and Rodney King, with Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart. We were here with Anthony Baez, Michael Wayne Clark, Julio Nunez, Maria Rivas, Mohammed Assassa.
The list continues with dozens more.
But let’s pause with the examples and consider the script itself. The trope, of course, is that black suspects are mercilessly hounded, even if they are innocent; and white suspects stroll free, even if they are self-evidently guilty. It is plainly true that both things have happened in our recorded history. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they still happen, though we are long past the point where they are common or that they go unremarked or that they are allowed to stand if exposed to the light of day. Still the collective memory of this sort of racial injustice is so powerful that it can blind us to the facts at hand.
The Trayvon Martin shooting just isn’t a very good fit with the racial injustice narrative. Martin was not a poor put-upon innocent; Zimmerman was a man of mixed race, living in an integrated neighborhood, and possessed of a life history that contained only friendly relations with blacks. And both the police and the jury believed he acted in genuine self-defense. The narrative of the white neighborhood watch guy gunning down in cold blood the innocent child who went out to buy Skittles didn’t stand up to facts.
Academics in our post-modern age, however, are rarely daunted by facts. When the facts get in the way of a good narrative, the narrative tends to win. What’s going on?
From Zanzinger to Zimmerman
One way to think of this willingness to let a narrative trump the facts is that it is a victory of poetry over reason. A story retold often enough in an emotionally compelling way becomes “true” even if it isn’t. That heartfelt truth can indeed flatten almost any obstacle, especially if it is rooted in real events. When it comes to instances of blacks unfairly accused and whites getting away with murder, we have both a tragic national history and a poetic consciousness of what happened.
Bob Dylan, for example, has supplied sound tracks for both scenarios. In “Hurricane,” Dylan sings of a professional boxer, Rubin Carter, who is black and who was railroaded in 1967 for a murder he didn’t commit. And in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a masterpiece of storytelling, Dylan related how “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,” but no one much cared that the rich white guy had beat the black barmaid to death with a cane in February 1963.
There were plenty of witnesses to Zanzinger’s deed at the white-tie Baltimore Spinsters’ ball. It wasn’t a whodunit. But Zanzinger ended up with only a six-month term in prison for manslaughter. He went on to an appalling life. When he died in 2009, the New York Times obituary recounted Zanzinger’s conviction years later for fraudulently collecting rent from black families “living in shanties he no longer owned,” shanties that “lacked running water, toilets or outhouses.” He paid a $62,000 fine and had to spend two nights in jail for an 18-month suspended sentence. That was in 1991.
One other detail that bears recalling: Zanzinger harbored bitterness toward Dylan for immortalizing his crime in a song. The Times reported Zanzinger telling a biographer of Dylan, “I should have sued him and put him in jail,” presumably for the songwriter’s altering a few details that intensified Zanzinger’s villainy.
So is Zimmerman the new Zanzinger? Zimmerman is reportedly suing NBC for doctoring a tape of his 911 call to make it sound like he was racially profiling Martin. A doctored tape isn’t quite the same as a ballad that seared itself into the memory of a generation. But NBC’s depiction of Zimmerman clearly helped advance the racial narrative of what happened on February 26, 2012.
I am, incidentally, far from alone in noticing the historical resemblance. As far back as April 2012, bloggers were drawing the comparison.
Path Dependency
If you arrange the keys on a typewriter one way, they remain that way for generations and for new technologies, such as keyboards, no matter the inconvenience. If you set the width of the railroad tracks at a specific gauge, it too will remain that way seemingly forever. Economists call this “path dependency.” Initial decisions, sometimes intended just as improvised answers to a situation, tend to stay with us.
That can happen with misinformation too. In the early hours of a story, reporters often get things wrong. NPR did a telling round-up of the misinformation reported as news in the early hours following the Newtown shootings. Some of those misstatements are still in circulation.
One of the misstatements in the Trayvon Martin case wasn’t actually a statement at all. It was the picture of the 17-year-old Martin as a twelve-year-old, which was widely circulated and heightened the sense that Zimmerman had murdered an innocent child. But the most consequential mistake was the report that Zimmerman was “white.” This became amended over time to “white Hispanic,” but the truth was more complicated. Zimmerman is of mixed race, and was raised in a household that included two African-American girls. This had no bearing on the question of whether he had committed a crime in connection with Martin’s death but it has a great deal of bearing on the aptness of the narrative presented by Burnham, Potter, Goodwin, Dennis, Kelley and so many others. In that narrative Zimmerman was “white,” or as Goodwin puts it, a person who “identifies as white,” and that identification was crucial to turning the story into an allegory of racial injustice in modern America.
Anger
The Trayvon Martin story has one other crucial element: it is a story meant to inflame. Indignation is a worthy response to real injustice, but indignation can also be a force in its own right. Anger feels empowering, and it can become a kind of mob rule of the emotions over our better judgment. Several years ago I wrote a book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, about our cultural shift from the slow burn to the fast fuse. We Americans over the last half century gradually relinquished our sense that real strength lies in self-control and that anger has to be governed. Instead we became convinced that repressing anger is psychologically damaging and letting it out is empowering. Vituperative anger became not only destigmatized but admired and celebrated.
In a sense, we now wait around for opportunities to get angry and we have supplied ourselves with an arsenal of occasions in which we are licensed to let loose. Righteous indignation over racial injustice is near the top of the list.
This applies in nearly all contexts of American life, but higher education holds a special place in that arsenal. Our colleges and universities are the nation’s primary font for racial ressentiment. The American college campus is the place where we accentuate racial division as a matter of policy via preferences in admissions, organization of students into grievance-based groups, and curricula that foreground the narrative of racial oppression as the central story of American history. In this environment, the need to stoke grievance is never-ending, and the opportunity to turn tragic events into fodder for protest is almost irresistible.
While many have complained that President Obama, the New York Times, and the mainstream media overall have fed the outrage over Zimmerman, the racializing of the Martin killing has deeper roots in academe. After all, President Obama’s own career was in substantial part formed in the context of university-based racial grievance. We had a good reminder of that in March 2012, when some videos of Obama as a Harvard Law student in 1991 came to light, showing him speaking at a rally in support of Derrick Bell, the bombastic law school professor who invented “critical race theory.” And our media are saturated with graduates of college programs who have been thoroughly schooled in the America-is-racist doctrine. The Daily News ran as a cover story a picture of a black hoodie, with a list of black men murdered before Trayvon Martin culminating in the question, “When will it end?” It is the right question, but not as the Daily News intended it.
So the anger-is-empowering theme and the readiness to grab hold of an event and fit it to the anger narrative is in great part a university invention, supported by a substantial portion of the professoriate who have little to offer other than their commitment to keeping the pot on boil.
The Greater Outrage
But let’s not leave it there. I am thankful for the discernment of the jurors in Florida who heard the case. They saw that the story presented by the prosecution was a very poor match for the evidence. The events of that night in February 2012 remain murky in many details. We ought to grieve that a young man was killed, but that grief shouldn’t be out of proportion with the broader problem. As Will Allen mentioned in the National Review, there were 61 murders in Chicago alone during the Zimmerman trial, 52 of the victims were black, and 43 of them black males. Most died of gunshot wounds. Their lives were no less precious than Martin’s. But their deaths occasioned none of the attention and none of the outrage. The problem is basically that these murders do not fit the narrative of racial injustice. The Bureau of Justice’s special report in 2007 estimated that 93 percent of the murders of black men were committed by other black men.
The carnage is real and our justice system seems poorly equipped to do anything about it. This is something that scholars and teachers should address. Holding rallies to protest the Zimmerman verdict and competing to see who can express the greatest outrage does nothing to cut the rate at which black men die of bullet wounds. Rather the academic eagerness to advance the racist-white-on-innocent-black narrative of the Martin shooting simply exacerbates the nation’s racial divisions. We can do better.
This article originally appeared on Minding the Campus on July 23, 2013.
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Black Victims of Violent Crime
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/24/first-look-heres-the-family-rescued-by-george-zimmerman-that-is-apparently-afraid-for-their-lives/
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Liberal media love new Jesus book 'Zealot', fail to mention author is Muslim
By John S. Dickerson
Published July 24, 2013
FoxNews.com
Zealot
Reza Aslan, author of the new book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” has been interviewed on a host of media outlets in the last week. Riding a publicity wave, the book has surged to #2 on Amazon's list.
Media reports have introduced Aslan as a “religion scholar” but have failed to mention that he is a devout Muslim.
His book is not a historian’s report on Jesus. It is an educated Muslim’s opinion about Jesus -- yet the book is being peddled as objective history on national TV and radio.
“Zealot” is a fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs that Christianity has taught about Jesus for 2,000 years.
Aslan is not a trained historian. Like tens of thousands of us he has been formally educated in theology and New Testament Greek.
He is a bright man with every right to hold his own opinion about Jesus—and to proselytize his opinion.
As a sincere man, Aslan’s Muslim beliefs affect his entire life, including his conclusions about Jesus. But this is not being disclosed. “Zealot” is being presented as objective and scholarly history, not as it actually is—an educated Muslim’s opinions about Jesus and the ancient Near East.
“Zealot” is a fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs that Christianity has taught about Jesus for 2,000 years. Its conclusions are long-held Islamic claims—namely, that Jesus was a zealous prophet type who didn’t claim to be God, that Christians have misunderstood him, and that the Christian Gospels are not the actual words or life of Jesus but “myth.”
These claims are not new or unique. They are hundreds of years old among Muslims. Sadly, readers who have listened to interviews on NPR, "The Daily Show," Huffington Post or MSNBC may pick up the book expecting an unbiased and historic report on Jesus and first century Jewish culture. (I will let my Jewish friends address Aslan’s statement on MSNBC that, “there were certainly a lot of Jewish terrorists in first century Palestine.”)
As a journalist and author who is Christian I cannot imagine penning a so-called objective biography of Muhammad and then concealing my conflict of interest in national media interviews.
In world history there are no religions more violently and anciently opposed than the crusading, fighting, at times blood-shedding rivals of historic Islam and historic Christianity. Even non-violent Muslims and Christians, like Aslan and myself, understand that we hold aggressively oppositional views—particularly about Jesus. National news coverage of “Zealot” has ignored this conflict of interest.
“Zealot” is written with the self-assumed authority of groundbreaking revelation from a historian. In reality, it is a religious person’s opinion about Jesus—from an adherent to the religion that has been in violent opposition to Christ for 1,400 years.
Aslan informs us that we cannot trust the Gospel of Mark--because it was written 40 years after Jesus’ death. He then chides us to trust his new book, written almost 2,000 years later.
I believe in Aslan’s right to hold and propagate any opinion. It’s a right that, ironically, Christians do not have in many Muslim countries.
My concern is that national media coverage be smart and forthright about this conflict of interest, just as it would be if I—a Christian author and pastor—wrote a book about Muhammad.
Pouring praise onto “Zealot” as new information about Jesus, without explaining its author’s devotion to a combatting religion, is blatant bias. This same bias would be unthinkable if the Christian and Muslim roles were reversed.
With its riveting demolition of Jesus, “Zealot” will continue to attract interviews—some from reporters who want to see Jesus deconstructed. Many more interviews will come from reporters who simply don’t understand that Reza Aslan has a horse in this race. He is not an objective observer, but, to use his own word, a zealot, with religious motivation to destroy what Western culture has believed about its central figure for hundreds of years. In many ways, this conflict is larger than Christianity and Islam. It is a conflict of Western and Middle Eastern foundations. These are great and important debates that we should welcome, but let’s be honest about our motivations, positions and conflicts of interest as we dialogue.
Let’s hope reporters in future interviews will, being informed, mention the glaring conflict of interest in this Islamic opinion of Jesus. It is no more objective than my educated views about Muhammad, as a Christian.
“Zealot” is not new work from a historian. It is a sophisticated presentation of views that Muslims have held about Jesus for more than 1,000 years.
John S. Dickerson is author of the book “The Great Evangelical Recession: 6 Factors that Will Crash the American Church…and How to Prepare” and senior pastor of Cornerstone in Prescott, Arizona. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter @JohnSDickerson.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/22/liberal-media-love-new-jesus-book-zealot-fail-to-mention-author-is-muslim/#ixzz2a4Dpe2Xw
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Very interesting, but perhaps better in the Religion thread. What does the book actually say?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/willie-reed-who-risked-his-life-to-testify-in-the-emmett-till-murder-trial-dies-at-76/2013/07/24/ddfe67e0-f2e5-11e2-bdae-0d1f78989e8a_story.html
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/willie-reed-who-risked-his-life-to-testify-in-the-emmett-till-murder-trial-dies-at-76/2013/07/24/ddfe67e0-f2e5-11e2-bdae-0d1f78989e8a_story.html
Respectfully, I am not sure that this belongs in a "discrimination" thread. I'd say the discrimination was quite real.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/willie-reed-who-risked-his-life-to-testify-in-the-emmett-till-murder-trial-dies-at-76/2013/07/24/ddfe67e0-f2e5-11e2-bdae-0d1f78989e8a_story.html
Respectfully, I am not sure that this belongs in a "discrimination" thread. I'd say the discrimination was quite real.
Good point.
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Which is way I just modified the name of this thread.
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Thank you, sir.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I9yK-DyTrRM
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http://gawker.com/just-so-nobody-gets-the-wrong-idea-i-should-probably-s-955988817
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Moving Walter's post to here:
http://www.upworthy.com/know-anyone-that-thinks-racial-profiling-is-exaggerated-watch-this-and-tell-me-when-your-jaw-drops-2
Hello group,
The nation entered into a brief discussion about race as a by-product of the not guilty verdict the jury rendered in the George Zimmerman murder trial.
I believe that race is ubiquitously woven into American society; a thorough discussion about race is needed. I contend that any discussion about race in the immediate aftermath of an emotionally charged trial is the wrong time to explore the topic. A more productive way would be to build up to specifics after engaging in a broad based dialogue.
That said, the above link accesses a video in which a social experiment takes place. Please ignore the headline which slants perception.
Question:
How does one account of the disparity in treatment received by the various individuals attempting to compromise the bike lock and thus take possession of the bike?
Thank you,
Walter
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If we are to consider it an experiment, isn't there more we should know? For example, how many hours of footage were taken? What ended up on the cutting room floor ? Why was this location chosen? What are the demographics of this area? What are the crime rates in this geographical area?
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GM:
I'm familiar with this show, whose values are definitely progressive. I would not rule out the possibility of selective editing to serve the progressive agenda (see e.g. http://nationalreview.com/article/354794/bending-trayvon-martin-tragedy-fit-jonah-goldberg ) , but if I read between the lines correctly the last three of your questions imply the validity of racial profiling. In that the segment purports to establish the existence of racial profiling, in a sense can we say that you and Walter are in agreement?
Even allowing for the possibility of selective editing, the existence of ANY footage wherein various people flagrantly let the white guy slide in his open declarations of thievery is pretty fg remarkable.
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Validity of racial profiling? A friend once worked for the NYPD in a very high crime pct. in N. Brooklyn. The area was demographically black/hispanic. As the area was a center of large scale drug trafficing, white guys were noted and contacted quite aggressively as small time dealers from LI or Jersey could buy at a price that would be very profitable.
Would that be a valid tactic or not?
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Walter, Welcome! Very interesting video. Even though it is a dramatization on the part of the 3 actors, it is quite remarkable. It raises a number of different questions. GM hit one; how many takes or different looks did it take to get that footage. I assume there is truth potrayed here even though the show was very possibly fishing for this result. It is interesting that the black woman makes the most race pre-judging comment, saying it isn't common that a white guy would be carrying burglary tools.
To me, the woman stealing and the white guy looked like actors in a joke or stunt. None of it looked much like a real crime in process although the black actor seemed to be the most convincing. Was that because of race only? I don't know. What is strange is not people discovering and confronting him for stealing in broad daylight; everything he says and does indicates he is stealing the bike. The strange part is the disbelief that the other actors could be stealing.
Of course there is a race perception element in this, and people pre-judge based on how each looks. From there, then what? Does that stereotype fit real data, is it imagined or is it both? Is it fair? My guess is that most bike thieves are white, that most black guys are not thieves of any kind and judging them on looks is totally unfair, but the likelihood of a young black man going into crime in America I would guess is higher than for other races, based on circumstances in my opinion, not based on race.
Walter, what are your comments on what we saw in the video?
Here is a different test:
http://www.wallettest.com/Lost_Wallet_Test/Results_Page.html
They go further into measuring age and gender. In both cases, these are not large sample sizes or impressive or sufficient controls on the experiment.
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This isn't a numbers trick. This isn't a rate based on the whole black teen population in the country. This is the proportion of the black teen population that is looking for work but can't find a job.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/02/Black-Teen-Unemployment-rate-is-416
I would like to know what part of this is because of our bad economic policies and what part of this is from perceptions portrayed in the video.
My only data point is the teenager in this family who is making more than twice the minimum wage at her day job, added an evening job, has all the hours she can handle and turned down other job offers this summer.
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I believe that would fit in the racial profiling arena. Here, race is the secondary issue. The illegal activity is the primary issue. One would argue that a white person would not be in the area unless he/she is purchasing drugs. It is sort of a scenic route approach to the issue but it still fits.
I think a more comparable example of racial profiling would be if a white male wlaking down a street in a black neighborhood would be assumed to be doing something illegal just because he is alone
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Which reminds me of the Lou Reed/Velvet Underground song "I'm just waiting for my man"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hugY9CwhfzE
When I walked alone in Harlem it was often assumed
a) I was looking to score drugs
b) I was a cop
Actually I was going to a jazz club. :-D
But this may be a tangent to the point Walter is looking to develop :-)
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Walter has emailed me the following for me to post:
Marc,
I must clearly be having issues as I keep losing the post and now my reply to your response. Even though I am having difficulties, I wanted to express this now.
Upon further cogitating, I believe that your analogous is an example of discrimination, not profiling. Profiling is using race as a vehicle to determine likelihood of one committing a crime, a certain act or behavior-stereotyping.
In your example, the crime, as I understood it, was purchasing drugs. the racial makeup of the people was the criteria used to arrest-discriminatory in nature.
Walter
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Walter:
Fair enough about "discrimination" and "profiling". Anyway, back to the video clip from the TV show that you posted-- please share with us what you get from this and/or wish us to get?
Separately, this is rather funny:
http://www.upworthy.com/dear-white-people-could-you-please-do-something-about-your-scarier-white-people-2?g=2&c=ufb1
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Walter:
Fair enough about "discrimination" and "profiling". Anyway, back to the video clip from the TV show that you posted-- please share with us what you get from this and/or wish us to get?
Separately, this is rather funny:
http://www.upworthy.com/dear-white-people-could-you-please-do-something-about-your-scarier-white-people-2?g=2&c=ufb1
Funny video, there are obvious profound differences. No "white leader" will step forward to explain how social inequalities and oppression are responsible for the thuggish behavior of SoCal surfers, or demand million of dollars for outreach programs to work with the surfer community. I also don't see masses of white people marching, blaming the decades of police abuse for the surfer riot or demanding the officers that arrested the surfers and the HB chief of police be fired.
Maybe I missed that.
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Of course, bright fellow that you are, you also know the differences the the respective histories of the two groups , , ,
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Of course, bright fellow that you are, you also know the differences the the respective histories of the two groups , , ,
How is that relevant in 2013? We have a black president, black attorney general, both of whom love to play the race card. MLK didn't dream of black race baiters rising to power. When I worked with juvenile offenders, who were of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds, I told them "A traumatic childhood isn't a hunting license for the rest of humanity".
The point being that "We are depraved because we are deprived" is garbage. When the racial industrial complex tries to turn a thug rightfully getting shot into a victim and tries to pretend that America in 2013 is Mississippi in 1953, they cheapen the real victims and the real injustices from that time.
Sorry, the race/victim card is max'ed out. 60 years ago, black America's biggest problem was white America. Today, black America's biggest problem is black America. Projecting one's problems outward is always easier rather that looking hard in the mirror.
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C'mon Black America, We Can Do So Much Better!
By Lloyd Marcus
Someone sent me the link to this article, and I could hardly believe what I read. Folks, this is just too crazy for words. Forty-year-old Tawana Brawley was recently celebrated, treated as a rock star at a New Jersey fundraiser.
This article about people awarding Brawley sainthood is a hoax, right? C'mon, am I on Candid Camera or being "punked," as they say today?
Have the event organizers completely lost their minds? Are their brains so infected with the putrid pus of racial hatred that they have lost all sense of a moral compass?
For those of you unaware, Tawana Brawley committed an evil hoax which sparked a national racial firestorm in 1987.
Fearful of being punished for staying out overnight, Brawley, then 15, lied, saying 6 white men, including state officials, kidnapped her, raped her, used charcoal to cover her body with racial epithets, and smeared her with feces.
Al Sharpton was the spokesperson for Brawley's family. Sharpton ran to microphones and blasted white America with both barrels.
Even when the truth was revealed and defendants sued and won, Sharpton never backed down from Brawley's lie, nor has he apologized to this day. Sharpton and Brawley's two attorneys were ordered to pay $345,000 in damages.
So why after 25 years would the event organizers rewrite history, turning this sinner into a saint, praising her for surviving society's "lies since 1987"? What on earth were they thinking? Brawley lied! The white guys she lied on got paid. Are these people living in a parallel universe or what?
The emcee for the Bizarro-World love-fest event for Brawley was former City College professor Leonard Jeffries. He has said "rich Jews" financed the slave trade and that whites are violent, cruel "ice people." Folks, the fact that this racist nutty professor has had access to the impressionable minds of our youths terrifies and angers me.
And yet, Jeffries's ilk dominate campuses across America.
Now get this, folks: proceeds from the $50-a-person fundraiser went to a kid's camp. What the heck did the organizers tell the kids about their keynote?
See, kids, you too can concoct a vile lie smearing innocent people and then grow up and be treated like royalty.
With all the brilliant, honorable blacks out there who should be held high as inspirational role models, why in heaven's name would the event organizers select Tawana "Lying Hoaxter" Brawley? Lord help us.
Since the election of Obama, millions of blacks have embraced a brain-dead mindset fueled by racism -- by loyalty to skin-color. If Obama announced that he is the spawn of Satan, blacks would still call all who oppose his agenda racist. And no, I am not saying Obama is a devil.
Folks, as a proud American who happens to be black, the insane "race trumps everything" thinking prevalent in the black community continues to amaze, sadden, and frustrate me. You are probably as sick of reading my articles about this topic as I am of writing them. Still, I feel compelled to shine the light of truth -- a voice crying in the wilderness.
Black so-called civil rights leaders and white liberals in the media celebrate the bottom of the barrel: ignorant, violent, woman-disrespecting black rappers and thugs. Meanwhile, they throw away the cream of the crop: self-reliant, non-whiny, successful blacks.
And whom has the Race Exploitation Industry and mainstream media chosen to elevate to black icon status? Tawana Brawley, Rachel Jeantel (19 years old and still in high school) and thug Trayvon Martin. Though his death was extremely tragic, unarguably Martin was a thug.
Speaking of the having the putrid pus of racial hatred on the brain, black Chicago Rep. Monique Davis suggested that the reports of epidemic black on black murders in Chicago are really a cover-up for white cops killing young black men. Good grief!
Black America, why are you allowing such insanely hateful racist people to speak for you? Rep. Davis's thinking is typical of the CBC and NAACP. Thus, I would never give a dime of financial support to either race exploitation group. While Davis and her ilk continue to blame whites and make excuses, black America is swiftly going down the toilet.
Equally frustrating is black America's willingness to lay down their morals, values, and ability to reason at the feet of Obama in worship simply because he is black.
Frankly, I am sick of liberals, black and white, feeding black America excrement while calling it filet mignon. Black America, please, please, please stop eating it!
C'mon black America, we are and can do so much better.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/cmon_black_america_we_can_do_so_much_better.html
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Thanks for the refresher on that GM. Would you be so kind as to bring your google fu to bear on Sharpton's demagoguery in , , , I want to say "Crown Heights" or something like that-- there was a car-pedestrian accident where the driver was Jewish and the pedestrian was black and the way I remember it Sharpton said some pogrom provoking things that were part of setting off some nasty anti-semitic rioting , , ,
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An author Walter pointed us to made a point that there is no such thing as black on black crime. Though the numbers seem to prove him wrong, I believe he is right. Those crimes were about crime, not about race. It is analysts and people with an agenda who inject race into that crime statistic, not the criminal or the victim. Race may correlate but race is not the cause or any part of those crimes in my view.
Within America there is an underclass that feels a sense of worthlessness. My grandfather used to say that poor people have poor ways. The converse is that to succeed one should emulate the good and productive qualities of successful people. For example, go as far as you can with your education, work hard, work smart, marry for life, marry before you start a family, save, invest, pay your bills, keep your promises, take pride in your home and your neighborhood, take responsibility for yourself and your family, etc. There is a culture in the underclass of America that is doing exactly the opposite. My view is this is perpetuated and exacerbated by the enormity of the welfare state.
Within America's inner city and in plenty of other locations this underclass lives outside of our productive economy. When responsibility and self-worth are absent, idle time and a propensity to be broke, commit crimes, be evicted etc take the place of productive and healthy activities.
The problems in 'black America' are not racial. Too many people happen to be black within the underclass, but it is quite easy to show that these problems are cultural, not racial. Just look at the exceptions. Any black who follows the path of success is successful, while any person of any race who follows the path of failure, realizes failure.
We need to tell people at every step along the way that they have choices. These so-called black leaders are doing exactly the opposite in my view.
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You do have a good point about the underclass, Doug.
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http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2012/03/when-al-sharpton-incited-massacre-at.html
When Al Sharpton Incited a Massacre at Freddy's Fashion Mart
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KV5uyXEwnE0/T3MR6g51znI/AAAAAAAAJzg/cnKhZq2Aapg/s400/freddy-s-not-dead.1944125.40.jpg)
Angelina Marrero . . . Cynthia Martinez . . . Luz Ramos . . . Mayra Rentas . . . Olga Garcia . . . Garnette Ramautar . . . Kareem Brunner their names will forever be remembered as the seven victims of the massacre at Freddy's Fashion Mart. Their deaths can be traced to the racial incitement of one man.. the faux Reverend Al Sharpton.
It all started as a rent dispute in the summer of 1995:
The United House of Prayer, a large African-American church was also a major landlord in Harlem. They raised the rent Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store which had operated from the same Harlem location for over 40 years. In turn Freddy's had to raise the rent on its sub-tenant, a black-owned record store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensued. As he has done so often in his life, Al Sharpton turned this non-racial economic dispute into a racial conflict.
The Sharpton-led protests began in August and came to a head on the morning of Friday, December 8th when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of the Sharpton's protests, walked into Freddy's Fashion Mart, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire -- a fire that resulted in killing 7 people plus Smith. The only African American left in the story was Freddy's security guard Kareem Brunner, 22-years-old, who was ordered to stay by the mass murderer Smith.
At the time the faux-preacher claimed he wasn't involved in the protests, he was only there to mediate. He also claimed there was no Antisemitism involved in the protests, but he has been proven to be a liar.
Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes of several of Sharpton's weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor's Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy's. Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.
"We are going to see that this cracker suffers," Powell is heard telling a crowd in one broadcast on Aug. 19.
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ohQnTzKZm7o/T3MSC9vVmlI/AAAAAAAAJzo/J8XIfmNjVPU/s400/freddys_fire.jpg)
"Reverend Sharpton is on it. We have made contact with these crackers. We don't expect a lot out of them. They haven't seen how we feel about anything yet. We are going to show them." He also said
They think they gonna drive this man out of business, they gotta be out of their minds. We are not gonna stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in Black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street. If we stand for that, we'll stand for anything. Which we've been doing.
At a rally was recorded on Sept. 9, Mr. Sharpton is heard telling a crowd:
"I want to make it clear to the radio audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.
Ironically Sharpton was the interloper, he was living in Hollis Queens at around the time Freddy's opened in Harlem and living in New Jersey when Freddy's was burned down. When other white-owned businesses fled the neighborhood as the population became more African-American, Fred Harari the owner of Freddy's continued to serve the neighborhood.
On an October 21st broadcast Norman "Granddad" Reide said:
I am saying to the Jewish community and specifically to Abraham Foxman, that you come out and utter a word, accusatory remark against Reverend Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Donna Wilson, Reverend Shields, or Gary Byrd, we will boycott you and nobody loves money any more than the Jewish people. Thank you.
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dDCU8ea-zE0/T3MSS4Cp_5I/AAAAAAAAJ0A/dLbyTRNYJPM/s400/obamasharpton.jpg)
In court papers filed the day before the fire, Harari and two employees described weeks of protests outside the clothing store in which demonstrators threatened employees, hurled obscenities at "bloodsucking Jews" and talked of burning down the store.
Aftermath
Sharpton, the professional bigot criticized NYPD investigators for quickly linking the fire to the protesters. But the police evidence and the tapes from the Jewish Alliance proved him to be a liar. After first telling the press "What's wrong with calling someone a white interloper?" he apologized for using that term. He never apologized for the Jew-hatred broadcast on his radio shows and spoken at the rallies he helped to organize. He continues to deny that the rallies had anything to do with the firebombing
Of course Sharpton never apologized for Tawana Brawley or slandering DA Pagones by with the unfounded charge that Pagones was the rapist,
“I did what I believed….They are asking me to grovel. They want black children to say they forced a black man coming out of the hard-core ghetto to his knees….Once you begin bending, it’s ‘did you bend today?’ or ‘I missed the apology, say it again.’ Once you start compromising, you lose respect for yourself.”
..nor did he apologize for saying the "Central Park Jogger" was raped by her boyfriend and leading demonstrations calling the woman who was raped and beaten to within a hair of death a whore...
...and he certainly never apologized for the anti-Semitic Pogrom he led at Crown Heights.
Al Sharpton is a Baptist Minister who regularly breaks the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, he has incited riots which have lead to the deaths of innocents. A real preacher would not have incited violence but called for peace. A real preacher would have waited for the truth before he incited and a real preacher would have apologized when he wrongly accused people...none of which Al Sharpton has done.
Sharpton's real business isn't preaching, his real business is being a professional agitator. In the end just like a TV detergent, Al Sharpton is selling a product...Al Sharpton. And he has been rewarded for his efforts with an undeserved halo of respectability by the press, by MSNBC, and by the President of the United States.
As you read, watch or hear the news reports about Sharpton's protests with the Trayvon Martin family, understand this context. Sharpton couldn't give a rat's ass about Travyon, his grieving family or improving the lives of African Americans in this country. He is only concerned with selling his product.
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http://www.thejewishstar.com/stories/Recalling-Al-Sharptons-role-in-1991-Crown-Heights-riots,4242
Recalling Al Sharpton’s role in 1991 Crown Heights riots
Photo by Christian Razukas / Wikipedia Commons
Al Sharpton led marches through Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood after the 1989 stabbing death of Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black youth. Sharpton himself survived being stabbed in Bensonhurst in 1991.
Commentary by Jeff Dunetz
Al Sharpton’s incitement of anger and violence in the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman case recalls what he did in Crown Heights.
Twenty-two years ago, a tragic car accident in that Brooklyn neighborhood escalated into a pogrom against the Jewish people. The media gives it a politically correct description — violence between the area’s blacks and Jews. But the violence was not two-sided, it was an attack on the Jews by the neighborhood’s Caribbean community, fueled in part by Al Sharpton, now an MSNBC host and adviser to President Obama.
Black anti-Semitism in 1991
Jews were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous march to Selma, Alabama, he walked hand in hand with many Jews including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Along with the Jews was a contingent of Torahs to emphasize that the quest for Civil Rights was a holy mission for the Jewish people.
In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the civil rights movement, the transformation from the peaceful marches to black power movement introduced considerable friction into African American-Jewish relations, especially within the “Black Muslim” movement.
During the 1970s and 1980s, African-Americans stopped looking at Jews as their allies but rather as their oppressors. Jews were seen as having the political power that African-Americans desired; such black leaders as Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson went public with anti-Semitic comments.
Adding to the hatred were leaders of the South African anti-Apartheid movement who toured the United States as conquering heroes, spreading Jew-hatred. In 1984, Desmond Tutu publicly complained about American Jews having “an arrogance — the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.
Understandably, Jewish-Black relations were already rocky as New York entered the summer of 1991.On July 20, 1991, Leonard Jeffries of City College, who had a history of anti-Semitic slurs, presented a two-hour long speech claiming “rich Jews” financed the slave trade, and that Jews control the film industry (together with Italian mafia) and use that control to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. Jeffries also attacked Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education, calling her a “sophisticated Texas Jew,” “a debonair racist” and “Miss Daisy.”
Jeffries’ speech received enormous negative press during the first weeks of August, especially from the leaders of the Jewish community who wanted Jeffries fired for the bigotry.
With each new criticism of the professor, leaders in the African-American community rushed to Jeffries’ defense. The city’s two black newspapers as well as black radio station WLIB; joined activists such Al Sharpton, Colin Moore, C. Vernon Mason, Sonny Carson, and Lenora Fulani to showcase their approval of Jeffries’s “scholarship” and to denounce the people who criticized Jeffries anti-Semitism as race baiters.
Serial race-baiter Al Sharpton is credited with saying, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house,” as a response the Crown Heights riot. That is a fallacy; he made that threatening comment to the Jewish community about the growing Jeffries controversy on Aug. 18, the day before the riots began. Clearly something bad was coming.
Jeffries was fired because of his bigoted speech and pressure from the Jewish community (he was later reinstated and won a court case surrounding his firing) leading to further resentment of the Jews from a black community already being barraged with anti-Jewish incitement from the African-American media.
Crown Heights ignites
On Monday Aug. 19, a station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh, hit another car and bounced onto the sidewalk at 8:21 p.m. The station wagon was part of a three-car motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. The Rebbe was in a different car.The station wagon struck two black children, 7-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela Cato who were on the sidewalk. Lifsh immediately got out of his car and tried to help the children gathering crowd started to attack him.
Within minutes, an ambulance from the Hasidic-run ambulance service, and two from the city’s Emergency Medical Service arrived. Meanwhile, the gathering crowd became unruly. The police who showed up radioed for backup, reporting the station wagon’s driver and passengers were being assaulted. Police officer Nona Capace ordered the Hasidic ambulance to remove the battered Yosef Lifsh and his passenger from the scene.
The injured children went by separate city ambulances to Kings County Hospital. Gavin Cato was pronounced dead; his cousin survived.
A rumor began to spread that the Hasidic ambulance crew had ignored the dying black child in favor of treating the Jewish men. This falsehood was later used by Al Sharpton to incite the crowd. Other rumors sprang up — Lifsh was intoxicated (breath alcohol test administered by the police proved his sobriety). More falsehoods circulated — Lifsh did not have a valid driver’s license; he went through a red light; the police prevented people, including Gavin Cato’s father, from assisting in the rescue.
Charles Price, an area resident who had come to the scene of the accident, incited the masses with claims that, “The Jews get everything they want. They’re killing our children.” Price later pled guilty for inciting the crowd to murder Yankel Rosenbaum.
Ignited by the falsehoods, resentment exploded into violence. Groups of young black men threw rocks, bottles and debris at police, residents and homes.
According to the New York Times, more than 250 neighborhood residents went on a rampage that first night, mostly black teenagers, many of whom were shouting “Jews! Jews! Jews!”Three hours after the tragic crash, 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked by a gang of black teens. He was stabbed four times. Cops quickly arrested Lemrick Nelson, who was identified by Rosenbaum as his attacker. Rosenbaum’s wounds were not fatal he was expected to recover; Mayor Dinkins visited Rosenbaum at the hospital. Yankel died at 2:30am Tuesday because the hospital staff missed one of his knife wounds.
The next evening, according to the sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, Sharpton started agitating the crowd.
“Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”
With each passing hour the violence worsened, Jewish leaders began to desperately complain about the lack of protection to the authorities. The rioters were being allowed to rampage unchecked, too little force was being brought to bear, and too few arrests were being made, they said. Area Jews felt the police were under orders by the city’s first black mayor to hold back, that the police were not allowed to fight against the black rioters, who continued to grow bolder in their anti-Semitic attack as they sensed the appeasement.
The fact is Mayor David Dinkins responded to the riot immediately by deploying 2,000 police officers and making a personal visit to the troubled neighborhood under a hail of rocks and epithets hurled at him by fellow blacks.
Dinkins has spoken of his own mishandling of the riots. Admitting he “screwed up Crown Heights.”
“I regret not saying to the police brass sooner ‘whatever you guys are doing is not working’ — it was then they altered their behavior and they were able to containe the ravaging young blacks who were attacking Jews. … I will forever be accused of holding back the police and permitted blacks to attack Jews, however that did not happen, it is just inaccurate.”In all, the street violence against the Crown Heights Jews lasted three days / four nights starting with the evening of the accident. On Thursday evening, cops finally restored order, although sporadic violence against Jews continued for weeks after the riot was contained.
Yankel Rosenbaum wasn’t the only person murdered by the rioters. On Sept. 5, Anthony Graziosi, an Italian-American was dragged out of his car, brutally beaten and stabbed to death because his full beard and dark clothing caused him to be mistaken for a Hasidic Jew.
During the funeral of Gavin Cato on Aug. 26, Al Sharpton gave an anti-Semitic eulogy, which fueled the fires of hatred.
“The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. ... It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. ...
“All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’. Pay for your deeds.”
Regarding the Mayor’s call for peace Sharpton pontificated: “They don’t want peace, they want quiet.”
Sharpton and the lawyer representing the Cato family counseled them not to cooperate with authorities in the investigation and demanded a special prosecutor be named.
When Sharpton was asked about the violence, he justified it:
“We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”
The first Sabbath after the funeral, Sharpton tried unsuccessfully to kick up tensions again by marching 400 protesters in front of the Lubavitch of Crown Heights shouting “No Justice, No Peace.”
Sharpton called for the arrest of Lifsh, the driver of the station wagon. Even though more than 20 similarly accidental vehicular deaths had occurred in Brooklyn since 1989 without a single arrest — several involving local Hasidim run down by blacks. The agitator’s pressure led Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes into convening a grand jury.When the investigation of the accident did not produce a criminal indictment against Yosef Lifsh, Sharpton encouraged the Cato family to seek big-bucks damages in a civil suit against Lifsh (who had since fled to Israel for his own safety). Sharpton announced that he would personally serve papers on Yosef Lifsh in Israel. He bought tickets and hopped an El-Al flight on the weekend of Yom Kippur.
At Ben Gurion Airport, a woman spotted Sharpton hailing a cab and yelled to him, “Go to hell! “I am in hell already,” shot back. “I am in Israel.”
The aftermath
Sharpton abandoned the Caribbean people of Crown Heights as soon as the anti-Semitic violence died down. His entire participation in the violence may have been a calculated effort to usurp Jesse Jackson as the leading spokesman for African-Americans. Jackson may have had his “Hymie-town” but Sharpton’s incitement against those Jews who he perceived as having the political power that African Americans deserved, went much further than simply words like those uttered by Jackson.
Sadly, had Sharpton not exploited the death of Gavin Cato for his own “resume,” what was, by all accounts, a disorganized group of ruffians on the first night of the riot, might well have dissipated the morning after the accident.
The media portrayed the Crown Heights riot as two-sided, promoting the myth that both blacks and Jews were equal in their violence. The violence was a one-sided rampage waged by some of the neighborhood’s 180,000 strong black majority against a Jewish minority of 20,000.
The Crown Heights riot occurred just five months after the infamous Rodney King beating, a disgusting act of police brutality against the African American King which was video-taped and repeated on TV ad nauseum.After the King case, who could believe that blacks in America could ever take over the role of racists? But that is what happened in Crown Heights. Even today the deaths of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum are viewed as some sort of a “tit for tat.” This is a misrepresentation of the facts. Cato’s death was the result of a horrible accident; on the other hand, Rosenbaum was deliberately stabbed four times by an angry mob. Anthony Graziosi’s death has been forgotten perhaps because his death would break some cynical equality of fatality.
Many in the Jewish community felt Mayor Dinkins was complacent in the violence, holding back the police from protecting the Jewish community, but there has never been evidence offered proving that charge.
A more likely explanation for the lack of protection offered to the Hasidic community is a perfect storm of incompetence. An incompetent Police Commissioner Lee Brown was being managed by an incompetent mayor.
Nevertheless the pogrom dealt a death blow to Dinkins’ mayoral career. Ironically, it was the fact that Jews had voted for him in overwhelming numbers that him a narrow victory over Rudy Giuliani in 1989. Those same Jews switched sides, giving Giuliani the win against Dinkins in 1993.
As for Al Sharpton, he went on to lead a second pogrom, in 1995, against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem where seven people were slain.
Now, as an adviser to the Trayvon Martin family, Sharpton is again exploiting the death of a child to incite violence and build his reputation as a “civil rights leader.”
A version of this report appeared in The Jewish Star in 2011, on the 20th anniversary of the riots in Crown Heights.
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_the_myth.html
The Myth of Racial Profiling
Heather Mac Donald
The anti-"racial profiling" juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities. The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. Yet politicians are swarming on board. In February, President George W. Bush joined the rush, declaring portentously: "Racial profiling is wrong, and we will end it in America."
Too bad no one asked President Bush: "What exactly do you mean by 'racial profiling,' and what evidence do you have that it exists?" For the anti-profiling crusaders have created a headlong movement without defining their central term and without providing a shred of credible evidence that "racial profiling" is a widespread police practice.
The ultimate question in the profiling controversy is whether the disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics with law enforcement reflects police racism or the consequences of disproportionate minority crime. Anti-profiling activists hope to make police racism an all but irrebuttable presumption whenever enforcement statistics show high rates of minority stops and arrests. But not so fast.
Two meanings of "racial profiling" intermingle in the activists' rhetoric. What we may call "hard" profiling uses race as the only factor in assessing criminal suspiciousness: an officer sees a black person and, without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons. "Soft" racial profiling is using race as one factor among others in gauging criminal suspiciousness: the highway police, for example, have intelligence that Jamaican drug posses with a fondness for Nissan Pathfinders are transporting marijuana along the northeast corridor. A New Jersey trooper sees a black motorist speeding in a Pathfinder and pulls him over in the hope of finding drugs.
The racial profiling debate focuses primarily on highway stops. The police are pulling over a disproportionate number of minority drivers for traffic offenses, goes the argument, in order to look for drugs. Sure, the driver committed an infraction, but the reason the trooper chose to stop him, rather than the speeder next to him, was his race.
But the profiling critics also fault both the searches that sometimes follow a highway stop and the tactics of urban policing. Any evaluation of the evidence for, and the appropriateness of, the use of race in policing must keep these contexts distinct. Highway stops should almost always be color-blind, I'll argue, but in other policing environments (including highway searches), where an officer has many clues to go on, race may be among them. Ironically, effective urban policing shows that the more additional factors an officer has in his criminal profile, the more valid race becomes—and the less significant, almost to the point of irrelevance.
Before reviewing the evidence that profiling critics offer, recall the demands that the police face every day, far from anti-police agitators and their journalist acolytes.
February 22, 2001, a town-hall meeting at P.S. 153 in Harlem between New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Harlem residents: a woman sarcastically asks Giuliani if police officers downtown are paid more than uptown officers, "because we don't have any quality of life in Harlem, none whatsoever. Drug dealers are allowed to stand out in front of our houses every day, to practically invade us, and nothing's done about it." Another woman complains that dealers are back on the street the day after being arrested, and notes that "addicts are so bold that we have to get off the sidewalk and go around them!" She calls for the declaration of a state of emergency. A man wonders if cop-basher congressman Charles Rangel, present at the meeting, could "endow the police with more power," and suggests that the NYPD coordinate with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the INS, and the IRS to bring order to the streets.
The audience meets Giuliani's assertions that the police have brought crime down sharply in Harlem with hoots of derision. No one mentions "police brutality."
Valentine's Day, 2001, a police-community meeting at Harlem's 28th Precinct: an elegant man in an angora turtleneck, tiny blue glasses, and a shadow of a goatee breaks a local taboo by asking what the precinct is doing "to address dealing on the corners." Most residents shrink from mentioning the problem at precinct meetings for fear of retaliation from dealers. A tense silence falls. The man, a restaurant investor, tells me, "If this was 59th and Park, the police wouldn't allow these individuals to hang out on the corner." He can't understand why there's no "immediate result," if the police have in fact been cracking down on drug-dealing. "I don't think it should be so hard to dismantle," he says impatiently.
February 12, 2001, the fifth floor of a hulking yellow apartment building on Lenox Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn: two officers from the 67th Precinct investigate an anonymous call reporting a group of youths smoking marijuana in the hallway. The boys have disappeared. As officers check the stairwell, a gaunt middle-aged man sporting a wildly patterned black-and-white tie courteously introduces himself as Mr. Johnson, the building superintendent. After slowly bending down to pick up a discarded cigarette butt, he asks politely if anything more can be done about the kids who come from the next building to smoke pot in his hallway.
This is the demand—often angry, sometimes wistful—that urban police forces constantly hear: get rid of the drugs! These recent appeals come after the most successful war on crime that New York City has ever conducted. A decade and a half ago, when drug-related drive-by shootings became epidemic, inner-city residents nationwide were calling even more frantically for protection from drug violence. When New Jersey, a key state on the drug corridor from Central America to New England, sent its state highway troopers to do foot patrols in Camden and Trenton, residents met them with cheers.
In New York, the mayhem eventually led to the development of the Giuliani administration's assertive policing that strives, quite successfully, to prevent crime from happening. Outside of New York, the widespread pleas to stop drug violence led the Drug Enforcement Administration to enlist state highway police in their anti-drug efforts. The DEA and the Customs Service had been using intelligence about drug routes and the typical itineraries of couriers to interdict drugs at airports; now the interdiction war would expand to the nation's highways, the major artery of the cocaine trade.
The DEA taught state troopers some common identifying signs of drug couriers: nervousness; conflicting information about origin and destination cities among vehicle occupants; no luggage for a long trip; lots of cash; lack of a driver's license or insurance; the spare tire in the back seat; rental license plates or plates from key source states like Arizona and New Mexico; loose screws or scratches near a vehicle's hollow spaces, which can be converted to hiding places for drugs and guns. The agency also shared intelligence about the types of cars that couriers favored on certain routes, as well as about the ethnic makeup of drug-trafficking organizations. A typical DEA report from the early 1990s noted that "large-scale interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians, and black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack." The 1999 "Heroin Trends" report out of Newark declared that "predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Mid-levels are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians."
According to the racial profiling crowd, the war on drugs immediately became a war on minorities, on the highways and off. Their alleged evidence for racial profiling comes in two varieties: anecdotal, which is of limited value, and statistical, which on examination proves entirely worthless.
The most notorious racial profiling anecdote may have nothing to do with racial profiling at all. On April 23, 1998, two New Jersey state troopers pulled over a van that they say was traveling at 74 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone on the New Jersey Turnpike. As they approached on foot, the van backed toward them, knocking one trooper down, hitting the patrol car, and then getting sideswiped as it entered the traffic lane still in reverse. The troopers fired 11 rounds at the van, wounding three of the four passengers, two critically.
Attorneys for the van passengers deny that the van was speeding. The only reason the cops pulled it over, critics say, was that its occupants were black and Hispanic.
If the troopers' version of the incident proves true, it is hard to see how racial profiling enters the picture. The van's alleged speed would have legitimately drawn the attention of the police. As for the shooting: whether justified or not, it surely was prompted by the possibly deadly trajectory of the van, not the race of the occupants. Nevertheless, on talk show after talk show, in every newspaper story denouncing racial profiling, the turnpike shooting has come to symbolize the lethal dangers of "driving while black."
Less notoriously, black motorists today almost routinely claim that the only reason they are pulled over for highway stops is their race. Once they are pulled over, they say, they are subject to harassment, including traumatic searches. Some of these tales are undoubtedly true. Without question, there are obnoxious officers out there, and some officers may ignore their training and target minorities. But since the advent of video cameras in patrol cars, installed in the wake of the racial profiling controversy, most charges of police racism, testified to under oath, have been disproved as lies.
The allegation that police systematically single out minorities for unjustified law enforcement ultimately stands or falls on numbers. In suits against police departments across the country, the ACLU and the Justice Department have waved studies aplenty allegedly demonstrating selective enforcement. None of them holds up to scrutiny.
The typical study purports to show that minority motorists are subject to disproportionate traffic stops. Trouble is, no one yet has devised an adequate benchmark against which to measure if police are pulling over, searching, or arresting "too many" blacks and Hispanics. The question must always be: too many compared with what? Even anti-profiling activists generally concede that police pull drivers over for an actual traffic violation, not for no reason whatsoever, so a valid benchmark for stops would be the number of serious traffic violators, not just drivers. If it turns out that minorities tend to drive more recklessly, say, or have more equipment violations, you'd expect them to be subject to more stops. But to benchmark accurately, you'd also need to know the number of miles driven by different racial groups, so that you'd compare stops per man-mile, not just per person. Throw in age demographics as well: if a minority group has more young people—read: immature drivers—than whites do, expect more traffic stops of that group. The final analysis must then compare police deployment patterns with racial driving patterns: if more police are on the road when a higher proportion of blacks are driving—on weekend nights, say—stops of blacks will rise.
No traffic-stop study to date comes near the requisite sophistication. Most simply compare the number of minority stops with some crude population measure, and all contain huge and fatal data gaps. An ACLU analysis of Philadelphia traffic stops, for example, merely used the percentage of blacks in the 1990 census as a benchmark for stops made seven years later. In about half the stops that the ACLU studied, the officer did not record the race of the motorist. The study ignored the rate of traffic violations by race, so its grand conclusion of selective enforcement is meaningless.
Only two studies, both by Temple University social psychologist John Lamberth, have attempted to create a violator benchmark. The ACLU used one to sue, successfully, the Maryland state police; a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey used the other to free 17 accused black drug traffickers. Lamberth alleged that blacks in Maryland and southern New Jersey were stopped at higher rates than their representation in the violator population would seemingly warrant. But he defined violator so broadly—in Maryland, traveling at least one mile, and in New Jersey, traveling at least six miles, over the speed limit—that he included virtually the entire driving population. Lamberth must not have spent much time talking to real cops, for his definition of violator ignores how police actually decide whom to stop. Someone gliding sedately at 56 mph in a 55 mph zone has a radically different chance of being pulled over than someone barreling along at 80. An adequate benchmark must capture the kind of driving likely to draw police attention. Despite his severely flawed methodology, Lamberth is in great demand as a racial profiling guru.
Do minorities commit more of the kinds of traffic violations that police target? This is a taboo question among the racial profiling crowd; to ask it is to reveal one's racism. No one has studied it. But some evidence suggests that it may be the case. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that blacks were 10 percent of drivers nationally, 13 percent of drivers in fatal accidents, and 16 percent of drivers in injury accidents. (Lower rates of seat-belt use may contribute to these numbers.) Random national surveys of drivers on weekend nights in 1973, 1986, and 1996 found that blacks were more likely to fail breathalyzer tests than whites. In Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist fatality rate than whites. Blacks in one New Jersey study were 23 percent of all drivers arrested at the scene of an accident for driving drunk, though only 13.5 percent of highway users. In San Diego, blacks have more accidents than their population figures would predict. Hispanics get in a disproportionate number of accidents nationally.
But though the numbers to date are incapable of telling us anything about racial profiling, that does not mean that it was not going on in some locations, at some times. Hard racial profiling in car stops—pulling over one speeder among many just because he happens to be black or Hispanic—has surely been rare. But conversations with officers in strong interdiction states such as New Jersey suggest that some troopers probably did practice soft racial profiling—pulling someone over because driver and car and direction and number and type of occupants fit the components of a courier profile.
Over time, officers' experience had corroborated the DEA intelligence reports: minorities were carrying most of the drugs. An example of the patterns they noticed: a group of young blacks with North Carolina plates traveling south out of Manhattan's Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey? Good chance they're carrying weapons and drugs, having just made a big buy in the city. Catch them northbound? Good chance they're carrying big money and guns. Some officers inevitably started playing the odds—how many, the numbers cannot yet tell us.
Despite the hue and cry, there is nothing illegal about using race as one factor among others in assessing criminal suspiciousness. Nevertheless, the initial decision to pull a car over should be based almost always on seriousness of traffic violation alone—unless, of course, evidence of other law-breaking, such as drug use, is visible. If the result is that drug couriers assiduously observe the speed limit, fine. But compared with most other policing environments, highways are relatively cueless places. In assessing the potential criminality of a driver speeding along with the pack on an eight-lane highway, an officer normally has much less to work with than on a city street or sidewalk. His locational cues—traveling on an interstate pointed toward a drug market, say—are crude, compared with those in a city, where an officer can ask if this particular block is a drug bazaar. His ability to observe the behavior of a suspect over time is limited by the speed of travel. In such an environment, blacks traveling 78 mph should not face a greater chance of getting pulled over than white speeders just because they are black and happen to be driving a car said to be favored by drug mules.
Soft racial profiling was probably not widespread enough to have influenced traffic-stop rates significantly. Nor will eliminating it quickly change the belief among many blacks that any time they get stopped for a traffic violation, it is because of their race. Nevertheless, state police commanders should eliminate any contribution that soft profiling may make to that perception, unless strong evidence emerges (as it has not so far) that soft profiling has had an extremely high success rate in drug interdiction. Far more is at stake here than the use of race in traffic stops. Specious anti-racial profiling analysis threatens to emasculate policing in areas where drug enforcement is on a far stronger basis.
The most important victory of the anti-racial profiling agitators occurred not on the traffic-stop battlefield, but on the very different terrain of the searches that sometimes follow a stop. And here is where people who care about law enforcement should really start to worry. On April 20, 1999, New Jersey's then-attorney general Peter Verniero issued his "Interim Report of the State Police Review Team Regarding Allegations of Racial Profiling." It was a bombshell, whose repercussions haven't stopped yet.
"The problem of disparate treatment [of blacks] is real, not imagined," the report famously declared. Governor Christine Todd Whitman chimed in: "There is no question that racial profiling exists at some level." The media triumphantly broadcast the findings as conclusive proof of racial profiling not just in the Garden State but nationally. The New York Times started regularly referring to New Jersey's "racial bias" on the highways as incontrovertible fact. Defense attorneys and their clients celebrated as well. "Whenever I have a state police case, I file a suppression motion . . . alleging that the stop was based on color of skin and therefore illegal," a Trenton criminal defense attorney told the New York Times. "And now guess what? The state agrees with me!"
Yet the report's influential analysis is shoddy beyond belief. Contrary to popular perception, Verniero did not reach any conclusions about racial profiling in stops. His finding of "disparate treatment" is based on the percentage of "consent searches" performed on minorities after a stop has occurred. (In a consent search, the motorist agrees to allow the trooper to search his car and person, without a warrant or probable cause.) Between 1994 and 1998, claims the report, 53 percent of consent searches on the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike involved a black person, 21 percent involved whites, and overall, 77 percent involved minorities. But these figures are meaningless, because Verniero does not include racial information about search requests that were denied, and his report mixes stops, searches, and arrests from different time periods.
But most important: Verniero finds culpable racial imbalance in the search figures without suggesting a proper benchmark. He simply assumes that 53 percent black consent searches is too high. Compared with what? If blacks in fact carry drugs at a higher rate than do whites, then this search rate merely reflects good law enforcement. If the police are now to be accused of racism every time that they go where the crime is, that's the end of public safety.
The hue and cry over the alleged New Jersey search rate makes sense only if we assume that drug trafficking is spread evenly across the entire population and that officers are unable to detect the signs of a courier once they have pulled over a car. There are powerful reasons to reject both these assumptions.
Judging by arrest rates, minorities are vastly overrepresented among drug traffickers. Blacks make up over 60 percent of arrests in New Jersey for drugs and weapons, though they are 13.5 percent of the population. Against such a benchmark, the state police search rates look proportionate.
The attorney general's report dismissed this comparison with an argument that has become de rigueur among the anti-racial profiling crowd, even in Congress: the "circularity" argument. Arrest and conviction data for drugs and weapons are virtually meaningless, said Verniero. They tell you nothing about the world and everything about the false stereotypes that guide the police. If the police find more contraband on blacks and Hispanics, that is merely because they are looking harder for it, driven by prejudiced assumptions. If the police were to target whites with as much enforcement zeal, goes this reasoning, they would find comparable levels of criminality. David Harris, a University of Toledo law school professor and the leading expert for the anti-profiling forces, makes this preposterous argument. An enforcement effort directed at 40-year-old white law professors, he assures a Senate subcommittee, would yield noticeable busts. The disproportionate minority arrests then reinforce the initial, racist stereotypes, and the vicious cycle begins all over again—too many minorities arrested, too many whites going free.
The circularity argument is an insult to law enforcement and a prime example of the anti-police advocates' willingness to rewrite reality. Though it is hard to prove a negative—in this case, that there is not a large cadre of white drug lords operating in the inner cities—circumstantial evidence rebuts the activists' insinuation. Between 1976 and 1994, 64 percent of the homicide victims in drug turf wars were black, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of FBI data. Sixty-seven percent of known perpetrators were also black. Likewise, some 60 percent of victims and perpetrators in drug-induced fatal brawls are black. These figures match the roughly 60 percent of drug offenders in state prison who are black. Unless you believe that white traffickers are less violent than black traffickers, the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rate for blacks on drug charges appears consistent with the level of drug activity in the black population. (And were it true that white dealers are less violent, wouldn't we expect police to concentrate their enforcement efforts on the most dangerous parts of the drug trade?)
The notion that there are lots of heavy-duty white dealers sneaking by undetected contradicts the street experience of just about every narcotics cop you will ever talk to—though such anecdotal evidence, of course, would fail to convince the ACLU, convinced as it is of the blinding racism that afflicts most officers. "The hard-core sellers are where the hard-core users are—places like 129th Street in Harlem," observes Patrick Harnett, retired chief of the narcotics division for the NYPD. "It's not white kids from Rockland County who are keeping black sellers in business."
The cops go where the deals are. When white club owners, along with Israelis and Russians, still dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting. Recently, however, big shipments have been going to minority neighborhoods; subsequent arrests will reflect crime intelligence, not racism.
There's not a single narcotics officer who won't freely admit that there are cocaine buys going down in the men's bathrooms of Wall Street investment firms—though at a small fraction of the amount found on 129th Street. But that is not where community outrage, such as that Mayor Giuliani heard in Harlem, is directing the police, because they don't produce violence and street intimidation.
Ultimately, the circularity argument rests on a massive denial of reality, one that is remarkably vigorous and widespread. In March, 2000, for example, New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli asserted before then-senator John Ashcroft's Judiciary Subcommittee: "Statistically it cannot bear evidence [sic] to those who suggest, as our former superintendent of the state police suggested, that certain ethnic or racial groups disproportionately commit crimes. They do not." Needless to say, Torricelli did not provide any statistics.
The second condition necessary to explain the higher minority search rates on the highway is patrol officers' ability to detect drug trafficking. Unlike the initial decision to pull over a car, the decision to request permission to search rests on a wealth of cues. One of the most frequent is conflicting narratives among passengers and driver. "If a group in a car is carrying drugs, there will always be inconsistencies in their stories," reports Ed Lennon, head of the New Jersey Troopers Union. "It's unbelievable. A lot of times the driver won't know the passengers' first or last names—'I only know him as Bill'—or they'll get the names completely wrong. Sometimes they'll have a preplanned answer regarding their destination, but their purpose in being on the road will vary."
A driver's demeanor may also be a tip-off. "I've stopped white guys in pick-up trucks with a camper compartment on top," recalls Lennon. "Their chest is pounding; they're sweating, though it's the dead of winter. They won't look at you." And they're also hiding drugs.
Once a trooper stops a car, he can see the amount of luggage and its fit with the alleged itinerary, the accumulation of trash that suggests long stretches without stopping, the signs of drug use, the lack of a license and registration, the single key in the ignition and no trunk key, or the signs that the vehicle may have been fitted out with drug and weapon compartments. Some New York narcotics officers recently pulled over an Azusa SUV and noticed welding marks along the rain gutter on top. The occupants had raised the entire roof four inches to create a drug vault. If a car's windows don't roll all the way down, drugs may be concealed in the doors.
The fact that hit rates for contraband tend to be equal across racial groups, even though blacks and Hispanics are searched at higher rates, suggests that the police are successfully targeting dealers, not minorities. Race may play a role in that targeting, or it may not. Most cues of trafficking are race-neutral; it may be that race often correlates with the decision to search rather than causing it. But if race does play a role in the request to search, it is a much diminished one compared with a car stop based on a courier profile. When an officer has many independent indices of suspicion, adding his knowledge of the race of major trafficking groups to the mix is both legitimate and not overly burdensome on law-abiding minorities.
Amazingly, Attorney General Verniero acknowledges that the police merely try to maximize their hit rates in deciding whom to search, but he blames them for doing so. "The state police reward system gave practical impetus to the use of these inappropriate stereotypes about drug dealers" by rewarding big busts, he frets. But if the police were seeking to maximize their contraband yields, and the alleged "inappropriate stereotypes" were not helping them do so, presumably they would abandon those "stereotypes" and find some other set of cues—unless, of course, they were merely out to harass minorities for the thrill of it. But in that case, their hit rates would be lower for minorities than for whites, which they were not.
The bottom line is this: the New Jersey attorney general has branded the state police as racist without a scintilla of analysis for his finding. Yet New Jersey is the wave of the future, for racial profiling data-collection initiatives are sweeping the country. At least 30 states could soon require their state police to collect racial data on all traffic stops and searches, with the stated end of eliminating "racial profiling." Urban forces are under identical pressure. Virtually every major law-enforcement organization opposes these bills, because of their failure to deal with the benchmarking problem. Until someone devises an adequately sophisticated benchmark that takes into account population patterns on the roads, degrees of law-breaking, police deployment patterns, and the nuances of police decision making, stop data are as meaningless as they are politically explosive. Attorney General John Ashcroft has encouraged these data-gathering initiatives; he should instead withhold his support, unless local proponents can prove that they will capture the complex realities of law enforcement.
Unfortunately, the flurry of racial profiling analysis is not confined to the highways. It will wreak the most havoc on urban policing. Despite the racket by protesters, it is in city policing that race probably plays its least significant role, because officers have so many other cues from the environment. In assessing whether a pedestrian is behaving suspiciously, for example, they might already know that he is at a drug corner, about which they have received numerous complaints. They know if there has been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood. As they observe him, they can assess with whom he is interacting, and how.
A New York Street Crime Unit sergeant in Queens describes having stopped white pedestrians who had immediately changed directions as soon as they saw his unmarked car or ducked into an alley or a store for eight seconds and then looked for him once they came out. The night I spoke to him, he was patrolling the 102nd Precinct in Woodhaven, a largely white and Hispanic neighborhood. He had earlier questioned a white kid hanging out in front of a factory. "He was breaking his neck looking back at us; we thought he was a burglar." It turns out he was waiting for a friend. Another night in another precinct, the sergeant saw two black kids on bikes. "One guy's arm was hanging straight down, like he was carrying a gun. When they saw us, the other guy took off on his bike and threw a bag away. It was felony-weight drugs." Are you ignoring whites with guns? I asked him. "Of course not; I could see the same thing tonight," he said impatiently. "I don't use race at all. The only question is: are you raising my level of suspicion? Fifteen minutes after a stop, I may not even be able to tell you the color of the guy."
Even car stops on city streets usually have more context than on a highway. "If we pass four or five guys in a car going the opposite direction," explains the Queens sergeant, "and they're all craning their necks to see if we notice them, we may reverse and follow them for a while. We won't pull them over, but our suspicion is up. We'll run their plates. If the plates don't check out, they're done. If they commit a traffic violation, we won't pull everyone out of the car yet; we'll just interview the driver. If he doesn't have paperwork, it may be a stolen car. Now everyone's coming out to be frisked."
Hard as it is to believe, criminals actually do keep turning around to look at officers, though it would seem an obvious give-away. "Thank God they're stupid, or we'd be out of a job," the sergeant laughs.
But urban policing depends on another race-neutral strength: it is data-driven. The greatest recent innovation in policing was New York's Compstat, the computer-generated crime analysis that allows police commanders to pinpoint their enforcement efforts, then allows top brass to hold them accountable for results. If robberies are up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the precinct commander will strategically deploy his officers to find the perpetrators. Will all the suspects be black? Quite likely, for so is the neighborhood. Does that mean that the officers are racist? Hardly; they are simply going where the crime is. In most high-crime neighborhoods, race is wholly irrelevant to policing, because nearly all the residents are minorities.
Urban police chiefs worry about the data-collection mania as much as highway patrol commanders do. Ed Flynn, chief of police for Virginia's Arlington County, explains why. Last year, the black community in his jurisdiction was demanding heavier drug enforcement. "We had a series of community meetings. The residents said to us: 'Years ago, you had control over the problem. Now the kids are starting to act out again.' They even asked us: 'Where are your jump-out squads [who observe drug deals from their cars, then jump out and nab the participants]?' " So Flynn and his local commander put together an energetic strategy to break up the drug trade. They instituted aggressive motor-vehicle checks throughout the problem neighborhood. Cracked windshield, too-dark windows, expired tags, driving too fast? You're getting stopped and questioned. "We wanted to increase our presence in the area and make it quite unpleasant for the dealers to operate," Flynn says. The Arlington officers also cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like public urination, and used undercover surveillance to take out the dealers.
By the end of the summer, the department had cleaned up the crime hot spots. Community newsletters thanked the cops for breaking up the dealing. But guess what? Says Flynn: "We had also just generated a lot of data showing 'disproportionate' minority arrests." The irony, in Flynn's view, is acute. "We are responding to heartfelt demands for increased police presence," he says. "But this places police departments in the position of producing data at the community's behest that can be used against them."
The racial profiling analysis profoundly confuses cause and effect. "Police develop tactics in response to the disproportionate victimization of minorities by minorities, and you are calling the tactics the problem?" Flynn marvels.
However much the racial profilers try to divert attention away from the facts of crime, those facts remain obdurate. Arlington has a 10 percent black population, but robbery victims identify nearly 70 percent of their assailants as black. In 1998, blacks in New York City were 13 times more likely than whites to commit a violent assault, according to victim reports. As long as those numbers remain unchanged, police statistics will also look disproportionate. This is the crime problem that black leaders should be shouting about.
But the politics of racial profiling has taken over everything else. Here again, New Jersey is a model of profiling pandering, and it foreshadows the irrationality that will beset the rest of the country. In February 1999, New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman peremptorily fired the head of the state police, Colonel Carl Williams, whose reputation for honesty had earned him the nickname "The Truth." It was the truth that got him fired. The day before his dismissal, Williams had had the temerity to tell a newspaper reporter that minority groups dominate the cocaine and marijuana trade.
Of course, this information had constituted the heart of DEA reports for years. No matter. Stating it publicly violated some collective fairy tale that all groups commit drug crimes at equal rates. Whitman's future political career depended on getting Williams's head, and she got it. One scapegoat was not enough, however. The New Jersey state troopers who shot at the van are now on trial for attempted murder—a wildly trumped-up charge—and the attorney general has been prosecuting the case in a flagrantly political fashion.
One way to make sure that nasty confrontations with the facts about crime don't happen again is to stop publishing those facts. And so the New Jersey state police no longer distribute a typical felony-offender profile to their officers, because such profiles may contribute, in the attorney general's words, to "inappropriate stereotypes" about criminals. Never mind that in law enforcement, with its deadly risk, more information is always better than less. Expect calls for the barring of racial information from crime analysis to spread nationally.
The New Jersey attorney general's office has also dropped its appeal of a devastating 1996 trial court decision that had declared the state police guilty of "institutional racism." Using Lamberth's New Jersey traffic study as proof of racial profiling, the court dismissed drug indictments against 17 blacks without so much as glancing at the facts of their cases. The court was wrong on the evidence and wrong on the law, but the case now stands permanently on the books as the most important judicial decision to date on racial profiling.
Next, the New Jersey attorney general himself dismissed en masse drug and weapons charges against 128 defendants. The defendants all alleged that state troopers had pulled them over merely because of race. The attorney general was not willing to defend the state's officers and so let the defendants go free. In one case, the defendants' car allegedly passed a marked cruiser at 75 miles an hour; the occupants were openly smoking pot and drinking; the trooper found cocaine—hardly a case of racial profiling, hard or soft. Numerous requests to the attorney general's office for comment on the case have gone unanswered.
New Jersey will soon monitor the length of traffic stops that individual officers make and correlate it to the race of the motorist. It will also monitor by race the computer checks that individual officers run on license plates, on the theory that racist officers will spend more time bothering innocent black motorists and will improperly target them for background checks. Of course an officer's stop and arrest data will be closely scrutinized for racial patterns as well. And if in fact such investigatory techniques correlate with race because more minorities are breaking the law? Too bad for the cop. He will be red-flagged as a potential racist.
These programs monitoring individual officers are present in all jurisdictions that, like New Jersey, operate under a federal monitor. Along with the new state requirements for racial data collection on a department-wide basis, they will destroy assertive policing, for they penalize investigatory work. The political classes are telling police officers that if they have "too many" enforcement interactions with minorities, it is because they are racists. Officers are responding by cutting back enforcement. Drug arrests dropped 55 percent on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey in 2000, and 25 percent on the turnpike and parkway combined. When the mayor and the police chief of Minneapolis accused Minneapolis officers of racial profiling, traffic stops dropped 63 percent. Pittsburgh officers, under a federal consent decree monitoring their individual enforcement actions, now report that they are arresting by racial quota. Arrests in Los Angeles, whose police department has been under fire from the Justice Department, dropped 25 percent in the first nine months of 2000, while homicides jumped 25 percent.
The Harlem residents who so angrily demanded more drug busts from Mayor Giuliani last February didn't care about the race of the criminals who were destroying their neighborhood. They didn't see "black" or "white." They only saw dealers—and they wanted them out. That is precisely the perspective of most police officers as well; their world is divided into "good people" and "bad people," not into this race or that.
If the racial profiling crusade shatters this commonality between law-abiding inner-city residents and the police, it will be just those law-abiding minorities who will pay the heaviest price.
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NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com
October 27, 2008 7:00 AM
Racial Profiling: The Myth that Never Dies
The ACLU says the debate is over. Is it really?
By Jack Dunphy
More than seven years ago, Heather Mac Donald wrote “The Myth of Racial Profiling” for the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly, City Journal. “The anti-profiling crusade,” Mac Donald wrote, “thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime.” This ignorance persists, and last week saw the arrival of yet another shining example of it. But, unlike the bleating from such charlatans as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, this latest bit of ignorance comes cloaked in the legitimizing finery of Ivy League science.
Last Monday, the ACLU of Southern California released a report titled “A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department,” by Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, and Jonathan Borowsky, formerly a research assistant at Yale Law School and currently a student at Harvard Law School. The study examined data collected during pedestrian and vehicle stops made by LAPD officers from July 2003 to June 2004. “We find prima facie evidence,” write Ayres and Borowsky, “that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.” Among their more detailed conclusions are these:
Per 10,000 residents, the black stop rate is 3,400 stops higher than the white stop rate, and the Hispanic stop rate is almost 360 stops higher.
Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 127% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 43% more likely to be frisked.
Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 76% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 16% more likely to be searched.
Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 29% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 32% more likely to be arrested.
Damning stuff, says the ACLU, which commissioned the study. In an accompanying letter to the Los Angeles police commission, ACLU staff attorney Peter Bibring writes that “Prof. Ayres’s report ends debate about the existence of the problem and validates the experience in communities of color of police interactions attributable to ‘driving while black’ or ‘driving while brown.’”
Rubbish.
First of all, to claim that a study commissioned by an interest group, especially one as driven by ideology as the ACLU, is so irrefutably grounded in fact as to end debate on the matter is the very height of arrogance. Furthermore, the Ayres report has been neither peer-reviewed nor published in any scientific journal. That the report’s conclusions reflect the beliefs of the organization that paid for it should come as a surprise to no one. Indeed, the ACLU may have selected Mr. Ayres on the basis of his keen ability to detect racial bias nearly everywhere he looks. He has previously published books and articles on the hidden racial components involved in setting bail, purchasing automobiles, and tipping taxicab drivers.
Also, if the ACLU had truly been intent on ending the debate, they might have chosen a researcher whose résumé is less blemished by controversy. Last October, the Yale Daily News reported that Ayres’s latest book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, contained passages that were “unattributed verbatim reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of passages from various newspaper and magazine articles published in the last twenty years.” Ayres apologized for the “errors,” and said his publisher would make the appropriate changes in any future printings of the book.
Putting aside niggling questions of citations and quotations marks in his earlier work, Ayres’s report on the LAPD should stand or fall on its own merits. The reader can well imagine what my own opinion on the report might be, but my position as an LAPD officer may invite skepticism as to my objectivity. So I invited a respected academian to read the Ayres report and offer his opinion on its research methods and conclusions.
David Klinger is an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, and the author of Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force. He is himself a former police officer, having served with the LAPD and the Redmond, Wash. police department. But he is no shill for cops: he has testified as an expert witness both for and against police officers in civil cases arising from use-of-force incidents.
Klinger expressed a number of reservations on the Ayres report, beginning with its reliance on population figures in calculating what it labels as excessive stops, searches, and arrests of blacks and Hispanics in Los Angeles. In an e-mail to me, Klinger wrote that Ayres’s use of the racial and/or ethnic composition of a given area as expressed in census data is not sound. The key question is not who lives in a given area, says Klinger, but rather who is actually present in the area and interacting with the police.
For example, the Ayres report identifies two LAPD patrol divisions (out of eighteen) where the “stop rate” for blacks actually exceeded the number of blacks living in those areas. These disparities are easily explained, yet the report makes only a passing effort at doing so. “Residents can be stopped more than once,” write Ayres and Borowsky, “and non-residents who travel into a division can also be stopped.”
This last point bears further explication which Ayres and Borowsky do not provide. For example, they fail to account for the large number of homeless men living in downtown Los Angeles, where, according to their report, the number of blacks stopped exceeded the number of blacks living in the area. In recent years a large amount of unused office and industrial space in downtown L.A. has been converted into condominiums and lofts, the residents of which are for the most part white and fairly affluent. But the LAPD’s Central Division is also home to the city’s Skid Row, whose “residents” sleep outdoors or in homeless shelters and often go uncounted in census tabulations. These homeless men are overwhelmingly black, and their numbers include a large contingent of paroled felons and others with long criminal records. Consider: if you were a police officer in downtown Los Angeles, and you were interested in curtailing crime on your beat, on which group would you focus your efforts, the white, yuppie condo dwellers or the black ex-cons?
The situation is similar in Hollywood Division, where the black population is no more than six or seven percent. Unexamined in the Ayres report is the fact that Hollywood is home to many nightclubs that regularly attract large numbers of black gang members from South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. These gang members are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the crimes committed in Hollywood, most especially violent crimes, and thus are far more likely to attract the attention of the police.
The biggest problem with the Ayres report, says Klinger, is that it presents no ethnic- or race-based crime information, i.e. the amount of crime actually committed by blacks and Hispanics. “Ayres admits this is a liability,” said Klinger in his e-mail to me, “but downplays it and uses ‘indirect benchmarks’ (last paragraph of page 27) to try to overcome this problem. I find this practice quite wanting.” Klinger went on to say that Ayres and Borowsky were “speaking beyond the data” in that they did not include in their analysis a critical variable that even they admit must be taken into account in order to draw valid conclusions.
Though LAPD Chief William Bratton was critical of the Ayres report, he has as yet failed to disclose the information Klinger found lacking, information that is readily available and would surely refute the report’s bottom line, to wit, that blacks in Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, commit crimes at a far greater rate than do whites, and are therefore subjected to a greater level of attention from police officers on patrol. If one accepts the murder rate as a benchmark for measuring violent crime, the racial disparities are indeed striking. In 2007, the LAPD investigated 394 murders. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Los Angeles is 9.6 percent black, yet of those 394 murder victims, 134, or 34 percent, were black. And of the 354 identified murder suspects, 129 (36 percent) were black. The number of Hispanic murder victims and suspects roughly mirror the overall Hispanic population in Los Angeles. Hispanics make up 49 percent of the city’s population, and last year 54 percent of its murder victims and 55 percent of its murder suspects were also Hispanic. (Whites are about 29 percent of L.A.’s population, but in 2007 they made up just 8 percent of its murder victims and 7 percent of its known murder suspects. The nationwide murder figures reflect a similar racial disparity, as revealed here.)
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was once president of the L.A. chapter of the ACLU, and the rest of the city government is composed almost entirely of like-minded liberals. They are far too committed to politically correct ideals to disclose the cold and persistent facts that LAPD cops, indeed cops all over the country, know all too well: that the murder statistics cited above are also reflected in every other category of violent crime. Far from being over, the debate over racial profiling will continue for as long as these racial disparities in crime rates do.
— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author’s nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.
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http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhq6wuX1BF7NU2umkm
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'Dark ones': The left attacks Hillsdale's president because they can't control him
Published by: Herman Cain
Ridiculous.
Liberals hate Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which not only celebrates a decidedly conservative point of view, but also galls them by refusing to take government funding – which means they have no way of threatening Hillsdale and trying to force it to fall in line. It’s no surprise, then, that liberals and their media allies are trying to manufacture a scandal over Hillsdale President Larry Arnn’s use of the phrase “dark ones” during testimony before the Michigan Legislature.
They are trying to say Arnn is racist because he “described minorities as ‘dark ones.’” What he actually did, however, was describe the arguably racist actions of state bureaucrats who invaded his campus to play diversity police.
Arnn told a legislative committee at the state capital that bureaucrats from the Michigan Department of Education showed up at Hillsdale’s campus in 2000, wandering around with clipboards looking at the faces of students and writing down what they saw.
“What were they looking for besides dark ones?” he said.
Scandal!
Members of the committee gasped, scolded Arnn and suggested that he had better apologize. The news media went to work immediately, churning out stories announcing that Arnn “described minorities as ‘dark ones’” while burying the context of his statement, if they explained it at all. The usual race-mongers declared that context didn’t matter because the simple, literal, descriptive two-word phrase was so offensive.
The Rev. Charles Williams II, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network – whatever that is – demanded that Hillsdale funders denounce Arnn, and warned darkly (uh oh, can I say that?) that if they do not, “we will be very strategic in how we deal with any of their industries and venues.”
I am so tired of this nonsense. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of black people, and some have darker complexions than others. I am one of the dark ones!
Now, having said that, I could spend the rest of the day figuring out how to boycott myself for offending myself, but I think I will skip that absurd exercise because all I did was tell you what I look like.
You want to know a secret? Normal, everyday black Americans do not sit around getting offended because some college president, or politician, or celebrity, or media person, or talk show host, or whoever . . . used some phrase. It is not important and we do not care. But there is a whole industry that consists of people who do nothing but sit around and wait for someone to utter a phrase to which they can take offense. And when it happens, they pounce, and the media does their bidding.
Oh, and when the person who utters the phrase is an identifiable conservative – bar the door. It’s outrage time. Crank out the press releases. Organize the boycotts. Demand retribution. It’s your moment in the sun when you are a professional offense-monger.
And in the midst of all this, the media completely missed the real story. Arnn was describing an action of state bureaucrats that was totally inappropriate – showing up on his campus with clipboards and counting how many black faces they saw. In the aftermath of Arnn’s testimony, the Michigan Department of Education denied this had ever taken place – until admitting yesterday that it did.
Oh, by the way, conservative Hillsdale was the first private college in the nation to bar discrimination on the basis of race, sex or religion in its charter. That fact has shown up in a few of the media stories, but it’s buried underneath all the faux outrage over Arnn’s dastardly utterance.
Stand strong, Dr. Arnn! The left is attacking you not because you said anything wrong – you didn’t – but because you lead a conservative institution that doesn’t take their money and can’t be controlled by them. To them, that makes you a target. To this “dark one,” it makes you a hero.
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I missed the outrage over a member of congress using the term "cracker".
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Ah yes, Heather Mac Donald... this brings back memories.
Many exchanges with her of the Manhattan Institute-cousin to the Hoover Institute and Heritage Foundation, institutions that seem to have knee jerk reactions to anything that questions their skewed view of justice and their sense of entitlement for totalitarianism.
Let's talk about Skid Row. I lived in Skid Row from Feb.7, 2007 to December 29, 2009. I worked there from March 2008 to May 2010. I was neither a loftee nor a homeless individual. Yet, I knew both. I was a survivor. And yes, I am an Ivy Leaguer. I was ordered by a judge to live there while fighting a ridiculous criminal case. I know everyone in Skid Row.
I count LAPD commander Andy Smith, formerly of the Central Division as a friend. Senior Lead Officer Deon Joseph will attest to my fairness and objectivity. I was invited on numerous occasions by Sgt Kevin Royce and Commander Smith to speak to the officers at morning roll call. Why? As the Firemen from Station 9 on Seventh St, the busiest paramedic team in the City, stated in bright red letters on their landing page,"If you want to learn about Skid Row, read Scribeskidrow. He will tell you the truth about Skidrow like no one else can!!!.". Scribeskidrow is critically acclaimed by the New Yorker and law enforcement officers around the country. It continues to be on the blog roll of Blogdowntown, the premiere news source for the downtown Denizens. I am Scribeskidrow.
Racial profiling was not the case for Skid Row. Class profiling was rampant. Under that homeless umbrella was the certainty that those on the street were defenseless to protect themselves from brutality. Yes, felons live in Skid Row but but so do the mentally ill. Yes, you have your schemers but you have your cruelly disabled. Yes you have those who scam the government with Red, White and Blue medi-caid fraud while many others would die if they received no care. Yes, 90% of the residents of Skid Row receive Public Assistance, and Disability. Those Government transfer payments that amount to approximately $5,000,000/month formed the flooring that sustained downtown merchants during the recession. And I am not even calculating the multiplier effect.
I know that during the Triumvirate of the City Attorney's office, LAPD and the Mayor's Office, great strides were made to reach out to that community and restore a bit of humaneness. Work was done to establish cordial relations between LAPD and the community. Mutual respect, programs etc. Skid Row 3 on 3 basketball league was formed. The City Attorney office paid for uniforms. Games between the Skid Row All Stars and the LAPD continue to this day. Further evidence of the outreach police extended was Sargent Royce inviting me to his home for Thanksgiving and Christmas while I was there. I can't tell you how much that helped me survive. We are great friends to this day. We argue about politics because he is to the right of Attila the Hun. But I would give my life to save his. And Sargent Royce and all those officers would never agree with Heather Mac Donald. I know because I talked to them. Much more progress would have been made had it not been for the obstructionist tactics of that idiotic mayor Villaraigosa who was not pleased that Rocky Delgadillo was receiving much more press than he. Delgadillo was no angel but he was a friend to that community.And Skid Row is a community to be respected like any other. People live there are concerned about crime just like anywhere else.
So, I suggest that we not use the broad stroke of brush complete with ad hominem splashes on canvas to support claims to justify untenable behavior. I support the LAPD; But I know bullshit when I see it and I observed more than I care to remember after Andy Smith, Captain Kathy McDonald and that entire regime left. It reverted back to Gestapo ways.
Racial profiling had nothing to do with it. Homeless, class profiling had everything to do with it.
GM, your statements reveal complexity containing the unique dichotomy of insight and bias. (as mine probably do). I shall ponder all that you share.Certainly you are forcing me to go to the mental gymnasium pulling out this and that book from my library. I both curse you and thank you. :-)
6th and Gladys, the most notorious drug corner in Skid Row where activity was squashed during the Andy Smith era only to return to business as usual after he left. Drug dealers sell with impunity while, if anyone that could be characterized by an LAPD officer as a Skid Row resident even looked like they wanted to cross Los Angeles Street, they were pulled over and shaken down. I know it because I saw it. Never happened to me because I did not look like a Skid Row resident. I lived there but looked like what we be characterized as a typical Ivy Leaguer. And Yes, I am black. So race had nothing to do with any of it. When I crossed Los Angeles streets and hung out in the Loft district, I was never eyed. Now, had it been 1940's, and if blacks were seen crossing Western Ave by officers posted at the Western Ave intersections, then that would have been racial profiling. My father and his peers shared those stories with me.
And yes, I was on Wall Street for quite some time. I note here that I often chuckled at the irony that Wall Street is also a main street in Skid Row on which the LA Central Division sits.
Let's talk about Hollywood tomorrow. But Hollywood has elements of Skid Row in it. And many of those transient residents living in SRO's are white. They commit crimes throughout the area. It is just plain wrong attribute the predominant source of crimes to those only in attention grabbing scenarios.
Once I heard Former Chief Bratton make a statement that stunned me. He walked so smugly in front of the cameras. Paraphrasing, he proclaimed , the minorities are committing more than 50% of the crimes in the city. So nobody should get their panties bunched up because he said minorities are committing all the crimes.most of the crimes in the city.
Chief Bratton left out a very salient point. In Los Angeles, so called minorities comprise (and I may be wrong about this number and I am too tired to research out the exact figure for that year) more than 50% of the population for the city. So, If that is the case, the minorities are no longer minorities. They are the majority. And that difference in perspective is subtle, distinct and can be used to influence thinking.
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I failed to complete my thought about Wall St.
GM is correct. While I was there, Battery Park was the nexus of the Lower Manhattan drug trade. Traders flooded there to 'coffee up'. We did so as though it were legal.
Prep school--the same thing. At Penn, the same thing. Yet, a high school kid on the east side found with any contraband is going to have a problem with the wrong officer.
All of this brings to the surface more questions.
Time to sleep and rest. You guys are wearing me out and I know I have not even met the basics required for scholarly discourse. Goodnight.
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Well, while Walter is resting up for his next contribution :-) here's this:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/11/cnn-anchor-don-lemons-bold-takedown-of-russell-simmons-on-race-attack-the-problem-not-the-messenger/
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Coming from a Times writer. Finally stating the obvious. :-o :-)
Race
Don’t Ignore Race in Christopher Lane’s Murder
The association of young black men with violence doesn't come out of thin air
By John McWhorter Aug. 22, 2013124 Comments
Follow @TIMEIdeas
Australian Christopher Lane was killed on Monday in Oklahoma by three teens, one of whom has said they were just “bored.” The right is complaining that the media is making nothing of the fact that two of the teens were black whereas Lane was white, as opposed to the massive alarm sounded in cases such as white (or white-ish) George Zimmerman killing black Trayvon Martin. And again the cry was heard that there is more “black-on-black” or “black-on-white” crime than “white-on-black,” and that young black men are in fact more of a problem than people like Zimmerman.
The numbers don’t lie: young black men do commit about 50% of the murders in the U.S. We don’t yet know whether the attack on Lane was racially motivated, nor can we know whether the three black boys who attacked a white boy on a Florida school bus recently would not have done the same to a black kid. (Critics took Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to task for not condemning the violence.) But hardly uncommon are cases such as the two black guys who doused a white 13-year-old with gasoline and lit him on fire, saying “You get what you deserve, white boy” (Kansas City, Mo.) or 20 black kids who beat up white Matthew Owens on his porch “for Trayvon” (Mobile, Ala.).
So, it’s just fake to pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air. Young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. If the kinds of things I just mentioned were regularly done by whites, it’d be trumpeted as justification for being scared to death ofIt’s not that black communities are in complete denial about these statistics — Stop the Violence events are a staple of high-crime areas. But let’s face it: black America isn’t nearly as indignant about black boys killing one another or whites as about the occasional white cop killing one black boy, even though the former wreaks much more havoc in black communities. There is no coordinated nationwide movement equivalent to the one Martin galvanized. There are no thoughtful films “exploring” black-on-black crime the way Fruitvale Station treats the death of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was killed by transit police in Oakland, Calif.
And recent example illustrates how many blacks feel about who is murdering whom. Two weeks ago, an NYPD cop killed 14-year-old Shaaliver Douse. Douse was in the process of shooting other people, and had been charged with shooting someone else in May — and yet his aunt compared him to Martin. In her mind, the main sin was the white cop’s.
Granted, it seems a lot easier to do something about the Zimmermans than the black thugs. Protest profiling and police departments institute new programs. But black thugs aren’t moved by protests, so it can seem like we’re just stuck with them.
But who’s to say what would happen if black America exerted even half of the emotional fervor and brainpower it does over cases like Martin’s to thinking about how to keep black boys from going wrong? Annette John-Hall had some wise words on this last year. What kind of self-image do we have to assume we can only change others, but not ourselves?
For the time being, though, it’s time for the media to stop proudly emblazoning the race of white cops who kill black boys while cagily describing black teens as, say, “from the grittier part of town,” as has been the case regarding Lane’s killers. The media needs to be as honest with black people as we need to be with ourselves. No group gets ahead by turning away from its real problems.
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http://downtrend.com/travis/homeland-security-employee-promotes-race-war/
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"But we're not there yet. We’re not there yet. And so we've got to keep working on it. And for the president to speak out on it is appropriate. I think all leaders, black and white, should speak out on this issue." - Colin Powell on Trayvon verdict, "I think that it will be seen as a questionable judgment on the part of the judicial system..."
Yet the last example he had of discrimination against himself was 1963?? "I’ve been refused access to restaurants where I couldn't eat, even though I just came back from Vietnam. "We can't give you a hamburger. Come back some other time." and I did, right after the civil rights act of 1964. I went right back to that same place and got my hamburger, and they are more than happy to serve me now."
He rose to highest ranks, Chairman, Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State. He was the most popular politician in the country. His successor for Sec State was black. We elected a black President. Appointed and confirmed black Supreme Court Justices. Good grief, how long shall we keep whining about "the residual effects of our history, the racism that existed by law, segregation, slavery..." ?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/08/25/colin_powell_trayvon_martin_verdict_questionable.html
Adrian Peterson, party to a $100 million contract, compared the NFL with slavery. (http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/adrian-peterson-gives-readers-a-double-take-with-views-on-lockout?urn=nfl,wp206) I wonder if slave ancestors would agree, working round the clock, with education prohibited and families broken up.
Here is another idea. Enjoy your freedom!
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This is a remarkable sea change from what my generation is used to hearing from a Civil rights leader. Martin Luther King (aka Michael) "borrowed" from this Archibald Carey speech for his I have a Dream speech (that his family has since copyrighted).
In this speech we can hear Carey CHAMPION the REPBULICAN party! The party of the downtrodden and minorities. The party of freedom for the entire world.
I recall it was Dick Morris who pointed out that most Blacks were Republicans until Goldwater refused to push for Civil Rights. I didn't know that that was the reason for the sea change in their voting. I was only a couple years older than the ONE at the time of the '63 speech. Amazing how the Blacks will vote as a block and change on a dime. Recall when Bill Clinton was quoted as saying "you know a Black can't win" when referring to Bamster. The very next day Hillary tanked in the polls. Similar event occurred with Goldwater/Johnson I guess.
In any case the speech drags on a long time. Indeed I couldn't listen to all of it. I suggest listen to 10 or fifteen minutes:
https://soundcloud.com/wbez/archibald-carey-jrs-1952-gop
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Interesting point made by Thomas Sowell missed by most economists and historians:
Many people -- especially politicians and activists -- want to take credit for the economic and other advancement of blacks, even though a larger proportion of blacks rose out of poverty in the 20 years before 1960 than in the 20 years afterwards.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/08/27/a_poignant_anniversary_119721.html#ixzz2dKaISd8Q
(read it all)
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http://www.politicususa.com/2012/07/18/george-zimmerman-african-americans-apologize.html
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http://www.politicususa.com/2012/07/18/george-zimmerman-african-americans-apologize.html
I don't think that headline is quite accurate.
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http://www.balleralert.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2015113%3ABlogPost%3A1684312&commentId=2015113%3AComment%3A1684944&xg_source=activity
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FRC's Tony Perkins: "As a former quarterback, Craig James isn't used to being on the defensive. ... The retired Pro-Bowler became the latest face of the war on religious liberty, when -- after one day on the job -- Fox Sports gave James the boot for his conservative views on marriage. And here's the kicker: he made the comments, not at the sports desk, but during last year's Senate campaign! ... High level executives felt he hadn't been properly vetted (or, properly excluded, depending on how you look at it). When the news broke, a Fox Sports spokesman tried to explain away the network's religious profiling. 'We just asked ourselves how Craig's statements would play in our human resources department. He couldn't say those things here.' First off, Craig didn't say them there -- or anywhere in his commentating capacity. He stated his position as a candidate for public office -- in response to legitimate constituent questions. ... Is the grip of religious hostility so tight that Americans can't even have an open debate for fear it'll cost them their jobs?"
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http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/16/showbiz/miss-america-racist-reactions/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
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More whining from minorities. The MSM makes a few racist twitter posts after an woman of Indian decent won Miss America as some sort of national scandal. A few twitter posts do not represent America. I wish the MSM would stop dividing us by race.
How is it that at least three of the judges on Miss America are gay? Of course, we know they don't judge contestants based on political correctness do they?
****BY ANTHONY CAVE
acave@MiamiHerald.com
The new Miss America, Nina Davuluri, wants to be a doctor. The 24-year-old Miss New York is the first Indian-American woman to win the competition, too. The latter startled some after her victory last Sunday night.
Fox News & Commentary host Todd Starnes tweeted that Miss Kansas, runner-up Theresa Vail, lost because “she actually represented American values.” You know, because being “American” has a standard dictionary definition, which Starnes describes as a gun-toting, deer-hunting military veteran.
Several other Twitter users latched onto this skewed ideology, calling Davuluri an “Arab” and “Miss 7-11.” They also said Vail deserved to win because she “looked American.” White was the synonym they were probably looking for to describe “American.” While these folks are in the minority — I hope — it casts an unnecessary shadow over a historic win for Davuluri.
The Syracuse native touts herself as “Miss Diversity,” and thanks to the judges, she is. Her parents emigrated to the United States more than 30 years ago. Yet, she still had to defend herself a day later, telling reporters that she has to “rise above” the criticism. And that is the problem.
I have family members who are Indian — aunts and uncles, who, before last Sunday, would probably chuckle at the notion of an Indian Miss America. It is not out of ignorance, but rather how women are portrayed in American society.
Thin, beautiful and white. The social stratosphere is damning. Just ask the sororities at the University of Alabama. This week, the university moved to end segregation and admit black students to the historically white sororities on campus. There are numbers, too. A recent Reuters poll shows that 40 percent of white Americans have no minority friends.
How does that fit in? Well, it blankets the demographic. By 2050, minorities will be the majority, but you would not know it. This conservative-leaning notion of what it means to be American startles me. Conservatives’ “outreach efforts,” or lack thereof, to minorities comes across as market research.
But, it is more than the definition of an American. More than politics, civil rights or the racist remarks of a few.
Women and minorities are born into a world filled with misrepresentation. The perception of these long-ignored and overlooked groups has changed some, but not enough. A host of issues like inaccurate criticism or suppressed voting rights still exist.
And few are willing to empower those who need it, which is why Davuluri’s win is so important for women and minorities. Standing out should not involve wearing flesh-toned underwear on a major network like Miley Cyrus, but rather, a Davuluri using her $50,000 in prize money for medical studies.
The Miss America pageant is still based on an outdated platform that ultimately judges looks above intellect. Well, certain looks anyway.
Since 1983, there have been an Asian, an Indian and eight African-American Miss America winners. The token minority in a television commercial or business office is still the norm.
Airport screenings are not random, either. If I do not shave my beard, the TSA will pat me down.
It is only when minorities become those familiar “American” faces on a national stage, beyond the president, that the negative reactions will decline in the public eye. Stereotypes like “terrorist,” “drug dealer” or the “bad guy” would have to be gone.
Until then, the controversy will overshadow the progress of Davuluri and others.
Anthony Cave is a junior journalism student at Florida International University.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/20/3639820/miss-america-controversy-overshadows.html#storylink=cpy****
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an anecdotal story. I was speaking to a Russian Jewish physician colleague about medical care in Russia. How the poor people there would be grateful for any attention at all. How rewarding that can be to really feel appreciated as a doctor not just a commodity provider. Then in walks another colleague and friend who is Indian. He said the same is true in India particularly in rural India and amongst its' poor. He then want on and noted how Blacks in the US are constantly complaining. It took us one generation to achieve so much success here and Blacks have been here for what 200 yrs and they still do nothing but make excuses. He then called them "privileged". You want to see poverty go to the back streets of India.
I do admire my Indian colleagues. Maybe American minorities should study and learn from them. And stop bitching. This can still be the greatest country in the world.
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From a Sept. 22 letter written by Jason Morgan, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, complaining to his supervisor about the school-mandated diversity training for teaching assistants:
At the end of yesterday's diversity "re-education," we were told that our next session would include a presentation on "Trans Students." At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students 'choose their own pronouns', how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer ("I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?"). Also on the agenda for next week are "important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities," "stand[ing] up to the rules of gender," and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: "Trans": for those who "identify along the gender-variant spectrum," and "Genderqueer": "for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system". I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up.
Please allow me to be quite frank. My job, which I love, is to teach students Japanese history. This week, for example, I have been busy explaining the intricacies of the Genpei War (1180-1185), during which time Japan underwent a transition from an earlier, imperial-rule system under regents and cloistered emperors to a medieval, feudal system run by warriors and estate managers. It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day.
It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/11/do-you-know-the-history-behind-the-name-washington-redskins/
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Black couple savagely beaten by gang of white youths in Brooklyn
1:29 PM 10/21/2013
Jim Treacher
Just another day in Emmett Till’s America.
NYDN:
A group of 10 white youths — one of them a 12-year-old girl — surrounded a black couple’s car in Brooklyn, viciously beating the husband and yanking the wife to the pavement by her hair as they peppered the two with racial slurs, authorities said.
“Get those [n-words]!” some of them screamed, according to court papers. “Get that black whore!”
Ronald Russo, 30, and his wife, Alanna, apparently had the green light and the husband honked at the group to get out of the way. The rowdy kids started kicking the car, according to the criminal complaint. Ronald Russo got out to check on potential damage to his vehicle.
Ronald Russo was dragged to the ground. Then he was punched and kicked in the head. He felt more blows all over his body, investigators said. He suffered a fractured nose, a broken septum, a blood clot and abrasions to his shoulder…
In the midst of the attack, there was a steady chorus of epithets. “Black motherf—–!” screamed the attackers, who ranged in age from 12 to 18.
Alanna Russo was attacked too, suffering “a black eye, bleeding and difficulty breathing.”
All because of the color of their skin.
Congratulations, you pathetic teabaggers. This is all thanks to your sick, bigoted hatred of America’s first black president. Happy now?
Get ready for this story to be smeared across the national headlines for the next few months, wingnuts. Al Sharpton is gonna wipe the floor with you. This is what you get.
You racists.
Correction: Whoops! Ronald and Alanna Russo are white. And they were called “crackers” and “white motherf—–” and such as they were kicked and beaten, not that really bad word starting with “n.” Never mind. Nothing to see here. Local crime story.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/21/black-couple-savagely-beaten-by-gang-of-white-youths-in-brooklyn/
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This point was posted to rebut other things posted on the 'tea party' thread. The claim is made that Republicans are racist, so let's take a look.
"D) that the first black Secretary of State left the Republican party, after his aide pointed out that the GOP is "full of racists": http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election-2012/powell-aide-gop-full-racists-article-1.1193673"
The other point I question is racist 'realignment'.
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Colin Powell and his aide did not like hearing that Powell supported Barack Obama for President only because of race. But it was Powell who gave no coherent reason other than race as to why he supported Obama IMO and many others. And that makes those noticing that and pointing it out racists?
Is Powell not the poster person for Republican in name only charge? He worked for Republicans and at some point said he was one - a Barack Obama Republican. Sure. Barack Obama was the left-most member of the United States Senate. His sole executive experience qualifying to be President was running a campaign staff. His only foreign policy credential was to articulate a position on the main question of the day the exact opposite of Colin Powell's. Obama's domestic policy positions were the exact opposite of Republican up and down the line. And Powell chose him over a war hero and over a successful moderate Republican experienced executive. For what reasons other than race? None that he articulated.
Realignment? It was not a total realignment, nor does it demonstrate one side is racist. Did I read or understand that wrong? Some of us were Republican before and after that, and at least claim to not be racist. There were other issues too. Of these southern Democrats where racism was prevalent, were they still racist after the switch of parties? Wasn't the switch largely because the Dem party nationally did not match the views of Dems on other issues in those southern states? Were they racist if they voted for tax cuts or for a stronger foreign policy? And what about those who did not realign? Fritz Hollings, Robert Byrd come to mind. http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/28/sen-robert-byrd-not-only-was-a-kkk-member-but-led-his-local-klan-chapter/
If the point at least implied is that the racists were Republican, I'm not convinced and haven't seen any evidence of it. Even if Ed Schultz' sidekick says it's so.
"suggesting that the vast majority of blacks could be so easily "fooled" Democratic party is demeaning to people's intelligence, and is itself racist"
Blacks vote largely Democratic. Why? Republican racism? If so, where is that evidence? The Col. Lawrence Wilkerson accusation? Wilkerson is a regular guest of the Ed Schultz show; he tolerates the host who called Laura Ingraham a "right wing slut". http://nation.foxnews.com/ed-schultz/2011/05/25/outrageous Sexism, he sees nothing, but he knows racism and switched parties. Convenient.
Blacks vote Dem because they were told and a large majority believed those policies were better - for blacks and for the country. Now we know better. Maybe we'll see a new 'realignment'.
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"The other point I question is racist 'realignment'." But not realignment?
"Is Powell not the poster person for Republican in name only charge?" Then there sure are a great number "poster" people. And so what: that wasn't the point of the article GM posted.
What is a "total" realignment?
And, originally all I said was that there was a party realignment after a claim that "nothing had changed" in electoral politics. GM, in his typical fashion, took that much farther and made claims of racism for an entire political party. I didn't see you comment on that claim, Doug.
"Some of us were Republican before and after that, and at least claim to not be racist." But this isn't the case with Democrats? Again, if the claim that an entire party is racist is wrong, why didn't you take GM to task for painting the entire Democratic party in an ugly light. Why only step in now?
When there is a claim that insults the intelligence of a great number of (insert race here) people, then the claim is racist.
Nothing excuses sexism, but illustrating a point of sexism doesn't sweep something else under the rug.
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"why didn't you take GM to task for painting the entire Democratic party in an ugly light. Why only step in now?"
You were answering GM's take quite well without my help. I agree his longer post about Democrats was unfairly one sided, but these points get compiled to answer a huge narrative out there that one side is racist. I agree with you that from within the political arena, it was LBJ who led the civil rights legislation. He passed it with a majority of Republicans and a minority of Democrats. My failed attempt at a point on total realignment was that some of the Democrats who voting against civil rights legislation switched sides, for other reasons I think, and some like Al Gore Sr. did not. Southern Democrats who left the Democrat party did so (IMO) because the national party did not match their views on the issues, not about race or racism. Rick Perry's conservative economic ideology fit inside the Texas Democrat party not that long ago, as one example. Certainly not now.
Being a Republican and having been to countless conventions and events, I have witnessed no racism inside the party. I don't know of a Republican who wants blacks to stay poor or that doesn't wish more would come to our side. The charge liberals make of racism is laziness IMO and a diversion from not addressing the ideological differences. We see individual economic freedom as a better way to let people rise up, while leftist groups like ACORN go into black neighborhoods and push 'welfare rights', which largely keep people down. For the record, economic freedom IS a far better way for people rise up out of poverty.
"Nothing excuses sexism, but illustrating a point of sexism doesn't sweep something else under the rug."
Point well taken, but I was happy to point out that man's selective ability to take offense.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/iowa-supreme-court-attractive-woman-firing_n_3586861.html
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/iowa-supreme-court-attractive-woman-firing_n_3586861.html
The miserable plight of the attractive woman...
She did nothing wrong, but I agree with Crafty that the small, private employer should be able to hire or not employ whomever he or she wants.
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http://www.ijreview.com/2013/11/93250-must-watch-white-guy-pretends-black-wins-election-predominantly-black-district/
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http://news.investors.com/111113-678774-bank-liability-unknown-in-racial-bias-cases.htm#ixzz2kS9ZsQld
________________________________________
Banks Question Fairness Of New 'Fair Lending' Probes
By PAUL SPERRY, FOR INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/11/2013 06:34 PM ET
President Obama holds up a proposed mortgage application form during a speech at the James Lee Community Center in Falls Church, Va., on Feb. 1, 2012...
Already looking at $100 billion in federal legal penalties over the mortgage crisis, major lenders fear they face a large and undefined liability under the government's aggressive anti-discrimination enforcement and are pushing for officials to define where they're drawing the line.
The Obama administration has kept the statistical methodology it uses to prove lending bias in both home and car finance so secret that a bipartisan group of 22 senators — including 11 Democrats — fired off a letter to regulators Oct. 30 demanding details.
Senators asked the administration to clarify what constitutes a "statistically significant" racial disparity in auto loan outcomes that would trigger prosecution.
In a Nov. 4 letter of reply, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) refused to say.
Alan Kaplinsky of Ballard Spahr LLP, a national law firm specializing in bank regulation compliance, called the response "less than satisfactory."
Threshold Unclear
It "did not provide a basis-point threshold for determining when statistically significant disparities exist, as the senators requested," noted Kaplinsky, who heads the firm's consumer financial services practice.
The Obama administration is the first to sue lenders for bias under the controversial civil rights doctrine known as "disparate impact." So far it's sued more than two dozen banks under the theory, which relies on computer screens of loan data to find differences in approval rates and loan terms.
The data don't include borrowers' credit scores, income, assets, cash reserves, debt-to-income ratios, down payments or other credit risk factors that lenders say explain racial differences in lending outcomes. They say prosecutors have failed to distinguish risk from race.
"They're taking a shortcut and not getting a true picture" of individual creditworthiness, Washington lawyer Andrew Sandler, who has defended several banks in lending-bias cases, told IBD.
Larry Dillon, president of C&F Mortgage in Virginia, says Justice Department prosecutors refused to consider credit risks when they accused C&F of charging some black borrowers more for loans in 2012.
"They would not let us use loan-to-value ratios or debt-to-income ratios" to explain statistical differences in loan pricing, he told IBD. "If they had, there would be little, if any, disparity."
Difficult Defense
The administration insists "statistically significant" racial disparities in loan denials or loan costs are all the evidence it needs.
Lenders complain that the standard of proof is so low it's all but impossible to defend against disparate-impact claims. They want to know what they can do to limit their exposure to anti-redlining investigations while still complying with new Dodd-Frank Act rules that discourage pricing loans for risk in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately affected minority borrowers.
In June, eight financial and business trade groups sent a letter to the CFPB and HUD seeking "clarity" on how lenders can avoid liability under new disparate-impact regulations. They also sought written guidance on the metrics that investigators use to determine discrimination, arguing the "lack of guidance will create great uncertainty, resulting in higher prices to account for risk and less available credit for consumers."
"Compliance with one regulation should not make it impossible to comply with another," the groups said.
Before the crisis, lenders were sued for not originating enough loans in minority neighborhoods. Now they're being sued for "steering" low-income minority borrowers into loans that typically charge borrowers more to compensate for the higher risk of default based on traditional credit standards.
Chevy Chase Bank is an example. In the 1990s, the Washington lender was ordered by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to "target African-American neighborhoods" in poor areas of the capital and "aggressively solicit" loans for low-income blacks living there. In September, Holder, now attorney general, ordered Chevy Chase to pay almost $3 million to minority borrowers who defaulted on subprime loans.
Banks say they feel like they're "damned if they do and damned if they don't" lend to poor or credit-impaired minorities, American Bankers Association President Frank Keating said June 26 in a published column.
"Lenders are facing lawsuits and prosecutions even if they have done nothing wrong," Keating said.
They've received little guidance from regulators. On Oct. 22, five financial regulatory agencies issued a statement "in response to inquiries from creditors about whether they would be liable under the disparate impact doctrine of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act" if they originate only mortgages that comply with new rules meant to ensure loans are made only to borrowers who can repay them.
The agencies did not provide specific yardsticks, saying their "general approach and expectations regarding fair lending, including disparate impact doctrine, are summarized in prior guidance." But they said, "In selecting business models and product offerings, we expect that creditors would consider demonstrable factors that may include credit risk, secondary market opportunities, capital requirements, and liability risk."
Regulators referred to two published government documents, the 2009 "Interagency Fair Lending Examination Procedures" and the 1994 "Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending," which was adopted by the Obama administration in 2011. Both documents warn that "substantial" or "significant" racial disparities in loan denial rates or loan pricing can trigger investigations. Neither defines these terms.
The banking industry has turned to Congress for help. So far, lawmakers have failed to get the administration to disclose the econometric methodology it uses to measure whether discrimination is present in a lender's portfolio.
The administration recently expanded disparate-impact enforcement to include not just home lenders but also the auto industry. Auto lenders were supposed to be exempt from Dodd-Frank rules.
In their Oct. 30 letter to Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the 22 senators demanded that the administration reveal its investigative methods. Specifically, they asked Cordray to make public the numerical trigger point at which racial lending gaps violate federal law and justify discrimination charges.
In his response, Cordray could not provide a fixed level at which such gaps set off alarm bells, or even a danger range. He said the formula used by investigators "varies" case by case.
Nor could Cordray list any controlling risk factors that could explain racial disparities, saying he could not identify them all.
Such factors are key to lenders' defense against disparate-impact claims. Defendants say prosecutors have failed to control for all the risk factors that go into lending decisions when comparing final loan decision data by racial group. They say the administration is not actually comparing borrowers with similar credit backgrounds, which skews results and makes it look as if race is the cause of gaps, when in fact it's risk.
Consider Nara Bank of Los Angeles. Since 2009, it fought a federal suit claiming it overcharged blacks and Latinos for car loans. The Justice Department alleged a "statistically significant" disparity between "mark-ups" charged to blacks and Latinos versus Asians was proof that Nara discriminated.
A district judge dismissed the suit after agreeing that the government's statistical analysis of loan terms was faulty because it didn't consider other important factors. But after Justice appealed, Nara in September agreed to a nominal settlement while still denying wrongdoing.
Underwriting high-risk loans at prime terms — in effect, subsidizing substandard loans — may be lenders' best protection against disparate-impact liability.
"Creditors may, over time, feel increasing pressure to make" such risky loans, said Richard Andreano of Ballard Spahr. Such political pressure led to the economically devastating mortgage crisis, critics say.
The administration's 2009 fair-lending examination guidelines encourage lenders to establish "second review programs" for minority applicants previously denied loans.
"Such programs are permissible," the appendix to the federal examiners' manual instructs.
More and more bankers are giving rejected applications another look as protection against disparate-impact prosecution.
Last year the American Bankers Association, in a "fair lending toolbox" distributed to banks, advised its 5,000 members to give rejected minority loan applicants a "second look," which it said "can result in suggested changes in underwriting standards."
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/111113-678774-bank-liability-unknown-in-racial-bias-cases.htm#ixzz2kS9ZsQld
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/31/pentagon-training-manual-white-males-have-unfair-advantages/
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unbelievable. eom
right out of Columbia University.
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Yes, unbelievable. That is what de-funding and zero-based budgeting should be all about. Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. If this is their work product, while competing for scarce resources, then out they go.
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http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/kkk-member-walks-up-to-black-musician-in-bar-but-its-not-a-joke-and-what-happens-next-will-astound-you/
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Maybe the leaders of Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia can form a band. How about a middle east rap gang? They can curse each other out with rap lyrics. Someone I know can write them and maybe win a Noble Peace Prize.
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http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/26/21625339-family-disputes-gay-servers-story
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http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/26/21625339-family-disputes-gay-servers-story
A forensic handwriting analyst could check the document. The server and the restaurant could be on the hook for civil damages.
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Indeed.
Moving right along, here is this:
http://animalrights.about.com/b/2009/10/26/chris-rock-loses-movie-role-over-michael-vick-comment.htm
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/12/02/landry-thompson-dancer-arrested/
Comments?
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http://www.yourblackworld.net/2013/12/black-news/the-destruction-of-black-wall-street-by-american-terrorists/
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/14/Federal-Judge-Rules-Laws-Against-Polygamy-Unconstitutional
http://jonathanturley.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/brown-summary-judgment-decision.pdf
Who made that argument previously?
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1073.msg68328#msg68328
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Well, let's certainly keep an eye on that case!
BTW, what IS the argument against polygamy?
===============================================
http://freepatriot.org/2013/12/10/happens-black-man-brings-white-girlfriend-harlem-barbershop-watch/
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BTW, what IS the argument against polygamy?
I would argue that children have an unfair circumstance by design under polygamy. The adults may have consented, but the kids did not. Society is better off and stronger when we choose a spouse to form a family instead of just keep adding spouses and forming 'families'. (The NBA is not aware of this rule.)
In this day where anything goes, who are we to judge. Gay marriage ended of the meaning of marriage (and family) - one man and one woman become one married couple, husband and wife, sometimes becoming a family with one mom, one dad and children. If we cannot restrict on gender, why limit the numbers. If it has no meaning, why even keep track or acknowledge marriages.
State references or preferences to marriage are all discriminatory by design - against all unmarrieds, not just against gays and polygamists. The point of laws allowing the states to sanction marriage of the old type was that this particular discrimination and preference was good for society. Each person in a free society also had the freedom to not enter a single spouse, opposite gender union with all its recognized advantages.
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To me the left has simply made a mockery out of marriage.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/16/North-Dakota-Allows-Man-In-Same-Sex-Marriage-To-Also-Marry-Woman
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North Dakota is known for being pretty far left. The state AG who allowed this is a Republican:
http://www.ndgop.org/view/elected-officials/statewide-officials/attorney-general-wayne-stenehjem/
The irony here is that if same sex marriages were allowed in ND, the polygamist action wouldn't be:
"North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion last week confirming that the state does not recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, allowing a man married to another man to come to North Dakota and marry a woman without divorcing his husband."
To me the left has simply made a mockery out of marriage.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/16/North-Dakota-Allows-Man-In-Same-Sex-Marriage-To-Also-Marry-Woman
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Oy vey. What a fustercluck.
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I like and respect Dennis Prager a lot, but though I agree with the essence of his conclusion here, I note that out of disgust for just how far we have taken the notion of prohibiting discrimination, I would consider going much further and simply say "We are free to choose with whom we associate and with whom we do business. Period."
“Tolerance” Now Means Government-Coerced Celebration
Tuesday, Dec 17, 2013
Jack Phillips owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., about 10 miles from downtown Denver. In July 2012, two gay men, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, asked Phillips to provide the cake for their wedding celebration. Though same-sex marriage is not allowed in Colorado — the Colorado Constitution states that “Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state” — the two men had been married in Massachusetts.
As acknowledged by all parties, Phillips told the men, “I’ll make you birthday cakes, shower cakes, sell you cookies and brownies, I just don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.”
Jack Phillips is an evangelical Christian, and his religion does not allow him to participate in same-sex marriages or celebrations of same-sex marriages.
In other words, Phillips made it clear from the outset that he does not discriminate based on the sexual orientation of a prospective customer. He will knowingly sell his products to any gay person who wishes to purchase his baked goods.
Nevertheless, Craig and Mullins went to the ACLU, which then sued Phillips. On Dec. 6, administrative law Judge Robert N. Spencer handed down his decision:
“The undisputed facts show that Respondents [Masterpiece Cakeshop] discriminated against Complainants [Craig and Mullins] because of their sexual orientation by refusing to sell them a wedding cake for their same-sex marriage, in violation of ? 24-34-601(2), C.R.S.”
The section of the C.R.S. (Colorado Revised Statutes) cited by Judge Spencer reads:
“It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of … sexual orientation … the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.”
Thus, under penalty of fines and, potentially, jail:
1. Jack Phillips must participate in an event that the Colorado constitution explicitly prohibits.
2. He must do so against deeply held religious convictions.
3. He must do so despite the fact that there are hundreds of other cake makers in the Denver area.
Those who support this decision argue that religious principles do not apply here: What if, for example, someone’s religious principles prohibited interracial marriages? Should that individual be allowed to deny services to an interracial wedding?
Of course not.
Here’s why that objection is irrelevant:
1. No religion practiced in America — indeed, no world religion — has ever banned interracial marriage. That some American Christians opposed interracial marriage is of no consequence. No one assumes that every position held by any member of a religion means that the religion holds that position.
2. If opposition to same-sex marriage is not a legitimately held religious conviction, there is no such thing as a legitimately held religious position. Unlike opposition to interracial marriage, opposition to same-sex marriage has been the position of every religion in recorded history — as well as of every country and every American state until the 21st century.
3. The Colorado baker made it clear to the gay couple — as acknowledged by the court — that he would be happy to bake and sell cakes to these gay men any other time they wanted. Therefore, he is not discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation. He readily sells to people he knows to be gay. What he is unwilling to do is to participate in an (SET ITAL) event (END ITAL) that he opposes for legitimate religious reasons. Until, at the most, 10 years ago, no one would have imagined that a person could be forced to provide goods or services for a same-sex wedding.
4. If a baker refused on religious grounds to provide the wedding cake for a polygamous wedding, should the state force him to do so? If a baker refused to provide a cake to a heterosexual couple that was celebrating living together without getting married, should the state force him to?
Some years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote a bestseller titled “Liberal Fascism.” If you think that title is an exaggeration, read the book. Or just watch what liberals are doing to those who oppose same-sex marriage.
In the name of tolerance, the left is eroding liberty in America.
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I guess the law and constitution should mean whatever we want any any moment, right?
North Dakota is known for being pretty far left. The state AG who allowed this is a Republican:
http://www.ndgop.org/view/elected-officials/statewide-officials/attorney-general-wayne-stenehjem/
The irony here is that if same sex marriages were allowed in ND, the polygamist action wouldn't be:
"North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion last week confirming that the state does not recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, allowing a man married to another man to come to North Dakota and marry a woman without divorcing his husband."
To me the left has simply made a mockery out of marriage.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/16/North-Dakota-Allows-Man-In-Same-Sex-Marriage-To-Also-Marry-Woman
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(GM is so much more succinct! )
If the term marriage has no specific meaning, what is polygamy?
It wasn't the people of North Dakota who changed the meaning of marriage or changed any laws, and it looks to me like their AG applied the laws properly. DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act signed by Democrat President Clinton) makes it so that individual states do not legally have to acknowledge the relationships of gay and lesbian couples who were married in another state. Only the section of DOMA that dealt with federal recognition was ruled unconstitutional. What a tangled web the leftists and enabling jurists weave.
I agree with ccp, "To me the left has simply made a mockery out of marriage".
The Left adopted LGBT instead of just gay as the oppressed group with the intention of going after acceptance and public endorsement for thems too, with their various, multiple partner arrangements.
BD, others, are you not sympathetic to the discrimination suffered by mulitple-partner-Americans and their right, just like single partner heteros, to marry whomever they choose? Have they not suffered in the dark shadows of this country long enough.
Or does what the smartest and most widely traveled Secretary of State in history once shouted regarding Benghazi apply now to marriage:
"AT THIS POINT...WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE??"
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"North Dakota is known for being pretty far left. The state AG who allowed this is a Republican:
http://www.ndgop.org/view/elected-officials/statewide-officials/attorney-general-wayne-stenehjem/
The irony here is that if same sex marriages were allowed in ND, the polygamist action wouldn't be"
BD, once again in your legal ability to take an argument into any direction I concede to you: It is the *right* that has made a mockery out of marriage. :-P
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A Prelude to Murder: Calling Humans Vermin
After a monk called them 'mad dogs,' a Buddhist mob killed 20 Muslims in Burma.
By Susan Benesch and Michael Abramowitz
Updated Dec. 18, 2013 1:52 a.m. ET
Before the Nazis murdered six million Jews, they called them rats and vermin. Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Hutu leaders declared that all Tutsi men, women and children were inyenzi, cockroaches. Today, similarly dehumanizing language is surging in countries like Burma, Greece, Nigeria and Iran—and history teaches that it can inspire mass violence if left unchecked.
Such inflammatory speech is launched from a variety of platforms: newspapers, broadcasts, pulpits, the Web, and even text messages. It's the content that's strikingly similar. In dozens of languages, human beings are described as less than human. The inciters say these pests must be eliminated as a matter of self-preservation.
In Burma, a Buddhist monk who leads the nationalist 969 Movement has compared the country's Muslim minority to "mad dogs" and African carp that "breed quickly" and are "very violent." Last March, Buddhists rampaged through a Muslim community in the city of Meiktila, torching houses and killing more than 20 people including children. The monk, Wirathu, called the violence "a show of strength."
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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
In Greece, the fascist group Golden Dawn has risen in the past few years from a fringe group to a political party with 18 seats in parliament. It ran on a platform promising to "rid Greece of the stench" of immigrants. Ilias Panagiotaris, a Golden Dawn parliamentarian, vowed at a rally before the June 2012 election that the group would "carry out raids on hospitals and kindergartens and it will throw immigrants and their children out on the street so that Greeks can take their place." Golden Dawn members have indeed carried out beatings and stabbings. Since the 2012 election, 71 violent attacks have been attributed to Golden Dawn according to the country's ombudsman—including the fatal stabbing in September of the antiracist rapper Pavlos Fissas.
In Nigeria, ongoing violence between Christians and Muslims has been fueled by inflammatory messages from both communities. In 2010, in the city of Jos, text messages warned Christians not to buy food from Muslims "because it was poisoned." Hundreds of people were killed in subsequent riots. Since 1999, more than 14,000 people have been killed in such interreligious violence, according to the U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Then there is Iran, a country where dehumanizing speech is coming directly from the government itself. In a speech Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered to the Basij paramilitary organization on Nov. 20, he returned to tropes that have long been a staple of Iran's leading religious and political figures. Mr. Khamenei referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "rabid dog" and attacked European leaders for supporting Israel. They are "cringing before this creature," he said, "which is not worthy of the name of a human being, before these leaders of the Zionist regime, who look like beasts and who cannot be called human."
Such cases challenge leaders around the world who should be aware by now that speech can catalyze not just violence, but genocide.
Some countries respond with either censorship or punishment. Greece, for example, is attempting the latter with a proposed law against hate speech. But this won't solve the problem. Prosecuting extremist speakers can simply amplify their messages, and it's nearly impossible to suppress speech now that it spreads so quickly online.
A better method is for influential leaders to rebuke inflammatory speakers unequivocally and publicly. Yet neither foreign nor local leaders have forcefully condemned this incendiary rhetoric in a single one of these cases. Leaders in Burma, for instance, have been silent about torrents of anti-Muslim speech, even after they have been followed by killings.
Emphatic "counter-speech" may work. In Kenya, after months of inflammatory speech by politicians and community leaders pitting members of the Kikuyu, Luo and Kalenjin tribes against one another, and a disputed election in late 2007, violence broke out and more than 1,000 people were killed. When the country held its next presidential election on March 4, 2013, Kenyan leaders—political, religious, cultural and even athletes—spoke out against violence and violent speech. Despite another tense, close race and disputed results, there was no eruption of violence.
Directly confronting purveyors of hate and dehumanization offers the best hope of stopping the language that can escalate into physical violence. The responsibility to do so is one that leaders of all stripes, not just government officials, must not shirk.
— Ms. Benesch founded the Dangerous Speech Project, and serves as the Edith Everett Genocide Prevention Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mr. Abramowitz directs the Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide.
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/12/flashback-msnbc-host-sharpton-hurls-homophobic-slur-on-national-tv-youre-a-punk-faggt-video/
Camille Paglia http://clashdaily.com/2013/12/like-lesbian-camille-paglia-anti-duck-dynasty-crusade-utterly-fascist-stalinist/
We have Dog Brothers who are gay, and I have friends who are gay, my mother has become lesbian. Here's my philosophy: You're free to be who you are, and others are free to make of it what they will.
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second post:
Friday Digest
December 20, 2013
Publisher's Note
This is our last Digest of 2013. As is our custom, we take leave between Christmas and New Year's to be with our families. Our next edition will be on Friday, Jan. 3, 2014.
A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
THE FOUNDATION
"Conscience is the most sacred of all property." --James Madison
CULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITH
A&E Fires Phil
"Duck Dynasty" star and patriarch Phil Robertson came face to face with the political correctness police at A&E again this week when he dared to go "off script" during a GQ interview.
Last May, the network requested that the #1 show in cable TV history eliminate its references to God and guns, but Phil said no: "God and guns are part of our everyday lives [and] to remove either of them from the show is unacceptable. If we can't pray to God on the show, then we will not do the show."
Responding to a question about sin in the current edition of GQ, Phil replied in his colloquial manner, "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there." He then paraphrased 1 Corinthians: "Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers -- they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right."
The reaction from the two most infamous proponents of gender confusion and homosexual normalization was swift and predictable. The so-called "Human Rights" Campaign protested, "Phil Robertson's remarks are not consistent with the values of our faith communities or the scientific findings of leading medical organizations. We also know that Americans of faith follow the Golden Rule -- treating others with the respect and dignity you'd wish to be treated with. As a role model on a show that attracts millions of viewers, Phil Robertson has a responsibility to set a positive example for young Americans."
Well, we think Phil did set a positive example for young Americans!
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation complained, "Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe. He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans ... who support [them]." They accused Robertson of "vile and extreme stereotypes" and "hateful anti-gay comments."
If you want a good resource for "what true Christians believe," don't start with GLAAD, start with Scripture. Both the Old and New Testaments are crystal clear on the subject, as Mark Alexander outlined in detail in his commentary, "Gender Identity, the Homosexual Agenda and the Christian Response."
As for "the majority of Louisianans," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal clarified, "Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints -- except those they disagree with. I don't agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended."
Indeed, A&E immediately surrendered: "We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson's comments. The A&E Networks have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely."
Phil responded, "My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other."
The Robertson family responded, "We want to thank all of you for your prayers and support. The family has spent much time in prayer since learning of A&E's decision. We want you to know that first and foremost we are a family rooted in our faith in God and our belief that the Bible is His word. Phil's ... beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible. Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart' and 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Phil would never incite or encourage hate. We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith. As a family, we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm."
In other words, they just put A&E on notice.
When it comes to opposing the homosexual agenda, Christians are now routinely condemned for speaking their beliefs. But the tyranny of political correctness is anathema to America itself, and enslaving all of us to a particular code of thought deemed acceptable to leftists is no different from any other kind of slavery.
If you'd like to let A&E know what you think, send an email to feedbackaetv@aenetworks.com. (Keep it clean.)
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367176/racism-wrecking-ball-john-fund
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/30/cnns-don-lemon-shreds-smug-msnbc-for-making-fun-of-romney-family-photo-featuring-adopted-black-grandchild/
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The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity
When Shakespeare lost out to 'rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class' at UCLA, something vital was harmed.
Heather Mac Donald
Jan. 3, 2014 6:43 p.m. ET
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the "Empire," UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.
In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to "alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class."
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Powell Library and Royce Hall, UCLA campus Getty Images
Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, and long before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the school's English department was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.
The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.
Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA's undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.
Not so long ago, colleges still reflected the humanist tradition, which was founded not on narcissism but on the all-consuming desire to engage with the genius and radical difference of the past. The 14th-century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch triggered the explosion of knowledge known today as Renaissance humanism with his discovery of Livy's monumental history of Rome and the letters of Cicero, the Roman statesman whose orations, with their crystalline Latin style, would inspire such philosophers of republicanism as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
But Petrarch wanted to converse with the ancients as well as read them. So he penned heartfelt letters in Latin to Virgil, Seneca, Horace and Homer, among others, informing them of the fate of their writings and of Rome itself. After rebuking Cicero for the vindictiveness revealed in his letters, Petrarch repented and wrote him again: "I fear that my last letter has offended you. . . . But I feel I know you as intimately as if I had always lived with you."
In 1416, the Florentine clerk Poggio Bracciolini discovered the most important Roman treatise on rhetoric moldering in a monastery library outside Constance, a find of such value that a companion exclaimed: "Oh wondrous treasure, oh unexpected joy!"
Bracciolini thought of himself as rescuing a still-living being. The treatise's author, Quintilian, would have "perished shortly if we hadn't brought him aid . . ." Bracciolini wrote to a friend in Verona. "There is not the slightest doubt that that man, so brilliant, genteel, tasteful, refined, and pleasant, could not longer have endured the squalor of that place and the cruelty of those jailors."
This burning drive to recover a lost culture propelled the Renaissance humanists into remote castles and monasteries to search for long-forgotten manuscripts. The knowledge that many ancient texts were forever lost filled these scholars with despair. Nevertheless, they exulted in their growing repossession of classical learning.
In François Rabelais's exuberant stories from the 1530s, the giant Gargantua sends off his son to study in Paris, joyfully conjuring up the languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic—that he expects his son to master, as well as the vast range of history, law, natural history and philosophy.
This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western civilization, prompting the evolution of such radical ideas as constitutional government and giving birth to arts and architecture of polyphonic complexity. And it became the primary mission of the universities to transmit knowledge of the past, as well as—eventually—to serve as seedbeds for new knowledge.
Compare the humanists' hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school's core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, "across gender, sexuality, race and class."
"Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?" she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in "Great Books," his 1997 account of re-enrolling in Columbia's core curriculum. "My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It's a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color." These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.
W.E.B. Du Bois would have been stunned to learn how narrow is the contemporary multiculturalist's self-definition and sphere of interest. Du Bois, living during America's darkest period of hate, nevertheless heartbreakingly affirmed in 1903 his intellectual and spiritual affinity with all of Western civilization: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension."
It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school's premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: "If the problematic 'closure' of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . ." How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?
No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages.
The American Founders drew on an astonishingly wide range of historical sources and an appropriately jaundiced view of human nature to craft the world's most stable and free republic. They invoked lessons learned from the Greek city-states, the Carolingian Dynasty and the Ottoman Empire in the Constitution's defense. And they assumed that the new nation's citizens would themselves be versed in history and political philosophy.
But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one's narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one's own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a 19th-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne.
Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. And as politics grow ever more unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with some consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.
Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This article is adapted from the Winter 2014 issue of City Journal and based on the author's Wriston Lecture for the Manhattan Institute.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/04/msnbcs-melissa-harris-perry-fights-back-tears-in-on-air-apology-to-the-romney-family/
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NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE January 9, 2014 4:00 AM
The White Ghetto
In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.
By Kevin D. Williamson
Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007.
If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.
Driving through these hills and hollows, you aren’t in the Appalachia of Elmore Leonard’s Justified or squatting with Lyndon Johnson on Tom Fletcher’s front porch in Martin County, a scene famously photographed by Walter Bennett of Time, the image that launched the so-called War on Poverty. The music isn’t “Shady Grove,” it’s Kanye West. There is still coal mining — which, at $25 an hour or more, provides one of the more desirable occupations outside of government work — but the jobs are moving west, and Harlan County, like many coal-country communities, has lost nearly half of its population over the past 30 years.
There is here a strain of fervid and sometimes apocalyptic Christianity, and visions of the Rapture must have a certain appeal for people who already have been left behind. Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.
Appalachian places have evocative and unsentimental names denoting deep roots: Little Barren River, Coal Pit Road. The name “Cumberland” blankets Appalachian geography — the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, several Cumberland counties — in tribute to the Duke of Cumberland, who along with the Ulster Scots ancestors of the Appalachian settlers crushed the Young Pretender at the Battle of Culloden. Even church names suggest ancient grievances: Separate Baptist, with the descriptor in all-capital letters. (“Come out from among them and be ye separate” — 2 Corinthians 6:17.) I pass a church called “Welfare Baptist,” which, unfortunately, describes much of the population for miles and miles around.
* * *
There is not much novelty in Booneville, Ky., the seat of Owsley County, but it does receive a steady trickle of visitors: Its public figures suffer politely through a perverse brand of tourism from journalists and do-gooders every time the U.S. Census data are recalculated and it defends its dubious title as poorest county in these United States. The first person I encounter is Jimmy — I think he’s called Jimmy; there is so much alcohol and Kentucky in his voice that I have a hard time understanding him — who is hanging out by the steps of the local municipal building waiting for something to happen, and what happens today is me. Unprompted, he breaks away from the little knot of men he is standing with and comes at me smiling hard. He appears to be one of those committed dipsomaniacs of the sort David Foster Wallace had in mind when he observed that at a certain point in a drunk’s career it does not matter all that much whether he’s actually been drinking, that’s just the way he is. Jimmy is attached to one of the clusters of unbusy men who lounge in front of the public buildings in Booneville – “old-timers with nothing to do,” one observer calls them, though some of those “old-timers” do not appear to have reached 30 yet, and their Mossy Oak camouflage outfits say “Remington” while their complexions say “Nintendo.” Mossy Oak and Realtree camo are aesthetic touchstones in these parts: I spot a new $50,000 Ram pickup truck with an exterior as shiny as a silver ingot and a camouflage interior, the usefulness of which is non-obvious.
I expect Jimmy to ask for money, but instead he launches into a long disquisition about something called the “Thread the Needle” program, and relates with great animation how he convinced a lady acquaintance of his to go down to the county building and offer to sign up for Thread the Needle, telling her that she would receive $25 or $50 for doing so.
“‘Thread the Needle!’ I told her,” he says. “Right? Right?” He pantomimes threading a needle. He laughs. I don’t quite get it. So he tells the story again in what I assume are more or less the exact same slurred words. “Right?”
“Right . . .”
“But they ain’t no Thread the Needle program! I play pranks!”
I get it: Advising friends to go down to the county building to sign up for imaginary welfare programs is Jimmy’s personal entertainment. He’s too old for World of Warcraft and too drunk for the Shoutin’ Happy Mission Ministry.
It’s not like he has a lot of appealing options, though. There used to be two movie theaters here — a regular cinema and a drive-in. Both are long gone. The nearest Walmart is nearly an hour away. There’s no bookstore, the nearest Barnes & Noble being 55 miles away and the main source of reading matter being the horrifying/hilarious crime blotter in the local weekly newspaper. Within living memory, this town had three grocery stores, a Western Auto and a Napa Auto Parts, a feed store, a lumber store, a clothing shop, a Chrysler dealership, a used-car dealership, a skating rink — even a discotheque, back in the 1970s. Today there is one grocery store, and the rest is as dead as disco. If you want a newsstand or a dinner at Applebee’s, gas up the car. Amazon may help, but delivery can be tricky — the nearest UPS drop-box is 17 miles away, the nearest FedEx office 34 miles away.
If you go looking for the catastrophe that laid this area low, you’ll eventually discover a terrifying story: Nothing happened. It’s not like this was a company town in which the business around which life was organized went toes-up. Booneville and Owsley County were never economic powerhouses. They were sustained for a time in part by a nearby Midsouth plant, which manufactured consumer electronics such as steam irons and toaster ovens, as well as industrial supplies such as refrigerator parts. A former employee estimates that a majority of Owsley County households owed part of their income to Midsouth at one time or another, until a mishap in the sanding room put an end to that: “Those shavings are just like coal dust,” he says. “It will go right up if it gets a spark.” Operations were consolidated in a different facility, a familiar refrain here — a local branch of the health department consolidated operations in a different town, along with the energy company and others. But Owsley County was poor before, during, and after that period. Coal mining was for years a bulwark against utter economic ruination, but regulation, a lengthy permitting process, and other factors both economic and geological pushed what remains of the region’s coal business away toward other communities. After they spend a winter or two driving an hour or two each way over icy twists of unforgiving mountain asphalt, many locals working in the coal business decide it is easier to move to where the work is, leaving Owsley County, where unemployment already is 150 percent of the national average, a little more desperate and collectively jobless than before. It’s possible that a coal worker’s moving from Booneville to Pikeville would lower the median income of both towns.
Some hope that a long-awaited highway-improvement program will revitalize the town by making the drive a little less terrifying — the local police chief admits with some chagrin that he recently found himself heading down the road in panicked spins after encountering a patch of early-November black ice, which clings to the high and shady places. But the fact is, KY-30 is a two-way road, and there are still more reasons to leave Owsley County than to go there.
A few locals drive two hours — on a good day, more on others — to report for work in the Toyota factory at Georgetown, Ky., which means driving all the way through the Daniel Boone National Forest and through the city of Lexington to reach the suburbs on the far side. As with the coal miners traveling past Hazard or even farther, eventually many of those Toyota workers decide that the suburbs of Lexington are about as far as they want to go. The employed and upwardly mobile leave, taking their children, their capital, and their habits with them, clean clear of the Big White Ghetto, while the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted are once again left behind.
“We worked before,” the former Midsouth man says. “We’d work again.”
* * *
“Well, you try paying that much for a case of pop,” says the irritated proprietor of a nearby café, who is curt with whoever is on the other end of the telephone but greets customers with the perfect manners that small-town restaurateurs reliably develop. I don’t think much of that overheard remark at the time, but it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions.
It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices.
Last year, 18 big-city mayors, Mike Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel among them, sent the federal government a letter asking that soda be removed from the list of items eligible to be used for EBT purchases. Mayor Bloomberg delivered his standard sermon about obesity, nutrition, and the multiplex horrors of sugary drinks. But none of those mayors gets what’s really going on with sugar water and food stamps. Take soda off the list and there will be another fungible commodity to take its place. It’s possible that a great many cans of soda used as currency go a long time without ever being cracked — in a town this small, those selling soda to EBT users and those buying it back at half price are bound to be some of the same people, the soda merely changing hands ceremonially to mark the real exchange of value, pillbilly wampum.
* * *
‘Oh, we’s jes’ pooooor folllllks, we cain’t afford no cornbreaaaaaaad!” So says Booneville police chief Johnny Logsdon, who has an amused glint in his eye and has encountered his share of parachuted-in writers on the poverty beat. A former New York City resident who made his career in the U.S. Navy before following his wife back to her Kentucky home, Chief Logsdon is an outdoorsman and a gifted nature photographer (his work adorns the exterior of the municipal building) who speaks fondly of Staten Island but is clearly in his element in the Kentucky countryside, much of which is arrestingly beautiful.
Chief Logsdon has time to indulge his hobbies because the Big White Ghetto is different from most other ghettos in one very important way: There’s not much violent crime here. There’s a bit of the usual enterprise one finds everywhere there are drugs and poor people, which is to say, everywhere: Police have just broken up a ring of car burglars who had the inspired idea of pulling off their capers during church services, when all the good people were otherwise occupied. (The good people? One victim reported $1,000 in cash missing from the trunk of his car, and I’m putting an asterisk next to his name until I know where that came from.) But even the crime here is pretty well predictable. The chief’s assistant notes that if they know the nature and location of a particular crime, they can more or less drive straight to where the perpetrator, who is likely to be known to them intimately, is to be found. In Owsley County, finally there is a place in which “the usual suspects” is something more than a figure of speech.
There’s a great deal of drug use, welfare fraud, and the like, but the overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two-thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Chief Logsdon is justifiably skeptical of the area’s reputation for drug-fueled crime. But he is not blinkered, and his photos of spectacular autumn foliage and delicate baby birds do not denote a sentimental disposition. “We have loggers and coal producers,” he says, dropping the cornpone accent. “We have educators and local businesses, and people in the arts. And we have the same problems they have in every community.” He points out that the town recently opened up a $1 million public library — a substantial investment for a town in which the value of all residential property combined would not add up to the big lottery jackpot being advertised all over. (Lottery tickets, particularly the scratch-off variety, are ubiquitous here.) He does not deny the severity or scope of the region’s problems, but he does think that they are exaggerated by visitors who are here, after all, only because Owsley holds the national title for poorest county. Owsley’s dependent underclass has many of the same problems as any other dependent underclass; but with a poverty rate persistently at the 40 percent mark — or half again as much poverty as in the Bronx — the underclass plays an outsized role in local life. It is not the exception.
Two towns over, I ask a young woman about the local gossip, and she tells me it’s always the same: “Who’s growing weed, who’s not growing weed anymore, who’s cooking meth, whose meth lab got broken into, whose meth lab blew up.” Chief Logsdon thinks I may be talking to the wrong people. “Maybe that’s all they see, because that’s all they know. Ask somebody else and they’ll tell you a different story.” He then gives me a half-joking — but only half — list of people not to talk to: Not the shiftless fellows milling about in the hallways on various government-related errands, not the guy circling the block on a moped. Instead, there’s the lifelong banker whose brother is the head of the school board. There’s the mayor, a sharp nonagenarian who has been in office since the Eisenhower administration.
And that, too, is part of the problem with adverse selection in the Big White Ghetto: For the smart and enterprising people left behind, life can be very comfortable, with family close, a low cost of living, beautiful scenery, and a very short climb to the top of the social pecking order. The relative ease of life for the well-off and connected here makes it easy to overlook the real unpleasant facts of economic life, which helps explain why Booneville has a lovely new golf course, of all things, but so little in the way of everyday necessities. The county seat, run down as parts of it are, is an outpost of civilization compared with what surrounds it for 50 miles in every direction. Stopping for gas on KY-30 a few miles past the Owsley County line, I go looking for the restroom and discover instead that the family operating the place is living in makeshift quarters in the back. Margaret Thatcher lived above her family’s shop as a little girl, too, but a grocer’s in Grantham is a very different thing from a gas station in Kentucky, with very different prospects.
Owsley County had been dry since Prohibition. A close election (632–518) earlier this year changed that, and the local authorities are sorting out the regulatory and licensing issues related to the sale of alcohol. Chief Logsdon thinks that this is, on balance, a good thing, because local prohibition meant that local drunks were on the local roads coming back from bars or liquor stores. “They aren’t waiting until they get home,” he says. “They’re opening the bottle. They’re like kids at Christ¬mas.” Obviously, prohibition wasn’t getting the job done. At the same time, the scene in Owsley County might make even the most ardent libertarian think twice about drug legalization: After all, these addicts are hooked on legal drugs – OxyContin and other prescription opioid analgesics — even if they often are obtained illegally. In nearby Whitley County, nearly half of the examined inmates in one recent screening tested positive for buprenorphine, a.k.a. “prison heroin,” a product originally developed as a treatment for opiate addiction. (Such cures are often worse than the disease: Bayer once owned the trademark on heroin, which it marketed as a cure for morphine addiction — it works.) Fewer drunk drivers would be a good thing, but I have to imagine that the local bar, if Booneville ever gets one, is going to be a grim place.
* * *
This isn’t the Kentucky of Elmore Leonard’s imagination, and there is nothing romantic about it. These are no sons and daughters of Andrew Jackson, no fiercely independent remnants of the old America clinging to their homes and their traditional ways. Having once been downwind of a plate of biscuits and squirrel gravy does not make you Daniel Boone. This is not the land of moonshine and hill lore, but that of families of four clutching $40 worth of lotto scratchers and crushing the springs on their beaten-down Camry while getting dinner from a Phillips 66 station.
This is about “the draw.”
“The draw,” the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents’ earnings in the black-market Pepsi economy, is poison. It’s a potent enough poison to catch the attention even of such people as those who write for the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof, visiting nearby Jackson, Ky., last year, was shocked by parents who were taking their children out of literacy classes because the possibility of improved academic performance would threaten $700-a-month Social Security disability benefits, which increasingly are paid out for nebulous afflictions such as loosely defined learning disorders. “This is painful for a liberal to admit,” Kristof wrote, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.”
There is much here to confound conservatives, too. Jim DeMint likes to say that marriage is our best anti-poverty program, and he also has a point. But a 2004 study found that the majority of impoverished households in Appalachia were headed by married couples, not single mothers. Getting and staying married is not a surefire prophylactic against poverty. Neither are prophylactics. Kentucky has a higher teen-motherhood rate than the national average, but not radically so, and its young mothers are more likely to be married. Kentucky is No. 19 in the ranking of states by teen pregnancy rates, but it is No. 8 when it comes to teen birth rates, according to the Guttmacher Institute, its young women being somewhat less savage than most of their counterparts across the country. Kentucky and West Virginia have abortion rates that are one-fourth those of Rhode Island or Connecticut, and one-fifth that of Florida. More marriage, less abortion: Not exactly the sort of thing out of which conservative indictments are made. But marriage is less economically valuable, at least to men, in Appalachia – like their counterparts elsewhere, married men here earn more than their unmarried counterparts, but the difference is smaller and declining.
In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. It is not as though labor and enterprise are unknown here: Digging coal is hard work, farming is hard work, timbering is hard work — so hard that the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston. There is to this day an Appalachian bar in Detroit and ex-Appalachian enclaves around the country. The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio¬economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.
“The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says Teresa Barrett, a former high-school principal who now publishes the Owsley County newspaper. “You have people on the draw getting $3,000 a month, and they still can’t live. When I was at the school, we’d see kids come in from a long weekend just starved to death. But you’ll see those parents at the grocery store with their 15 cases of Pepsi, and that’s all they’ve got in the buggy — you know what they’re doing. Everybody knows, nobody does anything. And when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters.”
Her advice to young people is to study for degrees that will help them get jobs in the schools or at the local nursing home — or get out. “I would move in a heartbeat,” she says, but she stays for family reasons.
Speaking in the Rose Garden in March of 1965, Lyndon Johnson had high hopes for his Appalachia Bill. “This legislation marks the end of an era of partisan cynicism towards human want and misery. The dole is dead. The pork barrel is gone. Federal and state, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, Americans of these times are concerned with the outcome of the next generation, not the next election. . . . The bill that I will now sign will work no miracles overnight. Whether it works at all depends not upon the federal government alone but the states and the local governments as well.” The dole, as it turns out, is deathless, and the pork barrel has merely been reincarnated as a case of Pepsi. President Johnson left out of his calculations the factor that is almost always overlooked by populists: the people.
* * *
There is another Booneville, this one in northern Mississippi, just within the cultural orbit of Memphis and a stone’s throw from the two-room shack in which was born Elvis Presley, the Appalachian Adonis. There’s a lot of Big White Ghetto between them, trailers and rickety homes heated with wood stoves, the post-industrial ruins of old mills and small factories with their hard 1970s lines that always make me think of the name of the German musical group Einstürzende Neubauten — “collapsing modern buildings.” (Some things just sound more appropriate in German.) You swerve to miss deer on the country roads, see the rusted hulk of a 1937 Dodge sedan nestled against a house and wonder if somebody was once planning to restore it – or if somebody just left it there on his way to Detroit. You see the clichés: cars up on cinderblocks, to be sure, but houses up on cinderblocks, too. And you get a sense of the enduring isolation of some of these little communities: About 20 miles from Williamsburg, Ky., I become suspicious that I have not selected the easiest route to get where I’m going, and stop and ask a woman what the easiest way to get to Williamsburg is. “You’re a hell of a long way from Virginia,” she answers. I tell her I’m looking for Williamsburg, Kentucky, and she says she’s never heard of it. It’s about the third town over, the nearest settlement of any interest, and it’s where you get on the interstate to go up to Lexington or down to Knoxville. “I went to Hazard once,” she offers. The local economic-development authorities say that the answer to Appalachia’s problems is sending more people to college. Sending them to Nashville might be a start.
Eventually, I find my road. You run out of Big White Ghetto pretty quickly, and soon you are among the splendid farms and tall straight trees of northern Mississippi. Appalachia pretty well fades away after Tupelo, and the Mississippi River begins to assert its cultural force. Memphis is only a half-hour’s drive away, but it feels like a different sort of civilization – another ghetto, but a ghetto of a different sort. And if you stand in front of the First Baptist Church on Beale Street and look over your shoulder back toward the mountains, you don’t see the ghost of Elvis or Devil Anse or Daniel Boone – you see a big sign that says “Wonder Bread,” cheap and white and empty and as good an epitaph as any for what remains left behind in those hills and hollows, waiting on the draw and trying not to think too hard about what the real odds are on the lotto or an early death.
— Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review. This article originally appeared in the December 16, 2013, issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.
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Second post
http://defund.com/department-of-justice-its-racist-to-punish-misbehaving-black-students-in-school/
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Third post:
http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2014/01/11/liberals-aghast-as-uss-25-most-dangerous-neighborhoods-all-happen-to-be-black/
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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/politics/us-to-expand-rules-limiting-use-of-profiling-by-federal-agents.html?from=homepage
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The Left's 'Hate Crime' Agenda
Using 'Hate Crime' Hoaxes to Undermine Liberty
By Mark Alexander • Wednesday, January 15, 2014
"There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue ... if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice..." --John Adams (1775)
My last column, "The 'Gay Agenda' v. Liberty," outlined recent examples of how the Left's assault on marriage and family is a façade for their frontal assault on the First Amendment and, by extension, two of the most critical pillars of Liberty. The Democratic Party has cleverly seized upon the sympathies of tens of millions of mostly young and female voters, enticing them to become unwitting pawns who "feel good" about "gay rights." But the Leftist ideologues who now oversee the once-proud Democratic Party understand that the overarching strategy is to constrict Liberty and empower their statist politicos and bureaucrats.
As a follow up, this column focuses on how the Left canonizes "victims" of so-called "hate crimes" in order to expand voter constituencies. They do so by politicizing assaults against members of minority groups, which typically support Democrats -- qualifying those crimes as being of a more hateful class of offenses than the same crimes against others who are not a member of that constituency. The co-opting of these identity voter blocs follows the Left's tried-and-true politics of disparity paradigm.
For background, "hate crimes" today are the evolutionary political product of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which expanded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to outlaw any effort to "injure, intimidate or interfere with anyone [engaged in protected activities], by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin." The original proscription of such discrimination sounds reasonable -- but in the 50 years since passage of the 1964 Act, that reason has twisted to comport with Leftist political agendas.
For example, among the key protected activities in the '68 legislation are seeking entrance to educational institutions and equal employment opportunities, which, by way of legislated and court-ordered affirmative action criteria, created an epidemic of reverse discrimination -- which polarized the American people and further firmed up those already loyal Democrat constituencies.
But the current political "hate crime" classification is a far more insidious defilement of the Civil Rights Act than affirmative action.
I should state for the record that I believe ALL violent crimes are hate crimes, and no assault on a fellow citizen is more demanding of justice than another similar assault, regardless of the race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation of the victim. The notion that one murder is more deserving of justice than another is itself an assault on the principles of the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal justice under the law.
The Left's hate crimes hoax agenda is advanced by race hustlers, those awful opportunists who never let the truth get in the way of their political agenda. That was aptly demonstrated in the national crusade to elevate to "hate crime" status the self-defense shooting of a Florida hoodlum, Trayvon Martin, by "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman. That crusade was a political maneuver that dovetailed conveniently with Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
Now, if race hustlers were really interested in the Truth versus manufactured hate crimes hoaxes, they would have been too busy focusing on Obama's hometown of Chicago, which, between the date of Trayvon Martin's death and verdict in Zimmerman's trial, recorded more than 700 murders of black residents, almost all of whom were killed by other black or "black Hispanic" gangbangers. But Obama and his racist cadres never mentioned a single one of those deaths, or thousands of such others across the nation, because those murders did not fit their political agenda. And now that the 2012 campaign has concluded, the race hustlers have stopped insisting that Martin's death be treated as a hate crime.
Fact is, the per-capita black-on-white assaults and murders nationwide grossly outnumbers that of white-on-black assaults and murders, but there has never been a national campaign to classify one of the former as a race-based "hate crime" -- not even in horrendous cases such as the torture/rape/murders of a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom by five black thugs.
Unquestionably, in the majority of black-on-white crimes, race is a key factor, but you won't hear that from a Democrat.
While elevating rare white-on-black assaults to political "hate crime" status is an erroneous adulteration of the law, more fallacious is the awarding of that classification to rare assaults ostensibly based on sexual orientation.
Indeed, there is no more infamous example of the truth being trumped by the Left's "hate crime" constituency development agenda than the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. As you may recall, Shepard was savagely beaten, tortured and left for dead by two other young men, who claimed the "gay panic" defense, suggesting that Shepard had approached them for sex and they responded by murdering him.
Upon his death, the Left canonized Shepard as the poster boy for violence against homosexuals, a fitting cause célèbre to advance "hate crime" legislation. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) proclaimed, "Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement."
There were two plays, three films and a documentary about Shepard. Pop musicians including Elton John, Melissa Etheridge and Lady Gaga wrote songs about him. There was a "passion play" called "The Laramie Project," portraying Shepard as a martyr, which played in theaters and schools across the nation. It was "one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country," according to The Wall Street Journal. The Matthew Shepard Foundation became the hub for his legacy.
Ted Kennedy led the charge to pass the "Matthew Shepard Act," amending the Civil Rights "hate crime" legislation to include "sexual orientation." Obama ceremonially signed that legislation into law in 2009 after passage by Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.
But now there is a problem: Truth is trumping the myth.
After years of exhaustive research on Shepard's murder, including interviews with more than 100 people -- associates of Shepard, his murderers and their associates -- a respected journalist, Stephen Jimenez, has published his findings in "The Book of Matt." The book dispels the notion that the murder was related to Shepard's sexual orientation, and instead concludes he was a meth dealer and sex partner with one of his murderers -- both of whom were homosexuals.
Jimenez is also a homosexual.
Even the most prominent homosexual advocacy publication in the nation, The Advocate, in an article entitled "Have We Got Matthew Shepard All Wrong?," concludes that the new evidence significantly changes the popular narrative.
Its author, Aaron Hicklin, the homosexual editor of Out Magazine, asks, "What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard's murder was wrong?" He asks further, "Did our need to make a symbol of Shepard blind us to a messy, complex story that is darker and more troubling than the established narrative?"
Aaron concludes that Shepard's murder was "a kind of hate crime -- just not as straightforward as the one we've embraced all these years."
Indeed, as I noted above, all murders are hate crimes.
I should also note here that, as is the case with "media blackouts" of black-on-white racially motivated assaults and murders, while the Leftmedia was saturating headlines and airwaves with news of the trial of Shepard's murderers in 1999, there was virtually no mention of the kidnapping/torture/rape/murder of a 13-year-old Arkansas child, Jesse Dirkhising, by two homosexual predators.
When asked about the disparity in coverage, NBC spokesperson Barbara Levinson said, "We did not cover [the Dirkhising case]. There are many crime stories that don't make it on the air." Likewise, there was no mention of the Dirkhising murder by ABC, CBS, CNN, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, or USA Today. And there was no coverage of the trial of Dirkhising's murderers.
So the Shepard case joins the "2013 Top Ten Hate Crime Hoaxes," and the growing heap of hate hoaxers, including Sharmeka Moffitt, Tawana Brawley, Crystal Mangum, Morton Downey, Cornelius Weaver, Alicia Hardin, Madonna Constantine, Dayna Morales, Langston Carraway, Kerri Dunn, ad infinitum.
Will the truth about Shepard change anything?
Maybe for a handful of folks who are tired of being duped by Leftists. But for Obama and his cadres, their statist agenda will always trump the facts, and most of their low-info constituents are too ignorant to discern the difference.
So, where will we see the next expansion of "hate crime" interpretation in the courts and legislatures? Under Obama, the FBI's most recent Uniform Crime Report now defines "hate crime" as not just an act against an individual, but "a business, an institution, or society as a whole." Can you see where this is going?
The movement to define and convict "hate speech" as a reflection of "hate thought" is well underway. That interpretation will manifest itself in further constricting the First Amendment -- particularly freedom of religion, speech and the press -- and thus, Liberty.
The tactical "hate crime" agenda is about growing voter constituencies, but its strategic agenda is to play a key part of the Left's endeavor to undermine Constitutional Rule of Law, and redefine it with the so-called "living constitution." If they ultimately succeed in suppressing religious Liberty through constraints on "hate speech," then they will succeed in diminishing the most foundational understanding that Liberty is "endowed by our Creator, and they will then further advance the despotic notion that men are the arbiters of Liberty.
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http://patriotpost.us/documents/81
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/20/state-rules-oregon-bakery-that-refused-to-make-a-gay-wedding-cake-violated-lesbian-couples-civil-rights/
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http://theweek.com/article/index/255403/the-worlds-most-ancient-christian-communities-are-being-destroyed-mdash-and-no-one-cares
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gender_pay_gap_the_familiar_line_that_women_make_77_cents_to_every_man_s.html
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http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/17/student-forced-to-apologize-for-emailing-pic-of-obama-kicking-a-door-because-racism/
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http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2013/03/28/history-lesson/?singlepage=true
History Lesson: Racist Democrats and the Big Lie
March 28th, 2013 - 5:07 pm
(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/files/2013/03/jim-crow.jpg)
The way we were
In order to escape their truly wretched past (click on the link for my short book on the subject), modern Democrats have adopted as an article of faith the bedtime story that, thanks to Tricky Dick Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the racists who had been the backbone of their party for the better part of a century suddenly switched to the GOP en masse some time around 1968, with the happy result that now all the racists are on the right. Presto — instant virtuousness and a clean slate!
It’s a lie, of course. But don’t take it from me, take it from my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson, who addressed this issue brilliantly last year:
Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.
As Kevin goes on to point out:
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.
And yet this myth persists — in fact, it’s just about the only response today’s Democrats have to their own sordid history: pinning it on the other guy. It makes them profoundly uncomfortable that among the 21 who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be found Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., the founder of the Hillbilly Dynasty; Robert “KKK” Byrd, the Conscience of the Senate; and Sleepin’ Sam Ervin of Watergate fame.
Just for laughs, let’s take a look at the electoral maps for 1968 (Nixon-Humphrey), 1972 (Nixon-McGovern), 1976 (Carter-Ford), and 1992 (Clinton-Bush) to see how the South voted.
First, 1968, as the Vietnam War approached its high-water mark and the antiwar movement was starting to roll:
(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/files/2013/03/ElectoralCollege1968.svg_.png)
1968: still semi-solid
Nixon picked up some of the states of the Old Confederacy, largely because of their pro-military tradition and support for the war. “Wallace,” for those of you born yesterday, was Democrat George Wallace, a rabid segregationist who founded the American Independent Party and ran for president on its ticket. He won 13 percent of the popular vote, and carried five states in the Deep South for a total of 46 electoral votes.
Four years later, Nixon faced the first modern Democratic Party presidential candidate, George McGovern, who ran on a “Come Home, America” platform, and on whose campaign many of today’s radicals cut their teeth. Two items of note in the linked video clip: Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton was McGovern’s first running mate, who got dumped by the Compassion Party after it came out that he had been hospitalized for clinical depression and had undergone shock therapy. The other is McGovern’s extensive quote from “This Land is Your Land,” a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary written by the communist fellow-traveler, Woody Guthrie.
(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/files/2013/03/ElectoralCollege1972.svg_.png)
1972: the Cod stands alone
Yes, the South voted for the Republican — but so did every other state except for Massachusetts, which was the first indication of just how far gone the Bay State already was.
Four years later, Nixon was in San Clemente in the aftermath of Watergate, and a Southern governor named Jimmy Carter, whose only claim to the White House was that he was not RMN, was running against the Accidental President, Jerry Ford:
(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/files/2013/03/ElectoralCollege1976.svg_.png)
1976: you can go home again
Yes, twelve years after the Solid South supposedly flipped to the GOP, here it was, back again, helping to elevate a native son past the Michigander. The two Reagan wipeouts of 1980 and 1984 began the alignment of the South with the GOP — but it was partly reversed by Bill Clinton in 1992:
(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/files/2013/03/ElectoralCollege1992.svg_.png)
1992: Back to Bubba
Kevin concludes:
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.
So the next time a Regressive tries to repeat the Thurmond myth, show him the maps — and make the Democrats own their history. They don’t like it very much, and who can blame them?
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A VERY impressive and persuasive argument!
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Barry Goldwater made a huge mistake that leads to this -
""""History: Democrats & Republicans On Civil Rights & Equality
There is an awful lot of misinformation and untruth out there about the legacy of the two major political parties and the civil rights movement. Conservatives often like to use slight of hand, insisting that because the early Republican party was stronger in support of civil rights, this means that conservatives have the moral high ground. This is totally untrue.
Republicans – Moderate and Liberal Republicans supported civil rights. The Republicans who supported civil rights in America were not conservatives of the same ilk as George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They were liberals and moderates, people like former Rhode Island senator Lincoln Chaffee and former senator governor Nelson Rockefeller.
Conservative Democrats opposed civil rights. The Democrats opposed to the civil rights movement weren’t Democrats with the center-left ideology of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They were, in fact, conservatives – especially from the south – with far more in common with Limbaugh, Beck, etc. than any modern mainstream Democrat. When people say that someone like notorious segregationist Bull Connor was a Democrat, they are technically right on the party label, but when it comes to ideology Connor and the rest of those opposed to racial integration were conservatives.
Conservatives opposed civil rights. At the time of the civil rights movement, outside of the parties, conservatives were opposed to the civil rights movement. Barry Goldwater, a conservative whose brand of politics would soon take over the Republicans in the guise of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, opposed civil rights law. He claimed that he viewed it as a states rights issue, and actually favored equal rights, but the practical effect of his stance would be to allow segregation – in the south “states rights” meant “Jim Crow.” The conservative intellectual movement – William F. Buckley’s National Review, for instance, opposed what they viewed as law-breaking protests by Dr. Martin Luther King.
Democrats moved left on civil rights, in favor. Over time the Democrats moved to the left on civil rights, meaning they moved with other liberals in favor of them. Southern, conservative
Democrats opposed civil rights and the laws were passed by liberal/moderate Republicans and liberal/moderate Democrats. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat.
Conservative Democrats left the party in opposition to civil rights and became Republicans. After the Civil Rights law was signed into law, conservative Democrats left the party. Strom Thurmond, who ran as a segregationist in 1948, became a Republican, as did Jesse Helms (who went on to filibuster against making Martin Luther King Jr. day a federal holiday).
Republicans used racial resentment for elections, while Democrats became more racially inclusive. As the Republican party became more ideologically conservative in the post-Goldwater era, they increasingly used racially divisive politics for electoral gain. The GOP employed what is now known as “the southern stategy” (acknowledged by GOP party chairmen Ken Mehlman and Michael Steele in the last decade) to demonize blacks and other minorities while also riling up the white, male conservative base that forms the party now. Examples include the Willie Horton ad used by Bush Sr. allies vs Michael Dukakis, the “hands” ad used by Jesse Helms, and the nonstop racebaiting versus President Obama from conservative outlets like Fox News and talk radio.
At the same time, the Democratic party became more and more racially inclusive. After civil rights passed, and the GOP became more conservative and increased racial demagoguery, black and other minority voters became Democrats. Every black member of the House of Representatives is a Democrat, and every black senator since 1979 has been a Democrat. The first black president, is of course, Barack Obama – a Democrat.
The parties have changed but the ideology hasn’t. The attempt to co-opt liberal support of civil rights has been a consistent campaign of the right, despite their predecessor’s opposition to the concept. The attempt to say that liberal Republicans of the past are the same as conservative Republicans of today, is just a terrible lie. Conservatives often try to say people like Martin Luther King Jr. would be conservatives. This is entirely untrue. In the last years of his life, Dr. King ran what he called “The Poor People’s Campaign,” and his beliefs would largely be to the left of where the modern Democratic party is, let alone the Republicans.
The Democrats moved away from the conservative position against racial inclusion, while the right moved the other way and has only recently somewhat acknowledged the moral folly of its past. Conservatives opposed civil rights, while liberals favored them. Both ideologies have inhabited majorities in both parties, but the ideological support or opposition to civil rights and equality has largely remained the same.
LBJ - Civil Rights
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From Jonah G 2008:
LBJohnson was right. The Blacks (he reportedly used the N word) would vote for the crats for the next 200 years:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300432/party-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson
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"Barry Goldwater made a huge mistake that leads to this"
The article conflates 'civil rights' with a specific federal bill: "Conservatives opposed civil rights. ... Barry Goldwater ... opposed civil rights law. He claimed that he viewed it as a states rights issue, and actually favored equal rights, but the practical effect of his stance would be to allow segregation – in the south “states rights” meant “Jim Crow.”
'States rights' (in the US) is also a term that means following the constitution, even when it is not helpful to your political aspirations.
Goldwater voted for other civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960:
Wikipedia: Though he opposed forced segregation, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona voted against the bill, remarking, "You can't legislate morality." Goldwater had supported previous attempts to pass civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960 as well as the 24th Amendment outlawing the poll tax. He stated that the reason for his opposition to the 1964 bill was Title II, which in his opinion violated individual liberty and states' rights. Most Democrats from the Southern states opposed the bill and led an unsuccessful 83-day filibuster, including Senators Albert Gore, Sr. (D-TN) and J. William Fulbright (D-AR), as well as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who personally filibustered for 14 hours straight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tacJtYPHKiE
"Voting against it were 21 Democrats and [only]six Republicans."
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0619.html
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Thanks Doug. I was only seven yrs old at the time so I don't remember any of this or would I have cared in those days.
Do I understand it correct though that it was LBJs pushing through the Civil Rights Act that caused this "sea change" in Black Americans party affiliation from republican to democrat?
I am not comfortable with leaving the particulars of Civil Rights for Minorities for State's to decide when we know in many states they were de facto second class citizens. This is the precise Southern argument that the entire Civil War was about state's rights and not Slavery. Sorry I don't buy it.
That is a ruse and a cop out and a cynical ploy in my opinion. Most of us Northerners don't buy into this.
I side with Black Americans on this.
That said, I don't know why they Blacks persist in supporting a party that keeps them dependent and has in reality done more to damage their families, self esteem, etc...
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"Do I understand it correct though that it was LBJs pushing through the Civil Rights Act that caused this "sea change" in Black Americans party affiliation from republican to democrat?"
Good question.
"There was a big move to Democratic voting in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, and another in Lyndon B. Johnson’s."
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/04/blacks-and-the-democratic-party/
"Blacks mostly voted Republican from after the Civil War and through the early part of the 20th century. That’s not surprising when one considers that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the white, segregationist politicians who governed Southern states in those days were Democrats. The Democratic Party didn’t welcome blacks then, and it wasn’t until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend Democratic conventions in any official capacity. Most blacks lived in the South, where they were mostly prevented from voting at all.
The election of Roosevelt in 1932 marked the beginning of a change. He got 71 percent of the black vote for president in 1936 and did nearly that well in the next two elections, according to historical figures kept by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. But even then, the number of blacks identifying themselves as Republicans was about the same as the number who thought of themselves as Democrats.
It wasn’t until Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948 that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats. Earlier that year Truman had issued an order desegregating the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment."
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What GM's Kevin Williamson argument demonstrates is that southern (white) Democrats did not jump to Republican for racial or racist reasons. There was no going back on civil rights legislation, as Goldwater pointed out. People like Al Gore Sr, Robert Byrd, etc. never jumped parties. The south went Republican in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, etc. when Dems went liberal in the big government way, but went Dem in 1976, 1992, 1996, etc. when Dems talked a more centrist path. A typical Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi or Arkansas Democrat had national political views closer to northern Republicans than to northern Democrats - on national security and on the size and scope of government. Rick Perry is an extreme example of how conservative a southern (Texas) Democrat could be as recently as the 1990s. He is not close politically to McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Obama, Pelosi, etc. of the national Democratic mold. That type of switching was inevitable.
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"The election of Roosevelt in 1932 marked the beginning of a change. He got 71 percent of the black vote for president in 1936 and did nearly that well in the next two elections, according to historical figures kept by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. But even then, the number of blacks identifying themselves as Republicans was about the same as the number who thought of themselves as Democrats.
It wasn’t until Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948 that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats. Earlier that year Truman had issued an order desegregating the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment."
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What GM's Kevin Williamson argument demonstrates is that southern (white) Democrats did not jump to Republican for racial or racist reasons"
If it started during Roosevelt was it because of the New Deal? Truman capturing the majority of the Black vote might be because of the two orders you note.
I would suspect that one big contributing factor to the switch would be that Blacks began to move north at least after WW2.
So what was it? Economic? More social programs that benefitted poorer Blacks from the party of wealth redistribution?
I still don't understand. It does sound like the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the coup degra (sp?) so to speak for the Republican Party.
"What GM's Kevin Williamson argument demonstrates is that southern (white) Democrats did not jump to Republican for racial or racist reasons." OK so southerners maybe were more against big government than northerners. Perhaps that is why they jumped from Dems to Reps.
I still don't quite get the history of Blacks flocking to the Democratic party. Is it the Civil Rights OR (or and) Big government? It must be both.
How do Reps convince Blacks they are being sold out now? IF they think they have it tough now just wait till they have tens of millions from countries with far less opportunity than here who WILL work ten times harder and twice as long as them.
Yet they still cling to the reparations promise I guess. I still say they shoot themselves in their feet.
ON radio there is talk of a big behinds the scene push for reparations. This will keep the Blacks on board for another 200 years for sure or so it seems.
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ccp, Interesting questions. Democrats successfully create and manage political and economic dependency and for some reason, exposing it makes us look bad and uncaring. This came from an unknown individual on yahoo best answers:
(5 years ago)" If you're asking what percentage of all Black people who are on welfare it's about 10%. If you're asking what percentage of all welfare recipients are Black it is about 30%. Whites make up the majority of people on public assistance. "
'Welfare' of course is a loose term. Warren Buffet is a welfare recipient too with his cronies at the White House blocking a pipeline to pump up his railroads. Much of my work is in the inner city. The problems I see are not racial, they are cultural, but blacks are hit disproportionately with the culture of not entering the productive economy and living off of this program and that with all the cash, hassles, limitations and unintended consequences that come with that. People become easy prey for votes to those who pump up the failed programs, namely Democrats. And with that, people are receptive to the hate speech against those who challenge our pathetic status quo on this front, namely Republicans. Resentment and entitlement are the American values taught to all races in these large pockets of failure in America that tend to be majority black or minority. I have invested in the inner city because I know these people have all the potential to rise up from this economic culture. (I patiently wait.) Democrats, judging by their rhetoric, programs and policies, believe they cannot.
Most important is how do we break the cycle, but I like that you are asking the hard questions about how it began which might help us to better understand the viewpoint.
A point I made a couple of election cycles ago is that we do not have to win a demographic group we are losing badly, but we do have to begin to measurably chip away at that loyalty. The Obama Presidency creates that opportunity like we have never seen before. Blacks got their candidate, as they saw it; they gave him 96% support and enormous turnout. Dems won the House, Senate and Presidency while the black condition worsened - badly. The people look good but their policies don't work. Can they tell us that this stimulus program or that got ten million off of food stamps. No, it is just the opposite. Trillions went through cronies while the rolls of food stamps and disability just kept expanding.
There are lots of articulate and prominent black conservatives out there, not reaching the channels and publications that most black people read. At some point that message needs more and more people behind it, a critical mass. Changing the minds of 10% of any significant group is tidal wave in politics. Just having two viewpoints represented and debated where there was only one, would be a nation-changing breakthrough. If you are black and you spend any time reading or listening to Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, JC Watts, Clarence Thomas, Mia Love, Walter Williams, Hermann Cain, Alan West, Ken Blackwell, Larry Elder, Bill Cosby, Tony Dungy, and on and on, you would be hearing smart people speaking honestly from the brain and from the heart. Racist is to think their message is not their own or that people from one group cannot accomplish what people from other groups already have.
On the other side of economic freedom is the contorted argument that capitalism is holding you back and it is government that will set you free. How is that going??! Great at the top, if you are David Axelrod winning elections or Michelle Obama in a $25,000 dress and jetting to and from Hawaii and the Vineyard. Not so good back in the neighborhoods where they, once again, 'got out the vote'.
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"Changing the minds of 10% of any significant group is tidal wave in politics. Just having two viewpoints represented and debated where there was only one, would be a nation-changing breakthrough. If you are black and you spend any time reading or listening to Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, JC Watts, Clarence Thomas, Mia Love, Walter Williams, Hermann Cain, Alan West, Ken Blackwell, Larry Elder, Bill Cosby, Tony Dungy, and on and on, you would be hearing smart people speaking honestly from the brain and from the heart."
Thoughtful answer. Mainstream Blacks do go after their right wing fellow Blacks with massive fury. To White liberals the only people worse than Nazis are Conservative Republicans. To Democrat Blacks it is Conservative Blacks.
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Yes, civil rights champions, you can admit Obama is a failed president
Published by: Herman Cain
Yes, the election of a black man was a historic triumph for the struggle. But we do ourselves no honor when we cover up for the disaster of his policies.
After watching the movie "The Butler" staring Lee Daniels and Oprah Winfrey, I have a better understanding of why some people are reluctant to let go of the hoped-for glory of Barack Obama's presidency and acknowledge his failed policies.
The historic nature of his presidency trumps his failed policies in their minds because of the struggle, the sit-ins, the abuse, the senseless killings, the lynchings, the water hoses and attack dogs unleashed on the "freedom riders" during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.
Even more black people are reluctant to let go, but I believe that the champion of the Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would encourage them to let go, because they would not condone the social equivalent of spousal abuse. On the one hand, people are hanging on to the significance of a black man making it to the White House. And on the other hand they are enduring the abuse of failed policies, deceptions and now the arrogant trampling of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Just as the butler in the movie eventually let go of his anger toward his son who became a "freedom rider" and civil rights activist, it is past time for people to let go of their denial. It is time to face the facts so the future can be better than the past.
It took the butler nearly his entire life to let go of his anger, because he could never let go of watching the senseless killing of his father when he was a child. His father was killed for standing up to a white man who had abused his mother.
Yes, we must celebrate the good things in our history, but we must not hold on to the bad things in our history. Remember them, yes! Hold on to them, no! Let go!
History will record Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States of America. Some people want to quibble that he's not the first black president since his father was from Africa and his mother was from the USA. Get over it! The semantics do not matter.
If President Obama does not change his policies or his arrogance, which I doubt, history will also record him as the worstpresident, in terms of results, in American history. Historic federal spending, an un-recovered economy, blurred and ineffective foreign policy, a dependency nation, a health care disaster and a demotivated electorate are just a few of the historic descriptions that will be used to describe his presidency.
A historic triumph of getting to the White House is not enough to define one's presidency. It also takes results that will leave a positive impact on the nation.
Right now, it's not looking too good. Those who have spent their lives committed to the struggle do not betray that commitment by acknowledging that this is the truth. Indeed, they honor it. We can do better than this.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/24/powerful-gop-lobbyist-drafts-bill-to-ban-gay-athletes-from-playing-in-the-nfl/
From the article:
According to the statement, the idea for a Congressional ban on gay athletes in the NFL came to him after he watched coverage of Michael Sam’s decision to come out of the closet prior to the NFL draft. In recent weeks, Sam has been praised by many Democratic lawmakers, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama, who called him “an inspiration.”
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/24/powerful-gop-lobbyist-drafts-bill-to-ban-gay-athletes-from-playing-in-the-nfl/
From the article:
According to the statement, the idea for a Congressional ban on gay athletes in the NFL came to him after he watched coverage of Michael Sam’s decision to come out of the closet prior to the NFL draft. In recent weeks, Sam has been praised by many Democratic lawmakers, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama, who called him “an inspiration.”
This story looks like a spoof to me. If it's not, it should be. The GOP does not oppose freedom of association, no matter what one 'Lobbyist' says.
I've been part of the GOP for a long time. I've been Chairman, Co-Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, Delegate, Alternate, Caucus Convener and Attendee. There is no position in the GOP called 'Lobbyist'.
Wikipedia: "A bill is a proposed law under consideration by a legislature." 'Under consideration' by Congress is a fact not mentioned in the article.
"GOP" is not mentioned in the source article at The Hill. So this is neither the GOP, nor a bill, just a stupid idea.
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Ted not really persuading me here , , ,
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/24/watch-ted-nugent-takes-credit-for-getting-piers-morgans-a-thrown-out-during-cnn-interview/
Wasn't there also something he said about shooting people from a helicopter that could be interpreted as racist?
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Ted not really persuading me here , , ,
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/24/watch-ted-nugent-takes-credit-for-getting-piers-morgans-a-thrown-out-during-cnn-interview/
Wasn't there also something he said about shooting people from a helicopter that could be interpreted as racist?
The left can interpret anything as racist to smear political opponents. Having said that, he did say something pretty stupid recently.
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Clearly President Obama is 100% human, and clearly Ted Nugent knows that, was angry and displeased with him, said something stupid and untrue and apologized for it, but how does calling someone a 'subhuman mongrel' qualify as 'racist'? Seems to me it was a slur against millions of innocent canines. A real 'subhuman' mongrel, man's best friend, does not try to take our country down.
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C'mon, BO is the product of mixed race parents, and to my sense of things, "mongrel" has often been used as an out and out racist insult for such people. Similarly there is the meme of racist heart about how many black people look like gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys. I have zero sense of chimpanzee being used for fellow human beings outside of this context.
And, I don't have the quote, but there was something similarly dubious about shooting certain people from a helicopter in a manner similar to how helicopters are used for certain kinds of hunting.
I love Ted's exuberance and enthusiasm, but I really don't want to have to parse words in defense of this sort of excrement.
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Okay, understood after having it explained. If Nugent has had other episodes of race issues, then maybe this is strike three, but I have not heard of any.
It's hard for me to believe we are race sensitive about a guy who was popularly elected President of the United States - twice. Yet any Dem commentator can look at a tea party crowd or a Republican debate and denigrate their gender or race if it looks too lilly-white or vanilla to them. The only "white" guy I've ever seen was my grandfather in a casket. Caucasians have pigmentation too! The issue with this President is not his looks, his race or his heredity, it is that he is destroying the country.
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"The only "white" guy I've ever seen was my grandfather in a casket. Caucasians have pigmentation too! "
Doug your right. Blacks are brown not black. And whites are cream not white. :wink:
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Many people suspect many folks in the Tea Party to have racist inclinations. As a Jew I have seen Nazi and Aryan Brotherhood and similar literature, websites, etc. This is pretty much the kind of place where I find "mongrel", "chimpanzees", "monkeys" and similar words used. At the very least, calling this president a "mongrel" and a "chimpanzee" walks right into that. The kindest thing that can be said here is that it was really stupid-- as was the failure to acknowledge that these words can be seen as such. Throw in his comment about gunning people down from helicopters (I'm vague as to what it was, but it was something along the line of people rioting for welfare checks or something like that) and reasonable people are going to be seeing a pattern.
It is a normal human thing to size people up by the kind of company they keep. Ted can be great fun and occasionally somewhat eloquent about things we believe in, but he is now damaged goods. Using him as a spokesman, will taint those who cite him in this way.
The undecided person coming to this conversation will be considering what Ted has to say and then the other side with say "You're listening to a racist! He called the president a mongrel and a chimpanzee."
Lots of good people are offended by the nastiness of discourse today (indeed is this not one of the memes of our side? How nasty the progressives are?) In their eyes our using someone who talks like this loses us credibility and respect in their eyes.
This is reality.
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I don't know if Nugent is a racist or not, but this is not the first time there have been public utterances that led to questions:
http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/ted-nugent-uses-slurs-in-radio-interview-gets-kicked-off-the-air/
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Too bad the article does not have the courage to actual say what the words in question were.
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Too bad the article does not have the courage to actual say what the words in question were.
Agreed.
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Ted Nugent, 2003, Denver 103.5FM: Nugent insisted he was trying to make the point that the offensive terms were merely words and shouldn't offend anyone. The show's Korean producer KATHY LEE admits she wasn't personally offended.
http://www.contactmusic.com/news-article/nugent-in-trouble-over-racial-slurs
Has anyone ever used the n-word just discussing the issue of using the n-word, intending to slur no one? If so, did you lose your free speech rights and all credibility forever?
Nugent has used the mongrel term for white people: “So much media has lost its soul lying Saul Alinsky Joseph Geobbells freaks,” Nugent tweeted. “CNN Joseph Goebbells Saul Alinsky propaganda ministry mongrels (sic).” http://www.thewrap.com/ted-nugent-gay-pirate-twitter-cuba
'The Wrap' writer: "For the record: Yes, we get it — he’s being sarcastic but epic ridiculousness deserves to be recognized."
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http://tundratabloids.com/2012/11/lesbian-in-need-of-a-haircut-picks-an-all-male-muslim-barbershop-gets-the-boot.html
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http://tundratabloids.com/2012/11/lesbian-in-need-of-a-haircut-picks-an-all-male-muslim-barbershop-gets-the-boot.html
If it was an authentic muslim barbershop, it wouldn't be her hair that was cut.
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:lol:
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http://pamelageller.com/2014/03/obama-administration-let-anti-gay-muslim-leader-u-s-fundraise-speak.html/
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second post
http://www.davidmcelroy.org/?p=19876
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24653643
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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/spike-lee-sentimental-segregationists-article-1.1710867
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A week later, and liberals are still lining up to assail Paul Ryan's "racism." The episode is worth noting not because Mr. Ryan said anything wrong, but because of what it shows about the political habits of today's elected and media left.
The Wisconsin Congressman has been looking into the problem of upward economic mobility and how effective federal programs are in combatting poverty. Appearing on Bill Bennett's radio program, Mr. Ryan observed that antipoverty assistance can often create "incentives not to work and to stay where you are, that's not what we want in society. . . . There are a lot of people slipping through the cracks in America that are not reaching their potential and we as conservatives should have something to say about that."
He also mused: "We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, so there's a cultural problem that has to be dealt with."
The liberal online organ Think Progress led with the headline "Paul Ryan Blames Poverty On Lazy 'Inner City' Men," and it was off to the races. California Democrat Barbara Lee denounced his "thinly veiled racial attack," adding, "Let's be clear, when Mr. Ryan says 'inner city,' when he says 'culture,' these are simply code words for what he really means: 'black.'" Others were less charitable about his imagined neo-Confederate sympathies.
Mr. Ryan put out a statement saying he had been "inarticulate" but reiterated his point that "the predictable result" of the poverty trap for society at large has been "multi-generational poverty and little opportunity."
But don't take his word for it. "We know young black men are twice as likely as young white men to be 'disconnected'—not in school, not working. We've got to reconnect them. We've got to give more of these young men access to mentors. We've got to continue to encourage responsible fatherhood. We've got to provide more pathways to apply to college or find a job. We can keep them from falling through the cracks."
Those were the words of President Obama, speaking less than a month ago about his "My Brother's Keeper" project to help "groups who've seen fewer opportunities that have spanned generations," especially boys and young men of color. "It's going to take time. We're dealing with complicated issues that run deep in our history, run deep in our society, and are entrenched in our minds."
No less than Mr. Ryan, Mr. Obama sure sounded like he was talking about "a cultural problem." He didn't mention "inner cities," but his entire White House initiative is geared to helping young minority men, not whites. The President even concluded with an ode to self-reliance that Mr. Ryan might have considered a little too lacking in nuance: "Government cannot play the only—or even the primary—role. . . . It's ultimately going to be up to these young men and all the young men who are out there to step up and seize responsibility for their own lives."
So even though Mr. Ryan never mentioned race, liberals attacked his off-the-cuff remarks as racist while the President's moral lecture was hardly noticed. Republicans are accused of racism if they ignore the least fortunate, and now they're racist for taking poverty and its causes seriously. Unless you unreservedly favor the welfare status quo, or used to be a community organizer, the left gets you coming and going.
The attacks on Mr. Ryan are one more example of the politics of personal vilification that typifies the left these days. Its policies were supposed to reduce inequality, but instead the income gap is widening. They were supposed to lift people out of poverty, but poverty has increased.
So the last thing they can tolerate is a conservative like Mr. Ryan who is looking for better solutions and using a moral language of opportunity and upward mobility that could appeal to Americans of all incomes and backgrounds. Liberals have to smear conservatives personally because they know they're losing on the merits.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5bA5NRoFUc
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/27/stephen-colberts-politically-incorrect-joke-on-twitter-has-people-calling-for-his-show-to-be-cancelled/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/27/stephen-colberts-politically-incorrect-joke-on-twitter-has-people-calling-for-his-show-to-be-cancelled/
Most Americans of asian background are too busy being successful to play the victim game.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/27/kobe-bryant-incurs-wrath-of-the-left-over-his-comments-on-trayvon-martin-case/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/27/stephen-colberts-politically-incorrect-joke-on-twitter-has-people-calling-for-his-show-to-be-cancelled/
Except for the fact that there are two sets of rules, he should be widely called out on it same as if it was Rush L, Hannity, Beck would be if it was one of them who said it.
That said, calling for silencing a person is anti- free speech which is what they do, not what we do.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/27/kobe-bryant-incurs-wrath-of-the-left-over-his-comments-on-trayvon-martin-case/
Kobe clarified with a quote: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
What if we all just lived by THAT?
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/27/kobe-bryant-incurs-wrath-of-the-left-over-his-comments-on-trayvon-martin-case/
Kobe clarified with a quote: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
What if we all just lived by THAT?
No opportunity for graft, set asides and captive voting blocs.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uPijRqYOYg
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http://www.tomkratman.com/Right20rules.html
1. Anyone responsible for three hundred years of slavery would have to be a lot older than you and me.
2. There has to be some genetics in “racism’s” DNA, some DNA in its gene pool, or it just isn’t racism.
3. Racism could be eliminated in the United States if we could just eliminate the white liberals who so plainly depend on it so much and do so much to keep it going.
4. Reality isn’t racist: The reality is that there are pond-scummy gallows bait in every group. Some of those will be more of a problem to their own group than to you (see Rule 14, below). Some will be more of a problem to you precisely because you’re not a member of their group. It is wise, not racist, to avoid the latter. In Boston, this may be referred to as the “Evelyn Wagler-George Pratt Rule,” and that’s not code. Odd exception to half of Rule 4: Jesse Jackson would much rather be followed by a white on the streets of DC, at night, than a black.
5. There have been two instances in recent history where the concept of “honorary white” held sway. One was in apartheid South Africa where, for example, Japanese were considered “honorary white.” The other was when, in relation to the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American mainstream media made Hispanic George Zimmerman an “honorary white.” This is not entirely coincidence since (see Rule 18) the very liberal American media is as racist in their way as ever the Afrikaner Broederbond was in its.
6. Nobody really thinks whites are as evil as portrayed by white liberals and black demagogues. If they really thought so, they’d be too afraid to ever leave the house, since a) there are a lot more whites, b) those whites are much better armed, c) they’re more likely to be veterans of the Army’s and Marine Corps’ ground gaining combat arms, and d) they have an historically demonstrated cultural aptitude for mass, organized violence.
7. People who insist you’re speaking in code insist on it because they believe it’s true. They believe it’s true because they really do speak in code and can’t imagine anyone who does not speak in code. It’s not racist to think those people are idiots, nor to note that they’re mostly white. (Exception to rule: When conservatives talk about guns and zombies? Especially in terms of using the former to kill the latter? Yeah; “zombie” is code for “liberals of any color.” See Rule 6, above.)
8. It’s not racist to note that white liberalism managed to do in about thirty years something that three hundred years of slavery could not, seriously damage the black family, generally though not universally, and ruin it completely over wide swaths.
9. Speaking of slavery, the bulk of slave raiding and trading in Africa was black, usually Islamic black (see Rule 16, below), on black. The Arabic word for black and slave is the same, “Abd.” And the first registered slave owner in Virginia was black. Pointing this out to liberals, white and black, is always fun.
10. It’s not racist to wish that our first black president had been Thomas Sowell.
11. The “Some of my best friends” defense against a charge of racism is no defense…unless it happens to be true. Sometimes it’s best expressed to a white liberal as, “You don’t have so much as a day in uniform, do you, dipshit?”
12. The system of education that white liberals have inflicted on inner city blacks is a crime against humanity. No amount of money that they toss at it helps to overcome the elimination of discipline liberalism has caused. It’s neither racist to note this…nor wrong.
13. The various college and university minority “studies” programs, because they give a useless pseudo-education, and at very high cost in both money and time, are racist in their effects.
14. Most black crime is black on black crime. It is racist in its effects to deprive the black community of the social good that comes from executing black criminals that prey on other blacks.
15. It takes a white liberal idiot (Lord, forgive us our redundancies) not to understand the difference between casual sex with a member of another race and marrying and investing one’s entire reproductive effort in a member of another race. See, e.g., http://www.tomkratman.com/yoli.html. Dipshits.
16. Islam is not a race. Detesting Islam is not racist. There is nothing in Islam which genetically compels either slightly tanned Palestinians or totally white English reverts to pray toward Mecca five times daily, to self-detonate in crowded squares and movie theaters, to find offense in just about everything, nor even to clitorectomize their women. Flash alert: Lysenko was wrong. Dipshits.
17. When a liberal accuses you of racism, rejoice; it means the dipshit knows he or she is losing.
18. The worst racists are liberals, mostly white ones, who assume that blacks and hispanics are so inferior that only affirmative action in perpetuity would give them a remotely fair chance. (That this also keeps a lot of liberal white social workers and bureaucrats employed is, of course, merely incidental. Ahem. Dipshits.)
19. There was a conservative argument for a kind of affirmative action. Unfortunately, all the money’s already been spent on employing white liberal social workers and bureaucrats, and we’re broke now, so that ship has sailed. Again, blame dipshit white liberals.
20. Screaming “Racism! Raaaacissssm!” on the part of a white liberal, when the matter in question has no DNA in its gene pool, no genetics in its DNA (see Rule 2, above), is the surest proof that said white liberal is genetically defective. And a dipshit. And it’s not racist to point this out.
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The '77 Cents on the Dollar' Myth About Women's Pay
Once education, marital status and occupations are considered, the 'gender wage gap' all but disappears.
WSJ
By Mark J. Perry and Andrew G. Biggs
April 7, 2014 6:58 p.m. ET
April 8 is "Equal Pay Day," an annual event to raise awareness regarding the so-called gender wage gap. As President Obama said in the State of the Union address, women "still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns," a claim echoed by the National Committee on Pay Equity, the American Association of University Women and other progressive groups.
The 23% gap implies that women work an extra 68 days to earn the same pay as a man. Mr. Obama advocates allowing women to sue for wage discrimination, with employers bearing the burden of proving they did not discriminate. But the numbers bandied about to make the claim of widespread discrimination are fundamentally misleading and economically illogical.
In its annual report, "Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2012," the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that "In 2012, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $691. On average in 2012, women made about 81% of the median earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($854)." Give or take a few percentage points, the BLS appears to support the president's claim.
But every "full-time" worker, as the BLS notes, is not the same: Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings.
Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men's earnings in 2012.
Enlarge Image
Corbis
The supposed pay gap appears when marriage and children enter the picture. Child care takes mothers out of the labor market, so when they return they have less work experience than similarly-aged males. Many working mothers seek jobs that provide greater flexibility, such as telecommuting or flexible hours. Not all jobs can be flexible, and all other things being equal, those which are will pay less than those that do not.
Education also matters. Even within groups with the same educational attainment, women often choose fields of study, such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market. Men are more likely to major in finance, accounting or engineering. And as the American Association of University Women reports, men are four times more likely to bargain over salaries once they enter the job market.
Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men. Dangerous jobs tend to pay higher salaries to attract workers. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk.
While the BLS reports that full-time female workers earned 81% of full-time males, that is very different than saying that women earned 81% of what men earned for doing the same jobs, while working the same hours, with the same level of risk, with the same educational background and the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and assuming no gender differences in family roles like child care. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for most of these relevant variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O'Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by Mr. Obama can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O'Neills conclude that, "labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all."
These gender-disparity claims are also economically illogical. If women were paid 77 cents on the dollar, a profit-oriented firm could dramatically cut labor costs by replacing male employees with females. Progressives assume that businesses nickel-and-dime suppliers, customers, consultants, anyone with whom they come into contact—yet ignore a great opportunity to reduce wages costs by 23%. They don't ignore the opportunity because it doesn't exist. Women are not in fact paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.
Administration officials are (very) occasionally challenged on their discrimination claims. The reply is that even if lower average female pay is a result of women's choices, those choices are themselves driven by discrimination. Yet the choice of college major is quite free, and many colleges recruit women into high-paying science or math majors. Likewise, many women prefer to stay home with their children. If doing so allows their husbands to maximize their own earnings, it's not clear that the families are worse off. It makes no sense to sue employers for choices made by women years or decades earlier.
The administration's claims regarding the gender pay gap are faulty, and its proposal to make it easier for women to sue employers for equal pay would create a disincentive for firms to hire women.
Mr. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus. Mr. Biggs is a resident scholar at AEI.
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It's my understanding that 92% of deaths in the workplace are suffered by men. It's time women share the burden, yes?
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AS mentioned above:
"Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men. Dangerous jobs tend to pay higher salaries to attract workers. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk."
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2012/08/24/drive-for-a-living-make-sure-your-life-insurance-is-paid-up/
I was thinking about this article, missed the mention above.
Equality now!
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If women are underpaid by 23% for the exact same work, why isn't the unemployment rate for women 0%?
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Hank Aaron is among my heroes in sports. At least for a time, he was the all time leader in the home run of sports. We had Harmon Killebrew, but Hank Aaron was the best.
He experienced some extreme race hatred at that time and saved the hate mail to never forget.
Too bad that this much later he would want to want to cast aspersions on "all of the Republicans".
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/hank-aaron-likens-obama-opponents-kkk-article-1.1751113
In case Hank Aaron is reading the forum: The hate mail you received was not from 'all of us' and maybe not from any of us, and the reason we don't like Barack Obama as President is because of his policies, not his race. If he was Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean, the opposition would be the same or worse.
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Hat tip to our CCP:
==================================
A Short History of Democrats, Republicans, and Racism
The following are a few basic historical facts that every American should know.
Fact: The Republican Party was founded primarily to oppose slavery, and Republicans eventually abolished slavery. The Democratic Party fought them and tried to maintain and expand slavery.
Why is this indisputable fact so rarely mentioned? PBS documentaries about slavery and the Civil War barely mention it, for example. One can certainly argue that the parties have changed dramatically in 150 years, but that does not change the historical fact that it was the Democrats who supported slavery and the Republicans who opposed it. And that indisputable fact should not be airbrushed out for fear that it will tarnish the modern Democratic Party.
Had the positions of the parties been the opposite, and the Democrats had fought the Republicans to end slavery, the historical party roles would no doubt be repeated incessantly in these documentaries. Funny how that works.
Fact: During the Civil War era, the "Radical Republicans" were given that name because they wanted to not only end slavery but also to endow the freed slaves with full citizenship, equality, and rights.
Yes, that was indeed a radical idea at the time!
Fact: Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson, was a strongly pro-Union (but also pro-slavery) Democrat who had been chosen as a compromise running mate to attract Democrats. After Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson thwarted Republican efforts in Congress to recognize the civil rights of the freed slaves, and Southern Democrats continued to thwart any such efforts for nearly a century.
Fact: The Ku Klux Klan was originally and primarily an arm of the Southern Democratic Party, and its mission was to terrorize freed slaves and Republicans who sympathized with them.
Why is this fact conveniently omitted in so many popular histories and depictions of the KKK, including PBS documentaries? Had the KKK been founded by Republicans, that fact would no doubt be repeated constantly on those shows.
Fact: In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, a Republican, integrated the US military and promoted civil rights for minorities. Eisenhower pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1957. One of Eisenhower's primary political opponents on civil rights prior to 1957 was none other than Lyndon Johnson, then the Democratic Senate Majority Leader. LBJ had voted the straight segregationist line until he changed his position and supported the 1957 Act.
Fact: The historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress. In the House, 80 percent of the Republicans and 63 percent of the Democrats voted in favor. In the Senate, 82 percent of the Republicans and 69 percent of the Democrats voted for it.
Fact: Contrary to popular misconception, the parties never "switched" on racism.
Following the epic civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the South began a major demographic shift from Democratic to Republican dominance. Many believe that this shift was motivated mainly by racism. While it is certainly true that many Southern racists abandoned the Democratic Party over its new support for racial equality and integration, the notion that they would flock to the Republican Party -- which was a century ahead of the Democrats on those issues -- makes no sense whatsoever.
Yet virtually every liberal, when pressed on the matter, will inevitably claim that the parties "switched," and most racist Democrats became Republicans! In their minds, this historical ju jitsu maneuver apparently transfers all the past sins of the Democrats (slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, etc.) onto the Republicans and all the past virtues of the Republicans (e.g., ending slavery) onto the Democrats! That's quite a feat!
It is true that Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably attracted some racist Democrats to the Republican Party. However, Goldwater was not a racist -- at least not an overt racist like so many Southern Democrats of the time, such as George Wallace and Bull Connor. He publicly professed racial equality, and his opposition to the 1964 Act was based on principled grounds of states rights. In any case, his libertarian views were out of step with the mainstream of the Republican Party, and he lost the 1964 Presidential election to LBJ in a landslide.
But Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided liberals an opening to tar the Republican Party as racist, and they have tenaciously repeated that label so often over the years that it is now the conventional wisdom among liberals. But it is really nothing more than an unsubstantiated myth -- a convenient political lie. If the Republican Party was any more racist than the Democratic Party even in 1964, why did a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act? The idea that Goldwater's vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act trumps a century of history of the Republican Party is ridiculous, to say the least.
Every political party has its racists, but the notion that Republicans are more racist than Democrats or any other party is based on nothing more than a constant drumbeat of unsubstantiated innuendo and assertions by Leftists, constantly echoed by the liberal media. It is a classic example of a Big Lie that becomes "true" simply by virtue of being repeated so many times.
A more likely explanation for the long-term shift from Democratic to Republican dominance in the South was the perception, fair or not, that the Democratic Party had rejected traditional Christian religious values and embraced radical secularism. That includes its hardline support for abortion, its rejection of prayer in public schools, its promotion of the gay agenda, and many other issues.
In the 1960s the Democratic Party essentially changed its strategy for dealing with African Americans. Thanks largely to earlier Republican initiatives on civil rights, blatant racial oppression was no longer a viable political option. Whereas before that time Southern Democrats had overtly and proudly segregated and terrorized blacks, the national Democratic Party decided instead to be more subtle and get them as dependent on government as possible. As LBJ so elegantly put it (in a famous moment of candor that was recorded for posterity), "I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years." At the same time, the Democrats started a persistent campaign of lies and innuendo, falsely equating any opposition to their welfare state with racism.
From a purely cynical political perspective, the Democratic strategy of black dependence has been extremely effective. LBJ knew exactly what he was doing. African Americans routinely vote well over 90 percent Democratic for fear that Republicans will cut their government benefits and welfare programs. And what is the result? Before LBJ's Great Society welfare programs, the black illegitimacy rate was as low as 23 percent, but now it has more than tripled to 72 percent.
Most major American city governments have been run by liberal Democrats for decades, and most of those cities have large black sections that are essentially dysfunctional anarchies. Cities like Detroit are overrun by gangs and drug dealers, with burned out homes on every block in some areas. The land values are so low due to crime, blight, and lack of economic opportunity that condemned homes are not even worth rebuilding. Who wants to build a home in an urban war zone? Yet they keep electing liberal Democrats -- and blaming "racist" Republicans for their problems!
Washington DC is another city that has been dominated by liberal Democrats for decades. It spends more per capita on students than almost any other city in the world, yet it has some of the worst academic achievement anywhere and is a drug-infested hellhole. Barack Obama would not dream of sending his own precious daughters to the DC public schools, of course -- but he assures us that those schools are good enough for everyone else. In fact, Obama was instrumental in killing a popular and effective school voucher program in DC, effectively killing hopes for many poor black families trapped in those dysfunctional public schools. His allegiance to the teachers unions apparently trumps his concern for poor black families.
A strong argument could also be made that Democratic support for perpetual affirmative action is racist. It is, after all, the antithesis of Martin Luther King's vision of a color-blind society. Not only is it "reverse racism," but it is based on the premise that African Americans are incapable of competing in the free market on a level playing field. In other words, it is based on the notion of white supremacy, albeit "benevolent" white supremacy rather than the openly hostile white supremacy of the pre-1960s Democratic Party.
The next time someone claims that Republicans are racist and Democrats are not, don't fall for it.
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ccp: "Perhaps someone should email him (Hank Aaron) the post of the history of racism and the two major American parties on the racism board."
Another case where emotion trumps logic in the human brain. His adoring fans are probably majority white and possibly majority Republican. But the vocal hatred of a few is what hits the hardest and won't let go. Returning fire with group hate back has a very unfortunate irony to it that he does not see. The casualty rate of the First Minnesota Regiment at Gettysburg was the highest in Union Army. Still, more ultimately died from disease than did from enemy fire.es n The casualty rate of the First Minnesota Regiment at Gettysburg was the highest in Union Army. Still, more ultimately died from disease than did from enemy fire.
Yes, I'll bet you could trace those hate letters back to Dem voters and we can trace everything from the freeing of slaves to the passing of civil rights legislation to the Republicans, but that makes no difference.
One day early in my housing rental side business a man named Fontaine came after me with an iron pipe behind an apartment building in a tough neighborhood of south Minneapolis while he was having some kind of a mental illness episode. He kept saying, "you don't know who I am!" All I could draw out of him was that he was a descendant of slaves and wanted me to know that I didn't know what he had been through - as if I had oppressed him then or was oppressing him now by offering low cost housing in a free market. If logic were applied, then I am a white Minnesotan, the free-state home of Dred Scott, where we helped elect Republican Abraham Lincoln twice and sent the first troops to the war to free the slaves. http://sites.mnhs.org/civil-war/minnesota-and-civil-war-first-last "The casualty rate of the First Minnesota Regiment at Gettysburg was the highest in Union Army."
I'm not expecting a thank you, but it would be nice to move someday past race to judging people by the content of their character.
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304512504579491860052683176?mod=Opinion_newsreel_2
Review & Outlook
Opinion of the Year
You won't believe how the EEOC tried to prove racial bias.
April 16, 2014 7:19 p.m. ET
A big story of President Obama's second term is how federal courts are overturning executive abuses. But sometimes the prosecution is so outrageous, and the legal smackdown so sublime, that the episode deserves special recognition.
Such is the case with last week's hilariously caustic rebuke of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The EEOC had sued Kaplan, the for-profit education company, for using "the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses," as Judge Raymond Kethledge cheekily put it in the first sentence of his ruling in EEOC v. Kaplan.
Despite its own practices, the Obama EEOC has made a cause of suing private companies because it claims that credit and criminal background checks discriminate against minorities. In 2012 the agency issued "guidance" to get companies to think twice before using criminal checks but stopped short of doing the same for credit checks.
That didn't stop it from suing Kaplan for using credit checks, which the EEOC claimed had no business necessity and resulted in a "disparate impact" on blacks. A federal judge tossed the case, but the EEOC is so convinced of its virtue that it appealed. Bad idea.
Judge Kethledge eviscerated the EEOC like a first-day law student, writing that Kaplan had good reason to conduct credit checks on "applicants for positions that provide access to students' financial-loan information" because employees had "stolen payments" and "engaged in self-dealing."
As for proving disparate racial impact, Judge Kethledge noted that "the credit-check process is racially blind; the [credit-check] vendor does not report the applicant's race with her other information." But the EEOC had relied entirely on Kevin Murphy, a consultant who assembled a team of five "race raters" to look at the drivers' licenses of a sample of applicants and then classify them by race. If four of the five agreed on the race of the individual, the applicant was classified by that race.
The district court had found that Mr. Murphy's methodology lacked, to put it mildly, "standards controlling the technique's operation." The EEOC "responds that the relevant standard was Murphy's requirement that four of five raters agree on an applicant's race," wrote Judge Kethledge. "But that response overlooks Murphy's own concession that the raters themselves had no particular standard in classifying each applicant; instead they just eyeballed the DMV photos."
Thus do President Obama's enforcement police attempt to prove discrimination—by pointing at photo IDs and guessing. As Judge Kethledge put it in closing: "We need not belabor the issue further. The EEOC brought this case on the basis of a homemade methodology, crafted by a witness with no particular expertise to craft it, administered by persons with no particular expertise to administer it, tested by no one, and accepted only by the witness himself."
The unanimous opinion was joined by Damon Keith, one of the most liberal judges on the entire federal bench. If government officials were accountable, EEOC General Counsel P. David Lopez would be fired for losing in such humiliating fashion. But instead he wrote us in an email via a spokeswoman that while he is "disappointed" by the decision, it is "an evidentiary ruling that does not go to the merits of the underlying discrimination allegation made by the EEOC." He must be a glutton for legal punishment.
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Our society is in the midst of a deep discussion over homosexuality. There are articulate voices on both sides of the conversation. Then there are @#$! like these , , , females. Wherever we may be on the spectrum, I think we can all agree that this is profoundly wrong:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archbishop-prays-while-topless-gay-activists-shout-curses-and-douse-him-wit
PS: Note the anti-free speech nature of the Belgian law that was applied against this man.
For me, the social code around which we should all be able to unite it rather simple. "One is free to do it, and others are free to make of it what they will."
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http://patriotpost.us/opinion/25166
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/kkk-leader-caught-with-a-black-male-prostitute.html
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/kkk-leader-caught-with-a-black-male-prostitute.html
Heh!
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What Race Preferences Hide
Mona Charen
By Mona Charen April 25, 2014 3:00 AM
Sonia Sotomayor is a wonderful role model. Truly. Through hard work, brains and rare self-discipline at an early age, she was able to overcome poverty and family dysfunction to become what she is today. She was diagnosed at the age of 7 with Type 1 diabetes, and because her father was an alcoholic and her mother a full-time nurse, it fell to her to manage the daily insulin injections and testing that are part of the required treatment. The image, in her memoir, of a small girl dragging a chair to the stove so she could sterilize her syringes before school is poignant indeed.
Any person attempting to overcome hardship can look to Sotomayor for inspiration. But as she demonstrated in her long, impassioned dissent in the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the experience of benefiting from race preferences has left her prickly and defensive on the subject. As others, including her Supreme Court colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, have argued, that kind of gnawing insecurity is one of the consequences of preferences. Others are never sure if you've achieved your position entirely on merit, and neither are you.
Sotomayor's argument rests entirely on a fallacy — that lowering admission standards for certain minority applicants is the only possible response to concerns about racial and ethnic disparities in American life. "Race matters," she scolded again and again in her dissent. Actually, she went further and argued that a Michigan constitutional amendment that explicitly forbids racial discrimination amounts to racial discrimination.
The contention that white, Asian and other students should be disadvantaged because of discrimination against blacks that ceased decades before they were born is facially unjust. Under the regime of preferences, the white child of a poor waitress from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who would be the first person in her family to ever attend college, will have to get SAT scores about 300 points higher (depending upon the school) than the black daughter of a dermatologist from Beverly Hills, California. An Asian student would have to score even higher, because that minority is, according to those who insist on counting by race, "overrepresented."
Admissions officers at selective schools pretend they are offering opportunity to "underserved" minorities, but in reality, they are simply lowering standards for already-privileged students with the preferred skin tone. Ninety-two percent of blacks at elite colleges are from the top half of the income distribution. A study a decade ago at Harvard Law School found that only a third of students had four African-American grandparents. Another third were from interracial families. The rest were children of recent immigrants from Africa or the West Indies.
Should mixed-race students get half a preference? Should their scores be 50 percent higher than students with two black parents? These are the kinds of absurdities our current system presents.
Racial and ethnic preferences are unjust — reason enough to abandon them — but there are other reasons as well. They serve to perpetuate, rather than combat, racial stereotypes. They encourage gaming the system (as when Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American). They permit students from certain groups to coast in high school knowing they will get an automatic golden ticket to college. They encourage intergroup resentment. They result in what Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard Sander have rightly called "mismatching" students — so that all but the very top minority students wind up attending schools that are a little out of their league. This, in turn, causes more minority students to abandon demanding majors like science and technology (so necessary for the economy's flourishing), and to drop out in numbers far higher than other students. Black students are about a third more likely than similarly qualified other students to start college, but less likely to finish.
When California outlawed racial preferences in 1996, preference advocates predicted apocalyptic consequences. Instead, as Taylor and Sander reported, "Black and Hispanic students improved their academic performance, stuck more successfully to (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors, and graduated at stunningly improved rates."
Dropping preferences is not harmful to minority students; it's beneficial. It should not be the end of the story, though. The gap in achievement between some minority groups and others can and should be addressed. Contra Sotomayor, it's not so much that "race matters" as that schools matter. The shame of the nation is that poor children continue to be so trapped in terrible schools. That is the disgrace that race counters cloak.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM
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http://socialnewsdaily.com/37594/nba-legend-larry-johnson-calls-for-all-black-league-twitter-reacts/
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FYI: Charles Murray has his own history on this subject (IIRC see e.g. his "The Bell Curve") Worth taking a moment to see what that history is in that regard before reading this interesting and likely to be controversial review of this book:
=============================================================
Book Review: 'A Troublesome Inheritance' by Nicholas Wade
A scientific revolution is under way—upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.
By Charles Murray
May 2, 2014 5:35 p.m. ET
America's modern struggle with race has proceeded on three fronts. The legal battle effectively ended a half-century ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second front, the battle against private prejudice, has not been won so decisively, but the experiences of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling in the past few weeks confirm a longstanding truth about American society: Expressions of racial prejudice by public figures are punished swiftly and severely.
The third front is different in kind. This campaign is waged not against actual violations of civil rights or expressions of prejudice or hatred, but against the idea that biological differences among human populations are a legitimate subject of scholarly study. The reigning intellectual orthodoxy is that race is a "social construct," a cultural artifact without biological merit.
A Troublesome Inheritance
By Nicholas Wade
The Penguin Press, 278 pages, $27.95
A digital representation of part of the human genome, which was fully mapped in 2003. Getty Images
The orthodoxy's equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that "human equality is a contingent fact of history," as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984.
Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, NYT -1.40% has written a book that pulls back the curtain.
It is hard to convey how rich this book is. It could be the textbook for a semester's college course on human evolution, systematically surveying as it does the basics of genetics, evolutionary psychology, Homo sapiens's diaspora and the recent discoveries about the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred since then. The book is a delight to read—conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven't seen for a few decades.
The title gives fair warning: "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the orthodoxy are wrong.
Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right, then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that's exactly what happens. A computer given a random sampling of bits of DNA that are known to vary among humans—from among the millions of them—will cluster them into groups that correspond to the self-identified race or ethnicity of the subjects. This is not because the software assigns the computer that objective but because those are the clusters that provide the best statistical fit. If the subjects' ancestors came from all over the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New Guinea. If the subjects all come from European ancestry, the clusters will instead correspond to Italians, Germans, French and the rest of Europe's many ethnicities. Mr. Lewontin was not only wrong but spectacularly wrong. It appears that the most natural of all ways to classify humans genetically is by the racial and ethnic groups that humans have identified from time out of mind.
Stephen Jay Gould's assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left Africa has also proved to be wrong—not surprisingly, since it was so counterintuitive to begin with. Humans who left Africa moved into environments that introduced radically new selection pressures, such as lethally cold temperatures. Surely, one would think, important evolutionary adaptations followed. Modern genetic methods for tracking adaptations have established that they did. A 2009 appraisal of the available genome-wide scans estimated that 14% of the genome has been under the pressure of natural selection during the past 30,000 years, long after humans left Africa. The genes under selection include a wide variety of biological traits affecting everything from bone structure and diet to aspects of the brain and nervous system involving cognition and sensory perception.
The question, then, is whether the sets of genes under selection have varied across races, to which the answer is a clear yes. To date, studies of Caucasians, Asians and sub-Saharan Africans have found that of the hundreds of genetic regions under selection, about 75% to 80% are under selection in only one race. We also know that the genes in these regions affect more than cosmetic variations in appearance. Some of them involve brain function, which in turn could be implicated in a cascade of effects. "What these genes do within the brain is largely unknown," Mr. Wade writes. "But the findings establish the obvious truth that brain genes do not lie in some special category exempt from natural selection. They are as much under evolutionary pressure as any other category of gene."
Let me emphasize, as Mr. Wade does, how little we yet know about the substance of racial and ethnic differences. Work in the decade since the genome was sequenced has taught us that genetically linked traits, even a comparatively simple one like height, are far more complex than previously imagined, involving dozens or hundreds of genes, plus other forms of variation within our DNA, plus interactions between the environment and gene expression. For emotional or cognitive traits, the story is so complicated that we are probably a decade or more away from substantial understanding.
As the story is untangled, it will also become obvious how inappropriate it is to talk in terms of the "inferiority" or "superiority" of groups. Consider, for example, the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. What are the ideal points on these continua? They will differ depending on whether you're looking for the paragon of, say, a parent or an entrepreneur. And the Big Five only begin to tap the dozens of ways in which human traits express themselves. Individual human beings are complicated bundles of talents, proclivities, strengths and flaws that interact to produce unexpected and even internally contradictory results. The statistical tendencies (and they will be only tendencies) that differentiate groups of humans will be just as impossible to add up as the qualities of an individual. Vive les différences.
The problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don't yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that "race is a social construct" in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality.
After laying out the technical aspects of race and genetics, Mr. Wade devotes the second half of his book to a larger set of topics: "The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations."
To develop his case, Mr. Wade draws from a wide range of technical literature in political science, sociology, economics and anthropology. He contrasts the polities and social institutions of China, India, the Islamic world and Europe. He reviews circumstantial evidence that the genetic characteristics of the English lower class evolved between the 13th century and the 19th. He takes up the outsize Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences, most easily explained by the Jews' conspicuously high average IQ, and recounts the competing evolutionary explanations for that elevated cognitive ability. Then, with courage that verges on the foolhardy, he adds a chapter that incorporates genetics into an explanation of the West's rise during the past 600 years.
Mr. Wade explicitly warns the reader that these latter chapters, unlike his presentation of the genetics of race, must speculate from evidence that falls far short of scientific proof. His trust in his audience is touching: "There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it."
I fear Mr. Wade's trust is misplaced. Before they have even opened "A Troublesome Inheritance," some reviewers will be determined not just to refute it but to discredit it utterly—to make people embarrassed to be seen purchasing it or reading it. These chapters will be their primary target because Mr. Wade chose to expose his readers to a broad range of speculative analyses, some of which are brilliant and some of which are weak. If I had been out to trash the book, I would have focused on the weak ones, associated their flaws with the book as a whole and dismissed "A Troublesome Inheritance" as sloppy and inaccurate. The orthodoxy's clerisy will take that route, ransacking these chapters for material to accuse Mr. Wade of racism, pseudoscience, reliance on tainted sources, incompetence and evil intent. You can bet on it.
All of which will make the academic reception of "A Troublesome Inheritance" a matter of historic interest. Discoveries have overturned scientific orthodoxies before—the Ptolemaic solar system, Aristotelian physics and the steady-state universe, among many others—and the new received wisdom has usually triumphed quickly among scientists for the simplest of reasons: They hate to look stupid to their peers. When the data become undeniable, continuing to deny them makes the deniers look stupid. The high priests of the orthodoxy such as Richard Lewontin are unlikely to recant, but I imagine that the publication of "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be welcomed by geneticists with their careers ahead of them—it gives them cover to write more openly about the emerging new knowledge. It will be unequivocally welcome to medical researchers, who often find it difficult to get grants if they openly say they will explore the genetic sources of racial health differences.
The reaction of social scientists is less predictable. The genetic findings that Mr. Wade reports should, in a reasonable world, affect the way social scientists approach the most important topics about human societies. Social scientists can still treat culture and institutions as important independent causal forces, but they also need to start considering the ways in which variations among population groups are causal forces shaping those cultures and institutions.
How long will it take them? In 1998, the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a book, "Consilience," predicting that the 21st century would see the integration of the social and biological sciences. He is surely right about the long run, but the signs for early progress are not good. "The Bell Curve," which the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I published 20 years ago, should have made it easy for social scientists to acknowledge the role of cognitive ability in shaping class structure. It hasn't. David Geary's "Male/Female," published 16 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the different psychological and cognitive profiles of males and females. It hasn't. Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate," published 12 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the role of human nature in explaining behavior. It hasn't. Social scientists who associate themselves with any of those viewpoints must still expect professional isolation and stigma.
"A Troublesome Inheritance" poses a different order of threat to the orthodoxy. The evidence in "The Bell Curve," "Male/Female" and "A Blank Slate" was confined to the phenotype—the observed characteristics of human beings—and was therefore vulnerable to attack or at least obfuscation. The discoveries Mr. Wade reports, that genetic variation clusters along racial and ethnic lines and that extensive evolution has continued ever since the exodus from Africa, are based on the genotype, and no one has any scientific reason to doubt their validity.
And yet, as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation's universities. I expect that their resistance to "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.
So one way or another, "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists' willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be seen a century from now as proof of this era's intellectual corruption.
—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/05/01/naacp-admits-sterling-bought-them-off/
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/05/01/naacp-admits-sterling-bought-them-off/
Of course, it's what they do.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/376910/end-affirmative-action-victor-davis-hanson
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD7_kmV4EI0
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/09/video-dem-candidates-plan-to-mock-republicans-racist-record-unravels-when-hes-confronted-by-black-gop-delegate/
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/05/07/Farage-do-not-ever-call-us-racist?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+May+8%2C+2014&utm_campaign=20140508_m120344535_Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+May+8%2C+2014&utm_term=More
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcvPAvURgn4&noredirect=1#t=116
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‘The Point’ of an Honest Discussion of Race
Posted By Jack Kerwick On May 23, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com
In reply to a recent article in which I disclosed some neglected facts concerning race and slavery, a reader inquired as to the point in unveiling them. Before answering, let’s review some of the tidbits that I shared in the interest of that “honest discussion” of race that the Eric Holders of the world continually charge the rest of us with deferring:
(1) For centuries, millions of white European Christians were enslaved by Asian and African Muslims;
(2) The first slaves in Colonial America were white;
(3) Blacks were in America prior to slavery;
(4) A significant portion of African blacks who eventually became slaves in America were already Christian;
(5) These black slaves had been converted by the African blacks who sold them into bondage;
(6) During the antebellum period, there existed several thousand slave owners who were black;
(7) The first slave master in America was a black man, Anthony Johnson, an Angolan who had originally been sold into slavery by his fellow Africans to Arabs and who owned black and white servants.
There is still other historical “trivia” that defy the conventional narrative on race and slavery.
The civilized world, justly, expresses outrage over the abduction and enslavement of hundreds of young Nigerian schoolgirls at the hands of the African Islamic terrorist organization, Boko Haram. But the stone-cold truth of the matter is that this sort of thing has been transpiring in Africa from time immemorial. For millennia upon millennia, black Africans have seized upon and enslaved other black Africans. And, as notes famed Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, among others, from the dawn of Islam, Muslims have abducted and enslaved non-Muslims—both black and white.
It is estimated that well over 100 million black Africans died over the span of 14 centuries as they were marched across the scalding hot sands of the Sahara Desert by those Arab raiders and traders intent upon reducing them to a life of bondage in foreign lands.
In spite of the tremendous number of blacks transported to the Middle East, the latter consists of relatively few blacks today. Why? For one, African boys were frequently forced to undergo castration, a practice so barbaric that but a tiny percentage survived it. Those who did, however, fetched a purchasing price several times that of their peers who were not made into eunuchs.
Another consideration accounting for the miniscule black population in the contemporary Middle East is that African girls were sold as concubines and into sex slavery to Arab masters. This reflected the Islamic belief—most recently articulated by the leader of Boko Haram but first stated in the Koran and practiced by Muhammad—that girls can and should become wives once they are nine years of age. Upon begetting their masters’ offspring, many eventually became assimilated into their families.
But, thirdly, the tragic fact is that many slaves were simply worked to death.
What follows are some other fascinating truths that are a “must” for any truly honest discussion of race and slavery:
While whites were by no means unique in practicing slavery, they were indeed unique insofar as they were the first people in all of history to have developed a moral revulsion against this age-old institution. No one liked being abducted and enslaved by others. But many of these same unfortunates wouldn’t have hesitated to do the same to others if the opportunity had arisen. Whites, more specifically, English white Christians, personified and led by the conservative William Wilberforce, succeeded in prevailing upon the British Empire—the most economically and militarily powerful presence on the planet at that time—to abolish slavery, not just in England or even within the Empire, but in every area of the globe over which Britain could hope to exercise any of its influence.
More scandalously, the British met with much resistance from Arabs, Asians, and Africans. Bernard Lewis relays an exchange between a British Consul General in Morocco and the Sultan of that land that typifies precisely the challenges to its campaign against slavery that the English had to surmount. When the Sultan was asked what he had done to relegate to the dustbin of history the trade in human flesh, he “replied, in a letter expressing evident astonishment, that ‘the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam…up to this day.’” The Sultan added that he was oblivious to slavery’s “manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”
Incidentally, England’s success was a long time coming, for in some parts of the non-European world, places like India and Saudi Arabia, slavery didn’t become illegal until the 1940s and 1960s, respectively.
My reader who inquired as to the “point” in raising these facts at no time denies any of them. Thus, he confirms what some of us have long suspected: in their tireless promotion of the conventional orthodoxy on race and slavery in America, neither he nor his ilk has ever been in the least bit interested in history for its own sake. Rather, there has always been a “point” to their campaign, the advancement of a political agenda involving fictions concerning perpetual black suffering, white oppression, and white guilt.
The facts to which I allude here frustrate that agenda.
And this, by the way, is “the point” of mentioning them.
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http://allenbwest.com/2014/05/sharpton-defends-racist-comments-one-jew/
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/23/washington-redskins-respond-harry-reid-team-name-c/?page=all#pagebreak
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/29/how-the-asians-became-white/
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Well, we did fight a Civil War. 750,000 dead at a time when there were roughly 32 or 33 million people in the US (22 in the North and 9 in the South roughly 4 mill of them slaves . That would be around 7.5 million deaths in today's numbers 300 mill + 30 mill illegals:
***Thursday, May 29, 2014 FULL SHOW | HEADLINES | PREVIOUS: "A Peace Warrior": Poet, Civil Rights Activist...
The Case for Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reckoning With U.S. Slavery & Institutional Racism
African-American History, Race in America
"We Shall Overcome": Remembering Folk Icon, Activist Pete Seeger in His Own Words & Songs
Jan 28, 2014 | Story
Bill Moyers on Dark Money, the Attack on Voting Rights & How Racism Stills Drives Our Politics
Jan 27, 2014 | Story
SPECIAL: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in His Own Words
Jan 20, 2014 | Story
An explosive new cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine by the famed essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates has rekindled a national discussion on reparations for American slavery and institutional racism. Coates explores how slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and federally backed housing policy systematically robbed African Americans of their possessions and prevented them from accruing inter-generational wealth. Much of the essay focuses on predatory lending schemes that bilked potential African-American homeowners, concluding: "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole." Click here to watch Part 2 of this interview.":http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/30/part_2_ta_nehisi_coateson
AMY GOODMAN: "The case for reparations. 250 years of slavery. Nine years of Jim Crow. 60 years of separate but equal. 35 years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole." So begins an explosive new cover story in the June issue of the Atlantic magazine by the famed essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates. The article is being credited for rekindling a national discussion on reparations for American slavery and institutional racism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and federally backed housing policy systematically robbed African Americans of their possessions and prevented them from accruing intergenerational wealth. Much of the piece focuses on predatory lending schemes that built potential African-American homeowners. This is a video that The Atlantic released a preview its new cover story, "The Case for Reparations."
*BILLY LAMAR BROOKS SR.: This area here represents the poorest of the poor in the city of Chicago.
MATTIE LEWIS: I’ve always wanted to own my own house, because I work for white people when I was in the South, and they had beautiful homes and I always said, one day I was going to have me one.
JACK MACNAMARA: White folks created the ghetto. It drives me crazy today even that we don’t admit that. This is the best example I can think of the institutional racism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To talk about "The Case for Reparations," we’re joined now by Ta-Nehisi Coates here in New York City. Welcome to Democracy Now! You start your article with one particular figure, Clyde Ross. Tell us his story and why you decided to begin with him.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Mr. Ross is really just emblematic of much of what has happened to African-Americans across the 20th century, and I emphasize 20th century. Mr. Ross was born in the Delta region of Mississippi. His family was not particularly poor, they actually quite prominent farmers. They had their land and virtually all of their possessions taken from them through a scheme around allegedly back taxes and were reduced to sharecropping. In the sharecropping system, there was no sort of assurances over what they might get versus what they actually picked. When I first met Mr. Ross, the first thing he said to me was he left Mississippi for Chicago because he was seeking the protection of the law. I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that. But, as he explained it to me, he said, listen, there were no black judges, no black prosecutors, no black police — basically, we had no law. We were outlaws and people could take from us whatever they wanted. That was very much his early life. He went to Chicago thinking things would be a little different. On the surface, they were. He managed to get a job, got married, had a decent life. He was basically looking for that one more emblem of the American middle class in the Eisenhower years, and that was the possession of a home. Unfortunately, due to government policy, Mr. Ross at that time, like most African-Americans, was unable to secure a loan due to policies or red-lining and deciding who deserved the loans and who doesn’t. There was a broad, broad consensus that African-Americans, for no other reason besides blatant racism, could not be responsible homeowners. Mr. Ross, as happens when people are pushed out of the legitimate loan market ended up in the illegitimate loan market and got caught up in the system of contract buying, which is essentially just a particularly onerous rent to own scheme for people looking to buy houses. Ended up purchasing a house, I believe at $27,000 he paid for it. The person who sold it to him had bought the house only six months before for $12,000. Mr. Ross later became an activist, helped formed the Contract Buyers League, and just fought on behalf of African American home owner on the west side of Chicago. I should add that it is estimated during this period that 85% of African-Americans looking to buy homes in Chicago bought through contract lending.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Let’s hear Clyde Ross and his onward speaking a in 1969 on behalf of the Contract Buyers League a coalition of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides from all of whom had been locked into the the same system of predatory lending.
CLYDE ROSS: They have cheated us out of more than money. We have been cheated out of the right to be human beings in a society. We have been cheated out of buying homes at a decent price. Now it’s time now, we got a chance. The Contract Buyers League has presented a chance for these people in this area to move out of this crippled society, to move up. Stand on your own two feet. Be human beings, fight for what you know is right. Fight.
AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, can you talk about this example and others in this remarkable piece and how you then talk about the bill for reparations that has been introduced by John Conyers year after year in the house, and what reparations would actually look like?
TA-NEHISI COATES: What I try to establish in this piece is that there is a conventional way of talking about the relationship in America between the African-American community and the white community, and it is one that we are very comfortable with. I call it basically the lunch table view of the problem with racism in America is that black people want to sit at one table and white people want to sit at another lunch table. If we could just get black and white people to like each other, love each other, everything would be solved. In fact, even these terms that we’re using are inventions, and they’re inventions of racism. If you trace back the history back to 1619, a better way of describing the relationship between black and white people is one of plunder, the constant stealing, the taking from black people that extends from slavery up through Jim Crow policy. Slavery is obviously the stealing of people’s labor. In some cases the outright theft of people’s children, and the vending of people’s children, the taking of the black body for whatever profit you can wring from it, up through the Jim Crow South where you have a system of debt peonage, sharecropping — which really isn’t much different minus the actual selling of children you steal, exploiting labor and taking as much as you can from it. Into a system when you think about something like separate but equal. In the Civil Rights Movement, we traditionally picture colored only water fountains, white only restrooms. The thing people have to remember, if you take a state like Mississippi or anywhere in the deep South where you have a public university system, black people are paying into that. Black people are pledging their fealty to the state and yet, they aren’t getting the same return. This is theft. This is systemized. When we try to talk about the practicality of it, I spent 16,000 words almost just trying to actually make the case. At the end, what I come to is that the actionable thing right now is to support Representative John Conyers’ Bill H.R.40 for a study of what slavery has actually done, what the legacy of slavery has actually done to black people and what are remedies we might come up with. I did that not so much to dodge the question, but because I think to actually even sketch out what this might be would take another 16,000 words. We have to calculate what slavery was. We have to calculate what Jim Crow was. We have to calculate what we lost in terms of redlining and come to some sort of ostensible number and figure out whether we can actually pay it back. And if we can’t, what we might do in lieu of that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: When you mentioned that the systemic plunder that occurred, I mean, this is not ancient history.
TA-NEHISI COATES: No, no.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the most recent economic crisis in the country, there was this enormous reduction in the wealth of African-Americans in the country as a result of the housing crisis, yet the narrative portrays it as the housing crisis was caused — the conservative narrative is — by affirmative action policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make it easier for African-Americans with low credit to get loans. Talk about that and this enormous wealth loss that occurred recently.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, the great sociologist Douglas Massey has a very interesting paper out specifically about the foreclosure crisis as it should be rightly called that happened very, very recently. One of the things he demonstrates in the paper is the thing that made this possible, segregation was a driver of this. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The African-American community is the most segregated community in the country, and what you have in that community is a population of people who have been traditionally cut off from wealth building opportunities. So, anxious to get wealth-building opportunities. If you are a banker and you are looking sell a scheme to somebody and rip somebody off, well there your marks are, right there, right in the same place. That’s essentially what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, I wanted to go to this issue of reparations and the examples you have seen, for example, after the Holocaust, Germany and the Jews. Can you talk about how those reparations took place?
TA-NEHISI COATES: It is very, very interesting. One of the reasons why I included that history, because as we know, reparations for African-Americans has all sorts of practical problems that we would have to deal with and fight about. I wanted to just demonstrate that even in the case of reparations to Israel, the one that’s most cited, this was not a sure thing. One thing that people often say about African-American reparations is, well, oh you’re just talking about savory, that was so long ago, as though if we were talking about a more proximate or more present case it would be much easier. But, in fact, the fact it was so close made it really, really hard for people, made it hard for some Israelis who did not want to feel like they were taking a buck off of folks’ mothers or brothers or sisters or grandmas who had just been killed. In Germany in fact, if we look at the public opinion surveys at the time, they were no more — Germans in the popular sense — were no more apt to take responsibility today than Americans are for slavery. So, it was a very, very difficult piece. What’s interesting and I think one of the lessons that can be learned from it, however, is the way it was structured. In fact, Germany did not just cut a check to Israel. What they actually did was they gave them vouchers. Those vouchers that were worth a certain amount of money, those vouchers had to be used with German companies. So, essentially, what they structured was a stimulus for West Germany while giving reparations to Israel at the same time. It gives us some clue that some sort of creative solutions we might have in the African-American community.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the issues you also raise is that this reparations demand is not new in American history. You talk about Belinda Royall who in 1783 had been a slave for 50 years, became a freed woman. She petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Right, right, right, and I think people think of this as something that just sort of came up, you know 150 years — Black people — reparations is basically as old as this country is, and it’s not just, as you mention, Belinda Royall, people like that, but, it is also white people who understood at the time some great injury had been done. Many of the quaker meetings for instance — basically, they would excommunicate people who didn’t just free their slaves, but actually gave them something, you know, paid them reparations in return. We have the great quote from Timothy Dwight who was the president of Yale who said, to liberate these folks, to free these folks and to give them nothing would be to entail a curse upon them. Effectively, that is actually what happened upon African American and really, I would argue, upon the country at large. Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. Many of those folks also at the very least gave land to African-Americans when they were liberated. Some of them educated them. But they understood to just cut somebody out into the wild, which is basically what happened to black people, would not be a good thing.
AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, we want to thank you very much for being with us. We’re going to do part two right after the show and we will post it online at democracynow.org. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent of The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics and social issues. He has just written a cover story called "The Case for Reparations." Ta-Nehisi Coates is also the author of the memoir "The Beautiful Struggle."***
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So, would the children of Vietnamese immigrants have to pay taxes for reparations ?
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So, would the children of Vietnamese immigrants have to pay taxes for reparations ?
Some African Americans are white from South Africa. Some are black and descendants of slave owners or slave traders. How about somethi8ng to white northerners whose ancestors fought to free slaves. Recipients of reparations should have a little more slave in their blood that Faux-cahantas Warren has of Cherokee.
What we should pay are welfare reparations. That is what did the most harm to people still in the so-called underclass. Pay the damages and then stop doing it.
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http://fullist.co.uk/2014/06/unbelievable-racism-angry-white-woman-front-kids/
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When Gandhi was studying law at the University College of London, a white
professor, whose last name was Peters, disliked him intensely and always
displayed prejudice and animosity towards him.
Also, because Gandhi never lowered his head when addressing him , as he
expected.... there were always "arguments" and confrontations.
One day, Mr. Peters was having lunch at the dining room of the University,
and Gandhi came along with his tray and sat next to the professor. The
professor said, "Mr Gandhi, you do not understand. A pig and a bird do not sit
together to eat."
Gandhi looked at him as a parent would a rude child and calmly replied,
"You do not worry professor. I'll fly away," and he went and sat at another
table.
Mr. Peters, reddened with rage, decided to take revenge on the next test
paper, but Gandhi responded brilliantly to all questions. Mr. Peters, unhappy
and frustrated, asked him the following question. "Mr Gandhi, if you were
walking down the street and found a package, and within was a bag of wisdom
and another bag with a lot of money, which one would you take?"
Without hesitating, Gandhi responded,"The one with the money, of course."
Mr. Peters , smiling sarcastically said, "I, in your place, would have
taken the wisdom, don't you think?"
Gandhi shrugged indifferently and responded,"Each one takes what he
doesn't have."
Mr. Peters, by this time was fit to be tied. So great was his anger that
he wrote on Gandhi's exam sheet the word "idiot" and gave it to Gandhi.
Gandhi took the exam sheet and sat down at his desk trying very hard to remain
calm while he contemplated his next move.
A few minutes later, Gandhi got up, went to the professor and said to him
in a dignified but sarcastically polite tone, "Mr. Peters, you signed the
sheet, but you did not give me the grade."
******
Molon Labe
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Race in the Age of Genomics
Uncomfortable truths must be dealt with, but we should stick to facts and call out rampant speculation.
Email
By David Altshuler And Henry Louis Gates Jr.
WSJ
June 6, 2014 6:47 p.m. ET
Writing just before the outbreak of the Civil War, the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs paused in her passionate attack on the evils of slavery to question its underlying justification: the biological fixity of race and the view, then written into law and culture, that inborn characteristics make some human beings fit by nature to be held in bondage to other human beings. "And then who are Africans?" Jacobs asked. "Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?"
Jacobs, who was of mixed ancestry, could hardly have imagined that a century and a half later widely available technology would make it possible to answer her question. Genetic testing can determine the proportion of any individual's ancestors who lived in Africa, Europe, Asia or the Americas, and can identify specific genes that influence traits such as skin color or risk of disease. But Jacobs probably would not have been surprised to learn this science tool would be twisted for political ends and to justify the advantages of some groups over others.
Genomic technology has now made it possible to sequence an individual's genome for as little as $1,000, and to determine aspects of ancestry and genetic risk for under $100. Scientific journals and the media are filled with stories about the role of genetics in disease, making clear the role that DNA plays in shaping individual characteristics. As more becomes known about DNA, the impulse to view race strictly through the lens of genetic inheritance is gaining force.
The most prominent example is a new book by New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." The book starts by describing advances in genetic science, then proceeds to speculate about how human evolution and genetics shaped human culture and history. Such an approach takes square aim at the idea that race is a social construction—defining groups of people according to whatever criteria societies choose to impose—and encourages the framing of this matter as a conflict of political correctness vs. scientific truth.
That is an unfortunate development, because the rise of genomics just adds texture to an age-old question: What does "race" mean?
Enlarge Image
Getty Images
One challenge in answering the question is that different people have used the word in different ways across time. Yet the thread running through most racial theorizing since the 18th century—when Carl Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Leclerc (Count de Buffon) and Immanuel Kant first defined the races of man—has been the ranking of human groups into hierarchies. By the 19th century, the tenets had become crisply defined, with Europeans placing themselves as the top of the racial table. Race was claimed to be fixed by God or nature, and was used to justify economic, social and political power relationships, encompassing slavery, colonialism and anti-miscegenation laws.
Such thinking led, in the 20th century, to the justification of the Holocaust in the name of race science. It wasn't until the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s that the linking of ancestry, biology and social hierarchy in the name of race was seriously challenged in the political sphere. As it happened, science would also come in on the side of shaking up received ideas about rigid racial boundaries.
We now know that biological variation among individual humans, while correlated with ancestry, stems from a variety of factors—genetic, environmental, cultural and behavioral. Widespread migration, urbanization and the relaxing of social boundaries over the past century has led to a vast number of people of mixed ancestry.
It is also true that, on average, people whose ancestors lived in the same place tend to be more closely related to one another than people whose ancestors lived in more distant locales. This shared ancestry can be detected based on differences in the frequencies of genetic variants across human populations. So, if the question of race is limited simply to whether our DNA contains information about where our ancestors lived, then genomic science can be said to inform thinking about race. But the history, legacy and meaning of race are more than biogeographic ancestry. The questions underlying the debate are the extent to which differences in characteristics among groups are determined by inheritance, can be shaped by environment and behavior, and are used to defend or attack social policies.
In recent years, we have started to learn about how specific genes contribute to variation in human traits. Commonly varying traits such as body weight and cholesterol levels and diseases like diabetes, cancer and schizophrenia are each influenced by a vast number of genes and by environmental factors. Nearly all genetic variants yet found to influence common human traits are either widely distributed across populations or vanishingly rare, existing only in a single individual or family.
A small proportion of genetic variants that influence diseases or traits are common in some places and rare in another, but these appear to be the exception and not the rule. Even where such genetic variants exist, they appear to explain only a small fraction of the variation in the trait within the population. Moreover, most differences in frequency of genetic variants have arisen by chance rather than natural selection. Even in special cases where natural selection can be evoked, differences track not with "racial" groupings but rather with the geographic range of an environmental exposure. For example, in the U.S., sickle-cell anemia is often considered a disease of African-Americans. But sickle cell is common in many places where malaria was once endemic, including Southern Europe and the Middle East.
In other words, attempting to draw conclusions about race from DNA evidence is a fool's errand. What is now becoming clear about genomics, as has occurred regarding race over the past few centuries, is the tendency of some to extrapolate from outlier examples to the general case, to cherry-pick examples that fit a thesis and ignore the rest, and to speculate on how biological observations might translate in the social and political sphere.
Genetics is becoming a Rorschach test, too often employed to support racial arguments or to debunk them. The fact that genetic data can be used to cluster people based on ancestry, and that ancestry is correlated with racial labels, tells us nothing new about how human characteristics are shaped by environment, or about the social meaning of "race." No data have yet documented a role for genetics in the social or political characteristics of human populations, other than the obvious fact that discrimination continues and is often based on skin color and surname, both of which are inherited.
We are all curious about our origins and the origin of our individual traits, and science is racing ahead to reveal these fascinating genetic stories. But we shouldn't let the current focus on DNA dominate the vital discussion of race and society. We must embrace the conversation being sparked by what genetics teaches us about human variability—and if someday we learn uncomfortable truths, we must deal with them. But in doing so we should stick to the facts, both historical and scientific, and call out rampant speculation and biased arguments wherever they may be found.
Dr. Altshuler is deputy director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and was a leader of the HapMap and 1000 Genomes projects on genetic variation. Mr. Gates is the director of Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, co-founder of AfricanDNA.com and executive producer of the PBS program "Finding Your Roots.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/18/redskins-trademark-canceled-feds/
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Are there four other white guys on this board that would like to sign a petition to the Trademark Office describing how we cannot sleep eat or calm down over the name Cracker Barrel?
Why are not 50 Senators spending their time with this? No time between raising cash I guess. One absurd meaningless crusade is as much as they can handle.
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Are there four other white guys on this board that would like to sign a petition to the Trademark Office describing how we cannot sleep eat or calm down over the name Cracker Barrel?
Why are not 50 Senators spending their time with this? No time between raising cash I guess. One absurd meaningless crusade is as much as they can handle.
Very funny! Yes, another agency without oversight.
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I just went to washingtonredskins.com and bought two t-shirts.
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Excuse me. I meant the "Reverand" Jesse Jackson.
I guess he implies Yahoo is racist and keeping Blacks and Hispanics ( a phoney label unto itself - made clear by Marc Levin this past week) from its work force. This shyster should be speaking to crowds of Blacks and Latinos motivating and encouraging and helping them do better not blaming Yahoo which is hiring the best candidates for their positions. Yes JJ, Asians are kicking the asses out of Blacks and Latinos , and many of us Whites too. Wake up you phoney corrupt shakedown artist:
Jessica Guynn, USATODAY 1:25 p.m. EDT June 18, 2014
Half of Yahoo's work force of more than 12,000 is white, 39% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 2% black and 4% undisclosed or more than one race, reflecting the stark lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo on Tuesday shared some basic demographic information on its work force, the latest Silicon Valley company to reveal the stark lack of diversity in its ranks.
For years technology companies have resisted reporting this information even though they collect it and report it to the federal government.
But Google late last month swung open the door by revealing the gender and racial breakdown of its work force, bringing to the fore an issue that Silicon Valley has long wanted to keep hidden from public view: that these work forces are predominantly white and male.
Google made the move after Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. stood up at its annual shareholder meeting to urge Google to disclose its numbers. He made a similar plea at the Facebook shareholder meeting. But the giant social network where Sheryl Sandberg is the No. 2 executive, said it preferred to share the data internally first.
Yahoo, which is also run by a woman and another former Google executive, Marissa Mayer, said 50% of its work force of more than 12,000 is white, 39% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 2% black and 4% undisclosed or more than one race.
Asians comprise 57% of Yahoo's tech workers while 35% of tech workers are white. About 37% of Yahoo workers are women and 23% of senior managers are women.
Last week, LinkedIn also disclosed its diversity figures, which were very similar to those released by Google and Yahoo. But LinkedIn also released the demographic report it provides to the federal government.
Only Intel, Cisco and a smattering of other companies routinely disclose their demographic reports to the federal government.
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I like the way this connects the NAACP taking money from Donald Sterling and taking money from Teacher Unions to oppose school choice.
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/why-does-the-naacp-promote-policies-harmful-to-the-black-community/
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I like the way this connects the NAACP taking money from Donald Sterling and taking money from Teacher Unions to oppose school choice.
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/why-does-the-naacp-promote-policies-harmful-to-the-black-community/
They aren't going to work their way out of a job.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/06/24/Native-American-Groups-to-Sue-Cleveland-Indians-over-Chief-Wahoo-Mascot
Will the Minn. Vikings be next?
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/06/24/Native-American-Groups-to-Sue-Cleveland-Indians-over-Chief-Wahoo-Mascot
Will the Minn. Vikings be next?
No. It is still legal to portray white people of Scandinavian ancestry as ruthless savages.
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Why the Left’s Preoccupation with the Redskins?
Tuesday, Jul 1, 2014
Given how much evil there is in the world; given how many signs of moral, intellectual and economic decline there are here in America; and given the increasing irrelevance of America to world events, it is fair to ask why the American Left is preoccupied with the name Washington “Redskins.”
The Washington Redskins have been in existence for 82 years. For about 80 of those years, virtually no one, including the vast majority of American Indians, was troubled by the name.
Yet, it is now of such importance to the American left that the majority leader of the United States Senate has repeatedly demanded, from the floor of the United States Senate, that the team drop its name; 50 United States senators, all of them Democrats, have signed an open letter demanding the same; Sports Illustrated’s Peter King no longer uses the name; other leading sportswriters have adopted the same practice; and the president of the United States has weighed in on the issue.
The pressure is relentless. There is more concern in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times — not to mention the rest of the left — with the Redskins than with Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups for investigation, one of its division heads pleading the Fifth Amendment before Congress, and the Agency’s losing all relevant emails and hard drives.
The angry will tell you that the name “Redskins” is profoundly offensive to American Indians and that they — the angry — are simply more sensitive to racial slurs than others.
This explanation is self-serving, but insufficient.
The great majority of American Indians understandably just don’t care. Like heterosexual AIDS and so many other crises, this has been entirely manufactured by the left. Since 1947, there has been a movie theater, the Redskins Theatre (with the same logo as the football team), in Anadarko, Oklahoma, a city whose population is divided evenly between Indians and whites, and which calls itself the “Indian Capital of the Nation.” Why, in 67 years, have the Indian populations of Anadarko and Oklahoma not changed this theater’s name?
Because the left hadn’t made it an issue. It’s not an Indian issue; it’s a left-wing issue.
And why is the left so preoccupied?
It isn’t because they are more morally sensitive to injustice. That is what the left believes about itself. But there are other reasons for the manufactured hysteria about the Redskins name. Here are some:
First, there is a rule in life: Those who do not confront the greatest evils will confront much lesser evils or simply manufacture alleged evils that they then confront. This has been a dominant characteristic of the Left for at least half a century. The greatest evils since World War II have been Communism and, since the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union and most other Communist countries, violent Islam — or, as it often called, Islamism. Islamism is the belief that Sharia (Islamic law) must be imposed wherever possible on a society, beginning, of course, with Muslim-majority countries. These Islamists are, as the British historian Andrew Roberts has noted, the fourth incarnation of fascism — first there was fascism, then Nazism, then communism, and now Islamism.
For many years, most of the Western left was supportive of communism, and after the 1960s, it was simply hostile to anti-communists. The left was far more concerned with attacking America than with attacking the Soviet Union. So, too, today, the left is far more concerned with attacking America — its alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and economic inequality — than with fighting Islamism.
Second, the corollary to the above is that those who do not fight the greatest evils invariably loathe those who do. The left hated American anti-communists much more than it hated communists. The left today hates traditional America much more than it hates traditional Islamists. The Redskins name is a symbol of that hated America.
Third, the left has huge nostalgia for the sixties. In the left’s eyes, virtually every one of its causes is as morally urgent as the civil rights battles on behalf of blacks (for which it falsely claims exclusive credit). Therefore getting the Redskins to change their name is a contemporary expression of working to give blacks full voting rights.
Fourth, aside from tearing down another American tradition, and showing how awful America was and remains, the motivating issue here is left-wing self-esteem. Remember it was the left that developed the self-esteem movement. And nobody feels as good about themselves as the left does when it finds another American moral flaw, especially when that flaw is another example of “intolerance,” and racism.
Fifth, and finally, the left is totalitarian at heart. Whenever possible, they seek control of others; and they love to throw their considerable weight around. The left-wing president does it so often that the Supreme Court has unanimously shot down his attempts on a dozen occasions. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, under huge pressure from leftists, just dropped conservative Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist George Will. Under pressure from left-wing professors and students, Brandeis and other universities dropped the few conservative speakers they had invited to this year’s commencement exercises.
Forcing the Redskins to do their will is just the left’s latest attempt to force its views on the vast majority of its fellow citizens. That’s why it’s worth fighting for the Redskins. Today it’s the Redskins,tomorrow it’s you.
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http://www.army.mil/article/68557/
Scroll through the photos to view Apache elders blessing the Apache helos.
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:-D
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342/recall-that-ice-cream-truck-song-we-have-unpleasant-news-for-you
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http://www.nspr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342/recall-that-ice-cream-truck-song-we-have-unpleasant-news-for-you
Anyone care to examine the lyrics of various rappers that have been celebrated by this president?
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http://www.dennisprager.com/greatness-whiteness/
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=713888135325226&set=vb.161807307199981&type=2&theater
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/08/report-convenience-store-manager-terrified-of-being-murdered-by-stores-customers/
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"Some seriously stupid white people" - these guys must be masochists. I notice they are all not physically imposing and do approach people larger than them and insult them to their faces.
The racial insults are offensive.
The flatus ones are actually kind of funny but the kind of stuff a ten y. o. might do with a school mate - not to some stranger on the street.
It is sad to think these young people think it funny to insult people of different race because of their skin color in this day and age.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/08/thoughts-on-the-ritual-now-taking-place-in-ferguson-missouri.php
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"Barack Obama has not yet said that Michael Brown looked like the son he never had–probably not because the physical resemblance is implausible, but because he has already used that line"
The article says it all. As I noted, nor has Bamster said the *looters* look like the son he never had.
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Strange, strange story. Proves me right on one thing. Look away from these breaking stories, unless there is something you can do to help, until the facts begin to come in.
More than a dozen witnesses - plus three autopsies - corroborate the police story (that I never heard in the media). He was coming toward the officer.
But what was the uproar about? Too many black getting shot by whites? Really? The odds are 15-fold higher in the other direction. In fact, the fear of a black being shot is to be shot by another black. That is tragic.
Did "protesters" really believe he was gunned down in broad daylight for no reason? Did the officer have a history of that? Did the police department have a history of that? No. But if that is what he had done, the man isn't any more dead the last 40 to be gunned down in Chicago. But this one rose high in the news. Partly because the news ran it wrong. And partly because the protests are planned and orchestrated, not spontaneous.
One might ask, as I have done in the "America's Inner City" thread, what else is going wrong in these neighborhoods and with these people that is keeping them out of productive activities and responsibilities. Comments?
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Anyone heard anything on the autopsy of the US ambassador to Libya?
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Anyone heard anything on the autopsy of the US ambassador to Libya?
Was he as valuable as this guy?
Maybe we can send Eric Holder there to get at the "truth". And interrupt a golf trip to announce it.
I have long complained that equal protection under the law has no meaning with this group of ruling bullies or to anyone else on their side of the aisle. They don't even have equal curiosity.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sFomUgbqUFc
[youtube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sFomUgbqUFc[/youtube]
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http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0818fs.html
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Did anyone watch the CNN series on the sixties? The leaders of our nation live breath (marijuana) and speak in the 60s.
Some call it the "greatest" decade.
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Did anyone watch the CNN series on the sixties? The leaders of our nation live breath (marijuana) and speak in the 60s.
Some call it the "greatest" decade.
Not even employees of CNN watch CNN.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/us/shooting-accounts-differ-as-holder-schedules-visit.html?emc=edit_th_20140820&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://twitchy.com/2014/08/20/uncle-tom-racists-go-off-on-larry-elder-after-debate-with-marc-lamont-hill-video/
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10204325511367677&fref=nf
"Acting like Curious Georges on Red Bulls , , ,"
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from the race baiters. Including POTH and the AG? We know Sharpton will BS it into it is "bigger" then this. I agree with Savage. Why won't Gates fire this dirtball.:
Missouri cop was badly beaten before shooting Michael Brown, says source
By Hollie McKay
·Published August 20, 2014·
FoxNews.com
Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Mo., police officer whose fatal shooting of Michael Brown touched off more than a week of demonstrations, suffered severe facial injuries, including an orbital (eye socket) fracture, and was nearly beaten unconscious by Brown moments before firing his gun, a source close to the department's top brass told FoxNews.com.
“The Assistant (Police) Chief took him to the hospital, his face all swollen on one side,” said the insider. “He was beaten very severely.”
According to the well-placed source, Wilson was coming off another case in the neighborhood on Aug. 9 when he ordered Michael Brown and his friend Dorain Johnson to stop walking in the middle of the road because they were obstructing traffic. However, the confrontation quickly escalated into physical violence, the source said.
“They ignored him and the officer started to get out of the car to tell them to move," the source said. "They shoved him right back in, that’s when Michael Brown leans in and starts beating Officer Wilson in the head and the face."
The source claims that there is "solid proof" that there was a struggle between Brown and Wilson for the policeman’s firearm, resulting in the gun going off – although it still remains unclear at this stage who pulled the trigger. Brown started to walk away according to the account, prompting Wilson to draw his gun and order him to freeze. Brown, the source said, raised his hands in the air, and turned around saying, "What, you're going to shoot me?"
At that point, the source told FoxNews.com, the 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown charged Wilson, prompting the officer to fire at least six shots at him, including the fatal bullet that penetrated the top of Brown's skull, according to an independent autopsy conducted at the request of Brown's family.
Wilson suffered a fractured eye socket in the fracas, and was left dazed by the initial confrontation, the source said. He is now "traumatized, scared for his life and his family, injured and terrified" that a grand jury, which began hearing evidence on Wednesday, will "make some kind of example out of him," the source said.
The source also said the dashboard and body cameras, which might have recorded crucial evidence, had been ordered by Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, but had only recently arrived and had not yet been deployed.
A spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department, citing the ongoing investigation, declined late Wednesday to say whether Wilson required medical treatment following the altercation.
Edward Magee, spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCullough, said the office will not disclose the nature of the evidence it will reveal to a grand jury.
"We'll present every piece of evidence we have, witness statements, et cetera, to the grand jury, and we do not release any evidence or talk about evidence on the case."
Nabil Khattar, CEO of 7Star Industries – which specializes in firearms training for law enforcement and special operations personnel – confirmed that police are typically instructed to use deadly force if in imminent danger of being killed or suffering great bodily injury.
“You may engage a threat with enough force that is reasonably necessary to defend against that danger,” he said.
Wilson is a six-year veteran of the Ferguson police force department, and has no prior disciplinary infringements.
Massive protests have since taken over the St. Louis community, prompting Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon last Thursday to place Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson at the helm of security operations in an effort to calm ongoing tensions. The federal government is also investigating the death, and Attorney General Eric Holder has taken the lead – calling “the selective release of sensitive information” in the case “troubling.”
On Friday, Ferguson police released surveillance video showing Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store just before his death. Jackson came under intense criticism for disclosing the tape and a related police report as he also insisted that the alleged robbery and the encounter with Wilson were unrelated matters. Brown’s family, through their attorney, suggested the tape’s release was a strategic form of “character assassination.”
However, FoxNews.com’s source insisted that there was absolutely no spin agenda behind the tape’s release and that there were a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) media requests filed by media outlets seeking it. Tom Jackson is said to have waited on publicly releasing it, and did not want it shown until Brown’s grieving mother first had the chance to see it.
“He defied the FOIAs as long as he could,” noted the insider. “A powerful, ugly spin has completely ruined public discourse on this whole situation.”
Follow @holliesmckay www.twitter.com/holliesmckay
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6'4" and 292lbs? That is a big man, especially if you have just had your face broken by him.
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6'4" and 292lbs? That is a big man, especially if you have just had your face broken by him.
There is a legal concept called disparity of force.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/16/massad-ayoob-fist-vs-gun-disparity-of-force-and-the-law/?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
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http://www.truthrevolt.org/videos/bill-whittle-ferguson-and-real-race-war
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second post
http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/19/government-farmers-host-sex-wedding-pay-13000-fine/
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/215763-reid-apologizes-for-asian-jokes
Anyone see this on the MSM? Amazing how having a D next to your name allows you so much protection.
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Or if a police officer in Fergusen said this.
It would headline news all over CNN and he would be forced to resign amidst national MSM upping it into a world wide scandal.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/22/jesse-jackson-cornered-by-angry-ferguson-protesters-when-you-going-to-stop-selling-us-out/
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/23/police-brutality-michael-brown_n_5700970.html
No actually I am tired of race baiting demonstrators. I am tired of people not taking responsibility for their actions. I am tired of bullies going around robbing store clerks and I am tired of juveniles who think they can assault police officers without repercussion. And finally I am tired of parents and grandparents who seem unable to teach these children right from wrong.
Shove around an older store clerk after robbing him, walk down the middle of a road which has a sidewalk, refuse to get onto the sidewalk, then assault a police officer and charge him all while he is supposedly walking to grannies house.
Then have race baiters and the rest of the libs descend on the scene and make this into some sort of bigger issue than it is.
That is what I am tired of.
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/08/25/cop-who-shot-michael-brown-has-a-not-so-spotless-background/
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second post of day
http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2014/08/24/black-lies-and-white-anger/?singlepage=true
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/08/25/cop-who-shot-michael-brown-has-a-not-so-spotless-background/
So nothing bad about the officer could be found. I wonder what the examination of the author of the above piece would find...
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/08/25/cop-who-shot-michael-brown-has-a-not-so-spotless-background/
So nothing bad about the officer could be found. I wonder what the examination of the author of the above piece would find...
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/08/competing-media-narratives-of-darren-wilson-and-michael-brown/
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https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152314396513715&fref=nf
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second post of the day
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1e8_1409202738
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http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/08/27/blacks-must-confront-reality-n1882887/page/full
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/09/02/overwhelming-majority-say-keep-nfls-washington-redskins-name-says-new-poll/
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/08/25/video-native-american-washington-redskins-fans-fight-back-to-save-team-name/
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From Media Issues: http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1066.msg84447#msg84447
I didn't see the anything racist in the Bill O'Reilly comments other than the entire topic of analyzing people by group membership.
Former Sen Jim Webb wrote about the myth of white privilege here: http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703724104575379630952309408
O'Reilly accurately commented on the breakdown of the black family, which is true but not unique to blacks. White families are breaking down at the same rate; they are just at a different point on the same time line. What O'Reilly has right is that the breakdown of the family for all is the biggest problem in our culture and our economy. It is not unique to blacks but it hit them first and it hit them hardest.
The blame, I very strongly believe, is not white privilege but white guilt that is driving our massive welfare programs that are throwing blacks and black families disproportionately into the eternal dependency of the government. When you choose to receive food stamps, or SSI, or Section 8 housing, or free Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare, or the free Obamacare phone, or cash welfare benefits, you enter into an agreement with the government that you will keep your earned, reported income under a livable level, or lose your benefits. As an inner city landlord, I very commonly witness families afraid to list the husband or father of the children on the lease for fear of losing their benefits.
When a woman sees the government as the provider, instead of the husband and father of the children, the loyalties go toward keeping that support. When a man does not take the responsibilities of a family he started, he very often goes on and fathers more children and creates more non-("treaditional") families. Then if he ever earned significant reported income it would mostly go to child support that he otherwise does not have to pay - so he doesn't. Both the man and the woman living in so-called poverty face effective marginal tax rates far higher than either Warren Buffet or his secretary.
There is no simple, easy solution for this but it is crazy to deny or ignore this enormous unintended consequences of our policies that are ripping our society apart from its foundation.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VqgTdUFtq8
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http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/11/01/6249252/neo-nazis-vs-the-klan-it-must.html?rh=1
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What????
This is nuts. You mean this kid did not rob and manhandle a smaller Indian store clerk than attack a police officer who asked him to not walk in the middle of the road. I suppose the police officer pulled him into the car through the door window to attack him.
Why do we have to put up with this?
****Greatest show on Earth? 5 agencies to meet Michael Brown's parents
Prior to pleading case to U.N. Committee Against Torture
Published: 2 hours ago
By Jerome Corsi and Curtis Ellis
NEW YORK – The parents of Michael Brown will meet with about 20 representatives of the Obama administration in Geneva, Switzerland, before pleading their case to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, according to the director of the nonprofit group organizing their trip.
Ejim Dike, executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, told WND that Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden – the parents of the black teen who was killed in a confrontation in August with a white police offer in Ferguson, Missouri – will meet Nov. 11 in Geneva with the U.S. officials.
The parents, who demand the immediate arrest of Officer Darren Wilson, say their “goal is not only to achieve justice in Ferguson, but to unite governments around the world against the human rights violations that result from racial profiling and police violence.”
The officials, who also will be in Geneva to speak to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, Dike said, are from the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and the State Department.
After meeting the U.S. officials, Brown’s parents will address the 53rd Session of the United Nations Committee Against Torture, Nov. 12 and 13.
At issue is U.S. compliance with the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was passed by the U.N. in 1984 and ratified by the U.S. in 1994.
The parents’ U.N. invitation is the result of a 13-page position paper written by Saint Louis University Law School assistant professor Justin Hansford with the support of left-leaning advocacy groups, Hands Up United, the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.
The U.N. panel, Dike told WND, realizes “the issue of gun violence and police violence especially directed at black and brown people in this country is really a grave human rights concern.”
The committee consists of so-called independent legal experts from countries such as the Republic of Georgia and communist China. The panel’s two members from the U.S. have recused themselves from hearing the case.
Hansford’s paper characterizes the Aug. 9 shooting in Ferguson as the murder by a white police officer of an innocent black youth who had his arms raised in an attempt to surrender.
However, the findings of the grand jury considering whether or not Wilson should be prosecuted have leaked out, and they indicate the officer was acting in self-defense and won’t be charged.
The U.S. already has been reviewed twice this year for alleged noncompliance with U.N. treaties on civil and political rights and the elimination of racial discrimination. The mother of Trayvon Martin, the black teen killed by a neighborhood watchman in Florida, and the father of Jordan Davis, a Florida black teen fatally shot over loud music, participated in the reviews in August.
Hansford’s position paper calls among other things for the arrest of Wilson for the alleged murder of their son, the resignation of Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson and an apology from Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon for alleged intimidation and excessive police force against those seeking to protest the Brown shooting.
The document further calls on the U.N. to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice conduct “a nationwide investigation of systematic police brutality and harassment in brown and black communities, and youth in particular.”
A website, FergusonToGeneva.com, makes available the Hansford report and accepts donations to defray the costs of the trip to Geneva.
As WND columnist Jack Cashill has noted, the leaks of grand jury findings appear to be an attempt by the Justice Department to prepare the public for the likelihood that Wilson will not be charged in Brown’s death.
An Oct. 17 New York Times story, for example, shows Wilson’s version of events inside the officer’s vehicle lines up with the forensic evidence.
As Wilson told the story, Brown reached for the gun, and it was fired twice, with one shot striking Brown on the hand. In the scuffle, Brown “punched and scratched [Wilson] repeatedly.”
Forensic tests meanwhile showed Brown’s blood on the gun, on Wilson’s clothes and on the interior door panel.
The autopsy also indicated Brown did not have his hand’s up in surrender, discrediting a crucial claim that became a central theme of protesters.
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Charles Blow is a black columnist for the NY Times
Race, to the Finish
NOV. 12, 2014
Last week, the economist and former Richard Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein went on Fox News and delivered a racial tirade completely detached from the the anchor’s line of questioning.
When asked by the anchor about a Fox News poll showing the economy was the No.1 issue for voters, and how that poll result might work for or against Democrats in the midterms, Stein skirted the question altogether and instead spewed an extraordinary string of psychobabble about how “what the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics” by telling lies to African-Americans about how Republican policies would hurt them. He continued: “This president is the most racist president there has ever been in America. He is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans.”
Pat Buchanan, the two-time Republican presidential candidate, assistant to Richard Nixon and White House director of communications for Ronald Reagan, wrote a column this week accusing Democratic strategists of “pushing us to an America where the G.O.P. is predominantly white and the Democratic Party, especially in Dixie, is dominated by persons of color” in their last-minute get-out-the-vote appeals to African-Americans, by invoking Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Jim Crow.
This glosses over a hundred years of history that will be tucked quietly away into some attic of amnesia.
Let’s review how we got to this point where African-Americans vote so overwhelmingly Democratic and are suspicious of Republican motives.
As NPR reported in July, “If you’d walked into a gathering of older black folks 100 years ago, you’d have found that most of them would have been Republican” because it was the “party of Lincoln. Party of the Emancipation. Party that pushed not only black votes but black politicians during that post-bellum period known as Reconstruction.”
As Buchanan, writing in American Conservative, pointed out, “The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and segregation, of ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman and the K.K.K. ‘Bull’ Connor, who turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.”
But allegiances flipped.
The first wave of defections by African-Americans from Republican to Democrat came with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s. According to the Roosevelt Institute: “As Mary McLeod Bethune once noted, the Roosevelt era represented ‘the first time in their history’ that African-Americans felt that they could communicate their grievances to their government with the ‘expectancy of sympathetic understanding and interpretation.'”
By the mid 1930s, most blacks were voting Democratic, although a sizable percentage remained Republican. Then came the signing of the Civil Rights Act by the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson — although he wasn’t perfect on the issue of race, and the bill passed partly because of Republican support.
In response to the bill, Barry Goldwater waged a disastrous campaign built in part on his opposition. As NPR put it: “Goldwater can be seen as the godfather (or maybe the midwife) of the current Tea Party. He wanted the federal government out of the states’ business. He believed the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional — although he said that once it had been enacted into law, it would be obeyed. But states, he said, should implement the law in their own time.” Whites were reassured by the message, but blacks were shaken by it.
Richard Nixon, for whom both Stein and Buchanan would work, helped to seal the deal. Nixon had got nearly a third of the African-American vote in his unsuccessful 1960 bid for the White House, but when he ran and won in 1968 he received only 15 percent. In 1972, he was re-elected with just 13 percent of the black vote. That was in part because the Republican brand was already tarnished among blacks and in part because the Nixon campaign used the “Southern strategy” to try to capitalize on racist white flight from the Democratic Party as more blacks moved into it.
As Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times Magazine in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”
That’s right: Republicans wanted the Democrats’ “Negrophobes.”
The history of party affiliations is obviously littered with racial issues. But now, there is considerable quarreling and consternation about the degree to which racial bias is still a party trait or motivating political factor for support of or opposition to particular politicians or policies.
It is clear that our politics were “racialized” long before this president came along — and that structure persists — but that’s not the same as saying the voters are racist.
To get more directly at the issue of racism in political parties, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight Politics looked at “a variety of questions on racial attitudes in the General Social Survey” and specifically at “the numbers for white Democrats and white Republicans.”
This wasn’t a perfect or complete measure of racial bias, but more a measure of flagrant bias — the opinions of people aware of their biases and willing to confess them on a survey.
That said, they found that:
“So there’s a partisan gap, although not as large of one as some political commentators might assert. There are white racists in both parties. By most questions, they represent a minority of white voters in both parties. They probably represent a slightly larger minority of white Republicans than white Democrats.”
Still, the question is how much of this muck at the bottom of both barrels sullies what’s on top? The best measure many find for this is in the rhetoric and policies of party leaders.
The growing share of the Democratic Party composed of historically marginalized populations — minorities, women, Jews, L.G.B.T.-identified persons — pushes the party toward more inclusive language and stances. The Republican Party, on the other hand, doesn’t have that benefit. They can’t seem to stop the slow drip of offensive remarks, like those of the Republican governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, who referred to the president’s policies last week as “tar babies” or the obsessive-compulsive need to culturally diagnose and condemn black people, like Stein’s saying this week that “the real problem with race in America is a very, very beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass.”
At that rate, Republicans will never attract more minorities, try as they may to skip over portions of the racial past or deny the fullness of the racial present.
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/11/12/video-washington-redskins-strike-back-at-pc-police-sues-native-americans/?utm_source=Newsletter+11%2F13%2F14+9am&utm_campaign=11%2F11%2F14+9am+&utm_medium=email
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The Other Ferguson Tragedy
Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, and 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.
By Jason L. Riley
Nov. 25, 2014 7:21 p.m. ET
544 COMMENTS
We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them.
The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation.
Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count.
According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.
Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pointed this out recently on “Meet the Press” in a debate with sociologist Michael Eric Dyson. “What about the poor black child that is killed by another black child? Why aren’t you protesting that?” Mr. Giuliani asked.
“Those people go to jail,” Mr. Dyson responded. “I do protest it. I’m a minister. They go to jail.”
Mr. Dyson might want to try protesting a little harder. Chicago had 507 murders in 2012, only 26% of which were solved. “To put it another way: About three-quarters of the people who killed someone in Chicago in 2012 have gotten away with murder—so far, at least,” Chicago Magazine noted. Mr. Dyson and others on the left are not oblivious to this black pathology, but they are at pains even to acknowledge it, let alone make it a focus. Instead, liberals spend their time spotlighting white racism, real or imagined, and touting it as an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes.
Ferguson helps further that agenda in ways that Chicago does not. Hence, the left posits that the Michael Brown shooting is the norm, even though the data show that it’s the exception. And if black criminal behavior is a response to white racism, how is it that black crime rates were lower in the 1940s and 1950s, when black poverty was higher, racial discrimination was rampant and legal, and the country was more than a half-century away from twice electing a black president?
Racial profiling and tensions between the police and poor black communities are real problems, but these are effects rather than causes, and they can’t be addressed without also addressing the extraordinarily high rates of black criminal behavior—yet such discussion remains taboo. Blacks who bring it up are sell-outs. Whites who mention it are racists. (Mr. Dyson accused Mr. Giuliani of “white supremacy.”) But so long as young black men are responsible for an outsize portion of violent crime, they will be viewed suspiciously by law enforcement and fellow citizens of all races.
Pretending that police behavior is the root of the problem is not only a dodge but also foolish. The riots will succeed in driving business out of town, which means that Ferguson’s residents will be forced to pay more at local stores or travel farther for competitive prices on basic goods and services. Many Ferguson residents today can’t go work because local businesses have been burned down.
Even worse, when you make police targets, you make low-income communities less safe. Ferguson’s problem isn’t white cops or white prosecutors; it’s the thug behavior exhibited by individuals like Michael Brown, which puts a target on the backs of other young black men. Romanticizing such behavior instead of condemning it only makes matters worse.
Mr. Riley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board and the author, most recently, of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
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There is no money in facing the truth about black crime rates.
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Jason Riley is right. I thought Giuliani was clumsy in making his points in the heated exchange on Meet the Press, but he introduced crucial facts that didn't go away just because distractions followed.
If you are a black who was murdered, there is a 93% chance your murderer was black, even though blacks comprise only 13% of the population.
With rounding, there is a zero percent chance your murderer was a cop, or a white cop.
Because of thugs like Brown and terrible crime statistics in certain black neighborhoods, there is a much larger need for a police presence. That presence is there to protect black victims! Because of those population statistics, there is something like an 87% chance (or greater) that the additional cops available for those assignments are not black. If you are in that neighborhood and your mind is consumed with race-centric thinking, and you are black and a police officer is white, then everything that happens appears to be racial when mostly it is not.
I believe the high crime level in these neighborhoods is not racial, but cultural, and is accelerated by a half century or more of our failed social spending programs that tear apart the families in these neighborhoods, who happen to be disproportionately black. The males are free to go through life without the responsibilities that keep the other males in our society from being criminals and street thugs. (Proof that this is cultural, not racial, comes from the fact that blacks not in this environment don't behave like this and whites and others living in this culture do.) The result of our policies is that many, many males go through life diverted away from the moral and financial burdens and responsibilities of getting a good education, job, credit, mortgage, home, supporting your family financially and otherwise, and keeping your criminal record clean.
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You can look at the UK for a perfect parallel culture of criminality with a very white subgroup
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That is a good point GM.
I think this piece well written: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/ferguson-fraud-113178.html#.VHapHoWwX3R
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_3_oh_to_be.html
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Pasting Coulter's piece here from the Media thread:
Leftists Willing to Fight to the Last Drop of Black Blood
Posted By Ann Coulter On November 27, 2014
The riot in Ferguson reminds me, I hate criminals, but I hate liberals more. They planned this riot. They stoked the fire, lied about the evidence and produced a made-to-order riot.
Every other riot I’ve ever heard of was touched off by some spontaneous event that exploded into mob violence long before any media trucks arrived. This time, the networks gave us a countdown to the riot, as if it were a Super Bowl kickoff.
From the beginning, Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown wasn’t reported like news. It was reported like a cause.
The media are in a huff about the prosecutor being “biased” because his father was a cop, who was shot and killed by an African-American. What an assh@le!
Evidently, the sum-total of what every idiot on TV knows about the law is Judge Sol Wachtler’s 20-year-old joke that a prosecutor could “indict a ham sandwich.” We’re supposed to be outraged that this prosecutor didn’t indict the ham sandwich of Darren Wilson.
Liberals seem not to understand that they don’t have a divine right to ruin someone’s life and bankrupt him with a criminal trial, just so they’re satisfied.
The reason most grand jury investigations result in an indictment is that most grand juries aren’t convened solely to patronize racial mobs. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was basically demanding an indictment of Wilson before Big Mike’s body was cold. It was only because of racial politics that this shooting wasn’t dismissed without a grand jury, at all.
Obama says anger is an “understandable reaction” to the grand jury’s finding. Why? And why — as almost everyone is saying — are we supposed to praise the “peaceful protests”?
There’s nothing to protest! A cop shot a thug who was trying to kill him. The grand jury documents make perfectly clear that Big Mike was entirely responsible for his own death. Can’t the peaceful protesters read?
The night of the riot, Obama said the law “often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.” Maybe, but not in this case — except toward Officer Wilson.
I know liberals were hoping they had finally found the great white whale of racism, but they’re just going to have to keep plugging away. They might want to come up with a more productive way to spend their time, inasmuch as they’re about 0:100 on white racism sightings.
Anyone following this case has seen the video of Big Mike robbing a store and roughing up an innocent Pakistani clerk about 10 minutes before being shot by Officer Wilson. They’ve seen him flashing Bloods gang signs in photos.
They know Brown’s mother was recently arrested for clubbing grandma with a pipe over T-shirt proceeds. They’ve seen the video of Brown’s ex-con stepfather shouting at a crowd of protesters after the grand jury’s decision: “Burn this bitch down!”
Liberals will say none of that is relevant in court, but apparently they don’t think actual evidence is relevant either. It’s certainly relevant in the court of public opinion that the alleged victims are a cartoonishly lower-class, periodically criminal black family.
TV hosts narrated the riot by saying it showed “the community” feels it’s not being listened to. Only liberals look at blacks looting and say, See what white Americans made them do?
That’s their proof of injustice — look at how blacks are reacting! (While I don’t approve of the looting part, I do approve of the whole throwing-bottles-at-CNN part.)
The looters aren’t the community!
The community doesn’t want black thugs robbing stores and sauntering down the middle of its streets. The community doesn’t want to be assaulted by Big Mike. The community didn’t want its stores burned down.
That community testified in support of Officer Darren Wilson. About a half-dozen black witnesses supported Officer Wilson’s version of what happened. One was a black woman, who saw the shooting from the Canfield Green apartments. Crying on the stand, she said, “I have a child and that could have been my son.”
And yet, she confirmed all crucial parts of Wilson’s account. She said “the child” (292-pound Big Mike) never had his hands up and the cop only fired when “the baby” was coming at him. “Why won’t that boy stop?” she asked her husband.
I always want to know more about the heroic black witnesses. They are put in a position no white person will ever be in and do the right thing by telling the truth — then go into hiding from “the community” being championed by goo-goo liberals.
White people don’t feel any obligation to defend some thug just because he’s white. Only blacks are expected to lie on behalf of criminals of their own race.
But real heroism doesn’t interest liberals. They only ooh-and-ahh over blacks with rap sheets. The only meaningful white racism anymore is the liberal infantilization of black people.
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https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152314396513715&set=vb.673253714&type=2&theater
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A different look at race than Obama, Holder see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGTUcS-yQtQ
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_the_myth.html
http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2008/05/know-your-enemy-heather-mac-donald
http://www.larryelder.com/b/Five-Myths-of-the-Racist-Criminal-Justice-System/-267027081583001581.html
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/187316/meet-the-mormons?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=04ce402174-Tuesday_December_9_201412_9_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-04ce402174-207194629
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOmYcmeOUoQ&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop
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http://www.diversityinc.com/news/white-s-c-cop-fired-charged-shooting-unarmed-black-man/
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http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0514hm.html
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/chair-of-africana-studies-at-cal-state-long-beach-convicted-torturer-of-women/
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http://nypost.com/2014/12/28/holder-and-obama-are-making-race-relations-worse-inflaming-hatred/
Not accidental.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/watch-man-holds-up-hands-and-lies-down-and-cops-still-kick-him-in-the-face-and-taser-him/
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http://www.tpnn.com/2015/01/06/police-source-al-sharptons-viagra-prescription-found-youll-never-guess-where/
and while we are at it: http://www.tpnn.com/2015/01/01/the-woman-who-ruined-the-lives-of-the-duke-lacrosse-team-with-sharptons-help-is-back-in-the-news/
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http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=27457
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Where does this guy Sharpton get his power from? I don't understand it.
He got his own cable show. He extorts from corporations, he goes in and out of a revolving door to the WH for God's sake.
He shows up at every remotely racial event happening or tragedy he wants and is suddenly the spokesperson the microphoned media run up to and give a forum.
I just don't get it. Why are people so fearful of this guy?
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A very good question.
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We are always treated to the first woman this or that or first Black woman this or that or first Latino woman this or that so why not this:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=first+muslim+woman+on+most+wanted&qpvt=first+muslim+woman+on+most+wanted+&FORM=VDRE
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http://www.gopusa.com/news/2015/01/15/syracuse-appoints-nation-of-islam-member-to-school-board/
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I wonder if Dowd is aware of LBJ's comment that with the Civil Rights Voting Act he would have "niggers voting Democratic for the next 100 years"?
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WASHINGTON — I WENT Friday morning to see “Selma” and found myself watching it in a theater full of black teenagers.
Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend — an effort that was duplicated for students around the country.
The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the “Selma” director, Ava DuVernay.
The horrific scene of the four schoolgirls killed in the white supremacist bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church stunned the audience. One young man next to me unleashed a string of expletives and admitted that he was scared. When civil rights leaders are clubbed, whipped and trampled by white lawmen as feral white onlookers cheer, the youngsters seemed aghast.
In a delicately wrought scene in which Coretta Scott King calls out her husband about his infidelities, some of the teenage girls reacted with a chorus of “oooohs.”
DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and Dr. King. L.B.J. stands above a seated M.L.K., pats him on the shoulder, and tells him “this voting thing is just going to have to wait” while he works on “the eradication of poverty.”
Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.
And that’s a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director’s talent makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.
DuVernay told Rolling Stone that, originally, the script was more centered on the L.B.J.-M.L.K. relationship and was “much more slanted to Johnson.”
“I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie,” she said.
Hollywood has done that with films like “Mississippi Burning,” which cast white F.B.I. agents as the heroes, or “Cry Freedom,” which made a white journalist the focus rather Denzel Washington’s anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko.
Instead of painting L.B.J. and M.L.K. as allies, employing different tactics but complementing each other, the director made Johnson an obstacle.
Top Johnson aide Jack Valenti told Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, that L.B.J. aspired to pass a Voting Rights Act from his first night as president. Valenti said that his boss talked to him about it the night of J.F.K.’s assassination in the bedroom of Johnson’s house in D.C., The Elms, before the newly sworn-in president went to sleep.
On the tape of a phone conversation between President Johnson and Dr. King the week of L.B.J.’s 1965 inauguration, the president said that he indicated the time was yet ripe to ask Congress for it, and he made it clear that they both needed to think of something that would move public opinion more than a presidential speech.
“Johnson was probably thinking, at least in part, of the spring of ’63, when J.F.K. was privately saying the public wasn’t yet politically ready for a comprehensive civil rights bill,” Beschloss said. “Then came the May 1963 photograph of Birmingham police setting dogs against African-American demonstrators, which helped to move many white Americans who were on the fence about the issue.
“Once Selma happened, L.B.J. was, of course, horrified, but he knew that the atrocity would have an effect on white Americans similar to Birmingham that would make it easier for him to get a Voting Rights Act from Congress.”
In an interview with Gwen Ifill on P.B.S., DuVernay dismissed the criticism by Joseph Califano Jr. and other L.B.J. loyalists, who said that the president did not resist the Selma march or let J. Edgar Hoover send a sex tape of her husband to Mrs. King. (Bobby Kennedy, as J.F.K’s attorney general, is the one who allowed Hoover to tap Dr. King.)
“This is art; this is a movie; this is a film,” DuVernay said. “I’m not a historian. I’m not a documentarian.”
The “Hey, it’s just a movie” excuse doesn’t wash. Filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season.
John Lewis, the Georgia congressman who was badly beaten in Selma, has said that bridge led to the Obama White House. And, on Friday night, the president offset the Oscar dis by screening “Selma” at the White House. Guests included DuVernay, Lewis and Oprah Winfrey, who acts in the film and was one of its producers.
There was no need for DuVernay to diminish L.B.J., given that the Civil Rights Movement would not have advanced without him. Vietnam is enough of a pox on his legacy.
As I have written about “Lincoln,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” and “Argo,” and as The New York Review of Books makes clear about “The Imitation Game,” the truth is dramatic and fascinating enough. Why twist it? On matters of race — America’s original sin — there is an even higher responsibility to be accurate.
DuVernay had plenty of vile white villains — including one who kicks a priest to death in the street — and they were no doubt shocking to the D.C. school kids. There was no need to create a faux one.
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Crafty,
Did you see Selma?
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Not yet -- Have you?
This article caught my attention because I am on the alert for Oliver Stone-like "improvements" of the story.
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http://native-american-reparations.wikispaces.com/
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though some say the invasion in the SW is a form of reparations for the war from 170 years ago:
http://www.latinola.com/story.php?story=1232
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And of course Black reparations:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
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http://www.adversity.net/reparations/reparations_for_reverse_discrimination.htm
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I've also heard reparations arguments for Chinese in American, Chinese in Japan.
How about reparations for Pol Pot. Or in Rhwanda.
Or for Mao? Or for Stalin? Or countless other Middle Easterners who spend more time killing each other than any other group.
How about reparations for the Blacks killing Blacks in the US?
I could go on.
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http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs
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http://michellemalkin.com/?p=162894
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http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2015/01/22/tables-are-turned-as-christian-files-complaint-against-baker/
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http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2015/01/22/tables-are-turned-as-christian-files-complaint-against-baker/
Some animals are more equal than others.
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Griggs v. Duke Power deeply offended me when I first read about it in law school.
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Disparate Scalia
A better response to the Justice on housing discrimination law.
Jan. 22, 2015 7:00 p.m. ET
WSJ
A challenge to the Obama Administration’s antidiscrimination excesses finally got a day at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, though not without a few oral-argument surprises. Not least, Justice Antonin Scalia sometimes seemed open to blessing these political abuses.
“Disparate impact” is the legal theory that local governments and businesses can be liable for racially disproportionate results without anyone ever proving—or even suggesting—the intent to discriminate. Instead the Administration is claiming racist outcomes through statistical manipulation. In 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the first time codified disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act.
The problem is that this 1968 statute was designed to prevent intentional discrimination—behavior that segregates, classifies, restricts. Never contemplated by Congress, disparate impact was discovered by the Supreme Court in the 1971 employment decision Griggs v. Duke Power, and the lower appellate courts then spread it throughout U.S. law.
Liberals are prophesying a return to Jim Crow in Texas v. the Inclusive Communities Project, though Texas is merely arguing for the original housing-discrimination meaning. The more compelling objections came from Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence on statutory construction. He suggested that Congress endorsed disparate impact in 1988 amendments to the Fair Housing Act. These add-ons created exemptions for three specific business practices from disparate-impact culpability.
Taking the 1968 and 1988 legislation together, Justice Scalia suggested, meant Congress must have accepted disparate impact except for the carve-outs for those three scenarios. Mocking Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller ’s argument, he put the question squarely: “That’s a very strange thing for Congress to do, to believe that those court of appeals’ opinions are wrong and yet to enact these exemptions.”
Mr. Keller ought to have answered: Merely because federal courts and the executive rewrote a statute does not change the statute itself. Look to the text, not the judicial metamorphosis. The fact that Congress barred some uses of disparate impact in 1988 doesn’t validate all other uses or require a new High Court imprimatur for the 1971 judicial interpretation.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., in December. ENLARGE
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., in December. Photo: Associated Press
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli leaned hard on the three exemptions. But then if he’s so confident in his reading of the statute, what explains the Administration’s political exertions to prevent the High Court from joining the housing disparate-impact debate?
The Justice Department in 2012 engineered a quid pro quo settlement in a case out of Minnesota that the Court had already agreed to hear, meaning the case was pulled from the docket at the 11th hour. The next year the Court voted to hear a New Jersey dispute, but that township also settled in a deal brokered by liberal foundations and housing groups.
For 40 years there were no formal disparate-impact regulations for housing, but HUD suddenly adopted a formal administrative interpretation only after the Court accepted the Minnesota suit. Justice Samuel Alito pointedly asked Mr. Verrilli, “Should we be concerned about the use of Chevron to manipulate the decisions of this Court?”
Justice Alito is referring to the wide degree of legal deference the High Court extends to regulatory parsing of statutes. Mr. Verrilli responded with a crack about overestimating “the efficiency of government”—har, har—but Justice Alito is right to wonder if the Administration is attempting to game the standard of judicial review.
Justice Scalia did circle back to the essential point: “Racial disparity is not racial discrimination.” Whatever the statistics say, the Justices ought to reject the notion that one kind of racial bias can be remedied by another. If the HUD rule is allowed to stand, municipalities, landlords, bank lenders, you name it, will inevitably adopt tacit racial quotas to ensure the numbers work out and thus avoid a possible HUD drive-by.
This form of judicial modesty belongs to the cannons of “constitutional avoidance,” here meaning the Court should avoid producing the potential for illegal or even unconstitutional outcomes such as race-based housing programs or zoning laws. Rebuking the HUD rule would also send a message about the proliferating harm that disparate impact is inflicting on the private economy not merely in real estate but across the government.
To borrow one of Chief Justice John Roberts ’s formulations, the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
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http://toprightnews.com/?p=8127 includes video interview with Cheadle
Veteran Hollywood actor Don Cheadle, an Oscar-nominee for the film Hotel Rwanda, sat down with a PBS interviewer to review detailed research that was done on his ancestors.
Like most Black Americans not descended from immigrants, Cheadle was hardly surprised when told his ancestors were slaves in the pre-Civil War United States.
But when he was told exactly who their slave-owners were, he was in for an absolute shock, and all of us are in for a history lesson that shatters stereotypes.
WATCH:
Whoa.
So Cheadle’s slave ancestors were owned by the Chickasaw. Not only that, they remained slaves for years after America abolished slavery because the Chickasaw nation was Sovereign, and refused to give up their slaves. And even after the U.S. had to force the Indians to free their slaves (irony) they refused to grant them citizenship, as America did, leaving the ex-slaves no nationality. They weren’t American or Chickasaw.
And according to some other ex-slaves, the Chickasaw were cruel slavemasters, as much any any White owner. Former slave Kziah Love told an interviewer in 1937, when she was 93 years old, what life had been like for an enslaved person in Indian Territory.
“That was a sorry time for some poor old black folks,” explained Love, who remembers living in fear of her Indian slave owner. “I believe he was the meanest man the sun ever shined [sic] on … He was sho’ bad to whup niggers … He’d beat ‘em most to death … One time he got mad at his baby’s nurse and he hit her on the head with some fire tongs and she died.”
Pretty mind blowing. Were you taught this in your history class?
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Whoa.
I thought only white men are/were evil. Everyone else are victims and saints.
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http://www.ushistory.org/people/catto.htm
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http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2015/02/06/a-police-shooting-in-denver-how-the-media-frames-the-narrative/
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Implication is she was shot BECAUSE she was lesbian and Latina. Plays well in LA. Lots of LA Times sold. Good for business as well as political agenda ideology.
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WSJ
Still Right on the Black Family After All These Years
The warnings that Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded 50 years ago have come true. Will liberals ever forgive him?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, President Nixon’s assistant for urban affairs in 1969. ENLARGE
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, President Nixon’s assistant for urban affairs in 1969. Photo: Corbis Images
By
Jason L. Riley
Feb. 10, 2015 2:13 p.m. ET
854 COMMENTS
Will liberals ever forgive Daniel Patrick Moynihan for being right?
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the future senator’s report on the black family, the controversial document issued while he served as an assistant secretary in President Lyndon Johnson’s Labor Department. Moynihan highlighted troubling cultural trends among inner-city blacks, with a special focus on the increasing number of fatherless homes.
“The fundamental problem is that of family structure,” wrote Moynihan, who had a doctorate in sociology. “The evidence—not final but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.”
For his troubles, Moynihan was denounced as a victim-blaming racist bent on undermining the civil-rights movement. Even worse, writes Harvard’s Paul Peterson in the current issue of the journal Education Next, Moynihan’s “findings were totally ignored by those who designed public policies at the time.” The Great Society architects would go on to expand old programs or formulate new ones that exacerbated the problems Moynihan identified. Marriage was penalized and single parenting was subsidized. In effect, the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.
“Economists and policy analysts of the day worried about the negative incentives that had been created,” writes Mr. Peterson. “Analysts estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000”—or an inflation-adjusted $88,000 today—“to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.”
History has proved that Moynihan was onto something. When the report was released, about 25% of black children and 5% of white children lived in a household headed by a single mother. During the next 20 years the black percentage would double and the racial gap would widen. Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twice the white percentage.
For decades research has shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and many other social problems grew dramatically when fathers were absent. One of the most comprehensive studies ever done on juvenile delinquency—by William Comanor and Llad Phillips of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2002—concluded that “the most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home.”
Ultimately, the Moynihan report was an attempt to have an honest conversation about family breakdown and black pathology, one that most liberals still refuse to join. Faulting ghetto culture for ghetto outcomes remains largely taboo among those who have turned bad behavior into a symbol of racial authenticity. Moynihan noted that his goal was to better define a problem that many thought—mistakenly, in his view—was no big deal and would solve itself in the wake of civil-rights gains. The author’s skepticism was warranted.
Later this year the nation also will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which some consider the most significant achievement of the modern-day civil-rights movement. With a twice-elected black man now occupying the White House, it might be difficult for younger Americans to appreciate this milestone. However, in 1964, three years after Barack Obama was born, black voter registration in Mississippi was less than 7%, the lowest in the South. By 1966 it had grown to 60%, the highest in the South.
Today black voter-registration rates in the South, where most blacks still live, are higher than in other regions of the country, and for the first time on record the black voter-turnout rate in 2012 exceeded white turnout.
Rarely does a government action achieve its objective with such speed and precision. Racial restrictions to ballot access were removed and black political power increased dramatically. Since 1970 the number of black elected officials in the U.S. has grown to more than 9,000 from fewer than 1,500 and has included big-city mayors, governors, senators and of course a president.
But even as we note this progress, the political gains have not redounded to the black underclass, which by several important measures—including income, academic achievement and employment—has stagnated or lost ground over the past half-century. And while the civil-rights establishment and black political leaders continue to deny it, family structure offers a much more plausible explanation of these outcomes than does residual white racism.
In 2012 the poverty rate for all blacks was more than 28%, but for married black couples it was 8.4% and has been in the single digits for two decades. Just 8% of children raised by married couples live in poverty, compared with 40% of children raised by single mothers.
One important lesson of the past half-century is that counterproductive cultural traits can hurt a group more than political clout can help it. Moynihan was right about that, too.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
Popular on WSJ
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/28/these-seven-charts-show-the-black-white-economic-gap-hasnt-budged-in-50-years/
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http://pamelageller.com/2015/02/university-of-texas-arlington-muslim-student-admits-she-made-up-story-about-being-threatened-at-gunpoint.html/
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/opinion/when-americans-lynched-mexicans.html?emc=edit_th_20150220&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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"In today’s charged debate over immigration policy and the growth of the Latino population, the history of anti-Mexican violence reminds us of the costs and consequences of hate."
Wait a minute. The only slaughter now is Mexican on Mexican due to drugs. You want to talk about racism in Mexico and Central and South America. Then how come darker skinned people hold little power in these countries run by the whiter offspring of Conquistadors.
And what does the lynching of a few thousand people over 75 years have to do with people flouting our borders and laws and then sticking it in our faces if we dare make a peep about it?
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Well, its Pravda on the Hudson-- what else to expect?
I just posted it because I was unaware of the history of lynching Mexicans.
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I wasn't aware of the lynchings either. It is just annoying to hear this guy using this to make some sort of equivalency point about present day problems.
If we were so rotten to those South of the border they wouldn't be flocking here by the millions.
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Yup.
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http://pamelageller.com/2015/02/detroit-muslim-assailant-will-not-be-charged-with-a-hate-crime-despite-stabbing-non-muslims-after-asking-if-they-were-muslim.html/
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http://personalliberty.com/tyranny-americas-moral-decline/
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/02/black-privilege-students-get-sat-bonus-points-for-being-black-or-hispanic-asians-are-penalized/
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10203891379138759&set=a.10201404025996485.1073741829.1049602504&type=1
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html?emc=edit_th_20150304&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.youngcons.com/larry-elder-puts-d-l-hughley-place-negative-comments-black-conservatives/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/03/on-this-day-in-1965-angry-democrats-with-billy-clubs-dogs-attacked-selma-civil-rights-marchers/
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Darren Wilson has been exonerated, again, in last August’s shooting death of Michael Brown, and that ought to be as much a vindication for the onetime Ferguson, Mo., police officer as it is a teachable moment for the rest of America.
It won’t be. The story line has failed, so the statistics have been put to work.
That the claims made against Mr. Wilson were doubtful should have been clear within days of Brown’s death, and again in November after a grand jury, having heard from some 60 witnesses, declined to indict the officer—an outcome one outraged commentator denounced as having “openly and shamelessly mocked our criminal justice system and laid bare the inequality of our criminal jurisprudence.”
Yet if anyone was openly and shamelessly mocking the criminal-justice system, it was so much of the media itself, credulously accepting or sanctimoniously promoting the double fable of Ferguson: that a “gentle giant” had been capriciously slain by a trigger-happy cop; and that a racist justice system stood behind that cop.
At least half that fable was put to rest last week by an exhaustive Justice Department report. It demolishes the lie that Brown was shot in the back, along with the lie that he was surrendering to Mr. Wilson, hands in the air, when he was shot. It confirms that Brown physically assaulted the officer, who had good grounds to fear for his life.
And it confirms that eyewitnesses either lied to investigators or refused to be interviewed out of fear of local vigilantes.
“Witness 109 claimed to have witnessed the shooting, stated that it was justified, and repeatedly refused to give formal statements to law enforcement for fear of reprisal should the Canfield Drive neighborhood find out that his account corroborated Wilson.”
Witness 113 “gave an account that generally corroborated Wilson, but only after she was confronted with statements she initially made in an effort to avoid neighborhood backlash. . . . She explained to the FBI that ‘You’ve gotta live the life to know it,’ and stated that she feared offering an account contrary to the narrative reported by the media that Brown held his hands up in surrender.”
Now there’s a story for the media: A community in which honest people can’t tell the truth for fear of running afoul local thugs enforcing “the narrative reported by the media.” Or is that more of a story about the media?
But let’s move to the other Ferguson fable, which is the Justice Department’s allegation, in an unfortunate second report, of systemic racism in the Ferguson police department.
For a flavor of this claim, it’s worth noting an incident recounted in the report, in which a Ferguson man was killed “after he had an ECW [Taser] deployed against him three times for allegedly running toward an officer swinging his fist.” The man “had been running naked through the streets and pounding on cars that morning while yelling ‘I am Jesus.’ ”
According to the Justice Department, this incident is an example of “overreliance on force when interacting with more vulnerable populations.”
This isn’t to say that the report doesn’t uncover more serious problems, including a number of racist emails in the department, policing that seems needlessly obnoxious or aggressive, and a municipal government desperate to prosecute every minor violation of the law in order to maximize city revenues—in effect, using cops as taxmen.
But this only demonstrates the journalistic truism that you can always find the “story” you’re looking for. Using ticket revenue and other fines to raise revenues is one of the oldest municipal tricks in the book, so much so that the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis even published a paper about it in 2006. “As local tax bases have been exhausted and public opposition to increases in local tax rates have increased over time, local governments face increased pressure to find alternative sources of revenue,” noted economists Thomas Garrett and Gary Wagner.
That turns out to be as true in Milwaukee, Nashville and Washington, D.C., as it is in Ferguson. So are we talking about institutional racism or just the usual government bloodsucking?
Then there’s the report’s abuse of statistics, notably of the fact that African-Americans are 67% of Ferguson’s population but are disproportionately arrested for crime.
Is this racism? The Missouri Statistical Analysis Center notes that in 2012 African-Americans, about 12% of the state’s population, constituted 65% of murder arrests and 62% of murder victims. To suggest that the glaring statistical disproportion between relative population size and murder rate is somehow a function of race would be erroneous and offensive. Yet tarring a police force as racist for far smaller statistical discrepancies is now one of the privileged “truths” of 21st century America.
The lesson of Darren Wilson is that there is no truth in narrative. And the lesson of Ferguson is that there is no truth in statistics. There is truth in fact. There is truth in reason. There is truth in truthfulness. Nothing less.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Popular on WSJ
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http://m.townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2015/03/12/the-farcical-ferguson-report-n1969140
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http://nypost.com/2013/08/04/pay-up-time-for-brawley-87-rape-hoaxer-finally-shells-out-for-slander/
Twenty-five years after accusing an innocent man of rape, Tawana Brawley is finally paying for her lies.
Last week, 10 checks totaling $3,764.61 were delivered to ex-prosecutor Steven Pagones — the first payments Brawley has made since a court determined in 1998 that she defamed him with her vicious hoax.
A Virginia court this year ordered the money garnisheed from six months of Brawley’s wages as a nurse there.
She still owes Pagones $431,000 in damages. And she remains defiantly unapologetic.
“It’s a long time coming,” said Pagones, 52, who to this day is more interested in extracting a confession from Brawley than cash.
“Every week, she’ll think of me,” he told The Post. “And every week, she can think about how she has a way out — she can simply tell the truth.”
Brawley’s advisers in the infamous race-baiting case — the Rev. Al Sharpton, and attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox — have already paid, or are paying, their defamation debt. But Brawley, 41, had eluded punishment.
She’s now forced to pay Pagones $627 each month, possibly for the rest of her life. Under Virginia law, she can appeal the wage garnishment every six months.
“Finally, she’s paying something,” said Pagones’ attorney, Gary Bolnick. “Symbolically, I think it’s very important — you can’t just do this stuff without consequences.”
Pagones filed for the garnishment with the circuit court in Surry County, Va., in January, a few weeks after The Post tracked down Brawley to tiny Hopewell, Va.
Before The Post came knocking, not even her own co-workers knew she was the teen behind the spectacular 1987 case.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone about that,” Brawley growled after a Post reporter confronted her about her sordid past in December.
Employing aliases including Tawana Thompson and Tawana Gutierrez, she leads a relatively normal life by all appearances, residing in a neat brick apartment complex and working as a licensed practical nurse at The Laurels of Bon Air in Richmond.
She’s also raising a daughter, a neighbor said.
Brawley was spotted one morning emerging from her house with a young girl and a man dressed in hospital scrubs.
They left in separate cars — Brawley in a Chrysler Sebring and the man and child in a Ford Taurus. Brawley arrived at work about 30 minutes later, and the man pulled into the same lot minutes afterward.
Her current life is a far cry from the one she fled in upstate Wappingers Falls, NY.
She was only 15 when she claimed she was the victim of a crime whose shocking brutality sparked a national outrage and stoked racial tensions.
The two-decade-long saga that nearly ruined Pagones’ life and career began on Nov. 28, 1987, when Brawley was found in a trash bag, with the words “n—-r” and “b—h” scrawled on her body in feces.
In her first meetings with police, the teenager responded to questions with blank expressions, nods and by scrawling notes. She said she had been abducted by two white men, who dragged her into the woods where four other white men were waiting.
But Brawley, a cheerleader, didn’t offer much detail. She didn’t give police names or detailed descriptions of the men she claimed had brutalized her almost nonstop for four days.
What she did share — that one attacker had blond hair, a holster and a badge — sparked a media firestorm in New York City, which was still reeling from the killing of a black youth in Howard Beach, Queens, by a white mob.
Firebrands Maddox and Mason and a relatively unknown Sharpton jumped into the fray. Within weeks, a suspect emerged — Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., who had been found dead in his apartment three days after the Brawley “attack.”
But Pagones, a Dutchess County prosecutor at the time, defended his dead friend Crist, offering an alibi for the cop — they were Christmas-shopping together on one of the days in question. And on the three other days of the “kidnapping,” Crist was on patrol, working at his other job at IBM, and installing insulation in an attic.
Brawley’s handlers then claimed — without proof — that Pagones was part of the white mob that kidnapped and raped the girl 33 times.
Celebrities lined up to support Tawana, including Bill Cosby, who posted a $25,000 reward for information on the case; Don King, who promised $100,000 for Brawley’s education; and Spike Lee, who in his 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing,” included a shot of a graffiti message reading, “Tawana told the truth.”
A grand jury reached a different conclusion. The jurors, who heard from 180 witnesses over seven months, concluded in 1988 that the entire story was a hoax.
They determined Brawley had run away from home and concocted the story — most likely to avoid punishment from her stepfather, Ralph King, who had spent seven years in prison in the 1970s for killing his first wife.
Crist’s suicide was unrelated; he killed himself over a failed romance.
“It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside-down with such false claims,” state Supreme Court Justice S. Barrett Hickman wrote at the time.
For Pagones, the damage was done. His marriage unraveled, and he ended up leaving his job as a prosecutor. He continued to proclaim his innocence, making it his life’s mission to bring Brawley and her advisers to justice — and compel them to tell the truth.
In 1998, he won his defamation lawsuit. Maddox was found liable for $97,000, Mason for $188,000, and Sharpton for $66,000 — money that was paid by celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran and other benefactors.
Sharpton, now a national figure, has never apologized for his role in the hoax. Mason, an ordained minister who hasn’t practiced law since being disbarred in 1995, has remained mostly silent.
But Maddox, whose law license was suspended in 1990, continues the drumbeat for Brawley. He even tried to petition the Surry County court to halt the garnishment of Brawley’s wages.
He maintained that in New York, where the defamation case took place, two sets of laws apply.
“The common law applies to whites. The slave code still applies to blacks,” he said.
In a July 22 legal brief signed by Brawley and submitted by Maddox, Brawley contends she wouldn’t submit herself to the court’s jurisdiction because an appearance in the court, “which inferentially sympathizes with the Confederate States of America, would be contrary to the US Constitution and would amount to a ‘badge of slavery.’ ”
Brawley did not return messages seeking comment.
Pagones is still licensed to practice law but is now a principal at a New York-based private-investigation firm. He has remarried, has three daughters and a son, and lives in Dutchess County.
Brawley was ordered in 1998 to fork over $190,000 at 9 percent annual interest. She now owes a total of about $431,492 — a sum she could be paying for the rest of her life.
Or maybe not.
Pagones said he’d forgive the debt if Brawley admits the truth.
“I’m willing to consider anything,” he said.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWQ4oVP-3Q#t=429
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http://www.redstate.com/2015/03/15/many-conservatives-blowing-it-ferguson-doj-report/?utm_source=rsfbp&utm_medium=fbpage&utm_campaign=rsupdate
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First, stipulate this: black lives matter, yes they do!
File this also under cognitive dissonance of the left.
Somehow the mantra 'black lives matter' cannot be extrapolated into the larger truth, 'all lives matter'.
Why not? I don't know, but let's stick with black lives mattering for this brief post.
The death penalty is unfair because it has been dealt disproportionately to blacks. Guilt is not the issue.
Ferguson and other police departments arrest blacks disproportionately. This is wrong, unfair and racist no matter of guilt.
Darren Wilson is a white cop who killed an unarmed black teenager. This is wrong and racist no matter the facts or 200 years of law and precedent that govern justified homocide, such as SELF DEFENSE.
Now switch issues. Black babies are aborted in America at FIVE TIMES the rate of white babies. Aborted, killed, terminated, had their young life stopped short, however you want to put it. This is NO PROBLEM. In fact, more is better! Liberal politicians are up in arms when tricked into supporting legislation that would at all minimize this racial disparity. Go figure.
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/296804851.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/abortions-racial-gap/380251/
Twice as many blacks are killed by abortion as by all other causes of death combined, including old age. No race issue here. Now back to police being too tough on street criminals.
http://www.abort73.com/abortion/abortion_and_race/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWc75TDhVOY
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http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/30/meet-10-americans-helped-by-religious-freedom-bills-like-indianas/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416248/indianas-law-not-return-jim-crow-jonah-goldberg
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Interview With a Christian
APRIL 4, 2015
Ross Douthat
AFTER watching the debate about religious freedom unfold over the past week, I decided to subject myself to an interview by an imaginary — but representative — member of the press. Here is our conversation:
Happy Easter!
Thank you.
O.K., enough pleasantries. You’re a semi-reasonable Christian. What do you think about the terrible Indiana “religious liberty” bill?
I favored the original version. Based on past experience, laws like this protect religious minorities from real burdens. As written, the Indiana law probably wouldn’t have protected vendors from being fined for declining to work at a same-sex wedding. But I would favor that protection as well.
Seriously? Shouldn’t businesses have to serve all comers?
I think they should be able to decline service for various reasons, religious scruples included. A liberal printer shouldn’t be forced to print tracts for a right-wing cause. A Jewish deli shouldn’t be required to cater events for the Nation of Islam.
But those are issues of belief, not identity. Denying service to gays is like denying service to blacks under Jim Crow.
None of the businesses facing sanctions are saying they wouldn’t serve gay people as a class; they just don’t want to work at nuptials. This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country. It seems possible, and reasonable, to live and let live.
I think discrimination is discrimination. What about you? Would you bake the cake?
Honestly, since so many of my friends aren’t religious or conservative, I’ve always taken for granted that being part of their lives meant accompanying them through life choices that belong to a different worldview than my own. (And I’m very grateful that they’ve accompanied and tolerated me.) My family has its share of divorces and second marriages; my friends’ romantic paths are varied; my closest friend from high school just exchanged vows with his longtime boyfriend. I’m going to a party celebrating them next month. If they asked me, I’d bring a cake.
So why can’t other believers do the same?
First, these issues are difficult and personal, and I don’t presume that my approach is always right. Second, details matter. My closest gay friends are fairly secular. But I would be uncomfortable attending same-sex vows in the style of a Catholic mass — or being hired to photograph such a ceremony. I don’t think that discomfort should be grounds for shutting down a business.
Well, that discomfort may seem religious, but segregationists felt justified by scripture too. They got over it; their churches got over it; so will yours.
It’s not that simple. The debate about race was very specific to America, modernity, the South. (Bans on interracial marriage were generally a white supremacist innovation, not an inheritance from Christendom or common law.) The slave owners and segregationists had scriptural arguments, certainly. But they were also up against one of the Bible’s major meta-narratives — from the Israelites in Egypt to Saint Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.”
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
That’s not the case with sex and marriage. The only clear biblical meta-narrative is about male and female. Sex is an area of Jewish law that Jesus explicitly makes stricter. What we now call the “traditional” view of sexuality was a then-radical idea separating the early church from Roman culture, and it’s remained basic in every branch of Christianity until very recently. Jettisoning it requires repudiating scripture, history and tradition in a way the end of Jim Crow did not.
Except we know now, in a way people writing the Bible couldn’t, that being gay isn’t a choice.
I take a different view of what they could have known. But yes, the evidence that homosexuality isn’t chosen — along with basic humanity — should inspire repentance for cruelties visited on gay people by their churches.
But at Christianity’s bedrock is the idea that we are all in the grip of an unchosen condition, an “original” problem that our wills alone cannot overcome. So homosexuality’s deep origin is not a trump card against Christian teaching.
I know smart Christians who disagree with you.
So do I. I just think their views ultimately point in a post-biblical, post-Christian direction. And I also know very smart gay Christians — the Anglican theologian Wesley Hill, the Catholic writer Eve Tushnet, others — who take the orthodox view, and try to live with the tension between their attractions and their faith, with (one hopes) their fellow Christians’ assistance.
They’re prisoners of a cruel delusion. I don’t see how a loving God could put them in such an impossible position.
Then you can add this to the popular arguments against Christianity. But again, the Christian idea is that God asks the seemingly impossible of all of us — and, fortunately forgives us when we fail. Nobody has to accept this idea, but if you do it’s compatible with a lot of pain, struggle and mystery where humanity encounters God.
Especially in a faith whose “Happy Easter” can’t be separated from the cross.
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Phony science. The new politically correct one sided racist rant. I notice no mention of terms like gringo, honky or cracker:
The most racist places in America, according to Google
By Christopher Ingraham April 28 at 8:23 AM
Where do America's most racist people live? "The rural Northeast and South," suggests a new study just published in PLOS ONE.
The paper introduces a novel but makes-tons-of-sense-when-you-think-about-it method for measuring the incidence of racist attitudes: Google search data. The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He's used it before to measure the effect of racist attitudes on Barack Obama's electoral prospects.
[Data suggest Republicans have a race problem]
"Google data, evidence suggests, are unlikely to suffer from major social censoring," Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in a previous paper. "Google searchers are online and likely alone, both of which make it easier to express socially taboo thoughts. Individuals, indeed, note that they are unusually forthcoming with Google." He also notes that the Google measure correlates strongly with other standard measures social science researchers have used to study racist attitudes.
This is important, because racism is a notoriously tricky thing to measure. Traditional survey methods don't really work -- if you flat-out ask someone if they're racist, they will simply tell you no. That's partly because most racism in society today operates at the subconscious level, or gets vented anonymously online.
For the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the N-word. People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches for "migraine(s)," "economist," "sweater," "Daily Show," and "Lakers." (The authors attempted to control for variants of the N-word not necessarily intended as pejoratives, excluding the "a" version of the word that analysis revealed was often used "in different contexts compared to searches of the term ending in '-er'.")
It's also important to note that not all people searching for the N-word are motivated by racism, and that not all racists search for that word, either. But aggregated over several years and several million searches, the data give a pretty good approximation of where a particular type of racist attitude is the strongest.
Interestingly, on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up to New York and southern Vermont.
[Three quarters of whites don't have any non-white friends]
Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio. But the searches get rarer the further West you go. West of Texas, no region falls into the "much more than average" category. This map follows the general contours of a map of racist Tweets made by researchers at Humboldt State University.
So some people are sitting at home by themselves, Googling a bunch of racist stuff. What does it matter? As it turns out, it matters quite a bit. The researchers on the PLOS ONE paper found that racist searches were correlated with higher mortality rates for blacks, even after controlling for a variety of racial and socio-economic variables.
"Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks," the authors conclude. Now, of course, Google searches aren't directly leading to the deaths of African Americans. But previous research has shown that the prevalence of racist attitudes can contribute to poor health and economic outcomes among black residents.
"Racially motivated experiences of discrimination impact health via diminished socioeconomic attainment and by enforcing patterns in racial residential segregation, geographically isolating large segments of the Black population into worse neighborhood conditions," the authors write, summarizing existing research. "Racial discrimination in employment can also lead to lower income and greater financial strain, which in turn have been linked to worse mental and physical health outcomes."
[White people are winning the 'war on whites']
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Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.
In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.
Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.
Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.
Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.
You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.
Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence.
Where I currently reside here in Watauga County, North Carolina, the poverty level is 31.3%. Median income is only $34,293. In both of those areas we are much worse off than Baltimore, that has a poverty rate of only 23.8% and a median income of $41,385.
Despite all that, we don’t riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others.
One attitude we don’t have here is the soul-killing belief that somebody owes us something, which, of course, is a recipe for discontent. Because if you’re not getting what’s owed to you, how can you be anything but angry?
Democrats and their never-ending grievance campaigns; their never-ending propaganda that government largess is the answer; their never-ending caves to corrupt unions; their never-ending warehousing of innocent children in failed public schools — that’s a Democrat problem, not America’s problem.
I might believe Baltimore was an American problem if the city was interested in new ideas and a new direction under new leaders. But we all know that will never happen. After Democrat policies result in despair and anarchy, Democrats always demand more of the same, only bigger.
And the media goes right along.
And things only get worse.
I wish you all the luck in the world Baltimore. And I truly wish you had the courage to change. If you ever do, send up a flare. Until then, there is nothing anyone can do for you. You are victims of your own choices, and no one can make choices for you but you.
As far as the good people of Baltimore trapped by the terrible voting of your fellow citizens, I suggest you buy more guns until you can move to a city not run by those who see rioting as part of the Master Plan.
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By
Jason L. Riley
April 28, 2015 7:17 p.m. ET
218 COMMENTS
The racial makeup of city leaders, the police department and other municipal workers in Ferguson, Mo., played a central role in the media coverage and analysis of Michael Brown’s death, which is worth remembering as history repeats itself in Baltimore.
The Justice Department’s Ferguson report noted that although the city’s population was 67% black, just four of its 54 police officers fit that description. Moreover, “the Municipal Judge, Court Clerk, Prosecuting Attorney, and all assistant court clerks are white,” said the report. “While a diverse police department does not guarantee a constitutional one, it is nonetheless critically important for law enforcement agencies, and the Ferguson Police Department in particular, to strive for broad diversity among officers and civilian staff.”
Broad diversity is not a problem in Baltimore, where 63% of residents and 40% of police officers are black. The current police commissioner is also black, and he isn’t the first one. The mayor is black, as was her predecessor and as is a majority of the city council. Yet none of this “critically important” diversity seems to have mattered after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died earlier this month in police custody under circumstances that are still being investigated.
Some black Baltimoreans have responded by hitting the streets, robbing drugstores, minimarts and check-cashing establishments and setting fires. If you don’t see the connection, it’s because there isn’t one. Like Brown’s death, Gray’s is being used as a convenient excuse for lawbreaking. If the Ferguson protesters were responding to a majority-black town being oppressively run by a white minority—which is the implicit argument of the Justice Department and the explicit argument of the liberal commentariat—what explains Baltimore?
Tensions between the police and low-income black communities stem from high crime rates in those areas. The sharp rise in violent crime in our inner cities, which dates to the 1970s and 1980s, happened to coincide with an increase in the number of black leaders in many of those very same cities. What can be said of Baltimore is also true of Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., where black mayors and police chiefs and aldermen and school superintendents have held sway for decades.
Opinion Journal Video
Best of the Web Today Columnist James Taranto on riots following the death of a black man in police custody. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Chicago’s population is 32% black, along with 26% of its police force, but it remains one of the most violent big cities in the country. There were more than 400 homicides in the Second City last year and some 300 of the victims were black, the Chicago Tribune reports. That’s more than double the number of black deaths at the hands of police in the entire country in a given year, according to FBI data.
Might the bigger problem be racial disparities in antisocial behavior, not the composition of law-enforcement agencies?
It was encouraging to hear a few Baltimore officials say as much Monday night as they watched their city burn. “I’m a lifelong resident of Baltimore, and too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
City Council President Jack Young pointedly recalled the Baltimore riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “We cannot go back to 1968 where we burned down our own infrastructure and our own neighborhoods,” he said. “We still have scars from 1968 where we had some burnt out buildings and businesses did not want to come back to the city of Baltimore. We have to stop the burning down and the breaking in of these stores because in the end it hurts us as a people.”
Sadly, Mr. Young could have been describing any number of cities that experienced black rioting in the mid-1960s and took decades to recover, if they ever did. The riot that began in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 resulted in 34 deaths, 4,000 arrests and 1,000 looted or destroyed businesses. The Detroit riots two years later caused 43 deaths and destroyed 2,500 businesses. Before the riots, both cities had sizable and growing black middle-class populations, where homeownership and employment exceeded the black national average. After the riots, those populations fled, and economic deprivation set in. Some 50 years later, Watts is still showing “scars” and Detroit remains in the hospital.
The violent-crime rate in Baltimore is more than triple the national average, and the murder rate is more than six times higher. As of April, city murders are 20% ahead of the number killed through the first three months of last year. But neither Mayor Rawlings-Blake nor Mr. Young needs any lectures from the media on Baltimore crime. The mayor lost a 20-year-old cousin to gun violence two years ago. And earlier this month Mr. Young’s 37-year-old nephew died from a gunshot wound to his head. Even the families of black elites in a city run by black elites can’t escape this pathology.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
Popular on WSJ
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https://www.facebook.com/prageru/videos/876146332428224/
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http://www.dennisprager.com/why-the-left-wont-call-rioters-thugs/
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http://www.dennisprager.com/why-the-left-wont-call-rioters-thugs/
Great Vid!
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He doesn't come out and say it but this could mean only ONE thing: reparations.
Well I got news for him. I for one ain't paying another dime. We have immigrants coming here by the tens of millions. They are blowing right by the American Blacks. No one is giving them special treatment. they should be protesting the Democrat Party for doing essentially nothing for them. Baltimore as noted by many TV talking heads has been controlled by that party. We have a black President who opened up the immigrant flood gates driving down wages and increasing competition. They should be outside the WH. "White man" is not keeping them down anymore.
I am off my soapbox.
http://time.com/3848474/kareem-abdul-jabbar-baltimore-is-just-the-beginning/
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https://scontent-lax.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/11076205_877218135670748_5227244596766999904_n.jpg?oh=6ecb4a669031ba36337286d2f80431ca&oe=55DB61AE
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http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/418382/chinas-attack-religious-liberty-model-progressives-ed-whelan
Yes, next question.
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Good point, one that would fit quite well in the First Amendment thread as well.
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y
Douglas Belkin
Updated May 15, 2015 9:26 p.m. ET
500 COMMENTS
A complaint Friday alleged that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants by setting a higher bar for admissions than that faced by other groups.
The complaint, filed by a coalition of 64 organizations, says the university has set quotas to keep the numbers of Asian-American students significantly lower than the quality of their applications merits. It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale.
The complaint was filed with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
“Many studies have indicated that Harvard University has been engaged in systemic and continuous discrimination against Asian-Americans during its very subjective ‘Holistic’ college admissions process,” the complaint alleges.
The coalition is seeking a federal investigation and is requesting Harvard “immediately cease and desist from using stereotypes, racial biases and other discriminatory means in evaluating Asian-American applicants.”
Robert Iuliano, Harvard’s general counsel, said the school’s admissions policies are “fully compliant with the law.” The school says its admissions process takes into account a variety of factors besides academics, including applicants’ extracurricular activities and leadership qualities.
“Within its holistic admissions process, and as part of its effort to build a diverse class, Harvard College has demonstrated a strong record of recruiting and admitting Asian American students,” Mr. Iuliano said in a statement. He said the percentage of Asian-American students admitted to the undergraduate school rose to 21% from less than 18% in the past decade.
But the group that filed the complaint said that percentage should be much higher given the increasing numbers of Asian-American students that apply.
“There is a lot of discrimination, and it hurts not just Asian-Americans, it hurts the whole country,” said Yukong Zhao, a 52-year-old Chinese-American author who helped organize the coalition. He said there are longtime stereotypes of Asian applicants’ being “not creative enough or risk-taking enough, but that’s not true. Nearly half of the tech start-ups in the country were started by Asian-Americans. Every one is a great example of creativity, and risk-taking and leadership.”
The complaint argues that elite schools “that use race-neutral admissions” have far higher Asian-American enrollment than Harvard. At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian-American, about twice that at Harvard.
The allegations come six months after a group called Students for Fair Admissions argued in a federal lawsuit that Harvard uses preferences to reach specific racial balance on its campuses.
Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton University sociologist who has done work on race in college admissions, said the complaint was the result of long-simmering anger in the Asian-American community.
“Up until five or 10 years ago the response has been, ‘Well we just have to work harder,’ ” Mr. Espenshade said. “But over the last decade, more groups are starting to mobilize, saying we don’t have to just accept his, we can push back against it.”
Write to Douglas Belkin at doug.belkin@wsj.com
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second post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKGZnB41_e4&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop
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second post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKGZnB41_e4&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop
Hardly a scientific examination of the topic.
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Of course not, this is FB level debate, and frankly we need to be able to play this game too.
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Of course not, this is FB level debate, and frankly we need to be able to play this game too.
Note that the white guy looks clean cut, middle class while the black guy is in standard issue gangstawear w/cornrows. Put a black male in a clean cut middle class clothes and use a white male with arms sleeved in prison ink and see how that changes things.
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It might be informative to look at the stats in the jurisdiction/s of suspect descriptions from the last year. I am willing to bet that "black male, dark clothing, cornrows" was much more common than "white male, clean shaven , polo shirt and jeans".
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"Note that the white guy looks clean cut, middle class while the black guy is in standard issue gangstawear w/cornrows. Put a black male in a clean cut middle class clothes and use a white male with arms sleeved in prison ink and see how that changes things."
Now we are playing the game!
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-corrections-officers-looting-20150513-story.html
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-corrections-officers-looting-20150513-story.html
? Factoid? What theory?
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That the looters were unemployed.
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That the looters were unemployed.
The whole "depraved because they are deprived" thing has been debunked long ago. Of course, the left loves to continue to push that narrative.
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/uppity-does-it/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DayByDayCartoon+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29
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By
Harvey Mansfield
May 19, 2015 6:59 p.m. ET
351 COMMENTS
Conservatives have been giving first lady Michelle Obama a hard time over her commencement speech at Tuskegee University on May 9. They denounce her complaints of continuing racism in America while recalling outrages long past. They wonder why she said nothing of the problem of black criminality. They scorn her unwillingness to acknowledge the privilege she enjoyed from attending Princeton and Harvard. Yet the speech had much merit that conservatives should appreciate.
The speech was given at the university founded as a school for teachers in 1881 in Tuskegee, Ala., by Booker T. Washington, the most conservative of black thinkers. Tuskegee University was not built with government funding or private donation but by blacks themselves under Washington’s direction. Michelle Obama paid tribute to him with the story that he pawned his watch to buy a kiln so that the students could fashion the bricks they needed to build the school but couldn’t afford to buy. George Washington Carver, she added, came to Tuskegee to do his research and had to search trash piles to equip his laboratory.
These facts—or legends, it doesn’t matter which—are faithful to Booker T. Washington’s central thesis that blacks should not depend on the white majority to improve their lives. They should rise “up from slavery,” the title of Washington’s autobiography, on their own. They had of course been liberated by the Civil War, but he said they needed also to make themselves fit for freedom, thus freeing themselves, through stages of self-education and hard work. His stirring program was the very antithesis of today’s racial preferences.
Washington’s thesis was opposed by another great black thinker, W.E.B. DuBois, and the two had a grand battle in the early 20th century. DuBois despised the passivity of Washington’s approach, blaming his isolation from politics and lack of outrage. “Demand your rights” was the gist of DuBois’s message, not “earn your rights,” as for Washington.
Here we have the essential, abiding question for black politics facing a white majority: Which is better, the civil-rights strategy of anger and agitation or the quiet, composed policy of pursuing American happiness like everyone else, if with fewer advantages? The first can lead to rioting, the second to accusations of being an Uncle Tom.
Michelle Obama, avoiding the battle, rather skillfully blended the two sides in her speech. She referred to “the bloody clubs and the tear gas at Selma,” bringing drama to her praise for the Tuskegee graduates with their worthy but unexciting accomplishments. She spoke too of the noted black airmen of Tuskegee, trained there during World War II, who went on “to show the world” what they could do.
The airmen, one could say, practiced the Booker T. Washington strategy. Instead of demanding benefits from the government, demand the right to serve in its military. Worthy military service by blacks in World War II prepared the decision to desegregate the military, which in turn led the way to desegregation in civilian life. But of course one can hardly overlook the civil-rights revolution that intervened in the 1960s, an event suggesting that it was necessary for blacks to protest as well as study and work.
Mrs. Obama assumed both outlooks as if there were no problem in doing so: the liberal way of protest and the conservative way of lawful virtue. At least it is clear, though, that she appreciates the conservative way. She wants for her children what the parents at the Tuskegee commencement wanted for theirs. This means, as she proclaimed, that she is “first and foremost a mom.” A prominent and successful woman who talks like that deserves at least a nod of approval from conservatives. Her emphasis on motherhood, she said, may not be “the first thing that some folks want to hear from an Ivy-League-educated lawyer,” but “it is truly what I am.” The “some folks” who might disagree with her are obviously not conservatives.
True, the first lady came to this sensible conclusion after voicing liberal gush about authenticity of the sort that reduces solutions for life’s problems to arbitrary personal choice. It is as if choosing well doesn’t matter. But she chose well to come to Tuskegee to praise its graduates, who also had chosen well so as to be there. She also found a moment of contrast between the graduates at Tuskegee and the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.
The frustrations evident in those places “are not an excuse to just throw up our hands and give up,” she said. Then she added a message worthy of Booker T. Washington: The history of black Americans “teaches us that when we pull ourselves out of those lowest emotional depths, and we channel our frustrations into studying and organizing and banding together—then we can build ourselves and our communities up.”
As for Mrs. Obama’s complaints about racism, who can deny that for blacks, as she said, “the road ahead is not going to be easy”? Liberals and conservatives can argue over whether blacks are helped or hurt by government, but either way she is right. Would it were otherwise, but our black citizens despite their gains still have a harder time of it than the rest of us.
Mr. Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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STEPHEN FULTON
STEPHEN FULTON 1 minute ago
Manfield is actually quite right. The lethal combination of a monopolistic teachers union that has 0% interest in teaching and their liberal lapdogs that fight charter schools at every turn giving those in the inner city no chance to escape + the progressives unwillingness to insist on responsible behavior in return for welfare payments + insane drug laws that ensure that drug distribution remains the best paying job in the hood = no education, fatherless "families" and high rates of incarceration in prisons better thought of as gladiator school where violence and intimidation are practiced and absorbed to the point where 90% recidivism is standard operation procedure. How many of "us" would revert to "lord of the Flies" behavior if we had no education, no role model, no job possibilities except slingin crack and a war like neighborhood? Our inner cities are past the tipping point and the best we can do is keep their pathologies from spreading.
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BOB DENBY
BOB DENBY 1 minute ago
How refreshing (and honest) it would have been if she had simply stepped up to the lectern and said, "Dear graduates, congratulations on qualifying to attend this momentous occasion. I'm not going to bore you with a lot of platitudes but I just want you to know this, and know it well -- EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER BUT NOBODY DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT! Now get out there and make your way in this great country.
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Anthony Alfero
Anthony Alfero 2 minutes ago
I don't think that anyone can say that "blacks" will have a more difficult road. Which ones? Some will be accepted to schools, be hired (and not fired) and promoted because of their privilege. Others will suffer from the effects of a perception of fear, created by the outrageous levels of crime and violence in many black communities. Some will still see discrimination but seeing the blatant discrimination today against whites, conservatives and the religious, I feel little empathy. What goes around, comes around.
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Brian Charles
Brian Charles 2 minutes ago
So she continues with legitimizing the frustration of rioters and looters but without correctly assigning blame and we are supposed to applaud her? Isn't this what Middle East despots do when they blame the West for their economic status without acknowledging they've enslaved their people?
Then she calls America racist despite the fact that in 2008 we elected a rookie Senator from Illinois President in no small part because he is black.
She and her family have been handed and will be handed millions of dollars (see the Clintons) over the coming years and she still criticizes this country as racist?
If we are racist, how did the Obamas succeed? Did they act white? Were they lucky? Was it the ladder of affirmative action? Are they "special"?
Lousy piece.
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Thomas Jones
Thomas Jones 2 minutes ago
It's been said here I'm sure, but I will say it again. If the commencement speech was full of merit why, then, did Ms. Obama have to put racial tension into it? What is it about this administration that they have to create divides rather than bring people together like true leaders do?
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Stuart Baxter
Stuart Baxter 11 minutes ago
She should kiss the ground that she and her whiny husband walk on every day for the opportunity they have been afforded and proudly hold themselves up as an example that everyone in this country can rise to wherever they want instead of continuing the race baiting and divisive rhetoric they insist on doing almost daily.
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TIM LUKER
TIM LUKER 15 minutes ago
I recommend for her next inspirational commencement address - she presents a slide show of all her fabulous taxpayer funded vacations.
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Sanjay Saxena
Sanjay Saxena 16 minutes ago
The Asian and Jewish people in US have shown the way to succeeding in US. It is hard (er) but it can be done.
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The speech was written by the writers of the teleprompter in chief, IMHO. What was new was to see that fiery tone coming from this First Lady. She was clearly auditioning for a future job, maybe social justice crusader, zillion dollar speech-giver, but more likely - future Presidential candidate. Sounded to me like the Obama answer to Blood Feud. If Hillary can't do it, Michelle will (as she sees it). She doesn't need to waste years pretending to be the junior Senator from flyover country (as she sees it). She already lives in the White House, is perfectly comfortable being flown around by Air Force One, and everyone she knows already accepts the premise that she is fully qualified.
I regret saying all this, but she is considerably younger than Hillary, clearly blacker, slightly more feminine, noticeably stronger, equally qualified (and I mean that as an insult), can deliver a written speech with passion, and comes with about half the baggage.
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https://www.facebook.com/mediatakeout/videos/960976430600971/
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second post
http://www.thestatelyharold.com/#!George-Zimmerman-arrested-for-public-nudity-screaming-the-N-word-and-wielding-a-knife/cmbz/5565d3f90cf24874175fc1f2
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Black Dads Are Doing Best of All
JUNE 8, 2015
One of the most persistent statistical bludgeons of people who want to blame black people for any injustice or inequity they encounter is this: According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), in 2013 in nearly 72 percent of births to non-Hispanic black women, the mothers were unmarried.
It has always seemed to me that embedded in the “If only black men would marry the women they have babies with…” rhetoric was a more insidious suggestion: that there is something fundamental, and intrinsic about black men that is flawed, that black fathers are pathologically prone to desertion of their offspring and therefore largely responsible for black community “dysfunction.”
There is an astounding amount of mythology loaded into this stereotype, one that echoes a history of efforts to rob black masculinity of honor and fidelity.
Josh Levs points this out in his new book, “All In,” in a chapter titled “How Black Dads Are Doing Best of All (But There’s Still a Crisis).” One fact that Levs quickly establishes is that most black fathers in America live with their children: “There are about 2.5 million black fathers living with their children and about 1.7 million living apart from them.”
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“So then,” you may ask, “how is it that 72 percent of black children are born to single mothers? How can both be true?”
Good question.
Here are two things to consider:
First, there are a growing number of people who live together but don’t marry. Those mothers are still single, even though the child’s father may be in the home. And, as The Washington Post reported last year:
“The share of unmarried couples who opted to have ‘shotgun cohabitations’ — moving in together after a pregnancy — surpassed ‘shotgun marriages’ for the first time during the last decade, according to a forthcoming paper from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Furthermore, a 2013 C.D.C. report found that black and Hispanic women are far more likely to experience a pregnancy during the first year of cohabitation than white and Asian women.
Second, some of these men have children by more than one woman, but they can only live in one home at a time. This phenomenon means that a father can live with some but not all of his children. Levs calls these men “serial impregnators,” but I think something more than promiscuity and irresponsibility are at play here.
As Forbes reported on Ferguson, Mo.:
“An important but unreported indicator of Ferguson’s dilemma is that half of young African-American men are missing from the community. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, while there are 1,182 African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34 living in Ferguson, there are only 577 African-American men in this age group. In other words there are more than two young black women for each young black man in Ferguson.”
In April, The New York Times extended this line of reporting, pointing out that nationally, there are 1.5 million missing black men. As the paper put it: “Incarceration and early deaths are the overwhelming drivers of the gap. Of the 1.5 million missing black men from 25 to 54 — which demographers call the prime-age years — higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000. Almost one in 12 black men in this age group are behind bars, compared with one in 60 nonblack men in the age group, one in 200 black women and one in 500 nonblack women.” For context, there are about eight million African-American men in that age group overall.
Mass incarceration has disproportionately ensnared young black men, sucking hundreds of thousands of marriage-age men out of the community.
Another thing to consider is something that The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in 2013: “The drop in the birthrate for unmarried black women is mirrored by an even steeper drop among married black women. Indeed, whereas at one point married black women were having more kids than married white women, they are now having less.” This means that births to unmarried black women are disproportionately represented in the statistics.
Now to the mythology of the black male dereliction as dads: While it is true that black parents are less likely to marry before a child is born, it is not true that black fathers suffer a pathology of neglect. In fact, a C.D.C. report issued in December 2013 found that black fathers were the most involved with their children daily, on a number of measures, of any other group of fathers — and in many cases, that was among fathers who didn’t live with their children, as well as those who did.
There is no doubt that the 72 percent statistic is real and may even be worrisome, but it represents more than choice. It exists in a social context, one at odds with the corrosive mythology about black fathers.☐
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Laughably stupid.
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Well Charles blowhard is like that :lol:
Posted so we can see how the other side thinks.
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/15/opinions/rich-rachel-dolezal/index.html
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/15/opinions/rich-rachel-dolezal/index.html
We really are living in the crazy years.
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(http://www.youngcons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/baltimore-meme-2.png)
http://www.youngcons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/baltimore-meme-2.png
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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/
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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/06/for-sale-on-ebay-hillary-clinton-2008-confederate-flag-pins/
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/22/hillary-clintons-history-with-the-confederate-flag/
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You are awesome!
Please post on the Hillary thread!
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420142/america-one-nation-indivisible?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420142/america-one-nation-indivisible?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral
Funny how the media won't cover this. They are professionals with credentials, right Bigdog?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kry_VfFSh4
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Apart from the misrepresentation of what O'Reilly said regarding bravery, and that he misses the other cultural aspects to its present use, on the whole I think he is rather on target.
https://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks/videos/vb.210277954204/10152970493514205/?type=2&theater
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/06/25/expunging-woodrow-wilson-from-official-places-of-honor/
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http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2015/July/Christian-Bakers-Fined-Gagged-in-Gay-Cake-Case/?cpid=:ID:-2638-:DT:-2015-07-05-20:10:27-:US:-AB1-:CN:-CP1-:PO:-NC1-:ME:-SU1-:SO:-FB1-:SP:-NW1-:PF:-IM1-
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/06/top-american-indian-scholar-outed-as-fake-indian/
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/07/1400155/-Sam-Brownback-R-KS-Signs-Sweeping-Anti-LGBT-Executive-Order?detail=facebook#
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/07/1400155/-Sam-Brownback-R-KS-Signs-Sweeping-Anti-LGBT-Executive-Order?detail=facebook#
Obama doesn't have to obey the law, why should anyone else?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/judge-upholds-cancellation-of-redskins-trademarks-in-a-legal-and-symbolic-setback-for-team/2015/07/08/5a65424e-1e6e-11e5-aeb9-a411a84c9d55_story.html?tid=sm_fb
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http://soopermexican.com/2015/07/07/black-people-are-now-vandalizing-confederate-flags-displayed-anywhere/
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http://soopermexican.com/2015/07/07/black-people-are-now-vandalizing-confederate-flags-displayed-anywhere/
Meanwhile, the murder rate continues to climb.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/MsEBL/status/620616419806310400
*Crickets*
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http://conservative50.com/blog/why-the-democrats-are-the-party-of-slavery-and-victimization-zonation/
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As riots tore through Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore this winter and spring, so did denunciations of a criminal-justice system that has placed a disproportionate number of black men behind bars. One widely aired theory holds that not only are racial disparities and mass incarceration patently unjust on their own terms, but they also result in, to quote Hillary Clinton in the first policy speech of her campaign, “missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers.”
The missing-men theory of family breakdown has the virtue of being easy to grasp: Men who are locked up are obviously not going to be desirable husbands or engaged fathers. It also bypasses thorny and deadlocked debates about economics and culture. Still, the theory has a big problem: It’s at odds with the facts.
What extensive data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Vital Statistics Reports show is that the black family was in deep disarray well before America’s prison-population increase. As the 1960s began, 20% of all black births were to single mothers. By 1965 black “illegitimacy”—in the parlance of the time—had reached 24% and become the subject of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prophetic but ill-fated report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Yet the figure that so worried future Sen. Moynihan turned out to be the ground floor of a steep 30-year climb. By 1980 more than half of black children were born to unmarried mothers. The number peaked at 72.5% in 2010 and is now just below 72%.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, as nonmarital births raced upward, the number of black men admitted to state and federal prisons annually hovered between 20,000 and 27,000, showing no significant trend up or down. The later 1970s showed a notable increase, so that in 1980 alone there were 53,063 black males admitted to prison. Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, black prison admissions grew to historic highs and peaked at 257,000 in 2009. They have since declined slightly.
If anything, the timing of the two problems points to the opposite causation from the one assumed by “missing men” theorists: As the family unraveled, crime increased—the homicide rate doubled between the early 1960s and late ’70s, with more than half of the convicted being black—leading to calls for tougher sentencing to place more bad guys behind bars. In other words, family breakdown was followed by increased crime and more-crowded prisons.
We shouldn’t take this alternative theory too far. Crime and prison rates are unlikely to have a single cause: Demographics, policing and sentencing policies, environmental toxins, and who knows what else may all play some role. Perhaps the most controversial of those policies was the “war on drugs,” first declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971. There’s little question that the government’s hard line on drugs eventually put large numbers of black men behind bars.
However, if the war on drugs played any role in shaping the contemporary black family, it is almost impossible to decipher from the data. As of 1979, only 5.7% of U.S. prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses. Yet by that time nearly half of black births were already to single mothers. The number of men imprisoned for drug crimes rose only modestly until 1990, four years after Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, legislating harsher sentences for crack cocaine, a move often cited as a cause of the disproportionately black prison population.
Far from leading to more fatherless children, the growing number of black men imprisoned for drugs coincided with a flattening of the percentage of black single mothers, after a 30-plus-year upward climb.
Whatever its errors, the war on drugs doesn’t take us far in explaining racial disparities in prisons, despite claims from many pundits. “More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010,” goes a typical formulation, from the Huffington Post. It’s true, as far as it goes—but “federal prisoners” make up only about 14% of all incarcerated men. In the far larger state system, the majority of black men are doing time for violent crimes. Between the federal and state system, almost 2½ times the number of black men are serving sentences for murder, assault and the like than they are for using and selling drugs.
The preponderance of violent prisoners splinters another plank of the missing-men theory: that mass incarceration of black adults has harmed black children. Researchers have made a compelling case that when fathers go to prison, their absence takes a toll on their children. Boys, especially, have more behavioral problems, including aggressive acting out, and lower educational achievement.
You can construct a reasonable argument that the children of men sentenced for drug offenses—and the communities they live in—would be better off if fewer fathers were behind bars. But when it comes to men prone to violence, that supposition is dubious. The difficult truth avoided by most missing-men adherents is that men doing prison time are part of a larger population that doesn’t provide much in the way of paternal care, even if they never are locked up.
None of this means that incarceration policies aren’t ready for an overhaul. The country needs a vigorous examination of mandatory-sentencing laws, the war on drugs, and racial disparities in arrests and sentencing. But that debate shouldn’t be used to evade the realities of family life in neighborhoods like Ferguson and Baltimore’s Sandtown. Evasion has been the preferred modus vivendi over the past 50 years, ever since Moynihan’s warning of rising fatherlessness drew sharp condemnation. Look where it has gotten us.
Ms. Hymowitz is a contributing editor to City Journal, from whose summer issue this article is adapted.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/19/did-black-lives-matter-organiser-shaun-king-mislead-oprah-winfrey-by-pretending-to-be-biracial/?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+August+19%2C+2015&utm_campaign=20150819_m127011017_Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+August+19%2C+2015&utm_term=More
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/19/did-black-lives-matter-organiser-shaun-king-mislead-oprah-winfrey-by-pretending-to-be-biracial/?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+August+19%2C+2015&utm_campaign=20150819_m127011017_Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+August+19%2C+2015&utm_term=More
Not really black people are an underrepresented minority in the racial industrial complex and thus deserving of special hiring and scholarships.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/gangsta-raps-grim-legacy-for-comptons-everywhere-1440542382
Gangsta Rap’s Grim Legacy for Comptons Everywhere
A hit movie about the rap group N.W.A. is a reminder: Glorified thuggery poisoned poor black communities.
Members of the rap group N.W.A. depicted in the new movie "Straight Outta Compton."
By JASON L. RILEY
Aug. 25, 2015 6:39 p.m. ET
For two weeks the top box-office draw has been “Straight Outta Compton,” a meandering biopic about the rise and disintegration of the Los Angeles-area rap group N.W.A., or Niggaz With Attitude. N.W.A. helped popularize “gangsta rap” in the late 1980s, and even this hagiography can’t hide the fact that its legacy has endured to the detriment of poor black communities.
The most prominent members of the quintet were Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E, and they distinguished themselves from other rap acts mainly through relentless, jarring profanity. Materialism and braggadocio were already rap staples, but N.W.A. added heavy doses of sadistic sex, misogyny, gun violence and all-round thuggery. Typical are the lyrics to a song on their second album that invoke gang rape of a 14-year-old “preacher’s daughter.”
“Straight Outta Compton” not only doesn’t dwell on N.W.A.’s glorification of self-destructive behavior, anyone appalled by it is portrayed as a racist or a square. The film is more interested in presenting the rappers as authentic voices of decent young black men in poor communities who are regularly victimized by police. Still, the viewer can’t help but notice that our protagonists regularly engage in criminal behavior, dress like gang members in areas infested by ruffians and defy the police who suspect them of being up to no good. Their problem is not that the cops harass them but that the cops interfere with their lawbreaking.
In one of the film’s early scenes, designed to illustrate the kinds of experiences that shaped the rappers’ upbringing, a young Ice Cube is riding home on a yellow school bus when a group of gang members pulls alongside in a sedan. Some of the kids on the bus start shouting out the window and playfully flashing gang signs at the men in the car. The gang members respond by stopping the school bus, forcing their way inside and putting a pistol to the head of one of the teenage taunters. The scene suggests that the biggest bane of the black community isn’t the police officer but the black hoodlum. Yet Ice Cube and other gangsta rappers would go on to great fame and fortune penning lyrics that claimed the reverse.
In short, these rappers specialized in pushing a vulgar nihilism that has poisoned urban America for decades and retarded upward mobility. The enemy was social order and anyone who promoted it, from parents to teachers to cops. “You walk into a fourth or fifth grade black school,” Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy told a newspaper in 1991, “I’m telling you, you’re finding chaos right now, ’cause rappers came in the game and threw that confusing element in it.” Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist, also noticed the change. “Before rap, dance-hall lyrics were harmlessly erotic, something I could listen and dance to with my daughters,” he told an interviewer in 1992. “Rap lyrics, as you know, are incredibly brutal . . . There is a horrible sickness here.”
Twenty years ago, sharp social critics like Martha Bayles and Stanley Crouch took others to task for indulging or playing down this celebration of delinquency instead of denouncing it. “Too many irresponsible intellectuals—black and white—have submitted to the youth culture and the adolescent rebellion of pop music, bootlegging liberal arts rhetoric to defend Afro-fascist rap groups like Public Enemy on the one hand, while paternalistically defining the ‘gangster rap’ of doggerel chanters such as Ice Cube as expressive of the ‘real’ black community,” wrote Mr. Crouch.
But that type of criticism was in the minority and ultimately lost the day. Scholars like Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. would argue that gutter rap verse comes out of a black American tradition that enriches our language and culture. Cornel West, in his familiar mix of Marxism and gobbledygook, once described rap as “primarily the musical expression of the paradoxical cry of desperation and celebration of the black underclass and poor working class.” And Michael Eric Dyson credited rappers with “refining the art of oral communication.”
Today, gangsta rap is no longer edgy or even very controversial. It can only be described as mainstream. On a 2013 track, Jay Z, one of the country’s richest and most popular rappers, name-checked a convicted drug dealer and hit man who terrorized the Washington, D.C., area in the 1980s. Lil Wayne, who specializes in rapping about drug-dealing and gun violence, has more entries on the Billboard charts than Elvis. In 2010, President Obama told Rolling Stone magazine that both rappers were on his iPod.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152915440087959&set=o.244962995628283&type=1
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad1q9N0xEbg
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ENLARGE
Photo: Ken Fallin
Stanford, Calif.
Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?
“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”
The paradox is that serious economic discussion enjoys a wider platform than ever before. One of the great bounties of the Internet is the trove of archival news and debate footage that has been dumped onto YouTube and other websites. Anyone with a modem can now watch F.A. Hayek discussing, in a soft and dignified German accent, the rule of law with Robert Bork in 1978. Or Milton Friedman at Cornell the same year, arguing matter-of-factly about colonialism with a young man in a beard, sunglasses and floppy sideways hat.
There is plenty of old footage of Mr. Sowell floating through the ether, too, and if one watches a few clips—say, his appearance on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line” in 1981—two things stand out. The first is how little Mr. Sowell has changed. The octogenarian who sits before me in an office at the Hoover Institution, where Mr. Sowell has been a senior fellow since 1980, has a bit of gray hair and a different set of glasses, but the self-assurance and the baritone voice are the same.
The second thing that strikes is how little the political debate has changed. Maybe economics isn’t merely a dismal science, but a futile one.
Take the minimum wage. In 1981, a year in which the federally mandated hourly pay rose to $3.35 from $3.10 (in today’s dollars that would be to $8.79 from $8.14), Mr. Sowell argued on “Firing Line” that the minimum wage increases unemployment by pricing unskilled workers—young minorities in particular—out of the job market. It’s the same point he makes today, as activists call for a minimum wage of $10.10, or even $15.
“When looking back over my life, I think of the lucky things that happened to me. And one of the luckiest ones, I just realized recently, is that when I left home as a 17-year-old high-school dropout, the unemployment rate among black 17-year-old males was in single digits,” Mr. Sowell says. “In 1948, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was 10 years old and it hadn’t been changed. And there was huge inflation, and so it was as if there was no minimum wage.” He got a series of jobs—delivering Western Union telegrams, working in a machine shop—that put him on the right path.
Which is not to say that life was easy: In his 2002 memoir, “A Personal Odyssey,” Mr. Sowell describes how he once pawned a suit of clothes to buy food—a knish and an orange soda at a little restaurant on the Lower East Side in New York City. “Since then I’ve eaten at the Waldorf Astoria, I’ve eaten in Parisian restaurants and in the White House,” he tells me. “But no meal has ever topped that knish and orange soda.”
Or take “disparate impact,” the idea that different outcomes among different groups—say, that there are more male CEOs than female—is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. The Obama administration has used disparate impact to charge racism in housing, employment and other matters. In the absence of discrimination, the theory goes, people naturally would be dispersed more or less at random. Nonsense, Mr. Sowell says. “In various books I’ve given lists of all the great disparities all over the world, and I recently saw a column by Walter Williams in which he added that men are bitten by sharks several times as often as women.”
Differences in outcome is a matter that Mr. Sowell takes up in his new book, “Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective,” out Sept. 8. Its theme, he says, is that “in a sense, there was never any rational reason to believe that there would be this evenness that they presuppose.” Some continents have more navigable rivers and deep water harbors than others. Some cultures value education highly, and some don’t. Underwhelming as the conclusion might sound to those with the urge to reorder society, many disparities arise simply because people are different, and because they make different choices.
Another problem is that the “disparate impact” assumption misidentifies where group differences originate. He sets up an example: “If you have people in various groups in the country, and their kids are all raised differently, they all behave differently in school, they do differently in school. And now they’re grown up and they go to an employer, and you’re surprised to find that they’re not distributed randomly by income.” It’s “just madness,” he says, to assume “that because you collected the statistics there, that’s where the unfairness originated.”
Mr. Sowell, looking back, can count the lucky breaks that contributed to his own success. As a baby he was adopted into a household with four adults who talked to him constantly. When he was 9 years old, the family left the South, moving from North Carolina to Harlem in New York. A mentor there took him to a public library for the first time and told him how to transfer out of a bad school into a good one. Not everyone has that kind of luck.
“It is unjust—my God it’s unjust,” Mr. Sowell says. “And yet that doesn’t mean that you can locate somebody who has victimized somebody else.” In human affairs, happenstance reigns.
Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.”
It’s a funny line—and an instance of what sets Mr. Sowell apart: candor and independence of mind. No one can suggest that he doesn’t say what he thinks. In 1987, while testifying in favor of Judge Robert Bork’s ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, he told Joe Biden, a senator at the time, that he wouldn’t have a problem with literacy tests for voting or with $1.50 poll taxes, so long as they were evenly and fairly applied. When I ask whether he remembers this exchange, Mr. Sowell quips, “No, Joe Biden is forgettable.”
In our interview he maintains that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have stuck to desegregating buses and government services, and let market forces take care of integrating lunch counters. Mr. Sowell says that the precedent set by imposing integration on people like Lester Maddox, a segregationist governor of Georgia who also owned a chicken restaurant, has opened a Pandora’s box. “If you say that Lester Maddox has to serve his chicken to blacks, you’re saying that the Boy Scouts have to have gay scout masters. You’re saying—ultimately—that the Catholic Church has to perform same-sex marriages.”
Mr. Sowell is unsparing toward those who purport to speak for American blacks. I ask him about the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. “People want to believe what they want to believe, and the facts are not going to stop them,” he says, adding that black leaders—from President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder down to Al Sharpton—“do all they can to feed that sense of grievance, victimhood and resentment, because that’s where the votes are.”
What about Ta-Nehisi Coates, the black writer whose new book, a raw letter to his son about race relations in the U.S., is stirring public intellectuals? I read Mr. Sowell a line from Mr. Coates’s 15,000-word cover story for the Atlantic calling for reparations for slavery: “In America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”
“Ah . . . yes,” Mr. Sowell sighs, as if recognizing a familiar tune. “What amazes me is not that there are assertions like this, but that there is no interest in checking those assertions against any evidence,” he says. “One of the things I try to do in the book is to distinguish between what might be the legacy of slavery, and what’s the legacy of the welfare state. If you look at the first 100 years after slavery, black communities were a lot safer. People were a lot more decent. But then you look 30 years after the 1960s revolution, and you see this palpable retrogression—of which I think the key one is the growth of the single-parent family.”
Mr. Sowell says he cannot remember ever hearing a gunshot when he was growing up in Harlem, and he used to sleep on the fire escape to beat the summer heat. He cites changes in black enrollment at New York City’s highly competitive Stuyvesant High School, which he attended. “In 2012, blacks were 1.2% of the students at Stuyvesant,” he says. “Thirty-three years earlier, they were 12%.”
Here’s the point: Does anyone believe that racism and the legacy of slavery are stronger today than in the 1970s—or for that matter in 1945, when Mr. Sowell enrolled at Stuyvesant? “It’s not a question of the disproportion between blacks and whites, or Asians, but the disproportion between blacks of today and blacks of the previous generation,” he says. “And that’s what’s scary.”
He offers another statistic: “For every year from 1994 to the present, black married couples have had a poverty rate in single digits,” Mr. Sowell says. “Those people who have not followed the culture—the ghetto culture—are doing fine.”
So how can the case for reform be made? Let’s say the Republican presidential nominee has a speech lined up at the historically black Howard University. What should the candidate say?
Mr. Sowell says he should tell the audience that “one of the worst things for blacks is the minimum wage. The worst thing,” he says, is “the public schools run by the teachers unions who will protect the most incompetent teacher there is, who will fight tooth and nail against your being able to make a choice and go to voucher schools.” Lay out the case, Mr. Sowell says, and “address them as if they’re adults. You’re not going to get 50-plus percent of the black vote. But good grief, if the Republicans got 20% of the black vote it would be a revolution.”
One can only hope that if such a day comes, Mr. Sowell, who has been making these arguments since Barack Obama was a teenager, is around to see it. He says he doesn’t intend to retire. The fifth edition of his 2000 book “Basic Economics” came out last December, and although his newest title isn’t on store shelves yet, he is already mulling a sequel. Mr. Sowell seems as sharp as ever, so I have to ask: Does he feel 85 years old?
Another answer with no hesitation. “Yes. Maybe 95 on some days,” he says, with a deep laugh. “When I think of the things that other people my age are going through, I really should feel so lucky.”
Mr. Peterson is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.
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Mary D Brown
Mary D Brown 6 hours ago
A Progressive colleague introduced me to Thomas Sowell in November, 2009; Sowell's book, "Basic Economics." I bought it, read it, and was transformed. He made so much sense. I went back to my Progressive colleague to discuss the book and he admitted, he had never even finished it.
Then, I read Sowell's book, "A Conflict of Visions; Ideological Origins of Political Struggles."
And that just spelled it all out. The difference between my Progressive colleague and me. The Uconstrained vs the Constrained vision.
This dichotomy has gone on for centuries.
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Bruce Greer
Bruce Greer 8 hours ago
When I read Dr Sowell's statistics about the ratio of black students at Sturvesant tears filled my eyes. How can one not feel an enormous injustice is being done to black students with a degeneration of opportunity shown by such numbers? I am sure that just one more government program, one more class action suit, one more EEOC finding, one more Justice Department forced agreement will resolve this favorably. Or maybe not.
May Thomas Sowell live, think and write forever!
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Kathryn Grammer
Kathryn Grammer 11 hours ago
Thomas Sowell is the Milton Friedman of our time. Like Friedman, Dr. Sowell is a man among boys. Dr. Sowell speaks and you can see that people listen, you can see the wheels turning before your eyes.
Some quotes: "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore it..."
"I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want token the money you've earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
"The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit--replacing what works with what sounds good."
Paul Krugman are you listening?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/08/a-white-guy-named-michael-couldnt-get-his-poem-published-then-he-became-yi-fen-chou/?utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt09082015&utm_term=Jolt
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http://www.myafricanow.com/african-immigrants-lead-with-the-highest-academic-achievements-in-the-us/
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http://www.myafricanow.com/african-immigrants-lead-with-the-highest-academic-achievements-in-the-us/
That seriously conflicts with some narratives being pushed by the left.
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:evil: :evil: :evil: :-D
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/us/houston-voters-repeal-anti-bias-measure.html?emc=edit_na_20151103&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426702/police-killings-black-men
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http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/us/oppressed-mizzou-student-protesting-privilege-has-a-secret
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Here's a novel idea.... deport people whom have a religion that has a stated goal of killing you because you don't believe.
I don' know, but that's where I would start.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/opinion/black-tape-at-harvard-law.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
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Does anyone really believe that a white person put tape over the pictures of black professors?
I certainly don't.
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Does anyone really believe that a white person put tape over the pictures of black professors?
I certainly don't.
Does it really matter?
Every person is guilty of being racist at times.
Should they? Perhaps, perhaps not....who cares...
Expecting someone to not be racist is like expecting someone to be perfect. Blacks and several other races get a free pass whereas other groups (or one group in particular) is expected to be perfect.
Oddly, there is a lot of racism here in Mexico. An educated person admitted to me one day, racism is deemed acceptable when perpetrated by Latinos, but not by Whites because some Latinos themselves view Whites as "better." They want to go to gringolandia, make gringo dinero and even Blacks want "white privilege."
It's time for the bs to stop. People are racist.... here in Mexico, I suffer from it frequently, but I don't care. I love this country and people, and I will not allow myself to make any excuses for my failures, especially that "I couldn't do something because that person was mean to me." What a laugh.
Lastly, I like freedom...and if we tell people that they can't or shouldn't be racist, that they "have to like or accept someone," where does that end? Telling people what flavours of ice cream they can enjoy?
People should have the freedom to be racist, even if it is levied against me. What shouldn't be tolerated, is people giving an ear to the sniveling of others. It's disgusting,.
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"Lastly, I like freedom...and if we tell people that they can't or shouldn't be racist, that they "have to like or accept someone," where does that end? Telling people what flavours of ice cream they can enjoy?"
Where does the definition of racist end and why do the elites have to decide for us?
As for the last part it doesn't end. It will not end till the liberals control every aspect of our lives from before birth to after our burials.
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"Lastly, I like freedom...and if we tell people that they can't or shouldn't be racist, that they "have to like or accept someone," where does that end? Telling people what flavours of ice cream they can enjoy?"
Where does the definition of racist end and why do the elites have to decide for us?
As for the last part it doesn't end. It will not end till the liberals control every aspect of our lives from before birth to after our burials.
Exactly.
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https://www.facebook.com/tzaahir/videos/10207367165927756/
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"Sam’s Club CEO Rosalind Brewer made no secret of her dislike at having to sit across the table from a group of white guys. In response, the Twittersphere is exploding with calls to give Sam’s Club what they think it deserves — fewer white customers."
http://www.westernjournalism.com/after-sams-clubs-ceo-admitted-to-discriminating-against-white-males-sams-is-paying-a-big-price/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=TPNNPages&utm_content=2015-12-22&utm_campaign=manualpost
http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/16/news/companies/rosalind-brewer-sams-club-diversity/index.html?sr=fbmoney121615rosalind-brewer-sams-club-diversity1159PMVODtopLink&linkId=19653050
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https://www.facebook.com/james.frazier.399/videos/757867674246941/
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A Christmas inspired column by Walter Russel Mead well worth your time to read, IMHO, embodying the largest issues humankind faces today. (read it all)
One for All
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The Christmas story suggests that we can somehow try both to be loyal members of our nations, our families, our tribes—and also to reach out to the broader human community of which we are also a part.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/01/one-for-all-4/
... People seem pulled in two directions. On the one hand, we form strong group identities and these identities are the basis of our political loyalties; on the other, we recognize universal values and acknowledge a duty, at least in the abstract, to help people everywhere regardless of their race, language, color, or creed.
It’s a puzzle. Human beings need roots in a particular culture and family and those roots shape them; at the same time, human beings have values (like freedom and democracy) and ideas (like the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of thermodynamics) that demand to be recognized as universal. ...
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Very good article. Please post in the Organized and Unorganized Religion thread as well.
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. . . to other blacks:
http://www.city-journal.org/2016/bc0106jr.html
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http://takimag.com/article/smashing_through_the_glass_coffin_jim_goad/print#ixzz3x8fENGbj
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47Y6VHc3Ms
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http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/collateral-damage-same-sex-marriage-private-religious-schools-and-parental/17474
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https://www.facebook.com/rosieroyjr/videos/1036195299740607/
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These recordings are a national treasure.
I never knew these existed.
Thanks CD for the post.
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https://www.facebook.com/shockwave1/videos/10156471502290627/
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Jason Riley on Powerline, commercial-free interview, well worth a listen. Blacks were making way more progress before modern civil rights http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/the-power-line-show-episode-33-with-jason-riley.php
Early minimum wage laws were designed to keep blacks out of good jobs.
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Jason Riley on Powerline, commercial-free interview, well worth a listen. Blacks were making way more progress before modern civil rights http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/the-power-line-show-episode-33-with-jason-riley.php
Early minimum wage laws were designed to keep blacks out of good jobs.
The dems need an underclass.
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The dems need an underclass.
Yes, but does the underclass reallyneed its oppressors?
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Founder of Nation of Islam was a rather mysterious character.
Appears to have left his first wife and child and then evidence he had 3 other "wives" at least.
Was arrested a number of times and used aliasis and changed his name multiple times. Sounds like a con man basically.
Seems to have gotten the idea for NOI from a guy named Drew Ali who founded the Moorish American Society in the 1920s. He may have gotten his idea to some extent from Marcus Garvey.
Fard or Ford or whatever his real name was mysteriously disappears off the face of the Earth in 1934. At that time his student Elijah Mohammed takes over.
Whatever happens to Fard is unknown. Even the FBI could not figure it out. He either changed his name and identity or I suspect he was murdered. I don't know if Elijah was responsible but it seems plausible knowing that he was likely behind or at least aware of the murder of Malcom X.
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https://www.facebook.com/lucy.wanjiku.18/videos/10154434081347662/
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https://www.facebook.com/firstbtnomb/videos/979847208730765/
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http://takimag.com/article/did_africans_sell_africans_into_slavery_lets_ask_some_africans_jim_goad
Not PC.
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http://takimag.com/article/did_africans_sell_africans_into_slavery_lets_ask_some_africans_jim_goad
Not PC.
Also funny.....
"The always interesting Nation of Islam argues that these treacherous go-betweens weren’t truly “African” anyway—they were instead Portuguese Jewish half-breeds known as lancados who’d DELIBERATELY interbred with indigenous Africans in order to swindle and kidnap them before handing them over to Jewish slave traders who’d shlep them to the Americas."
Just wow.... I ever tell you about the time I got into a fight with three of them (NOI)? If we're ever enjoying a glass of ice tea, I'll do that.
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Just a point of curiosity. This could go under constitution but someone should mention it somewhere. If Merrick Garland is confirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court will have 5 Catholics and 4 Jewish Justices and no other religions represented. No big deal except that the current regime is SO consumed with people being part of a demographic sub-group.
I like Jewish people :-) , some of my best liberal and conservative friends are Jewish. I find it mostly irrelevant in my dealings, friendships, politics, even dating.
That said, doesn't the over-representation of these groups that have histories of being discriminated against and of being blamed for disproportionate control (banks, networks, etc.), on a Court with a history of wrongly decided cases, risk the future possibility that a future bad decision will incite blame and inflame future anti-Semitism?
Just a thought that I might point back to someday...
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Charles Murray was co-author of The Bell Curve, a very long scientific book that became a landmine for a small point in it that exposed differences in intelligence between races, therefore author is a racist... His co-author died about when this was published so he has owned the work over the two decades since it was published.
Intelligence is 40%-80% inherited, a wide range that is nowhere near zero or 100%.
People tend to marry near their own intelligence making the difference grow rather than equalize over time. He predicted this would have societal effects that have most certainly become true.
Being called a racist for publishing scientific data is nothing new, but Charles Murray has received more than his share of it. What he could of or should have done is cover up the real results to fit what people like to hear, like the climate scientists do. He didn't.
Most recently his work received a public rebuke from the President of Virginia Tech.
His response to that is a bit long but quite a worthwhile read that will save you the time of reading his 3-4 inch thick hardcover book if you haven't already read this important work.
https://www.aei.org/publication/an-open-letter-to-the-virginia-tech-community/
Charles Murray
March 17, 2016 9:00 am
An open letter to the Virginia Tech community
Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m speaking on the themes of Coming Apart on March 25). Bravo for President Sands’s defense of intellectual freedom. But I confess that I was not entirely satisfied with his characterization of my work. So I’m writing an open letter of my own.
Dear Virginia Tech community,
Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”
Let me make an allegation of my own. President Sands is unfamiliar either with the actual content of The Bell Curve — the book I wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein to which he alludes — or with the state of knowledge in psychometrics.
The Bell Curve and Charles Murray
I should begin by pointing out that the topic of the The Bell Curve was not race, but, as the book’s subtitle says, “Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.” Our thesis was that over the last half of the 20th century, American society has become cognitively stratified. At the beginning of the penultimate chapter, Herrnstein and I summarized our message:
Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:
An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.
Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. [p. 509].
It is obvious that these conclusions have not been discredited in the twenty-two years since they were written. They may be more accurately described as prescient.
Now to the substance of President Sands’s allegation.
The heritability of intelligence
Richard Herrnstein and I wrote that cognitive ability as measured by IQ tests is heritable, somewhere in the range of 40% to 80% [pp. 105–110], and that heritability tends to rise as people get older. This was not a scientifically controversial statement when we wrote it; that President Sands thinks it has been discredited as of 2016 is amazing.
You needn’t take my word for it. In the wake of the uproar over The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association (APA) assembled a Task Force on Intelligence consisting of eleven of the most distinguished psychometricians in the United States. Their report, titled “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns,” was published in the February 1996 issue of the APA’s peer-reviewed journal, American Psychologist. Regarding the magnitude of heritability (represented by h2), here is the Task Force’s relevant paragraph. For purposes of readability, I have omitted the citations embedded in the original paragraph:
If one simply combines all available correlations in a single analysis, the heritability (h2) works out to about .50 and the between-family variance (c2) to about .25. These overall figures are misleading, however, because most of the relevant studies have been done with children. We now know that the heritability of IQ changes with age: h2 goes up and c2 goes down from infancy to adulthood. In childhood h2 and c2 for IQ are of the order of .45 and .35; by late adolescence h2 is around .75 and c2 is quite low (zero in some studies) [p. 85].
The position we took on heritability was squarely within the consensus state of knowledge. Since The Bell Curve was published, the range of estimates has narrowed somewhat, tending toward modestly higher estimates of heritability.
Intelligence and race
There’s no doubt that discussing intelligence and race was asking for trouble in 1994, as it still is in 2016. But that’s for political reasons, not scientific ones.
There’s no doubt that discussing intelligence and race was asking for trouble in 1994, as it still is in 2016. But that’s for political reasons, not scientific ones. Once again, the state of knowledge about the basics is not particularly controversial. The mean scores for all kinds of mental tests vary by ethnicity. No one familiar with the data disputes that most elemental statement. Regarding the most sensitive difference, between Blacks and Whites, Herrnstein and I followed the usual estimate of one standard deviation (15 IQ points), but pointed out that the magnitude varied depending on the test, sample, and where and how it was administered. What did the APA Task Force conclude? “Although studies using different tests and samples yield a range of results, the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites. The difference is largest on those tests (verbal or nonverbal) that best represent the general intelligence factor g” [p. 93].
Is the Black/White differential diminishing? In The Bell Curve, we discussed at length the evidence that the Black/White differential has narrowed [pp. 289–295], concluding that “The answer is yes with (as usual) some qualifications.” The Task Force’s treatment of the question paralleled ours, concluding with “[l]arger and more definitive studies are needed before this trend can be regarded as established” [p. 93].
Can the Black/White differential be explained by test bias? In a long discussion [pp. 280–286], Herrnstein and I presented the massive evidence that the predictive validity of mental tests is similar for Blacks and Whites and that cultural bias in the test items or their administration do not explain the Black/White differential. The Task Force’s conclusions regarding predictive validity: “Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans” [p. 93]. Regarding cultural bias and testing conditions: “Controlled studies [of these potential sources of bias] have shown, however, that none of them contributes substantially to the Black/White differential under discussion here” [p. 94].
Can the Black/White differential be explained by socioeconomic status? We pointed out that the question has two answers: Statistically controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) narrows the gap. But the gap does not narrow as SES goes up — i.e., measured in standard deviations, the differential between Blacks and Whites with high SES is not narrower than the differential between those with low SES [pp. 286–289]. Here’s the APA Task Force on this topic:
Several considerations suggest that [SES] cannot be the whole explanation. For one thing, the Black/White differential in test scores is not eliminated when groups or individuals are matched for SES. Moreover, the data reviewed in Section 4 suggest that—if we exclude extreme conditions—nutrition and other biological factors that may vary with SES account for relatively little of the variance in such scores [p. 94].
The notion that Herrnstein and I made claims about ethnic differences in IQ that have been scientifically rejected is simply wrong.
And so on. The notion that Herrnstein and I made claims about ethnic differences in IQ that have been scientifically rejected is simply wrong. We deliberately remained well within the mainstream of what was confidently known when we wrote. None of those descriptions have changed much in the subsequent twenty-two years, except to be reinforced as more has been learned. I have no idea what countervailing evidence President Sands could have in mind.
At this point, some readers may be saying to themselves, “But wasn’t The Bell Curve the book that tried to prove blacks were genetically inferior to whites?” I gather that was President Sands’ impression as well. It has no basis in fact. Knowing that people are preoccupied with genes and race (it was always the first topic that came up when we told people we were writing a book about IQ), Herrnstein and I offered a seventeen-page discussion of genes, race, and IQ [pp. 295–311]. The first five pages were devoted to explaining the context of the issue — why, for example, the heritability of IQ among humans does not necessarily mean that differences between groups are also heritable. Four pages were devoted to the technical literature arguing that genes were implicated in the Black/White differential. Eight pages were devoted to arguments that the causes were environmental. Then we wrote:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. [p. 311].
That’s it—the sum total of every wild-eyed claim that The Bell Curve makes about genes and race. There’s nothing else. Herrnstein and I were guilty of refusing to say that the evidence justified a conclusion that the differential had to be entirely environmental. On this issue, I have a minor quibble with the APA Task Force, which wrote “There is not much direct evidence on [a genetic component], but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis” [p. 95]. Actually there was no direct evidence at all as of the mid-1990s, but the Task Force chose not to mention a considerable body of indirect evidence that did in fact support the genetic hypothesis. No matter. The Task Force did not reject the possibility of a genetic component. As of 2016, geneticists are within a few years of knowing the answer for sure, and I am content to wait for their findings.
But I cannot leave the issue of genes without mentioning how strongly Herrnstein and I rejected the importance of whether genes are involved. This passage from The Bell Curve reveals how very, very different the book is from the characterization of it that has become so widespread:
In sum: If tomorrow you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the cognitive differences between races were 100 percent genetic in origin, nothing of any significance should change. The knowledge would give you no reason to treat individuals differently than if ethnic differences were 100 percent environmental. By the same token, knowing that the differences are 100 percent environmental in origin would not suggest a single program or policy that is not already being tried. It would justify no optimism about the time it will take to narrow the existing gaps. It would not even justify confidence that genetically based differences will not be upon us within a few generations. The impulse to think that environmental sources of difference are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.
In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story. But the evidence eventually may become unequivocal that genes are also part of the story. We are worried that the elite wisdom on this issue, for years almost hysterically in denial about that possibility, will snap too far in the other direction. It is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences on intelligence and not run screaming from the room. That is the essential message [pp. 314-315].
I have been reluctant to spend so much space discussing The Bell Curve’s treatment of race and intelligence because it was such an ancillary topic in the book. Focusing on it in this letter has probably made it sound as if it was as important as President Sands’s open letter implied.
But I had to do it. For two decades, I have had to put up with misrepresentations of The Bell Curve. It is annoying. After so long, when so many of the book’s main arguments have been so dramatically vindicated by events, and when our presentations of the meaning and role of IQ have been so steadily reinforced by subsequent research in the social sciences, not to mention developments in neuroscience and genetics, President Sands’s casual accusation that our work has been “largely discredited” was especially exasperating. The president of a distinguished university should take more care.
It is in that context that I came to the end of President Sands’s indictment, accusing me of promulgating “a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.” At that point, President Sands went beyond the kind of statement that merely reflects his unfamiliarity with The Bell Curve and/or psychometrics. He engaged in intellectual McCarthyism.
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I read parts of the book 20 yrs ago.
I notice this discussion does not mention that Asians were found to have IQs higher then whites who were higher then blacks. I don't know if that has anything to do with so many Vietnamese and Indian valedictorians or not.
In forensic anthropology we used to call the races, mongoloid, caucasoid, negroid (1970s).
I guess using those terms now would get me shot.
We all know the fact that something like only one white has ever run a sub 10 second 100 meters, a race dominated by those of West African descent and East Africans dominate the long distance races is because they work harder at those respective endeavors.
Thank God for progress. Science is not science when not politically correct.
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"Thank God for progress." - Agree.
Reminds me of a bumper sticker / billboard seen recently:
I am color blind. - God
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Doug:
Thank you for posting Charles Murray's open letter. It was very good!
Would you please post it on the Intelligence thread as well?
TIA,
Marc
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One followup point on the topic:
If you had in front of you the overlapping bell curves from sample data showing the intelligence range of 3 different race-ethnic groups studied for white, black and Asian for example, and you had in front of you 3 applicants, one each black, white and Asian, the group data would tell you nothing about the individuals.
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I don't know if it is a word but "babyfication" seems to fit nicely:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3506491/Emory-president-Students-scared-Trump-2016-chalk-signs.html
For a group that is not afraid of chlamydia gonorrhea or human papilloma virus, which are crazy rampant on campus they sure are wimps otherwise.
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...for a self defense killing.
A couple of self appointed activists took over the county attorney's press conference trying to say all the things that might set off the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore.
Note to activists: He wasn't shot because he was black. He was shot because he went for the officer's gun and a reasonable person would conclude he was about to kill them and endanger others.
[This occurred 2 blocks from a property of mine.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/us/jamar-clark-shooting-minneapolis.html?_r=0
It took the DA 31 hours to read through the evidence that is now posted for the public to see. Forensic evidence proves he got to the officer's gun and that he was not handcuffed when shot, as 'eyewitnesses' had said. Activists were able to reach their conclusion without the delay or burden of seeing evidence.
Let the looting begin.
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"Let the looting begin."
Lets hear the comment from the White House. Also lets hear that Sharpton is visiting him 2 x a week now instead of every week.
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"Let the looting begin."
Lets hear the comment from the White House. Also lets hear that Sharpton is visiting him 2 x a week now instead of every week.
It seems quiet after the no charges decision in the Minneapolis police shooting. The D.A. is a Dem; happened to be competent and thorough. The police didn't do anything wrong. The forensic evidence straightened out the contradictions of the people present. The victimhood crowd was left with just saying the system's all wrong, police abuse etc except this wasn't a case of that. The lead speaker was a professor who is the NAACP chapter president.
(He was shot because he was fighting to take one officer's gun, not for skin color.)
The so-called (black) community protest against police just extends the problem that no qualified blacks want to join the police and do that job. These guys (white I presume) were hired with experience from some other town, not from the Northside 'community'.
Like the Sharpton reference by ccp, this is another case of self appointed activists trying to stir something up and elevate themselves, not a general feeling from people in their homes, living their lives, that police are out committing crimes where none previously existed.
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Doug ,
Did you see this yet on the greatest civil rights leader of our day.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/al-sharpton-civil-rights-politics
rich famous goes to the white house frequently and probably whenever he wants
"everything is on the line" now with this election.
Whatever that means. I suppose if someone other than Hillary is in , he is out?
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Anti-White Racism
This pretty much sums up Obama and the left:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/04/26/anti-white-racism-hate-dares-not-speak-name-2/
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/02/hoodies-and-hearts-another-klan-wizard-endorses-trump/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160503GlennBeckDailyv4_FINAL&utm_term=Smart%20List%20-%20Responsive%20Group%20Control
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/02/hoodies-and-hearts-another-klan-wizard-endorses-trump/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160503GlennBeckDailyv4_FINAL&utm_term=Smart%20List%20-%20Responsive%20Group%20Control
Will he invite them to the White House as often as Obama has invited Al Sharpton?
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Its all about race, ethnicity. Basically get white anglos. And peel off the with gays to their side too. I am not surprised a state school in New Jersey would reward identity politics violent demonstrations with awards, and a scholarship to a tax funded university:
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/05/07/blood-smearing-protestor-milo-yiannopoulos-rutgers-talk-given-human-dignity-award/
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This is so wrong. So 99.999% of people have to be uncomfortable for the problems of somewhere in the range 0.001 % of people?
This is not a civil right for God's sake.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/president-obama-issues-historic-declaration-123200234.html?nhp=1
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This totally explains the fanatical nature of the darn trans bathroom garbage being shoved down our throats from the left. It is all about getting rid of the concept of gender. No 'his" or "her, "he" or "she" "girl or boy" or "male or female" . Isn't this what the loons sn some of the Scandinavian countries have done?
I think the title of this Breitbart article has it exactly right:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/12/mediagetshb2wrong/
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This is so wrong. So 99.999% of people have to be uncomfortable for the problems of somewhere in the range 0.001 % of people?
This is not a civil right for God's sake.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/president-obama-issues-historic-declaration-123200234.html?nhp=1
Crossdresser rights. Good grief. If you can't figure out your gender, you might expect some public bathroom issues. A person with penis shouldn't be in the little girls' room. It's bad enough letting crazies into the little boys room. If it's a matter of privacy, keep your personal issues private. Have thousands been arrested for going into the wrong room? Or blocked from entering? What is the problem?
Try common core. How many genders are there, as we teach it to our young people? Parents might be surprised at the answer. It wasn't just a liberal takeover of our schools, like Truman Democrats, it was a liberal leftist wacko takeover. A birth certificate and a federal student loan application no longer can use terms like mother and father. We were mocked for warning about this.
http://commoncoresuccess.eleducation.org/curriculum/ela/grade-7/module-2b/unit-1/lesson-2
"In this lesson, students deepen their working concept of identity by exploring how gender expectations influence identity formation."
http://www.govtslaves.info/virginia-schools-theres-no-such-things-as-boys-or-girls-in-new-gender-idenity-curriculum/
http://www.finaid.org/fafsa/lgbtfafsa.phtml
You can't make this stuff up.
This must be under the category of shiny objects. The economy is in shambles, world is going to hell, but hey, look at that shiny object over there. Let's debate that instead. Can't manage the economy, can't manage foreign affairs, so they made a category where he is comfortable leading, bathroom rights for the 0.001%! While the liberals slaughter their young, look what neanderthals the conservatives are on the issue of confused-gender urination!
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I have dealt with a M to F transgender sex offender. He perp'ed on multiple children. He is currently litigating with my state's Dept. of Corrections to provide him with the big snipola. I have dealt with more than a few sex offenders who certainly have some type of gender dysphoria going on. There are more than a few who who will suddenly decide they feel female to take advantage of our plunge into insanity.
Fundamental change.
This is so wrong. So 99.999% of people have to be uncomfortable for the problems of somewhere in the range 0.001 % of people?
This is not a civil right for God's sake.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/president-obama-issues-historic-declaration-123200234.html?nhp=1
Crossdresser rights. Good grief. If you can't figure out your gender, you might expect some public bathroom issues. A person with penis shouldn't be in the little girls' room. It's bad enough letting crazies into the little boys room. If it's a matter of privacy, keep your personal issues private. Have thousands been arrested for going into the wrong room? Or blocked from entering? What is the problem?
Try common core. How many genders are there, as we teach it to our young people? Parents might be surprised at the answer. It wasn't just a liberal takeover of our schools, like Truman Democrats, it was a liberal leftist wacko takeover. A birth certificate and a federal student loan application no longer can use terms like mother and father. We were mocked for warning about this.
http://commoncoresuccess.eleducation.org/curriculum/ela/grade-7/module-2b/unit-1/lesson-2
"In this lesson, students deepen their working concept of identity by exploring how gender expectations influence identity formation."
http://www.govtslaves.info/virginia-schools-theres-no-such-things-as-boys-or-girls-in-new-gender-idenity-curriculum/
http://www.finaid.org/fafsa/lgbtfafsa.phtml
You can't make this stuff up.
This must be under the category of shiny objects. The economy is in shambles, world is going to hell, but hey, look at that shiny object over there. Let's debate that instead. Can't manage the economy, can't manage foreign affairs, so they made a category where he is comfortable leading, bathroom rights for the 0.001%! While the liberals slaughter their young, look what neanderthals the conservatives are on the issue of confused-gender urination!
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(http://i0.wp.com/www.bookwormroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Stupid-liberals-male-female-restrooms-protect-women-and-girls.jpg?resize=300%2C273)
http://i0.wp.com/www.bookwormroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Stupid-liberals-male-female-restrooms-protect-women-and-girls.jpg?resize=300%2C273
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2016/05/13/sex-and-state-power-whats-behind-obamas-transgender-push/
Sex and State Power — What’s Behind Obama’s Transgender Push
MAY 13, 2016 BY BOOKWORM 79 COMMENTS
Stupid liberals male female restrooms protect women and girlsThe Obama administration has announced that from this day forward, all public schools in America must let children choose their bathroom and locker room based upon a child’s feelings about his or her gender on any given day. This means that, if a male sexual predator (or simply a sexually curious boy) feels that today is a good day to be a girl and watch the girls’ volleyball team strip off in the bathroom, that is his right and the school is obligated to comply:
The guidance from leaders at the departments of Education and Justice says public schools are obligated to treat transgender students in a way that matches their gender identity, even if their education records or identity documents indicate a different sex.
“There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement accompanying the directive, which is being sent to school districts Friday.
Because Congress has already allotted funds to the Department of Education, the DOE wields the power of the purse over this issue, and there’s nothing Congress can do to stop it.
If asked why they are forcing this policy onto American public schools, administration figures, from the president on down, would reply that they’re doing it “for the good of the children.” It’s all about self-actualization, and self-realization, and personal empowerment, right?
Wrong! This comes from the Left, so there’s good reason to believe that it’s not “for the children” at all. Indeed, there’s extremely good reason to believe that the transgender movement is very bad for those who identify as transgender, starting with the children and working up to the disproportionate number of transgender adults who commit suicide. David French as a good breakdown of the heartbreaking numbers behind the suddenly trendy tranny movement:
The evidence of transgender despair is overwhelming. A Swedish study found that trans people were 19 times more likely to die from suicide. An American study found that a horrifying 41 percent of transgender and “gender non-conforming” people had attempted suicide, compared with a national rate of 1.6 percent. In Canada, a study found that each year one in nine transgender people try to commit suicide, compared with the national rate of one out of 167.
So it’s not “for the children.” Lie Number One is exposed.
Lie Number Two is the contention that the transgender movement is the same as the gay rights movement. In fact, the transgender movement also weirdly homophobic, even though the LGBT movement has embraced it . The weirdly homophobic aspect comes from the fact that the transgender movement puts the lie to what gay rights activists have been telling us for a good decade or more, which is that when it comes to gay, “Baby, I was born this way.” Again, David French neatly defines the conundrum:
For the last decade, the American public has been told that sexual orientation is a fixed, immutable characteristic — like skin color. Now we’re told that “gender identity” is much the same. Psychology is fixed. Biology has to adjust.
But observe the lamentation in the video: A transgender boy wants other boys to change, to reject the “born this way” of their own sexuality for the open-mindedness of “getting physical” with a girl with a penis. Claire is desperate for their psychology to change, for their minds to open, and for their sexual identity to change in response to Claire’s allegedly unchangeable desires.
Writing in the Gospel Coalition, Trevin Wax asks: “When a person feels a disjunction between one’s sex at birth and one’s gender identity, why is the only course of action to bring the body into closer conformity with the person’s psychological state, rather than vice versa?” That’s the course of action for the transitioning person. The course of action for their loved ones is substantially different. In essence, the Caitlyn Jenners are saying to their spouses or paramours, “I’m now a woman, and that makes you a lesbian.”
Wax notes that the declaration of this new reality — with the expectation that spouses comply and conform — “destabilizes some of the foundational elements of LGBT theory on homosexuality.” Well, yes. But the true “foundational element” of LGBT theory isn’t so much “born this way” as it is “I do what I want.”
Even on the Left, saner minds are figuring out what I pointed out some time ago, which is that we laugh at and despair over all forms of body mutilation except for the gender type, which is wrongly celebrated. Daniel Harris, a hard Left gay man who hates Republicans, wrote a much-talked-about article for The Antioch Review stating the obvious, which I’ll summarize here in my own words: Body mutilation is always a sign of some sort of mental disability and that the LGBT world and its fellow travelers cannot say “All body mutilation is a tragic joke, except for gender mutilation, which is a wondrous thing.”
Or, to quote from Harris himself:
. . . TGs have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty. They insult us with the pejorative term “cisgender,” which they use to describe those of us who accept, however unenthusiastically, our birth gender, as opposed to the enlightened few who question their sex. Moreover, they shame us into silence by ridiculing the blunders we make while trying to come to grips with their unique dilemmas, decrying our curiosity about their bodies as prurience and our unwillingness, or even inability, to enter into their own (often unsuccessful) illusion as narrow‑mindedness.
[snip]
While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition and to do so without fear of reprisal, I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion. For one, the physical manipulation involved in transforming oneself into a man or woman is apparently different in kind—or so the transgender community presumes—from the nips and tucks undertaken by the trophy wife or celebrity, anti‑heroes of a materialistic culture with whom the TG, having taken advantage of the same merchandising of the body promoted by commercialized medicine, bears a strong and unfortunate resemblance. The general public almost universally disapproves of plastic surgery and laughs derisively at celebrities who present a face “different from the one they rode in on,” as one commentator referred to their futile—and often ruinous—efforts to roll back the hands of time. The obscene trout pout of Donatella Versace, the misshapen nipples and oblong breasts of Tara Reid, the Joker’s grimace of Kim Novak, are all fair game for that most American and democratic of blood sports, the desecration of the rich and famous in tabloids and gossip blogs.
And yet what is the actual difference between Michael Jackson whittling his nose down to a brittle sliver of bone and whitening his skin with alpha hydroxy acid and arsenic in order to efface his blackness and the TG sanding down her brow bone and hacking off a sizeable chunk of her mandible in order to efface her gender? Why is the one decried as a racially reprehensible instance of self‑mutilation, self‑denial, and self‑loathing and the other extolled as a celebratory instance of self‑liberation? Why is it not only okay but valiant for Caitlyn Jenner to liberate her inner woman through rhinoplasties and laryngeal shaves while it is deplorable and pathetic for Michael Jackson to liberate his inner Caucasian through bleaching and cleft chin augmentation? When Rachel Dolezal goes to the Palm Beach tanning salon for her weekly $30 dip, she is committing the unconscionable crime of appropriating blackness (or, in her case, as the Gawker put it, not blackness but “Medium Brown Spray Tan”), but when Laverne Cox, one of the breakout performers on the television show Orange Is the New Black, slaps on a transdermal estrogen patch, she is lauded as a hero and role model. All of the arguments against plastic surgery—that it is dangerous, even fatal, often botched, and symptomatic of either extreme body dysmorphia or a lamentable effort to accommodate Hollywood’s chauvinistic ageism—can be leveled against those who transition from one sex to another. The trophy wife and the TG swim, it seems, in the same surgeon‑infested seas.
Typically, the Social Justice Warriors ran amok when Harris’s piece was published, prompting a craven, groveling apology and distancing from The Antioch Review’s editor, who said (and I paraphrase), “We’re kind of a fiction thing, so don’t take what Harris wrote seriously. Also, I am crawling on my belly towards you and licking your feet to apologize for the possibility that merely publishing a countervailing view might have hurt your feelings.” He wasn’t that straightforward, but that’s what Bob Fogarty said:
The Review is a long-standing literary magazine—not a scholarly academic journal—that prints creative fiction, essays and poetry on a wide variety of topics. The views and values espoused in the article represent those of the author, Daniel Harris, and are not those held by the editor, the Antioch Review or Antioch College. However, as the editor, I recognize and acknowledge the criticisms and outrage for the views represented in Harris’s essay. Perhaps more importantly, I sincerely regret any pain and hurt that the publishing of this piece has caused to members of our own community, transgender people, the LGBTQ community, and their families and supporters.
If I were on the Board of The Antioch Review, I’d demand Fogarty’s firing. The reality, though, is that if I did that, I’d be booted off the board and Fogarty would get a Christmas bonus. Such is the world in which we live.
I’m satisfied in my own mind that promoting transgenderism is a bad thing for those claiming transgender status. The statistics David French cites make it clear that transgender people need psychiatric support, not access to the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice. And Harris’s article nicely hones in on the fact that the LGBT movement and the Left as a whole are hugely hypocritical to support body mutilation of the type that they decry in others.
So what gives? If the numbers show, and the Left truly knows, that transgenderism is a sign of mental illness, not a sign of self-actualization, self-realization, and self-empowerment, why this huge push to put gender up for grabs, in complete denial of biologic reality right down to the genetic level?
I think I have the answer. Indeed, I had the answer six years ago, when American Thinker published an article of mine entitled Sex and State Power. I will quote myself liberally, because the Obama administration’s newest order about public schools reveals that the Left’s motives in exerting control over people’s self-identity, to grab them at the core of their being, is exactly the same as it ever was:
[Note, rather than indent the following long quotation, which creates an endless skinny column, I am setting it off from the body of the text by painting it dark green.]
Those of us who came of age before the 1980s, when the Judeo-Christian, Western tradition, though battered, was still ascendant, view our sexuality as a private matter. We believe that our bodies are our own property, which means that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believes as well that his ability to control his body is the essence of his individuality. This physical individuality is the antithesis of slavery, which represents a person’s ultimate lack of control over his body.
Statist regimes, of course, cannot tolerate self-ownership, which is the natural enemy of government control over the individual. The easiest example one can find of a statist regime using sexuality to deny individuality and dominate its citizens is, of course, Islam.
[I’m snipping the Islam discussion in favor of focusing on the Left’s obsession with sex, but Islam’s sexual obsessions and misogyny are still relevant too, and you might find the discussion interesting to read.]
What’s interesting is that, because the Left expresses itself in terms of “freeing” people’s sexuality, many people miss the fact that it is every bit as sexually controlling in its own way as Islam is. This control comes about because the Left works assiduously to decouple sex from a person’s own sense of bodily privacy and, by extension, self-ownership. If a person has no sense of autonomy, that person is a ready-made cog for the statist machinery.
The practical problem for the Left when it tries to attack individuality as expressed through sexuality is the fact that a person’s sense of an inviolate physical self develops quite early, during childhood:
Once a child individuates, he becomes aware of being his own self. … The most basic thing one can own is one’s own self, and not letting others touch that self in ways you don’t like is an exercise in self-ownership. (Emphasis mine.)
The Left, therefore, needs to decouple self and body as early as possible in a person’s development — and it does this by bringing its own peculiar notions of sexuality into the realms of child-rearing and education.
Once upon a time, the radical Leftists were quite open about their agenda. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, German Leftists explicitly sought childhood “sexual liberation” as a political goal. In practice, this meant exposing children to adult sexual practices, focusing obsessively on the children’s external sexual organs, speaking about sexual matters in the crudest terms, and, unsurprisingly, engaging in actual sexual molestation. The Leftists advocating this liberation framed it as a way to break free of stifling bourgeois notions of morality that enslaved people and prevented them from realizing full sexual pleasure.
Reading the Leftists’ contemporaneous literature, however, reveals a more comprehensive aim than merely breaking those much-derided bourgeois sexual chains. The Leftists also intended to destroy the traditional nuclear family, with its bright lines between parent and child, and to bring down the capitalist system, which is dependent on a competitive, and therefore individualized, workforce:
For instance, “Revolution der Erziehung” (“The Revolution in Education”), a work published by Rowohlt in 1971, which quickly became a bestseller, addresses sexuality as follows: “The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation — as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system.” (Emphasis mine.)
Nor can the above ranting be excused as the thoughts of a radical fringe. For example, these same European Leftists infiltrated the Catholic Diocese in Mechelen-Brussels, in Belgium, creating a sickening environment that actively promoted pedophilia. In other words, this particular church’s forays into perversion were not the secretive gropings of individual priests. Instead, there was a concerted effort, led by a liberal Belgian church hierarchy, to make pedophilia a routine practice within the Church.
Incidentally, Frank Marshall Davis, a radical Leftist who was Obama’s surrogate father and mentor during his childhood years in Hawaii, fully supported this politically-driven hyper-sexualization, including sex with children. He engaged in and wrote about disturbing sexual practices such as bondage, simulated rape, undinism, and pedophilia (or, at the very least, pederasty). Since Obama’s political ascendancy, both his poetic forays and his peculiar disassociative behavior have supported speculation that Davis, giving free rein to his personal preferences and his commitment to preventing the child from gaining ownership of his own body, may have practiced what he preached on the fatherless young boy given so unthinkingly into his care.
While the overheated Marxist rhetoric of the 1960s has died away, the Leftist preoccupation with childhood sexuality, and its relentless desire to have the state control a child’s sexual development — and, by extension, to deny the child self-ownership — is still alive and well. The primary pathway the Left currently uses to decouple childhood sexual development from self-individuation is the gay rights agenda.
Many of us who believe that gays and lesbians should be free to pursue their personal lives free from discrimination have felt bewildered by our discomfort with and resistance to all of the homophilic programs that have suddenly invaded our children’s schools. To use the language of the Left, though, we should “listen to our feelings.”
Subconsciously, we recognize that these pro-homosexual programs have nothing to do with teaching tolerance, which is a virtue in a pluralistic society. Instead, the programs have everything to do with having the state substitute its goal of sexual, and therefore social, control in place of a parent’s desire to inculcate his children with traditional Judeo-Christian values, values that focus on the inviolability of the individual, beginning with his body.
Examples abound of supposedly anti-discriminatory programs that, instead of focusing on tolerance, work to direct a child’s sexual development away from the zone of privacy that is a hallmark of Western sexuality. Robin of Berkeley describes a group called “Gender Spectrum,” which has the ostensible goal of allowing “transgender, gender bending, [and] gender nonconforming” children and teens to hang with each other and share their experiences. She rightly sees this not as an effort to promote tolerance, but as a way to make it “cool to dabble in polyamory and gender nonconformism,” thereby “destroy[ing] the West by degrading traditional values.”
Only four years ago, California narrowly escaped a legislative effort to pass a bill that would have required all California textbooks, starting in first grade, to include materials focusing on famous homosexuals — with the focus not on the achievement that made them famous, but simply on the homosexuality itself. A parental outcry forced the legislature to retreat to something more in keeping with a free society, which is the requirement that children may not be exposed to material that is discriminatory to people based on their sexuality.
In Helena, Montana (Montana!), the school board is contemplating a K-12 sex ed program that repeatedly blurs the line between demanding tolerance, which should be an imperative in a free society, and advocating alternative sexuality, which is consistent with the Leftist agenda of separating sexuality from individuality. In Grade 2, children would be taught, appropriately, that “making fun of people by calling them gay (e.g. ‘homo,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer’) is disrespectful and hurtful.” By Grade 3, however, the focus is on breaking down traditional familial norms, as children are taught that to “nderstand media often presents an unrealistic image of what it means to be male or female, what it means to be in love & what parenthood & marriages are like.” And so it goes, with a proposed curriculum that veers wildly between respect and advocacy.
The relentless Leftist obsession with homosexuality and variations on traditional sexual gender roles is deeply embedded in the Obama administration. Last year, a vigilant blogger exposed the fact that Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” as part of his leadership role in the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (“GLSEN”), aggressively promoted child pornography in the classroom. GLSEN’s actions had nothing to do with creating a safe, non-discriminatory environment for young people with different sexual orientations and everything to do with using the government (i.e., public schools) to inculcate in children the notion that their bodies have no boundaries. A body with no boundaries, of course, is a body that can easily be decoupled from the individual’s control and then ceded to the state.
While the gay agenda, which is cloaked in civil rights language that makes it hard to challenge, is the leading edge of the state’s desire to control children’s sexuality, Leftists also use the schools to manipulate heterosexual behaviors so as to destroy a child’s physical boundaries. In England, parents were aghast to learn that a school was requiring its first-grade pupils to massage each other. In Iowa (Iowa!), one middle school has abandoned any pretense of traditional morality and, instead, is teaching its eighth-graders “how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct male sex organ.” The body is a tool, and nothing more.
Freud was right when he speculated that sex, perhaps because it is the least easily satisfied human need, may also be the most powerful physical need driving human beings. Freud, however, viewed sexuality through the spectrum of a given individual’s desires. What the statists understand — and have always understood — is that our bodies are the first line in the battle between statism and individualism. If a person is allowed to develop a sense that his body is his own to control, he will never willingly yield to the demands of the state. Only by convincing its citizens that they have no personal autonomy, beginning with control over their own bodies, can a state completely subsume the individual to the bureaucracy.
So if you’re getting an itchy feeling between your shoulder blades when you contemplate your child’s hyper-sexualized reading list and gender-bending sex education curriculum, you need not fear that you have turned into a repressed, homophobic Victorian. Instead, there’s an excellent chance that you are someone with a deep respect for individual freedom who resents the Leftists’ efforts to co-opt your child’s body as a necessary sacrifice to the State.
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https://outofthiscentury.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/the-greatest-african-american-and-afro-american-martial-artists-in-history/
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Second post
http://www.myafricanow.com/african-immigrants-lead-with-the-highest-academic-achievements-in-the-us/
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http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/15608840/native-americans-say-unbothered-redskins-team-name-washington-post-poll
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/22/obama-signs-bill-banning-negro-oriental/
So anyone Black comes from Africa? What about whites who are from Africa?
What about Blacks who were born here and whose ancestors were born here going back 100s of years? they are not really from Africa. Or one can argue we are all descended from Africa.
Why are all people from Asia now "Asian American". Are Indians the same as Chinese?
What do we call Australians?
What are all white people called? Europeans? Why and why not?
Why are native Americans not Asians? Isn't the theory that is where they came from?
Why are hispanics hispanic? Because they speak Spanish? If so why are they not European Americans?
These terms do nothing to clarify the mixing of language original origin, ethnicity, race or anything else.
Just PC bullshit.
And why is the government even keeping track? shouldn't we either be categorized as American or from some other country?
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The biggest racial lie
Far from still racist, America is the world’s most inclusive nation
By David Horowitz - - Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Let's begin with two statements on race — one that is offensive and false, the other self-evidently true. Taken together, they illuminate the toxic state of the national dialogue on race.
The false statement is that America is a racist country or, in its unhinged version: America is a "white supremacist" nation. This accusation is one that so-called progressives regularly make against a country that outlaws racial discrimination, has twice elected a black president, two black secretaries of state, three black national security advisers and two successive black attorneys general along with thousands of black elected officials, mayors, police chiefs and congressmen. In addition, blacks play dominant roles in shaping America's popular and sports cultures, and thus in shaping the outlooks and expectations of American youth.
The claim that America is a white supremacist nation is not only deranged and racist against whites, but is an act of hostility toward blacks, who enjoy opportunities and rights as Americans that are greater than those of any other country under the sun, including every African nation and Caribbean country governed by blacks for hundreds and even thousands of years.
The self-evidently true statement about race in America is that America is not a racist country but, in fact, the most tolerant and inclusive nation embracing large ethnic minorities on earth. Yet this true statement cannot be uttered in public without inviting charges of "racism" against the speaker. Consequently, all public figures and most people generally, clear their throats before speaking about race by genuflecting to the claim that racism against blacks is still a prevalent and systemic problem even though there is no credible evidence to sustain either claim.
By contrast, the offensively false statement that America is a racist nation, is one that our current (black) president has endorsed. According to President Obama, "racism is still part of our DNA that's passed on." Variations of the claim are ubiquitous among self-styled liberals, progressives, so-called civil rights leaders and campus protesters. The title of a recent book by a black university professor summarizes this politically correct slander: "Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul." The core claim of the Black Lives Matter movement — which is the chief activist force in advancing this claim, and is "strongly supported" by 46 percent of Democrats, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll — is that America is a white supremacist nation, whose law enforcement agencies regularly gun down innocent blacks.
Contrary to Mr. Obama's malicious assertion about his own country, the DNA of America — unique among the nations of the world — is not racism but the exact opposite. In its very beginnings, America dedicated itself to the proposition that all men are created equal and were endowed by their Creator with the right to be free. Over the next two generations, America made good on that proposition, though this achievement is regularly slighted by "progressives" because it didn't take place overnight.
The historically accurate view of what happened is this: Black Africans were enslaved by other black Africans and sold at slave markets to Western slavers. America inherited this slave system from the British Empire, and once it was independent, ended the slave trade and almost all slavery in the Northern states within 20 years of its birth. America then risked its survival as a nation and sacrificed 350,000 mostly white Union lives, to end slavery in the South as well. In other words, as far as blacks are concerned, America's true legacy is not slavery, but freedom. As noted, American blacks today have more freedom, rights and privileges than blacks in any black nation in the world.
These are important facts that have been obscured in our politically correct university culture and throughout the K-12 systems whose teachers are trained in university schools of education. Our literary culture is itself infected with a crude anti-white racism that beggars belief. The National Book Award this year was given to a poisonous racial tract called "Between the World and Me," written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the form of a letter to his son. In the book, Mr. Coates explains to his son that cops who murder innocent black teens "are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy." In an all-too-typical "history" lesson, Mr. Coates informs his son: "We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible."
In fact, Virginia planters did not enslave blacks originally and could not buy more black slaves once America ended the slave trade in 1807. Mr. Coates singles out Virginia planters because some of America's most prominent Founders, in particular the author of the Declaration of Independence, were Virginians and owned slaves. But Mr. Coates and every other black in America and throughout the Western Hemisphere is free because of Virginia planters like Thomas Jefferson. We need to begin our racial discussions with these facts, and treat the claim that America is a "white supremacist" nation, for what it is: anti-American and anti-white racism.
• David Horowitz is the author of the newly published "Progressive Racism" (Encounter Books, 2016).
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Black gorilla taken from his homeland in Africa shot and killed to save the life of some stupid white parent's white boy's privilege? Sounds like racism to some:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/05/30/black-outrage-gorilla-shot-protect-white-privilege-just-one-problem/
:roll:
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Larry Elder: Cop killings of blacks are DOWN 75% in 45 yrs. Of 965 people killed by cops 2015, less than 4% were white cop/unarmed black male.
President Obama, "children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime"
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/23/barack-obama/statistics-dont-lie-in-this-case/
72% of black kids raised w/o dads.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2012/12/23/72-percent-of-african-american-children-are-raised-in-single-parent-homes/
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2010/11/72_percent_of_africanamerican_children_born_to_unwed_mothers/
Doug says: This is a direct result of the 'war on poverty' programs that put a disincentive on the responsibility of Dads in families susceptible to these programs to marry and stay and support and raise their children.
* 63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes
* 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes
* 71 percent of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes
* 75 percent of all adolescent patients in chemical-abuse centers come from fatherless homes
* 85 percent of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes
http://www.children-ourinvestment.org/
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Number one cause of death of young black men, 15-34?
Murder by young black men, 15-34.
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In 1961 Martin Luther King Jf. said in a church in St. Louis:
"Negroes are 10% of the city of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes. We have to face that. And we have to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world but there are many things wrong in the black world too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do ourselves."
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In 1961 Martin Luther King Jf. said in a church in St. Louis:
"Negroes are 10% of the city of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes. We have to face that. And we have to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world but there are many things wrong in the black world too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do ourselves."
You won't hear that at any BLM marches.
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Nor will you here this:
https://www.facebook.com/thegameissoldnottold/videos/499190460291571/
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/americas-worst-president-14640.html
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Can we say red, white and blue lives matter? Still racist.
How about if we say, black, red, white and blue lives matter?
To say 'All Lives Matter' is to not appreciate that No One in America alive today was ever a slave or counted as 3/5th of a person.
My sister liked this one, 'black olives matter'.
I hate to ask, but what about the unborn? Do Black Lives Matter for the most innocent among us?
If you are an unborn 'little one' growing, thriving and developing in a black woman's womb, you are 4 times (5 times?) more likely than a white baby to be stabbed in the head with the 'doctor's' scissors, or whatever it is they do now, in celebration of 'liberal' America's 'pro-choice' 'freedom'.
http://www.abortionfacts.com/literature/partial-birth-abortion
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/abortions-racial-gap/380251/
Do Black Lives really Matter or is just fun to throw rocks at police?
http://www.kare11.com/news/102-arrested-21-officers-injured-in-94-shutdown/268434384
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/07/videost-paul-police-injured-attacks-black-lives-matter-protesters-rocks-rebar-bottles-fireworks/
Meanwhile, I wonder how the effort is going to recruit sharp young black men and women to take up law enforcement careers in troubled, inner city communities. Has our transformative President spoken to that need yet?
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Liberal unintended consequences are of no matter to liberals.
The black family was more intact under slavery than under the war on poverty.
This is not a statement that anything good happened under slavery. It is an indictment of our current policies.
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https://twitter.com/larryelder/status/622961559103389696
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Can we say red, white and blue lives matter? Still racist.
How about if we say, black, red, white and blue lives matter?
To say 'All Lives Matter' is to not appreciate that No One in America alive today was ever a slave or counted as 3/5th of a person.
My sister liked this one, 'black olives matter'.
I hate to ask, but what about the unborn? Do Black Lives Matter for the most innocent among us?
If you are an unborn 'little one' growing, thriving and developing in a black woman's womb, you are 4 times (5 times?) more likely than a white baby to be stabbed in the head with the 'doctor's' scissors, or whatever it is they do now, in celebration of 'liberal' America's 'pro-choice' 'freedom'.
http://www.abortionfacts.com/literature/partial-birth-abortion
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/abortions-racial-gap/380251/
Do Black Lives really Matter or is just fun to throw rocks at police?
http://www.kare11.com/news/102-arrested-21-officers-injured-in-94-shutdown/268434384
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/07/videost-paul-police-injured-attacks-black-lives-matter-protesters-rocks-rebar-bottles-fireworks/
Meanwhile, I wonder how the effort is going to recruit sharp young black men and women to take up law enforcement careers in troubled, inner city communities. Has our transformative President spoken to that need yet?
There is a serious problem finding anyone that wants to be a law enforcement officer now. It's only going to get worse.
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article89533592.html
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/cal-berkeley-to-open-segregated-housing-in-fall-for-real/
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A far LEFT agenda for socialism . I don't know what gender and sexual orientation has to do with BLM; or for that matter "fossil fuels", or decriminalize drugs and prostitution. Or "corporate exploitation, or APACs . Who wrote this up? Soros?
https://policy.m4bl.org/
My response - I don't think so.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/does-he-deserve-a-third-term-obama-is-stupid_us_57a90296e4b02251db3fdd3b
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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/mother-5-old-transgender-girl-fights-texas-school-213051833--abc-news-topstories.html
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http://spectator.org/olympics-watch-the-diversity/
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Notice there is no mention of the violence being done by Blacks till near the end of article. Predominantly "African American" is the politically correct description used. So why is not "African American lives matter?".
Again the guy shot has a long rap sheet and had gun. If I were a police officer I would just get out of the inner city and not bother.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/violent-protests-erupt-in-milwaukee-after-police-kill-suspect-at-traffic-stop_us_57b054d9e4b071840411b466?section=&
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnYWfVPT5aI
Services were held in the streets of Milwaukee for this man:
http://100percentfedup.com/meet-guy...resting-photos-emerge-sylville-smith-friends/
Here are some of his sister's words at his services:
http://ijr.com/2016/08/672666-siste...ells-rioters-to-burn-sht-down-in-the-suburbs/
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Coming soon, to a city near you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnYWfVPT5aI
Services were held in the streets of Milwaukee for this man:
http://100percentfedup.com/meet-guy...resting-photos-emerge-sylville-smith-friends/
Here are some of his sister's words at his services:
http://ijr.com/2016/08/672666-siste...ells-rioters-to-burn-sht-down-in-the-suburbs/
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/08/new-jersey-lesbian-couple-wants-their-pregnancy-paid-for
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/why-milwaukee-burns-14689.html
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This morning I heard on cable a black pundit make essentially the argument that Trump offers blacks nothing and why would any black support him.
the host said that Trump did go to Milwaukee and address people there but the pundit said he did not address backs specifically.
My question to the pundit is, "what exactly would or should Trump say to a group of blacks that would get them to think they should vote for him?"
Free all blacks from jail? Obviously the undertone is always about reparations. Offers of spending more on housing on education on child care?
Blacks want a conversation but exactly what is it they expect?
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Apologies in advance for trivial subject matter. I am curious, not being critical.
People say Michelle Obama looked GREAT for her speech at the DNC. She was sweet (mostly), vibrant, persuasive, hit all the right notes for her side and endorsed the nominee. She's over 50 and has been taking care of herself. Good for her. Now to the point...
Her hairstyle was designed to be noticed with the side-front falling into her eye. Not something I like but either trendy, ahead of the trend or poll tested. By some cost and effort, she has altered or straightened her hair, proud of skin color and heritage but not other racial, ethnic attributes? This is something she has done that throughout his Presidency according to reports. Why?
http://grandmotherafrica.com/why-does-michelle-obama-wear-relaxed-hair/
When a black conservative does anything considered 'white', like being conservative, they are slammed. I'm not surprised by the double standard, just pointing it out as time permits.
Am I wrong on this?
She is the authentic one of the Obamas as far as being an American black, descendant of slaves. Also, she is the most popular leftist in the country at the moment. This makes no sense given the persistent abuses of taxpayer funds for personal pleasure, also taking the fun out of school lunch. Speaks her mind but never gets challenged [on policy and results].
I oppose her on policy, not hairstyle.
(https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQBNzI5QaxTDKHcXOBGFgQAGl1d2VwJcafTnfzYtLCofCu4kBfi)
Michelle Robinson at Princeton:
(https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/19/books/review/19CHOZICK/19CHOZICK-blog427.jpg)
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Doug,
Apparently others have noticed this too:
http://grandmotherafrica.com/why-does-michelle-obama-wear-relaxed-hair/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/fashion/27SKIN.html?_r=0
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439202/indian-americans-democrats-republicans-immigration-minorities-congressional-elections
This is one group that Trump has driven away from the Republican party even more. We want them on our side.
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I don't really know what thread to post this under but this seems as good as any:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/21/school-allows-boy-run-homecoming-queen-first-rejecting-request/
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I don't really know what thread to post this under but this seems as good as any:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/21/school-allows-boy-run-homecoming-queen-first-rejecting-request/
Prompted no doubt, by a threatened lawsuit from the ACLU (also preventing students from being suspended for kneeling during anthems):
"ACLU Director Marjorie Esman said the organization had received two complaints in 24 hours."
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a0d5d0e3b5454e66af7bdfa694cded7b/aclu-students-have-right-sit-during-pledge-allegiance
There is not a day that goes by, in which I do not feel as though my country isn't under attack from within.
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Voter registration drive at a movie about an event that occurred 180 years ago. Talk about insulting play on emotions.
Perhaps we should have voter registration for Trump at playing of Schindler's list movies:
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/09/26/birth-nation-fox-searchlight-voter-registration
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/45128
If I have it right, this piece fails to connect all the dots clearly. When Hillary spoke of "equal pay for women's work" in the debate she was NOT speaking of equal pay between a man and a woman doing the same job, she was calling for equal pay between women dominated fields and male dominated fields a.k.a. "comparable worth"-- a truly pernicious, fascist, and Orwellian concept.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/10/the-real-reason-clarence-thomas-was-denied-a-spot-in-the-african-american-museum
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442210/racism-elected-donald-trump-according-people-who-make-everything-about-race
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http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/03/29/hamilton-casting-call-non-white/
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From above post:
"In recent years, the city has fined restaurants for advertising for “busboys” and “waitresses” instead of “bus help” and “wait staff.” In this case, a source told CBS2’s Aiello the commission would likely work with the “Hamilton” production team to help it comply with city law if it takes issue with the ad."
NYC is such a love fest of diversity. This is just so beautiful :roll:
Of course the exception is a cast call for anyone who is NOT WHITE.
Unless someone complains there is no problem. No fine etc.
I would like to see a movie in the future about Donald Trump with a non white cast.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left-white-nationalism.html?emc=edit_th_20161127&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left-white-nationalism.html?emc=edit_th_20161127&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
:roll:
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So here is this guy's father , a KKK "wizard" and leader in the nazi party. The old man is clearly a monster as was the kid before he woke up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Black_(white_nationalist)
I resent the idea that Trump has anything to do with nazis or KKK, etc.
You want to get on front page of Times and start your article "I was a Republican before I learned to love etc......" and "see the error of my ways......."
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So here is this guy's father , a KKK "wizard" and leader in the nazi party. The old man is clearly a monster as was the kid before he woke up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Black_(white_nationalist)
I resent the idea that Trump has anything to do with nazis or KKK, etc.
You want to get on front page of Times and start your article "I was a Republican before I learned to love etc......" and "see the error of my ways......."
Good thing the left isn't racist!
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/screen-shot-2016-11-08-at-7-41-06-pm.png)
https://heatst.com/culture-wars/lena-dunham-wants-to-improve-men-by-making-white-straight-men-extinct/
http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2016/04/26/why-the-left-loathes-western-civilization-n2153625
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As someone that has experienced a healthy amount of racism (and continue to do so), I'm going to say, people that are racist have every right to their legitimate view (and it is), whather others like it or not, because that goes hand in hand with freedom.
The fact that only some racists are ostracized is racism in and of itself, and ostracizing someone else, simply because you don't agree with them, isn't freedom.
I'm not saying I don't ostracize people. I do.... I ostracize anyone on the Left and think they should at a minimum, be forced into exile. Nothing to do with their color.
I'll add, if I didn't feel like appreciating someone for their color, that would also be my right, in MY country, and anyone opposed can go to hell. I'm in my country. I don't need your approval.
Now apply that to anyone in THEIR country, and we get the basis of individual and cultural values that may not agree with someone else, BUT those people are in their county and entitled to rule it, with ideas that others may find ignorant.
People leave that portion of the discussion out all of the time because it isn't politically correct and because it's a fact.
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Does this imply that a person who is gay, etc cannot dial 911 from any where else in the country?
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/os-opd-safe-place-20161209-story.html
I wish someone would allow me a safe space from the progressives.
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http://ijr.com/2016/12/753840-15-racist-classroom-presentations-that-will-make-you-never-want-to-send-your-kids-to-college/
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-ally-asked-resign-school-board-over-insults-163135483.html
Blatant racial comments makes any of us who call ourselves Republicans look bad through indirect association.
How can the party expect to attract minorities if they sit back and do nothing about this guy?
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Indeed!
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http://www.fox32chicago.com/news/crime/227116738-story
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LGBTQIAGNC stands for ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and gender-non-conforming’.
Let's get up to speed on this. )
Whatever became of private staying private? Now it's got to be a billboard and a parade.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/the-trans-train-trolls-on.php
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LGBTQIAGNC stands for ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and gender-non-conforming’.
Let's get up to speed on this. )
Whatever became of private staying private? Now it's got to be a billboard and a parade.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/the-trans-train-trolls-on.php
I though LBTQWTFBBQ was the best version.
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http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-many-lives-of-Frederick-Douglass-4883?utm_source=The+New+Criterion+Subscribers&utm_campaign=bde1ab7ffd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f42f7adca5-bde1ab7ffd-104774881
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https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/race-relations-and-law-enforcement/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=stripes&utm_medium=social&utm_content=02032017
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Doping in sports is now ok, if you're "transitioning" from one gender to the other. It may well be the first time a girl has had an undeafeted run all the way to the state title.
http://vesselnews.io/transgender-boy-wins-girls-state-wrestling-crown/
Dancing Dog and I grew up wrestling in Iowa (where to this day, it remains the national sport and is revered), there is no way I would wrestle this person... because if you lose, you lose...and if you win, you won against a girl. I wouldn't do it.
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Doping in sports is now ok, if you're "transitioning" from one gender to the other. It may well be the first time a girl has had an undeafeted run all the way to the state title.
http://vesselnews.io/transgender-boy-wins-girls-state-wrestling-crown/
Dancing Dog and I grew up wrestling in Iowa (where to this day, it remains the national sport and is revered), there is no way I would wrestle this person... because if you lose, you lose...and if you win, you won against a girl. I wouldn't do it.
By the current LBGTQWTF rules, if you wake up one morning and decide you are female, then you are, no makeup, dresses or surgery required. So, unaltered males that declare themselves female are now free to dominate women's sports. Oh, and enjoy the view of the locker room. Any female that protests gets shamed for her vile bigotry.
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Doping in sports is now ok, if you're "transitioning" from one gender to the other. It may well be the first time a girl has had an undeafeted run all the way to the state title.
http://vesselnews.io/transgender-boy-wins-girls-state-wrestling-crown/
Dancing Dog and I grew up wrestling in Iowa (where to this day, it remains the national sport and is revered), there is no way I would wrestle this person... because if you lose, you lose...and if you win, you won against a girl. I wouldn't do it.
By the current LBGTQWTF rules, if you wake up one morning and decide you are female, then you are, no makeup, dresses or surgery required. So, unaltered males that declare themselves female are now free to dominate women's sports. Oh, and enjoy the view of the locker room. Any female that protests gets shamed for her vile bigotry.
As usual, you're correct. I wonder how that would work in terms of grants and loans specifically for women? I wonder if any men have gamed that angle yet.
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This has been put in front of me , , ,
http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-northern-georgia-a-kkk-banner-seemed-to-some-a-sign-of-the-times/2017/03/12/de5a3518-05bd-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html?utm_term=.8091fcfe07a4&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
In Georgia, reaction to KKK banner is a sign of the times
By Stephanie McCrummen March 12 at 6:15 PM
City officials take down a KKK sign from a vacant building downtown in Dahlonega, Ga., on Feb. 16. Residents said the banner left them both surprised and scared. (Matt Aiken/The Dahlonega Nugget)
DAHLONEGA, Ga. — The mayor was still home when his phone started ringing. The reverend was still down with the flu when he began getting one message after another. Valerie Fambrough had just dropped off her daughters at day care when she heard.
“Have you seen the sign in the square?” a parent asked her on a cold morning three weeks ago. “There’s a Ku Klux Klan sign in the town square.”
And, in fact, there was. Just past the old brick courthouse and across the street from candy stores and antique shops, a large rectangular banner was screwed tight into the cracked wood siding of a long-vacant building on East Main Street. “Historic Ku Klux Klan Meeting Hall,” it said.
It had a cartoonish drawing of a white-sheeted person raising a hand. In addition, there was a Confederate battle flag at one corner of the building and a red flag with a white cross and the letters KKK at the other. They were fluttering in the wind blowing across Dahlonega, and what happened next would become one more pocket of America dealing with a disturbing incident at a time when hate crimes have been on the rise and new brands of white nationalism have been making a comeback across the country.
In Upstate New York, the home of a Jewish man was spray-painted with swastikas. In Virginia, fliers were distributed in several neighborhoods with the words, “Make America WHITE again-and greatness will follow.” In Colorado, two typewritten notes that read “WERE GONNA BLOW UP ALL OF YOU REFUGEES,” were left at a community center serving mainly Muslim immigrants. Now whatever was happening in other parts of the country seemed to have arrived in Dahlonega.
The mayor got dressed and headed for the square. The reverend called the sheriff. Fambrough recalled how she hurried over to see for herself, saying “No, no, not here,” the whole way, and “Hell, no,” until she was there, alone, staring at the banner.
She was a white 37-year-old mother of two, a program specialist in the biology department at the University of North Georgia who called Dahlonega a “sweet, loving town” and had never protested anything in her life. Now she felt her anger rising. She remembered the flip-chart paper in her trunk left over from a presentation a month before and made two signs — “Not in my town,” she wrote, and “Love Lives Here” — then got out and stood in her sandals holding them.
She was freezing. The square was still quiet, with all the shops closed. She scanned the windows across the street to see if someone was watching. She planned which way she would run if something happened. Cars passed, and she scrutinized each face.
A woman shook her head and kept going.
A man gave her a thumbs-up.
A woman called out of her window, “Did you put that sign up?” and Fambrough said “No, no!” and then Bridget Kahn parked, got out, and now there were the two of them.
A woman in a red minivan stopped and yelled “Y’all are angry! You’re angry, angry people!” and drove off.
A black pickup truck parked across the street, and a muscular man got out, and a reporter from the local paper who’d just arrived told the women it was Chester Doles, a former leader in the Klan and a white-separatist group called the National Alliance who had gone to prison on federal weapons charges. He lived just outside town and was currently a personal trainer who also worked promoting “hate rock” concerts around the country. He pulled out a cellphone and began taking photographs. He said something to the women, but they couldn’t hear.
“What’s that, sir?” Kahn called out, and the women heard him say something about how “glorious” it was to see such a sign in the light of day, and then he drove off, even as more people were arriving — white-haired locals, college students and others who said they were appalled; a Native American man who brought a ladder and tried to rip the banner down; a white man who argued the KKK banner and flag should come down but not the Confederate battle flag; a young black man who stood there crying.
Here came the mayor and the sheriff trying to figure out what was going on.
Here came two pickup trucks circling the square, revving their engines. The woman in the red minivan returned, honking her horn and seeming to veer too close to the protesters.
A school bus passed, and now Fambrough was crying as the town dispatched a cherry picker to the scene, and workers began ratcheting out the first of 21 screws holding the banner in place.
Another truck arrived, this one belonging to a local roofing company and plastered with Confederate logos, and several workers climbed on the roof and began removing the flags.
And that was how the banner came down, and the flags came down, and all the rest began.
***
All over town that first day, people kept saying this was not the Dahlonega they knew.
“Our little pocket of loveliness” is how one resident described the former gold mining town an hour north of Atlanta, known for its redbrick square lined with antique shops and wine tasting rooms. It was the seat of Lumpkin County, which did not have the reputation for racial violence that many other north Georgia counties did, though no one disputed that there were probably Klan members scattered around. It was overwhelmingly white and Republican, though Dahlonega itself was home to a small, deeply rooted, black population, and had in recent years attracted a more liberal crowd who considered themselves part of the progressive South.
Now, though, all anyone could talk about was what happened in the town square.
Even before the last screw came out of the banner, photos of it were appearing all over social media with captions like “WTF, Dahlonega?” and people began speculating about who did it.
Maybe it was a college prank. Maybe it was an outsider. Maybe it really was the Klan, a relic coming back to life. In an area that voted heavily for Donald Trump, speculation began that the whole thing was the work of anti-Trump activists, and when she got home, Fambrough went online and saw that people were accusing her of putting up the banner, saying she was part of the “alt-left.”
By evening, though, people had found out who was really responsible: It was one of their own, an 84-year-old white woman named Roberta Green-Garrett, the owner of the building in question who lives in a brick mansion with four white columns on a hill overlooking the town.
Offering no explanation and declining to speak with reporters, she had told town officials that she had allowed the banner to go up and might try to put it up again. She had been seeking permission to build a hotel on the square, and people speculated that it was all an audacious ploy to embarrass the town into approving her plans.
“An isolated case of Mrs. Green,” is how the mayor, Gary McCullough, described it, saying that there was no evidence the building was ever used by the Klan and that he hoped people would move on.
For many people, though, it was too late for that. The point wasn’t who did it. The point was that it had happened, and whatever it had unleashed was taking on a life of its own.
As day two began, a local Unitarian church was organizing a “unity march” for later that afternoon.
Fambrough heard and began calling her friends. “It’s about showing people that they have nothing to be afraid of in our town!” she told them.
More calls were made, including one to the minister, John Webb, a former town council member who is black, who had heard by then who had done it, which didn’t make it less worrying to him. He said he had noticed more pickup trucks roaring around during the presidential campaign, Confederate battle flags flying — “Guys I know,” he said, “saying ‘the South will rise again’ and all that stuff” — and that regardless of why the banner went up, “It’s very possible it could boomerang into something bigger than it is.”
He was 72, a veteran of the civil rights struggle still sick from the flu, but he was going, and he called others to go, too, and as word spread about the coming demonstration, so did a parallel set of rumors.
The KKK was coming. The neo-Nazis were coming. Black Lives Matter was coming. Fambrough heard that a so-called antifascist group from Atlanta was coming and began feeling sick imagining windows being smashed and businesses being torched. The sheriff called for backup and readied a plan in case a riot or something worse was about to happen in Dahlonega.
In the late afternoon, people began rallying around the square, waving signs.
“Not OKKK America,” one said. “Dahlonega Loves Y’all,” read another, and “Really, Roberta?”
Protesters rally Feb. 17 in Dahlonega, Ga., after a KKK sign was displayed on a vacant building downtown. (Matt Aiken/The Dahlonega Nugget)
People honked horns in support. A local fiddler came. A member of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls came and everybody sang “This Land Is Your Land.”
Soon, several pickup trucks arrived, revving their engines and circling the square, with Confederate battle flags and Make America Great Again flags flying. When a protester started yelling at one of them, Fambrough yelled at the protester, “Don’t make assumptions!”
By the third day, events began taking another turn.
“More s--- stirrers!” someone posted online about the protesters. “You all are the ones that are going to ruin that town and jobs will be lost!!! Good job, morons!!”
“All crybabies jump on board!” wrote someone else.
“Let it go,” a woman posted.
But people were not letting it go.
“It’s like a certain political climate has opened up,” said Paul Dunlap, a professor at the university, sitting at the end of the fifth day around a fire with friends at Shenanigans pub on the square. An openly gay man, he said he had never experienced any kind of bigotry in his two decades in Dahlonega.
“I think it’s a good idea not to be naive,” said Deb Rowe, the pub’s owner, and now they started talking about Chester Doles, who sometimes came in for a beer at the bar. Someone had noticed that on the building where the banner had been, inside a locked glass case near the door, there was a flier for Doles’s personal training services, showing him oiled up and smiling in full bodybuilder pose.
“Is this indicative of something bigger?” said Dunlap. “Like, do they think they have a voice?”
“I think Roberta’s using the national polarization against us all,” said Jeremy Sharp, a white student at the university who was organizing a boycott of her businesses, which included two buildings she rented out to antique dealers, several hundred units of student housing, and a Holiday Inn Express.
“A peaceable revolution,” Sharp said at a news conference on the sixth day as residents crowded into a small room at the university to hear.
“A few days ago, we had an obtuse sign put up,” he began. “When I walked out and saw that, it scared me. It scared me as a Catholic. It scared me as a person who has friends who look different than me. We are here because we are afraid.”
People clapped and cheered as Sharp began explaining a plan to withhold rent from Green-Garrett and barrage Holiday Inn’s corporate offices with phone calls, which would lead the hotel chain’s parent company, IHG, to issue a statement saying that they had “expressed our concerns” to Green-Garrett and that “This is not the type of activity that we want any of our brands associated with.” As Sharp kept talking, two Dahlonega council members arrived, explaining that they were only there to get “the public sentiment.”
“So, no comment?” a young woman yelled at them.
“The only comment I’ll make is that the KKK does not represent the values of this town,” one of the men said.
“Then why’d you vote for it? Why’d you vote for it?” the woman yelled, getting more upset, and even though there was never such a vote, some people began cheering her on.
“Let’s keep this civil! They did not vote for that sign!” said another young woman trying to quiet the room, but emotions were high.
A man said that the KKK had recently applied unsuccessfully to take part in the Adopt-A-Highway program in a neighboring county. A woman said she was worried about “all the undertones of hate being brought out of the woodwork.”
“I’m very concerned,” said Daniel Blackman, a former state Senate candidate who was the first black person ever to run for office from nearby Forsyth County, which has a long history of violence against blacks and was until the late 1980s known as a “whites only” county. “Whether it’s a stunt or whether Ms. Garrett really feels that way, the fact is there are children here that might be threatened or afraid and we’ve got to get ahead of it. The last thing you want to see is someone crazy enough to do something stupid.”
Soon, the meeting ended, and as everyone was heading out into the cold Dahlonega night, an older white man, trying to be sensitive, said to Blackman, “Be careful.”
The next morning, all of this was the topic of North Georgia talk radio, and the host was taking callers. A woman named Sharon was on the line.
“It’s not just fake news, it’s a fake agenda,” she began, and explained that the banner might have been part of an elaborate plot not only to create chaos in Dahlonega, but also to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump and ultimately, the nation.
She knew all of this, she said, because she had gone online and discovered a website for a group with locations across the country — including in Dahlonega — that was made up of “former congressional staffers working for the previous administration. They are supporting the impeachment. They support open borders. They are supporting Obamacare. They are promoting disruption at town halls — I call it bullying — and they have a potential for violence.
“I hope everyone is aware that this type of activity — I call it subversion, with a fake narrative — is taking root in the area,” she continued, and meanwhile, in Dahlonega, another new development was unfolding.
Over at town hall, an assistant to Green-Garrett was filing paperwork for a new sign permit.
“Size of sign: 4x6.”
“Material of sign: wood (painted).”
“Color of sign: Gold with Black Lettering.”
“How sign will be attached to wall: Screwed.”
It was an application to make the sign permanent. It would say, “Historic Ku Klux Klan Meeting Hall,” and that was how the seventh day ended.
***
And then, two days after that, the application was withdrawn.
Green-Garrett issued her first statement since unleashing all of this eight days before, saying that she had been trying to get a hotel built only to “meet opposition at every turn.” “I have no other motivation other than to bring businesses and tax revenue to the city,” her statement said. “I want to move forward and do something positive for the city of Dahlonega.”
She said nothing about the KKK banner, and when she was reached by phone at her winter home in Florida, she said “no comment” and hung up.
At her real estate office in a worn-out strip mall on the edge of town, her assistant, Barbara Bridges, said the banner was there, rolled up and stored in a closet.
The town issued an official statement saying that “Dahlonega is a welcoming community for people of diverse backgrounds” and that “recent episodes are not indicative of a change in our character or philosophy.”
The students called off the boycott and declared victory.
And now it was a sunny afternoon on the town square.
People were stopping by the candy shop, or wandering down the aisles of antique shops where Kenny G was playing through the speakers, or eating a sandwich across from the building where a KKK banner had been.
“Yeah, it’s the site of one of the last major gold rushes,” a man standing on the square said to a woman, explaining what he knew about Dahlonega.
“Do you have this in a large?” a woman asked at a T-shirt shop.
Reverend Webb, home this afternoon, said he was heartened to see how so many people had taken a stand. “Dahlonega is a sacred place for everybody,” he said.
At the same time, he said, the episode was not simply about the banner. To him, it was about a banner that had appeared after an election in which the new president had said certain things that had appealed to white nationalists and other hatemongers, whether he intended to or not, opening the door to events that could spiral out of control.
“The atmosphere he’s created in America today has caused people to think they have some kind of power again,” he said. “I thought that before, and I still do.”
Doles, who was out driving in his truck, said he agreed with this assessment. He had been on the way home from the gym when he first saw the banner and the flags, he said, and thought to himself, “It’s been a long time coming.” He said he had recently raised his own flag for the first time in years — the American one, because he finally feels pleased with the direction of the country.
“In the last 50 years, I didn’t think we had the votes to elect a governor, much less a president,” Doles said. “And yet here we are today.”
All of this was what worried Valerie Fambrough, sitting outside at a coffee shop on the pleasant afternoon. She felt good about all the people, including Trump supporters, who had come out to “proclaim a message of love.” She felt unsettled that some people thought she was part of an alt-left agenda. It all felt like the beginning of something, not the end.
“I’m just scared these days,” she said, even though the banner was no longer anywhere in sight.
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/13/ny-dropping-teacher-literacy-test-amid-claims-racism.html
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"HONOLULU, HI (KHNL) As sports organizations around the world continue to update their guidelines to make it easier for transgender athletes to compete with the gender they choose it’s becoming a controversial topic in Hawaii’s volleyball community.
“It’s a touchy subject because volleyball is a main sport here,” says Tia Thompson, a transgender athlete.
Born a male, Thompson knew at an early age something wasn’t right. She says she only hung out with girls and liked girl things.
“Because of my religious background with my dad’s side and my mom’s side, we didn’t speak of it, but we knew. As soon as I turned 18 and I moved out, I started transitioning and started taking hormones,” Thompson says.
The now 32-year old says volleyball has been the constant in a life full of changes. In January, she was just approved by USA Volleyball to compete as a woman. Before that, she was required to play in the men’s division at all USAV sanctioned events.
USAV requires transgender women to undergo hormone replacement therapy consistently for at least one year — with proper documentation — and they also have to change their identification, like passports and birth certificates, to female. Before, some organizations, including the Olympics, would require trans athletes to have sex reassignment surgery.
“It took me three years to finally get approved with all the transitioning and all the hormone therapy and submitting all my paperwork to the gender committee,” she said.
There has been some push back from the community. Players and parents we spoke to who did not want to be on camera say it’s not fair for teams with biological women because it creates an unrealistic level of competition."
http://nbc4i.com/2017/03/21/transgender-volleyball-player-has-eyes-on-2020-olympics/
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The SPLC is a thoroughly disingenuous organization. Though this article is what it is, it does reveal some items of interest.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/03/27/chorus-violence-jack-donovan-and-organizing-power-male-supremacy
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The SPLC is a thoroughly disingenuous organization. Though this article is what it is, it does reveal some items of interest.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/03/27/chorus-violence-jack-donovan-and-organizing-power-male-supremacy
"the chorus of moaning that emanates from the “Manosphere.”
I'm wondering if that is the way they put it when women speak about problems they suffer as a gender?
It's a pretty fair question.
Edit: I'm going to add, that much has been stated about US statistics.
Here in Mexico, per INEGI and IMSS, men suffer 90% of the workplace fatalities and are 85% of the amputations that happen, about 3/4's of the homeless in the ONLY study that exists on the subject, but the stated mission of SEGOB (Secretary of the Government), is the empowerment of women 2014 -2018.... http://www.gob.mx/segob/acciones-y-programas/programa-integral-para-prevenir-atender-sancionar-y-erradicar-la-violencia-contra-las-mujeres-2014-2018 (there are currently 101 different programs specifically designed to benefit women through the National Institute of the Woman alone - not counting others) and they're worried about anything greater than a 10% excess of men in politics... because male lives don't matter... obviously.
No studies at all in fact, that portray women in a light that is superior (divorce, custody...and even the INEGI statistics fail to even ask men if they've been victims of violence from women - even though studies in other countries show that women commit DV at rates higher than men, they cherry pick data from England, but won't conduct the studies here in a manner that would yield objective data)... because of $$$.
"Equality."
The major problem, is that such a huge portion of the male psyche derives its worth from being a lackey to women. This is especially interesting when the logical conclusion that having neither XX or XY chromosomes does anything in the way of making one morally superior nor inferior.
It is this problem in particular, that prohibits men from even having any problems that might plague them as a gender set, especially in a society where equality is the stated aim; discussed in any meanfingful manner, and any statement of well founded concerns, is dismissed as "moaning," "complaining," or "misogynistic" and what is nothing more than an attempt to discredit it, in a further attempt to retain female supremacy in first world countries.
The list of female supremacy is a long one. When a gender can abort a million babies a year, and legally abandon them in every state after they're born, but consume 90% of the welfare and have men thrown in jail for not paying child support and spending two decades through use of the male body, in involuntary servitude, and still have the ability to label men as the deadbeats, it is clear who has the power in that equation.
Labor quotas, implemented in every high paying job, but none of the physically demanding jobs, women graduating with degrees in higher numbers than men across the spectrum.
Violence that men suffer, blamed on men, even when perpetrated by a woman.
Hollywood's violence against men, and complete lack of respect for men (any doubt to this, ask yourself why the physical act of a woman being killed within the screenshot doesn't happen), or the joking of men being hit by women, or men being laughed at.
American combat deaths - Men - 650,000, Women - <200 (any death associated with war)....
Selective service for men... not women.
The list is so extensive; it would take a chapter to write them all down (which in many cases, they have been), and people still wouldn't care, primarily because women benefit from it financially, socially, politically, and in several other manners, whilst many men use this to determine their self worth, at the expense of other men.
Even when it is publicised, it is ridiculed or ignored.
There is not a single program in the world, specifically meant for the sole benefit of men, not a single government agency... not even one, in a world where people claim to believe in equality... not even one. That is a sobering thought. It can mean no less, than men are simply disposable and worthless, unless they are in the service of women.
A good example of this analysis, is asking oneself, "Is it acceptable for a man to die, in order to save a woman?" The answer to most would be "yes." Then to increase the number of men to "two," in order to save a woman, and many would still find this acceptable. Then onwards, to three, four, five, ten? How many men have to die, before it is acceptable to let a woman perish? According to Bureau of Labor statistics,, even when men die at a rate of 9-1, it still isn't enough to do anything to even that gender gap.
According to combat statistics, the point becomes clearer. If you are a man, you are worthless, at least in your government's and society's eyes. Do YOU accept that? Especially when they scream for equality, your money, custody of your children, while you pay for it and they hate you because you're never allowed to see them? They scream for double standards but no accountability and at no cost to their lives. When will stop accepting that? When will you stop obeying unjust laws? That's the question... because until men do, people will treat you the way you allow them to.
As men, if one believes in equality, men need to be willing to see women fail, and quit helping them, letting them fall, or admit to one's own hypocrisy. What one does not get to do; however, is claim equality for all, and then expect other men to suffer the yoke of the hypocrisy.
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Good post.
Minor comment:
"Here in Mexico, per INEGI and IMSS, men suffer 90% of the workplace fatalities"
My understanding is that in the US the number is 95%.
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Good post.
Minor comment:
"Here in Mexico, per INEGI and IMSS, men suffer 90% of the workplace fatalities"
My understanding is that in the US the number is 95%.
Thank you Guru. The number is actually close to the US number. I typed "90% for convenience. If necessary, I can retrieve the exact stat.
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Not necessary, but that the Mexican number is lower than the US number does surprise.
Anyway, I find this 95% datum to be quite useful in unbalancing those who allege/babble about income disparity. :-D
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Not necessary, but that the Mexican number is lower than the US number does surprise.
Anyway, I find this 95% datum to be quite useful in unbalancing those who allege/babble about income disparity. :-D
All the cartel related deaths probably don't get entered into the stats. Probably a big difference in deaths by chainsaw in Mexico vs. the US.
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Crafty: "I find this 95% datum to be quite useful in unbalancing those who allege/babble about income disparity."
The jobs where men are dying most might not high paying jobs but the extraordinary difference in death rates demonstrates that men and women choose and work different jobs.
http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/
Latest report:
"Women accounted for 43 percent of the hours worked in 2015, they accounted for only 7 percent of the fatal injuries." [Men 93%, assuming only two genders]
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
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Thank you for the more current data.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVS52zoTLjo
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Question : are Harvard researches checking with Asians about their bias towards whites or blacks?
are they studying about Africans bias about whites or asians. I doubt it.
Of course all asians and blacks are just loving gracious people. Look at how they have treated each other in history.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/map-shows-white-europeans-associate-225842153.html
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http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=404.msg103727#msg103727
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This story intersects Race, Religion, Urban issues and Homeland Security. Assault rifles and bomb parts, this could have been the Manchester story if not for the action of a concerned citizen, a black man who took offense that these Muslims were tossing their trash into our streets. The altercation led to the discovery of perhaps a threat in progress.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/05/another-look-inside-that-parked-car.php
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http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=404.msg103727#msg103727
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This story intersects Race, Religion, Urban issues and Homeland Security. Assault rifles and bomb parts, this could have been the Manchester story if not for the action of a concerned citizen, a black man who took offense that these Muslims were tossing their trash into our streets. The altercation led to the discovery of perhaps a threat in progress.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/05/another-look-inside-that-parked-car.php
Funny how the NSA's dragnet of all global comms never rolls these guys up.
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75-90% of American KIA are white males
http://adam.curry.com/enc/20160403181111_usservicedeaths.pdf
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It shouldn't go without mention that after Bill Maher used the house-n--- word, Kathy Griffin tried to end her brush with fame by blaming her sad life on oppression of white males.
There is something telling of our culture that this isn't offensive to white males.
"'There's Old White Guys Trying to Silence Me'"
Poor her. But why is okay to throw them all in a group and slander them? That wouldn't sound good if aimed at some other, any other, group.
http://www.bet.com/celebrities/news/2017/06/02/kathy-griffin.html
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http://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2017/07/10/san-francisco-transit-wont-release-robbery-surveillance-videos-racism-fears/
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https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/former-kkk-leader-david-duke-200532936.html
Trump responded well the time so I thought but then I read this:
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/trump-reaction-republicans-criticize/2017/08/13/id/807354/
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In retrospect, Sean Spicer was 100% correct , this guy is nothing but trouble:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/anthony-scaramucci-trump-apos-much-144246522.html
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/27/the-day-president-reagan-comforted-a-black-family-who-had-a-kkk-cross-burned-on-their-lawn/?tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.85bc18eca93c
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Modern Liberalism’s False Obsession With Civil War Monuments
Black accomplishments in the ’40s and ’50s prove that today’s setbacks are not due to slavery.
A statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson in Richmond, Va., Aug. 23.
A statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson in Richmond, Va., Aug. 23. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Jason L. Riley
Aug. 29, 2017 6:27 p.m. ET
465 COMMENTS
Visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and between exhibits of dinosaur skeletons, Asian elephants and Alaskan moose you might notice a bust of Henry Fairfield Osborn and a plaque honoring Madison Grant. Osborn and Grant were two of the country’s leading conservationists in the early 1900s. They also were dedicated white supremacists.
Osborn, a former president of the museum, founded the Eugenics Education Society—now known as the Galton Institute—which sought the improvement of humanity through selective breeding. Grant, a co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, is known today for his influential 1916 best seller, “The Passing of the Great Race,” a pseudoscientific polemic arguing that nonwhite immigrants—which included Eastern and Southern Europeans by his definition—were tainting America’s superior Nordic stock. Osborn, who was a zoologist by training, wrote the introduction to Grant’s book, which Hitler called “my Bible.” The New Yorker magazine once described Grant as someone who “extended a passion for preserving bison and caribou into a mania for preserving the ‘Nordic race.’ ”
Given their options, why are liberals so focused on monuments to Civil War figures? Politically, it makes some tactical sense. The GOP has spent decades warding off claims of racism, and forcing Republican politicians to defend prominent displays of Confederate statuary keeps them on the defensive. On another level, however, liberals make a fetish of Civil War monuments because it feeds their hallowed slavery narrative, which posits that racial inequality today is mainly a legacy of the country’s slave past.
One problem with these assumptions about slavery’s effects on black outcomes today is that they are undermined by what blacks were able to accomplish in the first hundred years after their emancipation, when white racism was rampant and legal and blacks had bigger concerns than Robert E. Lee’s likeness in a public park. Today, slavery is still being blamed for everything from black broken families to high crime rates in black neighborhoods to racial gaps in education, employment and income. Yet outcomes in all of those areas improved markedly in the immediate aftermath of slavery and continued to improve for decades.
Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. where higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.
In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s. But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%. Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.
Just ask Amy Wax and Lawrence Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and University of San Diego, respectively, who were taken to task for co-authoring an op-ed this month in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lamented the breakdown of “bourgeois” cultural values that prevailed in mid-20th-century America. “That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow,” they wrote. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
The professors noted that disadvantaged groups have been hit hardest by the disintegration of these middle-class mores and that the expansion of the welfare state, which reduced the financial need for two-parent families, hastened social retrogression. “A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect,” they wrote. “Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.”
For the suggestion that something other than continuing racial bigotry and the legacy of slavery has contributed to racial inequality, a coalition of faculty and students at the University of Pennsylvania promptly accused the professors of advancing a “racist and white supremacist discourse.” The reality is that there was a time when blacks and whites alike shared conventional attitudes toward marriage, parenting, school and work, and those attitudes abetted unprecedented social and economic black advancement.
Appeared in the August 30, 2017, print edition.
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second post
This is rather awesome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoHAG9UFaKI&feature=youtu.be
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450967/monuments-honoring-racists-democrats-predominate?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-30&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/10/portland-police-are-purging-their-gang-database-because-there-arent-enough-white-gangs/
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/10/portland-police-are-purging-their-gang-database-because-there-arent-enough-white-gangs/
Beyond stupid, but not unexpected.
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"City officials and community activists had long urged the bureau to stop attaching the gang designation to criminal suspects, claiming the practice disproportionately impacted people of color."
I propose we get rid of the designation "KKK" member because there are no black KKK members.
In fact I would bet most white
"supremacist" are law abiding. So why should they be stigmatized for their views
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/09/racism_the_ineradicable_sin.html
More articles by Fay Voshell
http://www.americanthinker.com/author/fay_voshell/
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/09/racism_the_ineradicable_sin.html
More articles by Fay Voshell
http://www.americanthinker.com/author/fay_voshell/
For the left, this is how they justify their aggression against the Neo-Kulaks.
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The growth of all the non-white demographics combined with the Democrat hold on those groups was supposed to signal the end of the Republican party - forever. But hold on,
Psychology Today: New research shows that minority groups may become more conservative if they view other rising minority groups as potential competition.
Minority Growth Makes Other Minorities More Conservative
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/without-prejudice/201706/minority-growth-makes-other-minorities-more-conservative
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/09/demography-and-the-end-of-diversity.php
This is a DISASTER for leftist identity politics.
More obvious is the dissonance of Jews, gays and Muslims all hanging out in the same party pursuing the same ideals??! This goes much further than that with evidence of Hispanic and non-Hispanic minorities splitting.
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" New research shows that minority groups may become more conservative if they view other rising minority groups as potential competition."
As I have posted for years I don't understand why Blacks are so much rooting for a party that wants open borders making harder for them.
Just as they move up on the economic ladder in the US they support policies that destroy the US. go figure!
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https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2017/09/20/the-welfare-states-legacy-n2382991
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452910/white-working-class-populism-underclass-anti-elitism-acting-white-incompatible-conservativism
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Notice the victim's left handed block near end of video. Looks like he has martial arts training. Like the movies. Some jerk pushes the hero beyond the limit of patience and finally the hero HAS to fight back in self defense of himself or some one else being bullied by a bigot. The only difference is we don't get to see the end of the movie where the hero kicks some butt and lays out the jerk:
https://nypost.com/video/bigot-attacks-asian-passenger-on-train-while-horrified-commuters-watch/
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Notice the victim's left handed block near end of video. Looks like he has martial arts training. Like the movies. Some jerk pushes the hero beyond the limit of patience and finally the hero HAS to fight back in self defense of himself or some one else being bullied by a bigot. The only difference is we don't get to see the end of the movie where the hero kicks some butt and lays out the jerk:
https://nypost.com/video/bigot-attacks-asian-passenger-on-train-while-horrified-commuters-watch/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs_kdGe8Ljc
Pro tip: If a guy is dressed like Jet Li, you might want to leave him alone.
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Nice finds!
Feel to post them on the Martial Arts forum too.
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Black Protest Has Lost Its Power
Have whites finally found the courage to judge African-Americans fairly by universal standards?
By Shelby Steele
Jan. 12, 2018 6:40 p.m. ET
The recent protests by black players in the National Football League were rather sad for their fruitlessness. They may point to the end of an era for black America, and for the country generally—an era in which protest has been the primary means of black advancement in American life.
There was a forced and unconvincing solemnity on the faces of these players as they refused to stand for the national anthem. They seemed more dutiful than passionate, as if they were mimicking the courage of earlier black athletes who had protested: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, fists in the air at the 1968 Olympics; Muhammad Ali, fearlessly raging against the Vietnam War; Jackie Robinson, defiantly running the bases in the face of racist taunts. The NFL protesters seemed to hope for a little ennoblement by association.
And protest has long been an ennobling tradition in black American life. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the march on Selma, from lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the 1963 March on Washington, only protest could open the way to freedom and the acknowledgment of full humanity. So it was a high calling in black life. It required great sacrifice and entailed great risk. Martin Luther King Jr. , the archetypal black protester, made his sacrifices, ennobled all of America, and was then shot dead.
For the NFL players there was no real sacrifice, no risk and no achievement. Still, in black America there remains a great reverence for protest. Through protest—especially in the 1950s and ’60s—we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.
It is not surprising, then, that these black football players would don the mantle of protest. The surprise was that it didn’t work. They had misread the historic moment. They were not speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.
What they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.
Of course this does not mean there is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.
Protest always tries to make a point. But what happens when that point already has been made—when, in this case, racism has become anathema and freedom has expanded?
What happened was that black America was confronted with a new problem: the shock of freedom. This is what replaced racism as our primary difficulty. Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.
Watch out that you get what you ask for, the saying goes. Freedom came to blacks with an overlay of cruelty because it meant we had to look at ourselves without the excuse of oppression. Four centuries of dehumanization had left us underdeveloped in many ways, and within the world’s most highly developed society. When freedom expanded, we became more accountable for that underdevelopment. So freedom put blacks at risk of being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.
To hear, for example, that more than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.
We can say that past oppression left us unprepared for freedom. This is certainly true. But it is no consolation. Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past. The tragedy in Chicago—rightly or wrongly—reflects on black America.
That’s why, in the face of freedom’s unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie. We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: “systemic” and “structural” racism, racist “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” and so on. All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism, and that freedom’s accountability is an injustice.
We end up giving victimization the charisma of black authenticity. Suffering, poverty and underdevelopment are the things that make you “truly black.” Success and achievement throw your authenticity into question.
The NFL protests were not really about injustice. Instead such protests are usually genuflections to today’s victim-focused black identity. Protest is the action arm of this identity. It is not seeking a new and better world; it merely wants documentation that the old racist world still exists. It wants an excuse.
For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present. This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many protests of groups like Black Lives Matter. The near-hysteria around the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others is also a hunger for the excuse of racial victimization, a determination to keep it alive. To a degree, black America’s self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live under a cloud of continuing injustice.
When you don’t know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth around which your character is formed. Watching the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.
But the NFL protests may be a harbinger of change. They elicited considerable resentment. There have been counterprotests. TV viewership has gone down. Ticket sales have dropped. What is remarkable about this response is that it may foretell a new fearlessness in white America—a new willingness in whites (and blacks outside the victim-focused identity) to say to blacks what they really think and feel, to judge blacks fairly by standards that are universal.
We blacks have lived in a bubble since the 1960s because whites have been deferential for fear of being seen as racist. The NFL protests reveal the fundamental obsolescence—for both blacks and whites—of a victim-focused approach to racial inequality. It causes whites to retreat into deference and blacks to become nothing more than victims. It makes engaging as human beings and as citizens impermissible, a betrayal of the sacred group identity. Black victimization is not much with us any more as a reality, but it remains all too powerful as a hegemony.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).
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https://www.michaelyon-online.com/morgan-freeman-exposed.htm
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/31110/totalitarian-nyc-de-blasio-issues-cultural-plan-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=052618-news&utm_campaign=position1
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ivy-league-university-admissions-policies-asian-americans/
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Harvard University systemically believes Asian Americans are less likeable. Ouch!
"Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/harvard-doesnt-like-asians.php
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http://theconversation.com/study-reveals-racial-inequality-in-mexico-disproving-its-race-blind-rhetoric-87661
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http://theconversation.com/study-reveals-racial-inequality-in-mexico-disproving-its-race-blind-rhetoric-87661
Anyone who knows Mexico at all knows it's a far more racist country than the US.
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Google proves its commitment to diversity results, black hiring has surged from 1.9% to 2.0% in just three years under the new program, perThomas Sowell.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/crb-sowells-inconvenient-truths.php
I worry that their workforce could be all black at that rate in just 3000 years and they will need to re-think the diversity initiative.
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Eight Decades of Ethnic Dilemmas
Iconic sociologist Nathan Glazer on the problems of group identity, affirmative action and Donald Trump.
166 Comments
By Jason Willick
Sept. 14, 2018 6:07 p.m. ET
Cambridge, Mass.
Like many young people, Nathan Glazer was once a socialist. After enrolling at New York’s City College in 1940, Mr. Glazer, whose parents were Polish Jewish immigrants, joined the radical wing of a Zionist group called Avukah. Looking back, he says, its ideology wasn’t so profound—“something about Jewish and Arab proletarians coming together” against British imperialism in Palestine.
City College in the 1930s and ’40s was a politically active haven for aspiring Jewish scholars, whose admission to Columbia and other Ivy League schools was restricted by quotas. This was the milieu that incubated the “New York intellectuals,” a loose cohort of left-wing, anti-Soviet writers and thinkers—including Daniel Bell, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol—who shaped American intellectual life in the mid-20th century.
Eight Decades of Ethnic Dilemmas
Photo: Terry Shoffner
Mr. Glazer, 95, is one of the last living members of this group. As young radicals often do, he drifted rightward as he grew older. After college, he decided “America would be fine if it was more like Sweden.” Then he concluded “it can’t be, it’s too diverse.” Now he has doubts about social democracy altogether: “It runs into its own problems.”
But Mr. Glazer, a professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, drifted only as far as the political center. He is sometimes labeled a “neoconservative,” like Kristol or Norman Podhoretz. But he tells me he’s never voted Republican except once in Massachusetts, as a protest against “the fact that some Kennedy was being elected from the district again and again.”
Mr. Glazer’s interest in Jewish identity deepened after World War II and the Holocaust. It eventually drew him to the wider question of how the U.S. accommodates ethnic pluralism, to which he devoted much of his career. His best-known work, “Beyond the Melting Pot”—written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and published in 1963—described the limits of “assimilation” for Jews, Puerto Ricans, Irish, Italians and blacks in midcentury New York City.
Moynihan and Mr. Glazer argued that ethnic identities—especially “those not close to the Anglo-Saxon center,” as they put it—tend to persist in the U.S., shaping politics and social life for generations. Ethnic groups “became interest groups,” Mr. Glazer says, “not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of their occupational concentrations. When you’re talking about the Italian Americans,” for example, “you’re talking about the sanitation men’s union.” The Irish were the police, the Jews the small shopkeepers, “and so on.” Ethnic residential clusters also persisted for decades, even after Congress severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in 1924.
Ethnic politics has existed throughout American history, as the country absorbed successive waves of immigrants. But Mr. Glazer sees contemporary identity politics as something new—an offspring of the civil-rights movement. “What happened was black identity became the model. It became the model for a revival of feminism,” Mr. Glazer says. “It became the model for all kinds of groups.”
Many sociologists of Mr. Glazer’s generation expected that black Americans after civil rights would follow the pattern of ethnic Europeans: They would continue to face discrimination and retain some ethnic distinctiveness, but the process of integration would be possible without state interference like quotas or set-asides. “We didn’t think of blacks in the North as we thought of blacks in the South,” Mr. Glazer says. “The blacks in the South have to be freed from a political oppression—separate schools, separate public facilities.”
Mr. Glazer hoped the Northern model of race relations could spread to the South after civil rights. Instead, liberals began thinking about race in the North along Southern lines—an unfortunate turn, in Mr. Glazer’s view. “I kept on fighting the word ‘segregation’ of blacks in the North,” he says. Northern blacks “didn’t have money, they lived where they could.” But they “were not segregated in schools; they were concentrated because that’s where they were”—just as ethnic neighborhoods in midcentury New York had schools that were heavily Puerto Rican or Italian.
The degree of discrimination against blacks under Jim Crow was unparalleled. Yet elite opinion blurred the distinction between the contentious ethnic pluralism depicted in “Beyond the Melting Pot” and legally mandated white supremacy. America’s identity problem “became merged, North and South,” Mr. Glazer says. New ethnic groups, although they faced different obstacles, replicated the language, tactics and institutions that had successfully liberated Southern blacks.
As an example, Mr. Glazer cites “the last big fight over microaggression, I suppose, or misappropriation—over this Indian figure in ‘The Simpsons.’ ” He means Apu, owner of the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store and subject of a 2017 documentary, “The Problem With Apu,” which condemns the cartoon character as an invidious stereotype. Fifty years ago, “who would argue about what you thought of Indian immigrants?” Mr. Glazer asks. “There weren’t enough of them to think about.” Now South Asians, along with myriad other groups, have been assimilated into the civil-rights tradition.
Mr. Glazer sees today’s racial preferences in college admissions as a legacy of this expansion of the civil-rights model, which has come under strain as new immigrant groups join the fold. A few miles from where we sit, unintended contradictions of this system are coming to a head as Harvard defends itself in a lawsuit whose Asian-American plaintiffs allege they are the victims of discrimination.
In Mr. Glazer’s view, preferences have expanded far beyond their original purpose, which was to lift blacks. “The only legitimacy for affirmative action,” he says, “was to make up for the fact that they were enslaved, or more or less treated as enslaved for a very long time thereafter.” He adds that “we never made it up, and there is no way of making it up”—and observes that today even many black beneficiaries of affirmative action “have at least one white parent” or are immigrants from Africa. “We aren’t doing much for the people we are trying to do something for.”
Ironically, the civil-rights movement’s central idea, colorblindness, precluded policies to help blacks in particular. Instead they had to be justified in ethnically-neutral terms, such as helping minorities in general, or promoting diversity. Mr. Glazer worries that the Asian plaintiffs suing Harvard are misusing the civil-right’s era’s “no-discrimination dictum,” whose purpose was recompense for Jim Crow.
Moreover, he sympathizes with the idea of trying to achieve some ethnic balance at elite schools—notwithstanding the discrimination he faced as a Jewish college applicant nearly eight decades ago. “I think it would have been bad for the country if the Ivy League had maintained a purely meritocratic basis for admissions,” he says. “The Jews would have risen to 40% or something.” As “national institutions,” these schools “had to be representative nationally in some way.” Mr. Glazer believes Ivy League admissions preferences often went too far—especially in medical schools, where the quotas were sometimes as low as 5%. But his pragmatic view of ethnic compromise balances meritocratic fairness with other values.
Comparisons between anti-Jewish discrimination then and anti-Asian discrimination now are complicated by the diversity within the latter category: “The Asian group—we are talking about Indians, we are talking about Filipinos, we are talking about Chinese, Japanese. There is such mixed history.” Still, Mr. Glazer is troubled by reports that Harvard admissions officers gave low “personality ratings” to Asian applicants they’d never met. And he admires the California Institute of Technology, which ignores race in favor of a model of diversity that consists in “having enough particle physicists to match the theoretical mathematicians,” as Mr. Glazer says with a laugh. Caltech’s student body is 43% Asian.
In Mr. Glazer’s ideal world, private institutions would have leeway to practice racial preferences or not, in accord with their public mission. But by now that kind of pluralistic approach has grown hard to sustain because “government has gotten too deeply involved.” With Congress funding billions of dollars of research and student loans, and federal regulators statute-bound to scrutinize campuses for discrimination, “the distinction between public and nonpublic has become meaningless,” Mr. Glazer says. Federal law mandates colorblindness, so the courts will have to continue tying themselves in knots if they are to permit racial preferences.
What about the politics of all this? Mr. Glazer doubts the issue will drive Asian-American voters to the GOP. “I think the Democratic position on immigration will outweigh Asian-American concern about discrimination in college admissions.”
Yet he disagrees with liberals who insist opposition to immigration is born primarily of “racism”—which he understands the old-fashioned way as the view that some races are inherently superior. Instead he emphasizes the economic changes that have affected the white working class. “It’s a terrible divorce that’s occurred” he says, “between those who get educated and who lead stable lives” and those who don’t. He does not believe that a “nationalist” fear that immigrants “are changing a traditional American society, its culture, its norms, its language” is in itself bigoted. But he remains confident in “the power of American culture to integrate new immigrant groups,” and he doubts the radical restrictionism advocated by some on the right is economically or politically practicable.
Mr. Glazer is a critic of President Trump, but a temperate one. He believes Mr. Trump has benefited from white identity politics, appealing to the “merged white ethnic classes,” but regards comparisons with 1930s Europe as absurd. “I saw the real fascism,” Mr. Glazer says. “I don’t see any relationship—I just don’t.” He dismisses claims that Mr. Trump’s clashes with the intelligence community and law enforcement amount to a bid to destroy democracy. “I can’t get interested in the Mueller thing,” Mr. Glazer says, “in part because I am so against what previous special counsels did, particularly in the Clinton case.”
He believes anti-Semitism in the U.S. has been all but eliminated in his lifetime, and adds: “I don’t see it connected to Trump—if his daughter marries a Jew and converts, if his grandchildren are being raised as Jews and no one cares.” As for open racists and anti-Semites who describe themselves as “alt-right”: “I don’t think anybody in the alt-right these days is going to get elected.”
Mr. Trump has made the presidency “a very undignified position,” Mr. Glazer says. “It’s too bad, because it was a grand position.” But he thinks the country can withstand it, and he cites the Adam Smith quip that there is “a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, Mr. Glazer arrived at a similar middle ground amid the “free-speech movement.” He engaged extensively with radical students and sought to understand their demands. He wrote later that their campaign for social reform was overwhelmed by a desire for “the humiliation of others,” and “for the destruction of authority—any authority, whether necessary and worthwhile or not.” Yet he opposed Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1967 decision to fire the president of the UC system: “Like ex-communists and Trotskyists who go only as far as being social democrats, rather than going all the way to the right on politics, I thought that was far enough.”
Mr. Glazer thinks today’s campus activists are characterized by a “discomfort at discussion that looks seriously” at important social issues—just as the Berkeley revolts, in their later stages, ended up seeking to silence opposing ideas. Yet he thinks today’s student protesters are likely to be less successful than their 1960s predecessors in pushing society leftward. Perhaps instead they will put off sympathizers and thereby help produce more centrists like Mr. Glazer.
Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
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“I think it would have been bad for the country if the Ivy League had maintained a purely meritocratic basis for admissions,” he says. “The Jews would have risen to 40% or something.” As “national institutions,” these schools “had to be representative nationally in some way.” Mr. Glazer believes Ivy League admissions preferences often went too far—especially in medical schools, where the quotas were sometimes as low as 5%. But his pragmatic view of ethnic compromise balances meritocratic fairness with other values.
I do not understand why there would be an objection to meritocracy.
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A most fair point.
On the whole though, I find the piece interesting, thoughtful, and perceptive.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/frank-e-petersen-first-black-general-in-marines-dies-at-83.html
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/the-blackface-party/?fbclid=IwAR0yHNl5hPzeQOWZHbXm8E6t61EN5oF_13ogvCRukSnUvH3lWkE8lIdf6FA
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https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/10/26/34543412/matthew-shepard-is-the-worlds-most-famous-gay-hate-crime-victim-but-was-he-really-killed-for-being-gay
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https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/racism-revised/
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matthew sheppard killed over meth.
SSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.... can't let this get out .
We need to get rid of "hate crimes" scam.
Might have mattered in the 50s or 60s when whites murdered blacks and walked free but not today .
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Disparities Galore
ByWALTER E. WILLIAMS
December 29, 2018
Much is made about observed differences between sexes and among races. The nation's academic and legal elite try to sell us on the notion that men and women and people of all races should be proportionally represented in socio-economic characteristics. They make statements such as "Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32 percent of the US population, they (constituted) 56 percent of all incarcerated people in 2015" and "20 percent of Congress is women. Only 5 percent of CEOs are."
These differences are frequently referred to as disparities. Legal professionals, judges, politicians, academics and others often operate under the assumption that we are all equal. Therefore, inequalities and disparities are seen as probative of injustice. Thus, government must intervene, find the cause and engineer a policy or law to eliminate the injustice. Such a vision borders on lunacy. There's no evidence anywhere or at any time in human history that shows that but for some kind of social injustice, people would be proportionally represented across a range of socio-economic attributes by race and sex.
Indeed, if there is a dominant feature of mankind, it's that we differ significantly over a host of socio-economic characteristics by race, sex, ethnicity and nationality. The differences have little or nothing to do with any sort of social injustice or unfair treatment. Let's examine some racial, ethnic and sex disparities with an eye toward identifying the injustice involved. We might also ponder what kind of policy recommendation is necessary to correct the disparity.
Jews constitute no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but are 35 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. As of 2017, Nobel Prizes had been awarded to 902 individuals worldwide. Though Jews are less than 2 percent of the world's population, 203, or 22.5 percent, of the Nobel Prizes were awarded to Jews. Proportionality would have created 18 Jewish Nobel laureates instead of an "unfair" 203. What should Congress and the United Nations do to "correct" such a disparity? Should the Nobel committees be charged with racism?
Jews are not the only people taking more than their "fair share" of things. Blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population but, in some seasons, have been as high as 84 percent of NBA players. Compounding that "injustice," blacks are the highest-paid basketball players and win nearly all of the MVP prizes. Blacks are also guilty of taking 67 percent, an "unfair" share, of professional football jobs. Blacks are in the top salary category in every offensive and defensive position except quarterback. But let's not lull ourselves into complacency. How often do you see a black NFL kicker or punter?
Laotian, Samoan and Vietnamese women have the highest cervical cancer rates in the United States. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the highest reported prevalence of diabetes of any population in the world. Tay-Sachs disease favors Ashkenazi Jews. Cystic fibrosis haunts white people. Blacks of West African ethnic origin have the highest incidence of sickle cell anemia. The prevalence of prostate cancer is lower in men of South Asian ethnicity than in the general population. Black American men have the highest prostate cancer rates of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. Black males are also 30 percent likelier to die from heart disease than white men.
There are loads of other disparities based upon physical characteristics, but it would take a fool to believe that we are all equal and any difference between us is a result of some kind of social injustice that begs for a societal remedy. The only kind of equality consistent with liberty is equality before the law — which doesn't require that people be in fact equal.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers
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https://www.accidentaltalmudist.org/heroes-blog/2019/2/20/the-black-holocaust-educator?fbclid=IwAR37nzUgC1CZ9eIzflzGV9zgCgKQXv4DBTHFokpHif0gTrZYrySSCZWogek
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https://www.prageru.com/video/the-candace-owens-show-hawk-newsome/
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The 'b' for 'bi', by definition, is saying there are only two genders. The other 54 genders are livid.
What does "bisexual" mean in a 56 gender world?
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/gender-facebook-now-has-56-categories-to-choose-from-including-cisgender-genderqueer-and-intersex.html
Is a B attracted to just men and women or every andromonoecious variety?
https://www.quora.com/If-B-in-LGBT-means-bisexual-does-that-mean-there-are-only-two-genders
I am quite late to this discovery. Huffington Post has been onto this since 2013:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aj-walkley/bisexual-gender-binary_b_2425081.html
We are going to have to learn some more letters to be inclusive,; we should replace the B for two with V for versatile, able to adapt to many different activities and situations.
Democrats just can't find a way to be all-inclusive. Republicans, OTOH, want to cut taxes for all genders, not just the top two or three.
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"The 'b' for 'bi', by definition, is saying there are only two genders. The other 54 genders are livid."
how ironic
the LEFt is dividing everyone into categories
while all the campaigning that is going on from their candidates
scream and yell how Trump is dividing us and we are more divided than ever.
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someone asking why Blacks vote Democrat .
Well the 60 s turned it around due to LBJ etc and voting act and great society
now we have new Democrat bribery in effect:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/05/los-angeles-times-all-democrats-genuflect-to-al-sharpton-now/
Lets see.
Repub -> work hard and self reliance and opportunity
Crats -> . how bout we cut you a check for $ 30 K or 50 K etc
who do you think is going to win that choice?
yes I know how unworkable it is just as the crats do but that is not the point at all.
it is the planting in their minds they could get cold hard cash for their votes
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https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/10/remembering-martin-luther-king-jr?fbclid=IwAR0ZWoTEBRVB_jTixWPKcf5iRALuFtbM811diSrnz5HKza-sQFq4P1Ojb3A
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Unfamiliar with this source-- caveat lector:
http://theredelephants.com/attacks-on-jews-by-blacks-in-new-york-city-skyrocket-and-the-media-ignores-because-it-doesnt-fit-their-anti-white-narrative/?fbclid=IwAR20YhpwB175AulErzLjF5Ghj7BTV8_ouxWV_fFzMPLq8NiEk9CphfV7M74
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https://spectator.us/racist-incidents-down-trump/
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https://news.yahoo.com/naacp-calls-for-trumps-impeachment-182134592.html
NAACP : the national association of confused people . (pssst . you're all free)
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/after-mass-shootings-trump-blamed-for-increasing-racism-but-is-white-racism-really-increasing/
We may see Larry on Tucker Hannity or Laura soon
and likely criticized and belittled on confused news network and ms lsd
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https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2019/09/04/criminologists-mislead-us-n2552448
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Work, education, and marriage-- who knew?
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/opinions/good-news-for-black-men-in-america-opinion-wilcox-wang-mincy/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0ddEx9RChkF5J1o2YNhIN7h-TgjRM0kuno8Qj9eBQ3FGddmRGAMUSoFTY
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Early false but true fake news story, Buttigieg just referred to. If the hate is so widespread, you'd think they could find a true story to celebrate.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behind-americas-most-famous-gay-hate-murder-matthew-shepard
A new twist came last year with the publication of another book, this one by investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez, who has spent 13 years interviewing more than 100 people with a connection to the case. His conclusion, outlined in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, is that the grotesque murder was not a hate crime, but could instead be blamed on crystal meth,
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112 genders or whatever one wants to call them:
https://dudeasks.com/how-many-genders-are-there-in-2019/
certainly this deserves a Nobel Prize in medicine , no?
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/11/27/the-victims-of-race-focused-liberals-are-blacks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-victims-of-race-focused-liberals-are-blacks?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTWpneE1qRXhNVE5oTkRNeiIsInQiOiJBTVlDMmQyV0NxN0NMaVpSdkJUQ3oxMjNHUFBEdWFiVnAxUTBuNHUyMjFZTDBuQjZ0SE9YMTRZMkJvck4rM3lmc3kyM2RDMzdTalFXdDNzbXEzTTZvY3kzZXJ1ckQzZEhQdTJQMlRFZ1N5MzhEbXg2aFd4Z2x3VGcyaElWbjljeSJ9
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But what about Adam now Eve and Eve now Adam?:
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/swedish-church-removes-lgbt-altarpiece-after-fears-it-is-anti-trans/
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https://www.christianpost.com/news/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-the-most-dangerous-hate-group-in-america.html
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Uproar Over Essays Turns MLK’s Dream Inside Out
The University of Montana judged contest submissions on content instead of the writers’ race. Big mistake.
By Heather Mac Donald
Feb. 6, 2020 6:54 pm ET
The University of Montana asked students, staff and community members to participate in an essay contest on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When the school released the results last month, Montana students and race activists across the country accused university officials of racism and disrespect. That’s because all four winners were white. Turns out some would rather the school had honored King by judging entrants on the color of their skin rather than the content of their submissions.
The four contest winners started receiving threats, and the African-American studies program, which had sponsored the contest, removed their photos and essays from its website. A central fact—no black students had even submitted an essay—failed to defuse the racism charge.
Critics blasted “shameful” university officials for holding a contest at all. A lecturer on the college race circuit admonished the university for thinking that “there is a universality around writing an essay,” when in reality blacks express themselves “completely different.” One black student sniffed that participating would have been a “sellout/compromise.” “Having grown up in all white spaces,” he posted on Facebook, “I often avoided events such as this because I knew the purpose was a performative gesture from the administration.” How the student determines when events are not “performative gestures” was left unspecified.
The African-American studies program was denounced for not canceling the competition when the organizers realized the skin color of the six entrants. “I cannot understand how anyone would think remembering the legacy of MLK Jr. is achieved by giving four white girls a shout out,” wrote a critic. “Do not center Whiteness on the day we are supposed to remember MLK Jr.’s legacy.”
But the contest rules had no racial prerequisites. The essay prompt—“How are you implementing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy here at the University of Montana?”—was universal. The competition’s very purpose, according to Tobin Miller Shearer, Montana’s African-American Studies program director, was to challenge the entire campus to fight racism, since black students complained about having to do the “heavy lifting,” in Mr. Shearer’s words, in the battle against the university’s white supremacy.
Outraged observers accused the contest committee of not specifically soliciting submissions from black students. In fact, the committee, whose majority consisted of “persons of color,” including the presidents of the Black Student Union and the Latinx Student Union, had asked members of the Black Student Union to participate. The students’ failure to do so, despite a $250 first prize, was nonetheless deemed the university’s fault and another instance of the university silencing minority voices. Woke white students declared that they would never presume to write about MLK and racism, since doing so would be an example of “speaking OVER black voices.” If no white students had submitted an essay, that too would have demonstrated campus bigotry.
Naturally, the demographics of the University of Montana student body and faculty were cited as evidence for the white supremacy charge. The undergraduate population is 79% white and 1% black; the faculty is nearly 90% white. Never mentioned was the state’s demographics: 89% white and 0.6% black, according to the 2019 census estimate. To boost its black enrollment, the university would have to poach black students from other states, whose colleges are equally desperate to increase their own diversity numbers. The essay submission rate for white undergraduates was 0.1%. If the school’s population of black students had submitted at the same rate, 0.08% of the essay contest submissions would have been from black writers. That’s essentially zero, which is, in fact, how many such submissions were received.
The university has been predictably repentant, calling the criticism “fair.” Yet its Facebook page also notes, with a hint of exasperation, that a student’s skin color does not preclude him from submitting an essay or working toward equality. The university’s creation of a new office for diversity and inclusion and the search for a new specialist for diversity, equity and inclusion in the human resources department will now take on added urgency. It was not lost on the contest critics that Mr. Shearer, the African-American studies director, himself is “nonblack,” as the local NAACP president put it. He will be watched.
The race industry’s search for racism in an America going out of its way to atone for its past is increasingly desperate. A fantastical alchemy is required, which converts good faith efforts at inclusiveness into instances of bigotry. Academics and activists police racial boundaries with a zeal that recalls Jim Crow, buttressed by ignorant conceits such as “cultural appropriation.” Dr. King’s colorblind ideal has been thoroughly repudiated: whites who write about implementing Dr. King’s legacy today are threatened, rather than welcomed to the cause. Power now flows from assertions of victimized racial identity, even as academics and activists declare race a social construct.
Racism “separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits,” wrote Dr. King. Such separatism appears to be the goal of those who claim to be his spiritual descendants.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
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https://www.dickmorris.com/the-little-known-beginning-of-the-civil-rights-movement-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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https://www.unz.com/mmalkin/top-3-reasons-to-doubt-the-ahmaud-just-a-jogger-arbery-narrative/
On the face of it all it certainly does look like cold blooded murder . And very suspicious .
That said look at the parade of race hustlers who have immediately jumped into the fray.
Enough to make Al Sharpton feel very very jealous.
Funny how lawyers always say "let's wait for the facts" - until pre judgement can fit into a leftist political agenda.
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/black-nationalism-white-supremacy
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WRM is always a worthwhile read. This is long but I post in its entirety because of limited access at his American Interest site. WRM is a Democrat, a historian, honest and very smart analytically, writes mostly on foreign policy. This is loaded with facts and history I really didn't know. In part, it is the antidote to the '1619 Project' (before there was one), telling far more accurately what really happened.
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"From 1947 through 1967, blacks’ median incomes rose at a blistering pace of 3.6 percent per year (while white median income grew on average by 2.8 percent per year)." [They were doing better before the 'war on poverty']
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Toward the end he points out blacks lost 59% of their net worth in the great recession (2008 etc) and whites lost 18%. Black unemployment was at 16.2 in June 2011, 3rd year of Pres. Barack Obama [before going to historic lows under Pres. Trump later].
[Some of his economic analysis such as the hollowing out of northern city manufacturing foretells the political rise of Trump.]
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/08/10/the-last-compromise/?utm-access=powerline
The Last Compromise
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The history of race in America has been one of a series of "great compromises", from the Founding up to the election of Barack Obama. There are signs that the latest compromise is breaking down.
Many hoped that the election of the first African-American President of the United States meant a decisive turn in the long and troubled history of race relations in the United States. And indeed President Obama’s election was a signal success for the American racial settlement of the 1970s. But at the moment of its greatest success, that settlement—call it the Compromise of 1977—was beginning to unravel, as evidenced by the fact that President Obama’s nearly four years in office to date have witnessed decades of economic progress and rising political power in black America shifting into reverse.
The race question is like no other in American life. From the beginning of the colonial era through the Civil War and up until today, American efforts to grapple with (or to avoid grappling with) the practical, moral, political and institutional consequences of race have shaped our political and institutional life. The Virginia House of Burgesses, the first elected assembly in the American colonies, assembled on July 30, 1619. In that same year the White Lion and the Treasurer docked in Virginia and unloaded the first African slaves to reach the present-day United States. Since that time, the stories of American representative government and race have been entangled in American history. The very structure of the Federal government and the nature of the party system were shaped by the slavery issue. The slavery question also shaped and ultimately limited national expansion. It affected the practical meaning of Federalism itself and the meaning of the rule of law. Nor is that entanglement yet over.
At every stage of American history, complicated political and economic compromises surrounded the question of race, each one managing it for a time but, despite the hopes of many, never settling it once and for all—not even by dint of a horrendously destructive civil war. The first of these was Compromise of 1787. The U.S. Constitution was written in a way that effectively banned Congress from interfering with slavery in the states, and the political interests of the slave states were protected further by the three-fifths clause as well as by weighted representation in the Senate and the Electoral College. On the other hand, that first compromise was shaped by the belief of many of the Founders, including enlightened slave owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, that economic progress would before very long make slavery unprofitable and that gradual emancipation on a state-by-state basis would bring an end to this evil. Thus when Congress gained the power to ban the importation of new slaves after 1807, it exercised that power at the first opportunity with the enthusiastic consent of Jefferson and many other slaveholders.
Alas, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the Industrial Revolution upset the constitutional settlement. Slavery transformed almost overnight from a dying and backward agricultural system into a vital link in the most dynamic industry of its time. The cotton looms of the industrializing world depended on slave-grown cotton from the American South. The huge returns on cotton spawned an enormous and complex web of interests. Great swathes of the shipping, insurance and banking industries of the North depended on slave-based commodity production in the South. As a result, the Compromise of 1787 no longer satisfied either pro- or anti-slavery forces. The slave system needed to expand; demand for cotton was growing exponentially but yields on cotton plantations fell as the demanding crop exhausted the soil. Anti-slavery forces, including the growing presence of educated free blacks in Northern states, no longer believed that slavery was on the road to extinction and began to worry that, instead of dying out, the economic power of the “slave interest” would increasingly dominate national politics.
The three great compromises of the antebellum years (1820, 1850 and 1854) each attempted to cope with the new situation created by the conversion of slavery into an aggressive and wealthy force that depended on territorial expansion. The formal elements of territorial compromise, dividing Federal territories into those open to slave settlement and those closed to it, aimed to preserve a rough electoral balance between slave and free states. These territorial concessions, however, could not offset the growing economic and demographic advantages of the free states. The railroad accomplished for the North’s free labor economy what the cotton gin had done for the South: thanks to the railroad, northern agricultural produce and manufactured goods became caught up in the rapidly expanding global economy. By the 1850s, the slave interest felt itself back on the defensive as new patterns of trade and production reduced the weight of cotton in the national economy.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln ran on a platform of what, in today’s language, might be called the containment of slavery. Lincoln essentially offered the slave states a return to the Compromise of 1787: He would preserve and even strengthen the constitutional protection of slavery where it existed, but he would prohibit the expansion of slavery into new territories. Additionally, the Republicans refused to expand into non-U.S. territories suitable for slavery; the 1850s had seen a range of diplomatic and filibustering efforts by Southerners aiming to annex Cuba and various parts of Central America in order to bring new “slavery-friendly” territory into the Union. In the efforts to find yet another sectional compromise to avoid civil war, Lincoln was adamant on the question of expansion, but he was flexible on the question of new constitutional guarantees to protect slavery where it already existed.
Indeed, oddly enough, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis shared the same belief about where a containment strategy would lead: If slavery could not expand, it would sooner or later disappear. Politically, the weight of the free states in the North would rise with slavery permanently confined to one section of the country, and economically the vitality of cotton agriculture would rapidly decline without fresh new land. Lincoln relished this future, but Davis was unwilling to consider any compromise that locked the South into a situation in which the territorial expansion of slavery could be blocked by Northern opposition. The South, in other words, was no longer content with the original racial compromises, which granted protection for slavery as it slowly withered away.
The result of this disagreement, of course, was a civil war and the forcible abolition of slavery. But the war did not remove the question of race from its place as a core factor in the shaping of American politics and order. Indeed, by taking slavery off the table, the Civil War raised the importance of race, for now that African Americans were all free, the question of their rights and their relationship to the Federal government moved to the forefront of American politics, and in many respects continues there today.
Before the Civil War, the question of the rights of free blacks, and indeed of all “persons of color”, was left to each state to decide. Some Northern states banned free blacks from settling there. Others gave them equal suffrage and property rights. In some states free blacks served on juries; in others they were excluded from the administration of justice. The slave states adopted codes of varying severity aimed at preventing free blacks from establishing rallying points for slave revolts. After the Civil War, questions about the place of free blacks in American life could no longer be treated as a secondary issue or left entirely to the states to decide. There were several states in which blacks were a majority—South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana—and, if allowed to vote, would dominate political life. The experience of the war, in which black soldiers fought and demonstrated heroism and courage, along with the strong sentiments in favor of equality that were reinforced by the war, gave new weight to demands for full social, political and economic rights for black people.
The politics of race thus became much more complicated during Reconstruction. For one thing, as a result of emancipation, the South actually stood to gain political power in Washington once the states of the former Confederacy were readmitted to the union. Blacks held in slavery counted as only three-fifths of a white man for purposes of allocating congressional seats and electoral votes. But now congressional representation had to be based on the full number of people living in a state. If blacks were denied the franchise but included in the census totals for assigning congressional seats and electoral votes, white Southerners would have gained political power by losing the Civil War.
The question of race relations in the South was intimately bound up in questions about the relations between the sections and the parties after the Civil War. In the end, a new great compromise was adopted that shaped American politics as well as race relations for almost a century. The Compromise of 1877, the year when the last Federal occupation troops left the last Southern states, had several dimensions. The South accepted the election of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency over Samuel J. Tilden despite clear evidence of fraud in exchange for the removal of the troops and the real end of Reconstruction.
But more fundamentally, the white South accepted the results of the Civil War, acknowledging that slavery, secession and the quest for sectional equality were all at an end. The South would live peacefully and ultimately patriotically in a union dominated by Northern capitalists. White Southerners might complain about Northern banks and plutocrats (and they did for decades), but they would not take up arms. For its part, the North agreed to ignore some inconvenient constitutional amendments of the Reconstruction period, allowing each Southern state to manage race relations as its white voters saw fit. In particular, the North allowed the South to deny blacks the vote while counting them for representational purposes. The Republicans also accepted the renewal of real party competition at the national level; while the GOP would mostly control the White House in the generation after 1877, the Democrats would often control one or both houses of Congress thanks to the new weight of the “Solid South.”
The defeated South also benefited from other elements of the Compromise. The death of the Southern wing of the Republican Party after 1877 made the South a de facto one party region, so that Southern Senators and Representatives accumulated enormous power under the seniority system. The Democratic Party’s rule, adopted in 1832, that a presidential nominee had to have the support of two-thirds of convention delegates, gave the white South an effective veto over the Democratic presidential nomination. This meant that no Democrat from the North with national political aspirations would alienate Southern powerbrokers.
For blacks, the Compromise of 1877 was a disaster. Not for another eighty years would the Federal government seriously try to uphold the constitutional rights of black Americans in the Southern states. Disarmed, degraded, denied the franchise in much of the country, black Americans were relegated to second-class status in civic life. Economically most blacks remained marginalized and held in conditions of peonage (sharecropping) that offered little more freedom and opportunity than slavery itself.
Yet even in these conditions, blacks found a way forward. Dogged by disabilities, discrimination and even mob violence, courageous and determined people built an educational system in both the North and South and created a vibrant and competent middle and upper-middle class. Lawyers, teachers and professors, business entrepreneurs and above all ministers of the Gospel gradually built a national infrastructure of black leadership that lead the fight for black rights in the courts, in the press and on the street.
The mechanization of Southern agriculture then combined with the 20th-century industrial boom in the great Northern cities to promote what has been called the Great Migration. Millions of African Americans streamed out of the South to establish themselves in cities like New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles. Though discrimination and segregation were still present in these cities, there was more opportunity and certainly more freedom from mob violence and terror than in the Jim Crow South. There was another difference, too. In the North, blacks could vote and, as the Great Migration persisted, black voting strength became a significant factor in Northern urban politics. Politicians from both parties courted blacks, and largely as a result the issue of Federal civil rights legislation, nearly dead by 1900, revived. The Compromise of 1877 was coming undone.
Changes in political economy had clearly influenced past racial settlements, and now this was happening again. When the black population in America consisted largely of economically dependent sharecroppers in isolated rural areas, its members had little ability to communicate or work effectively together. It was not possible in early 20th-century conditions to provide much beyond the most basic education in these rural areas, especially against the opposition of the local power structures. And since sharecroppers often struggled under long-term debt (and high interest rates), they were dependent on their landlords—so it took great courage to speak up against the system. That was the case even without taking the ever-present threat of white mob violence and lynching into account. Clearly, the end of the sharecropping economy, the rise of the mass-manufacturing system and its gradual extension from North to South undermined the conditions that sustained the Compromise of 1877. Urbanized Northern blacks were educationally more advanced and politically more active. Corporations moving manufacturing into the South found the Jim Crow system and racial hierarchy an obstacle. The New Deal and World War II dramatically accelerated all these trends as African Americans entered the modern economy, the manufacturing economy entered the South, and the mass conscription of World War II (soon renewed for the Cold War) forced the armed forces to re-examine the practicability of racial segregation under modern conditions.
The Compromise of 1877 thus came under increasing pressure during the 1940s and, by the end of the decade, was clearly coming apart. President Truman’s order desegregating the armed forces in 1948 and Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 marked the decline and fall of the post-Reconstruction racial settlement. From 1947 through 1967, blacks’ median incomes rose at a blistering pace of 3.6 percent per year (while white median income grew on average by 2.8 percent per year). This change both reflected the progress of the Civil Rights movement and fuelled its further development.
Over the generation after World War Two the interplay of the civil rights movement and white backlash against it dominated the American political scene. Mob violence in the South and devastating riots across the nation’s cities, in the worst episodes of domestic violence since the Civil War, led to the most important wave of political change since Reconstruction. They led to the Compromise of 1977.
As the Compromise of 1877 began to break down, the country struggled with a series of issues: the legally mandated segregation of schools and public accommodations, mostly in the South; private segregation in housing and associations like private clubs; discrimination in employment, whether formal or (as in the case of many trade unions, informal through control over entry into apprenticeship programs); racism as a set of preconceptions and negative stereotypes that influenced public and private judgments about black capabilities and rights; and a set of issues related to the treatment of the poor by the police and by various levels of government. That struggle, encapsulated in the catchall phrase “the civil rights era”, was one of great progress in race relations. To an extent that was unimaginable as recently as the 1930s, Americans of all races and sections examined and discarded old ideas and practices deeply embedded in popular culture. One can speak of a national conversion experience; the American worldview of 1970 was radically different from that of 1930, and the word “conversion” is used advisedly, for much of the change of the national heart was channeled through religious institutions. Racial inequality had been a fundamental working assumption of American life before the civil rights revolution; afterwards the country was committed to fight inequality and work to build a society in which all races had equal opportunity to succeed.
The Compromise of 1877 had been deeply woven into the country’s political institutions, and it was not easily dismantled. Even as demonstrations and sit-ins swept the country, powerful Southern conservatives kept new civil rights legislation bottled up. In the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson used his mastery of the Senate and his close relationships with Southern powerbrokers to push the Voting Rights Act through Congress, the dam burst, and American race relations were fundamentally recast. The politics of race in the civil rights era were bitter and complicated. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended most forms of legal discrimination and the Voting Rights Act undid a century of Southern resistance to black voting. But resistance to “forced bussing” to achieve school integration spread from the South to the North in those years, and the openly segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace shocked the country by running strongly in Democratic primaries in the Northern states. Waves of race riots in the nation’s cities coming after the passage of the civil rights laws and intensifying after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King demonstrated that black anger was far from appeased by the 1960s reforms. White flight hollowed out cities like Detroit as whites fled what to many seemed an intolerable mix of crime, racial violence and busing; after a century of forced silence and deference, blacks developed a new culture of assertion and pride.
In the end, Americans stitched together another complex racial settlement to replace the discarded post-Reconstruction compromise. This “Compromise of 1977” was never formally negotiated, but it provides the framework within which Americans continue to work as we struggle with the country’s racial issues.
The inauguration of Jimmy Carter, a white Southern evangelical who was liberal on racial issues but conservative on moral and some social ones, marked an end to the period when the politics of race played a decisive role in national elections. One can call the post-civil rights era that began in 1977 a settlement or a compromise because, once again, it balanced various claims and demands. At its core, the compromise offered blacks unprecedented economic opportunity and social equality, but it also allowed for the stern and unrelenting repression of inner-city lawlessness and crime. Blacks who were ready, willing and able to participate in the American system found an open door and a favoring wind; blacks who for whatever reason were unable or unwilling to “play by the rules” faced long terms in prisons where gang violence and rape were routine.
It was a liberal settlement, not a radical one; claims for reparations for slavery were rejected, but society sought to compensate for past discrimination by offering greater opportunity to individuals in the here and now. In the same way, it mandated the desegregation of schools and workplaces but, after some initial experiments, no serious efforts were made to force integration (as opposed to banning discrimination) in housing patterns. People who wanted to live “with their own kind” could still do so, but they could no longer invoke deed restrictions or other legal means to preserve what President Carter in an unfortunate turn of phrase called the “ethnic purity” of their neighborhoods.
There were other ways in which the settlement both advanced and contained black interests and aspirations. The Voting Rights Act, for example, not only firmly secured the franchise for blacks; it also required that legislative districts be drawn in such a way as to guarantee the creation of black-majority districts whenever possible. This ensured the greatest number of black elected officials since Reconstruction, increasing the number of black Congressmen from four in 1960 to 42 in 2010. Similarly, in 1964, 94 blacks were serving either as Representatives or Senators in state legislatures, of whom 16 served in Southern states. By 2009, 628 blacks served in these positions. But the additional numbers of black elected officials did not always result in more favorable political outcomes. By concentrating largely Democratic minority voters in a few districts, the reforms reduced the chances for Democratic majority legislatures in the affected states and reduced the number of Democrats returned to Congress from Southern states. Blacks were a larger share of a smaller party, and in many states Republican legislatures were able to pass pretty much any laws they wished over the objections of Democrats both black and white. Not surprisingly, many Republicans continued to support key provisions of the Voting Rights Act as they studied its political effect.
One distinct element of the new racial settlement was the centrality of urban policy. Blacks were the last major American ethnic group to urbanize, but, when the Great Migration ended in 1970, 47 percent of blacks lived outside the old Confederacy, and the majority nationwide lived in urban areas. Race policy had once been primarily about the rural South; for the past fifty years it has been almost a synonym for urban policy. A steady flow of funds to the cities from the 1960s Model Cities program to the present day supported expenses beyond what the local tax base could support. In many cities, black-run political machines built up encrusted systems of corruption and incompetence with little oversight or prosecutorial review, unless the corruption became truly spectacular—as in Detroit and a few other cities.
The most consequential element of the new settlement was the commitment to build something the United States had not had before: a substantial black middle class. The Federal and state governments, universities, and large corporations set about systematically to hire and promote blacks. When normal hiring and recruiting methods fell short, more unconventional forms of affirmative action ensued. Significant efforts to increase the pool of black students and graduates capable of filling these jobs were mounted, and success was particularly high in government. In 2011, 11.6 percent of the total American workforce was black, but blacks accounted for 21 percent of postal employees and 20 percent of government employees nationwide. Government is the largest employer of black men and the second largest employer of black women. Government jobs are especially important for the black middle class. Teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, state and city office workers, health workers: These are the jobs on which a generation of African Americans have built middle-class lives.
As American racial settlements go, the Compromise of 1977 was certainly the fairest and the most constructive in U.S. history. Under its terms, for the first time a majority of African-American families are middle class. Taking advantage of new opportunities in a host of fields, African Americans emerged as leaders; the upper ranks of the U.S. military, the legal profession, literature, journalism and the academy, too—all benefited from newly unleashed black talent. In entertainment, music and sports, where blacks had long succeeded as performers, blacks rose to the top and became not just stars but owners, coaches and moguls. Popular racial attitudes changed dramatically; race prejudice was no longer acceptable in polite society, and interracial marriage, once illegal in many states, became widespread.
Yet as relatively benign as it was, the Compromise of 1977 did not end America’s racial problem. The majority of blacks may have achieved, however precariously, a middle-class standard of living, but the large minority of blacks who did not get there found themselves trapped in an intensifying cycle of poverty, social dysfunction and despair. Conditions in many American cities deteriorated dramatically as white flight, globalization (destroying the manufacturing base of many rust belt cities), poor governance and the drug trade ravaged urban America. The heavy police presence and law enforcement crackdowns sent a growing proportion of young black men to prison. Weak family structures, absent fathers, abysmal schools and the consequences of a culture in which drug abuse and violence were widespread placed almost insuperable barriers in the way of young generations of African Americans born into the inner cities.
In some ways the City of Baltimore as depicted in The Wire is a disturbingly accurate picture of inner-city African-American life three decades into the post-civil rights era racial settlement. We see blacks represented in positions of authority in many though not all institutions; city government, the police and the schools have a particularly strong black presence. But we also see the projects, the prisons, the long-term unemployed and the hopeless. And dominating the picture is the decline in Baltimore’s economic situation: the port, the freight yards and manufacturing no longer provide steady work at middle- or lower-middle-class wages for Baltimoreans black or white. Baltimore has negotiated a careful and reasonably successful compromise that both races can live with, but the bottom has fallen out from under the city’s economy. The inner city’s social structure has imploded as a consequence, the political culture makes Tammany Hall look like Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, and thousands of young black children are growing up in a murderous and toxic—and almost totally segregated—world.
The election of President Obama marked both the definitive triumph of the 1977 racial settlement and the beginning of its end. A generation of national struggle against the spirit of race prejudice had created the closest thing to a color-blind electorate American politics had ever known. A generation of opening doors to talented blacks provided the opportunity for not just Barack Obama but a galaxy of African-American leaders in business, politics and culture to reach the summit of national life.
But the financial crisis that helped Obama win election in time devastated the black middle class and demonstrated the extent to which the core economic assumptions that shaped the new era in race relations were under threat. The housing bubble’s greatest victims were striving minorities; a combination of well-intentioned efforts to increase home ownership among low-income and minority families with unscrupulous and irresponsible Wall Street lending products left millions of Americans stuck with pricey mortgages in overvalued properties.
Worse, state and local governments were hit hard by the ensuing recession. Massive government layoffs rippled across the country as revenues fell and governments frantically slashed their budgets. Blacks are disproportionately represented among government employees, and government employment has been a mainstay of the new black middle class. The numbers are therefore revealing. Black unemployment under President Obama hit 16.2 percent (June 2011). The median net worth of black households collapsed, falling by 59 percent between 2005 and 2010, wiping out twenty years of progress and plunging to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first term. By comparison, the net worth of white households only fell by 18 percent from 2005 to 2010. The gap between black and white net worth doubled during the Great Recession, and the “wealth gap” between the races rose; the median white household had 22 times the net worth of the median black household. Moreover, the damage to black prospects will not soon be repaired. Indeed, if we now (as seems likely) face a prolonged period of austerity and restructuring in government, there will be fewer job openings and stagnant or falling wages and benefits in the middle-class occupations where blacks have enjoyed the greatest success.
Politics will probably make the government jobs squeeze worse. The black middle class isn’t based so largely on government jobs because blacks aren’t entrepreneurial or because they have some natural affinity for bureaucratic paper pushing. Historically, municipal government in particular has been a major avenue for the economic advancement of different American ethnic groups. The Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles and many others used their voting strength in urban centers to elect politicians sympathetic to the interests of their group, and over time that turned into municipal jobs for many voters and contracts for others. The urban ethnic political machines and their traditions of patronage, wholesale electoral fraud and influence peddling often led to bad governance, but historically the system did help millions of new immigrants bootstrap themselves into the American middle class. Charlie Rangel and William Jefferson aren’t evidence of some peculiar disease of black urban politics; they are as American as Tammany Hall.
The rise of black voting power in American cities led naturally to improved access for black workers to city jobs, just as Tammany Hall once helped the Irish and other political organizations helped other groups get that first toehold on the first rung of the ladder of success. Blacks, whose Great Migration to the Northern cities came as World War I and immigration restrictions closed the door to European immigrants early in the 20th century, were (until the recent Hispanic influx) the last major group to colonize America’s great cities; it is the misfortune of black America to be establishing a middle class on the basis of government work just as the economic foundations of government are shifting.
Now, however, urban demographics are changing, and the politics of urban employment will change with it. In cities like Los Angeles, New York and even Washington, DC, black political power has begun to decline. Spanish-speaking immigrants and immigrants from Asia are exerting more power in local elections, and the patronage networks that have served blacks well in recent decades will now increasingly serve other client groups. An influx of affluent whites, who dislike machine politics and want to improve services like schools while cutting costs, puts additional pressure on the patronage networks. Add the squeeze on state and municipal government hiring together with a decline in relative black political power, and the future is not particularly hard to calculate.
But the true dimension of the dangers facing the black middle class emerges only if we look at the full range of changes taking place in the American economy. Affirmative action and other methods of improving black access to middle-class jobs work best in large, stable firms with fairly bureaucratic structures and large numbers of employees performing reasonably similar functions. The U.S. Postal Service, regulated utilities, universities, healthcare firms, mass-market manufacturers like the automobile industry and large clerical intensive firms like national insurance companies have established programs that have been successful at hiring, training and promoting minority employees in middle-class and professional jobs. The trouble is, healthcare excepted, these firms are being forced to change their ways of doing business. In some cases, like the USPS, large layoffs have already taken place: Its headcount will drop by 220,000 by 2015. Other employers are busily outsourcing or automating many of the functions that once provided stable middle-class livelihoods for large groups of workers.
Perhaps worse, new business and new industrial facilities are often built in places where not many blacks live. Some of this is to avoid the high costs and heavy regulatory burdens associated with most urban locations. It is much cheaper to set up operations in the exurbs than in the inner suburbs and inner cities where many blacks live. The heavy compliance burdens imposed by environmental, construction and other regulations on urban areas discourage startups in precisely those areas where minority unemployment is highest. There is also a troubling pattern of foreign investment going into parts of the country where fewer minorities live. I have heard from both German and Japanese sources over the years that the absence of large black populations has influenced choices about, for example, locating new factories away from the South Carolina Low Country and the Mississippi Delta. It would be hard to prove that race alone is shaping these decisions, but race has clearly been a factor in the location of some significant foreign-owned plants.
Since 1979, manufacturing employment has been declining throughout the country, but it has declined farther and faster in cities with large black populations. Between 1990 and 2011, manufacturing employment fell by 34 percent across the country; in Detroit it fell by 53 percent, in Baltimore by 52 percent, in Flint by 80 percent, and in Los Angeles by 55 percent.
One of the tragedies of black history in America is that blacks often only get to the gravy train when the locomotive is coming to the end of its run. Blacks are qualifying in large numbers for civil service pensions just as those pensions are looking shaky. Blacks have moved into professional, middle-class government employment just as state and local governments are heading over the financial cliff. In the same way, blacks came relatively late to the other pillar of 20th– century American middle class prosperity: manufacturing jobs. For the European migrants to American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as productivity rose (and as immigration restrictions cut off the supply of low-wage competition), rising manufacturing wages and employment opened the door to mass prosperity. The children and grandchildren of immigrant factory workers would go to college, enter the professions and also build new businesses, but that factory employment gave the economic stability that underwrote the economic integration of whole waves of immigrants into the American system. Blacks, drawn to the urban North after European immigration was curtailed by World War I and the draconian restrictions passed in its aftermath, came late to the factory economy as well. Many labor unions refused to accept black apprentices into skilled trades until the 1960s. Formal and informal systems of discrimination kept blacks from competing on equal terms for many factory jobs in the North and South until well into the 1970s.
But again, many blacks got into the game just as the game was starting to change. As a percentage of the labor force, manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979. Since that time, a combination of productivity-raising technological change, global competition, the full entry of women into the labor force and the start of a new wave of mass immigration following immigration law changes in 1965 has held real wages down and reduced opportunities for struggling urban families to achieve a secure footing in the middle class.
Exacerbating these problems is the challenging nature of urban life for poor young people. Many of the waves of immigrants into American cities come from the countryside where there are strong religious and cultural patterns that help people live disciplined lives. Over time, those values and institutions lose their hold on immigrants living in new and unfamiliar urban surroundings. Youth gangs, the excitements and temptations of city life and the easy availability of demoralizing drugs, from alcohol to the many stimulants available today, threaten the ability of new urban generations to acquire the habits and skills that make success possible. Religious institutions, schools and social initiatives like Jane Addams’ Hull House have for many generations been fighting the forces of personal and social disorganization that take a great toll in each rising generation of poor urban young people, whether we are thinking about Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles or blacks. And the longer a population remains trapped in urban poverty, the deeper the damage to new generations.
Over the past two centuries, the question of race in America has been indissolubly linked to the general social and economic development of the country. That is not surprising; blacks and whites live and work in the same economy and the same forces act on their lives. But race and the history of race have meant that these forces play out in different ways. Just as past compromises going back to 1787 were based on the political economy of the day, the Compromise of 1977 reflected the nature of American economic and political life at that time. The United States was then still in the late heyday of the “blue social model.” Stable corporate oligopolies provided lifetime employment for both blue- and white-collar workers. Both public and private entities were bureaucratically organized with large clerical staffs dedicated to relatively low-skilled information processing. Employment in government and in the academy was rapidly expanding, and real wages had been rising for a generation. Manufacturing employment was high and presumably headed higher. The Compromise of 1977 was predicated on the assumption that these conditions would endure; they have not, and race relations must once again be rethought.
As Americans ponder how to build a prosperous and equitable post-industrial society, the question of race must be on the table. The racial policies reflected in the Compromise of 1977 do not suffice today. For much of the 20th century, the core problem facing black America was one of access. If blacks could get into the building and manufacturing unions on equal terms, they could build middle-class lives. If blacks could gain access to civil service and municipal jobs on the same terms as whites, they could enjoy a rising middle-class standard of living. If blacks could gain access to credentialing institutions like colleges, they could move into white collar and professional jobs—again, if they could compete on equal terms.
In the 21st century, access has not disappeared as an issue. Poor black kids in a chaotic, crime-ridden neighborhood with no option but to attend lousy schools can hardly be said to enjoy equal access to the opportunities of American life. But for the growing number of middle-class blacks, the problem today is less one of access than it is that the social model on which the progress of the past half-century depended is disintegrating. It’s no good having equal access to factory jobs if those jobs are disappearing. It’s no good having equal access to municipal government jobs if the city is laying off rather than hiring, and if wages and benefits for the jobs that remain are being cut. It’s no good having a pipeline into the healthcare sector if that sector faces an immense financial crisis and is skidding along on an unsustainable path. For blacks, as for all Americans, the central problem today isn’t how to get access to blue model jobs. It’s what to do next. This is not a racial problem, of course, but given the special circumstances and unique history of black America, those who want to get past blue are going to have to reckon with black. And in the reckoning we must recognize that we have no guarantees that the generally positive trajectory of the past half-century in race relations will persist if the underlying supports for it in the political economy fall away. That will surely affect the contours of the next great compromise, whenever it forms and whatever its terms.
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There are some race disproportions in our society. Blacks are disproportionately arrested. Blacks are disproportionately victims of crime. Blacks disproportionately commit crimes. Blacks disproportionately don't want to be police officers. Blacks are disproportionately poor. Blacks disproportionately live outside our productive, taxed economy. Blacks have worse graduation rates. Blacks disproportionately use and rely on our social spending networks. And so on.
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Blacks should be arrested less, but not by ignoring crime. Blacks should have similar educational opportunities and income outcomes to any other group, by not by giving out preferences based on race. (MHO)
These statistics don't make clear what should done about it. De-fund police? Bad idea. Pull the police out of black neighborhoods? Likewise.
Get more people out of work onto welfare? No. Most of what we do about these problems make things worse.
Just before COVID we were seeing the lowest black unemployment rates in (recent?) history. Employment, like marriage and family, makes people want to have a clean record and good credit, be responsible stakeholders in our society.
My view, stop emphasizing race and focus on connecting choices within your control with results. Do the basics. Finish high school on schedule. Further your education to the level that makes sense for your aptitude, interests, abilities. Get a job before marrying. Marry before having children. Open your own business if employers won't pay you what your worth. Obey the law. Do what the cop says when he's got you. Report his badge later, if called for. These things apply to all, but if blacks are at a disadvantage in our society, then it all applies to them even more.
One thing I can say about the people setting fire to the buildings and the Pulitzer Prize winning NYT author who says arson isn't violence...
... "you didn't build that".
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IN conjunction with Doug's post above
read this professors tweets:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ucf-professor-under-fire-claiming-170223339.html
Ahhh all the virtuous white saviors I know...........
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https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1268212431404142593
Thomas Sowell
@ThomasSowell
Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on election day.
11:06 AM · Jun 3, 2020·
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If the mission of this group is to get everyone to acknowledge the humanity of blacks, not to be an anarchy supporting terror group, why can't we all knowledge all blacks are human? It's proven in science and kind of obvious, fully supported in law, medicine and divinity.
Far as I can see, everyone agrees on this - except perhaps the black lives slaughterhouses of abortion and the anti-constitution distortionists who support them.
If the mission is really something else, like destruction of our economic system, don't tell us it's just to recognize our common humanity.
"the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women" . Who knew?
https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2008/08/abortion-and-women-color-bigger-picture
THAT is equal justice? Science based? Results oriented? Smart governing? Fair? Good God.
How many George Floyds in THAT toll?? Millions and millions.
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What policies help blacks most? Policies of law and order to feel safe in your home and business and policies of free market capitalism that science tells us lifted more people out of poverty in this nation and in the world than all other approaches combined. Where is that message in these Left governed cities and states?
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https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/03/i-did-not-kill-george-floyd/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/al-sharpton-is-not-a-civil-rights-hero/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88-dV9K_cHE&feature=share
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88-dV9K_cHE&feature=share
Well worth watching. Surprised he hasn't been de-personed by the Goolag yet.
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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/12/the_new_religion_of_woke_anti-racism_143431.html
and their missionaries the left stream media
and their church of the DNC
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAMWsWvcbtg
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http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/focus/20151025/africas-role-slavery
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/frances-failed-color-blind-experiment/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202020-07-18&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/the-fallacy-of-white-privilege-and-how-its-corroding-society/
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https://www.city-journal.org/conversation-on-race-and-equality
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https://dailycaller.com/2020/08/05/transgender-surgery-mental-health-study-american-psychiatric-association/
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The Resilience of the Black American
The racial grievance industry ignores inspiring examples of African-American achievement.
By Robert L. Woodson Sr.
Aug. 6, 2020 1:27 pm ET
Taxpayer-funded institutions are now adding their voices to the movement against “systemic racism”—the invisible legacy of slavery and discrimination that supposedly determines the destiny of black Americans. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture last month posted a graphic on its website outlining the “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States.” The document maintained that “white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time” and “we have all internalized some aspects of white culture—including people of color.”
From the sounds of it, these “assumptions” are the types of things that would be debilitating and deleterious to minorities should they adopt and practice them in their lives. Assumptions such as “hard work is the key to success,” “the nuclear family . . . is the ideal social unit” and “plan for [the] future” are offered as examples of “white dominant culture.” In fact, the qualities attributed to “whiteness” are the same principles and values that have empowered blacks in America to succeed despite lingering discrimination and bigotry. The museum removed the graphic after a public outcry, saying “it’s not working in the way we intended.”
The whiteness graphic is merely one of hundreds of capitulations to the demeaning and disabling message of racial grievance merchants, who claim that any and all failures of black Americans are attributable to so-called systemic racism. Institutions that had once been trusted to provide steppingstones to achievement have jettisoned the principles of personal responsibility and self-determination.
The stories of men and women for whom oppression triggered resilience and success have been redacted from politically correct, grievance-based histories such as “The 1619 Project.” The mission of the Woodson Center, and the “1776 Project,” is to rescue those inspiring examples of achievement against the odds—both historical and current.
If you asked young black students today who the Golden 13 were, few would be able to identify the group of determined African-American servicemen who won a noble victory in an era in which blacks were prohibited from becoming naval officers. At the insistence of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a crop of 16 college-educated black cadets were chosen for line-officer training in 1944.
To ensure their failure, the normal training period of 16 weeks was reduced to eight weeks for the black cadets. When they realized that someone in the Navy wanted them to wash out, the cadets covered up the windows of their barracks and studied all night. When they were tested, the entire group passed with high marks. Disbelief in the chain of command that an all-black cadet class could achieve higher scores than an all-white one meant that the black sailors had to suffer the indignity of retaking their tests. Again, all 16 passed, but the Navy offered commissions to only 13.
This grit and determination to succeed has been repeated over and over again. You can find it the bestselling book and award-winning movie “Hidden Figures”—the story of the three black female mathematicians who played a critical role in astronaut John Glenn’s 1962 mission to orbit the earth aboard the Friendship 7.
Three years ago, I attended a talk by the book’s author, Margot Lee Shetterly. The reaction to her presentation underscored the thirst within the black community for inspiring messages of success against all odds. The 1,000-seat auditorium was filled to capacity with a predominantly African-American audience. People were standing in the balcony and along the walls. Hundreds milled in front of the building after the fire marshal determined that the building’s capacity had been reached. The 100 books that the organizers had brought to the venue were sold out well before the presentation began. Even the local bookstores couldn’t scrounge up a copy. During the question-and-answer session, some in the audience lamented not having heard about Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan earlier. Children raised their hands excitedly to learn more.
“Hidden Figures” is but one of thousands of black American stories demonstrating that the most powerful antidote to disrespect isn’t protest but performance and the most potent answer to repression is resilience. Sadly, these sentiments are off-message for black elites, liberals in academia and cable-news talking-heads, who prefer the narrative of black victimization by “whiteness.”
Those who attribute all failure of blacks in America—academic, occupational and even moral—to an all-purpose invisible villain of “institutional racism” are betraying those they purport to represent. Those who shake their fists and proclaim that a change in white America is a prerequisite for black achievement are embracing a version of white supremacy. This debilitating dynamic is exacerbated by the guilt among white liberals, who approach the black community with a combination of pity, patronage and pandering.
Black Americans must refuse to surrender to incompetence, self-devaluation and self-marginalization. Every day at my office, I pass a wall with a photograph of a group of slaves from 1861. The photo is titled “Strength” and features the quotation: “The strongest people in the world are not those most protected: They are the ones who must struggle against adversity and obstacles and surmount them to survive.”
The Golden 13 and the women of “Hidden Figures” embodied this maxim. As Ms. Shetterly declared at her book signing: “These are the kinds of stories that change your life. You see people doing these amazing things and you internalize it, you normalize it, and it completely changes your inner landscape and what you believe is possible.”
Mr. Woodson is founder and president of the Woodson Center
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/19/21116713/civil-rights-christopher-caldwell-age-of-entitlement
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Justice Goes to Yale
The university is told it is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 13, 2020 7:20 pm ET
On Thursday the Justice Department put Yale University on notice: If by Aug. 27 the school doesn’t agree to stop discriminating by race in admissions, the U.S. “will be prepared to file a lawsuit to enforce Yale’s Title VI obligations.”
The notice follows a two-year investigation spurred by a complaint from Asian-American groups. Among the findings is that Yale “uses race at multiple points in its admissions process,” and that race is the “determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.” In other words, kids who would otherwise be accepted to Yale are denied solely because of skin color.
In his letter to Yale, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband puts it this way: “Asian American and White applicants have only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials.” In his press release he added: “There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination.”
As a private institution Yale can admit anyone it wants. But Yale accepts millions of taxpayer dollars each year under the condition that it will comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Supreme Court has said universities can consider race as one factor among many, but Justice’s investigation concludes that Yale’s use of race is “anything but limited.”
The case is timely given that a federal judge ruled last year for Harvard in a similar case, which is on appeal. The Supreme Court will have to speak clearly at last for this discrimination by race to end, but Justice’s warning to Yale is a move in the right direction.
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https://www.lifezette.com/2020/09/dc-professor-lies-about-being-black-for-job-preference/?utm_source=activeengage&utm_medium=email
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/06/pollak-eight-years-later-andrew-breitbart-vindicated-on-critical-race-theory/
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https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2020/09/18/indianapolis-activist-satchuel-cole-lied-being-black/3486542001/
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Haven't read this yet:
https://longreads.com/2019/09/23/downsizing-the-american-black-middle-class/
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second
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/jw-sues-cali-quotas/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20201006171119
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16560/black-lives-matter-appraisals-2
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16610/black-lives-matter-appraisals-3
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/judicial-watch-sues-california-to-prevent-enforcement-of-race-ethnicity-sexual-preference-and-transgender-status-quotas-for-corporate-boards-of-directors/
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She used a anti homosexual "dog whistle"
sex preference not orientation
what..........!
I get it - it ain't a choice it is what ever it is genetic learned whatever.
She should only be allowed on the bench if she takes a sexual orientation course - she needs a thorough education
on all the gender stuff. - heavy on sarcasm:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/sexual-preference-why-amy-coney-barretts-use-of-the-term-ignited-criticism-in-the-senate-and-across-the-internet-144311322.html
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Education or race?
https://www.thecollegefix.com/university-of-minnesota-lecture-features-12-step-recovery-program-for-whiteness/
University of Minnesota lecture features 12 step recovery program for whiteness
The University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work hosted a virtual lecture recently that aimed to teach white people about their white supremacy and how to counteract it by using a “12 step” program mirrored after the one used by people in Alcoholics Anonymous.
The two-hour “Recovery from White Conditioning” lecture, hosted through the school’s Center for Practice Transformation, featured therapist Cristina Combs.
Combs is a University of Minnesota alumnus who created the white supremacy 12 step program “after years of struggling to navigate the role and presence of whiteness in her personal, academic, and professional journeys,” according to the university’s website.
The university’s website indicates the lecture can earn viewers continuing education units.
Combs said her program helps people recover from their whiteness.
“I also want to hold that alongside the tension that, in this model, we are, in fact, centering whiteness, but we are centering it differently: to expose it, study its patterns, and to transform its violent legacy,” she said.
Combs began the lecture by acknowledging that “I am on traditional Dakota land,” the territory of a Native American tribe which settled in Minnesota. She also acknowledged “George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and all of the other lives stolen from families and communities and our world due to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence.”
She then talked about the goal of the lecture: to “decenter whiteness.”
Combs asked attendees: “What comes to mind when you hear the term ‘white supremacy?’”
As an answer to the question, she displayed a slide titled “The face of white supremacy.” Under the title were pictures of Ku Klux Klan members as well as white nationalists in Charlottesville. She then took those images off and put a picture of her own face on the screen.
“When BIPOC activists would use the term ‘white supremacy’ to talk about the systems that needed to change and the work that white people needed to do, my instinct was to recoil. It felt like too hard or too raw of a word, and I didn’t like it. And I ultimately realized that that is my ego,” she said.
“Stepping into that tension and accepting my connection to white supremacy has been a freedom of sorts to show up in better alignment with my values and do the work for the rest of my life.”
Before diving into her 12-step model, Combs prefaced it by quoting feminist author Bell Hooks in saying that “‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ [is] the power structure underlying the social order.”
Nevertheless, Combs said, “It is sometimes necessary to focus singularly on race,” before beginning her summary of the 12 steps.
Step 1: “We admitted that we had been socially conditioned by the ideology of white supremacy.”
Combs played a video of a young white girl who was shown drawings of a cartoon child in varying pigments of skin color. When asked which ones had positive characteristics like “pretty” or “smart,” she would point to the white figures. When asked about negative characteristics like “mean” or “ugly,” she pointed to the dark figures.
“We have been socially conditioned. [White supremacy] is in us. It will always be here. We will always have to work against it in this journey of transformation,” she said.
Step 2: “We came to believe that we could embrace our ignorance as an invitation to learn.”
Combs decried the fact that people make statements like: “I don’t understand why Black Lives Matter has to protest on the highway.”
“If, however, a white person says, ‘I don’t have lived experience that informs me of a risk so great that I would put my body on the line…I have so much I need to learn. I wonder where I can go and seek that knowledge.’ The route is the same: the ignorance, the things that we don’t know,” she said.
Step 3: “We develop support systems to keep us engaged in this work.”
“Far too often people rush in [to the work of social justice], make a mistake, and then turn away. Our commitment is to build support systems and practices that keep us coming back to our core humanity and then showing up in a spirit of accountability and solidarity forward,” Combs said.
Step 4: “We journeyed boldly inward, exploring and acknowledging ways in which white supremacist teachings have been integrated into our minds and spirits.”
Combs displayed a worksheet for people to fill out in order to examine how “white supremacy has negatively impacted” topics like “My Understanding of History, My Social Network, How I Interact with People of Color, and (Micro)aggressions I Perpetrate.”
According to Combs, the prefix in “(micro)aggressions” is in parentheses due to the fact that “I am done calling them ‘micro,’ because they hurt.”
Step 5: “We confessed our mistakes and failings to ourselves and others.”
“We know that we are gonna make mistakes, and so Step 5 is about coming back and sharing that and learning the lessons and sharing them with others,” Combs said.
Step 6: “We were entirely ready to deconstruct previous ways of knowing, as they have been developed through the lens of white supremacy.”
Combs displayed a meme of Morpheus from The Matrix saying, “What if I told you it’s ok to change your opinion based on new information.” According to Combs, “Step 6 is really about just acknowledging and sitting with that.”
Step 7: “We humbly explored new ways of understanding…proactively seeking out new learning and reconstructing a more inclusive sense of reality.”
Combs displayed a list of authors who can help with this step, including Audre Lorde, Chimamanda Adichie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Step 8: “We committed ourselves to ongoing study of our racial biases, conscious or unconscious, and our maladaptive patterns of white supremacist thinking.”
According to Combs, many members call this step “the slimy step.”
However, Combs said, that slime — people’s unconscious biases — are necessary to face. She quoted James Baldwin in saying, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
She compared this process to tracking the “automatic negative thoughts” of people who are struggling with depression.
Step 9: “We develop strategies to counteract our racial biases.”
In this step, Combs talked about thinking about people of color positively.
She said that one of her members, when she sees black people out in public, will repeat out loud to herself, “Hello my brother, Hello my sister, Hello my sibling.” This repetition, she said, is private and non-disruptive to those around her.
Step 10: “We embraced the responsibility of focusing on our impact, more than our intentions, in interactions with people of color.”
Combs included a passage from Ken Hardy called “Intentions: Province of the Privileged.”
She said that it is unacceptable that “[white people] want to sit and clarify that we didn’t mean it and someone else misunderstood while our BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] siblings are living with the impact.”
Step 11: “We engage in daily practices of self-reflection.”
“Forever and always, for the rest of our lives, we can notice and study where our issues are and how we’re gonna be more courageous the next day,” Combs said of this step.
Step 12: “We committed ourselves to sharing this message with our white brothers, sisters, and siblings…in order to build a supportive recovery community and to encourage personal accountability within our culture.”
“Step 12 is about saying, ‘We have to go and get our people and work on our communal transformation,” Combs said. She encouraged attendees to ask themselves: “Who are your heroes? What are your songs, traditions, rituals, rules of admonishment?”
After she finished talking about the 12 steps, Combs revealed the outline of what a gathering of those looking for a “Recovery from White Conditioning” meeting would look like.
Meetings start with a “Call to Recovery,” a quote from author Shailja Patel: “We are here to be fully human to ourselves, fully accountable to each other.”
After house-keeping concerns like introductions and announcements, attendees will undergo a minute of silent reflection, read about “a white anti-racist, then discuss the particular step they are focusing on in that meeting,” she said.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/25/black-and-white-americans-can-now-agree-o-j-was-guilty/
maybe 20 yrs alter more blacks (whoops I mean Blacks) will admit that cheating went on in grand scale in 2020 election
hahahhahahahhahahaha
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/76351-the-racist-agenda-behind-anti-race-training-2020-12-10?mailing_id=5495&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5495&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76350-the-virus-of-critical-race-theory-2020-12-10
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2018 estimate of US doctor demographics by race and sex:
https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure-18-percentage-all-active-physicians-race/ethnicity-2018
US population 2019 by race :
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
Asians outperform as far as percentage
Blacks underperform
Does this support the notion that *race * is not the issue
Economics probably do
and the Asians who came here and their offspring are a select group of high achievers
but that said race did not stop them.
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If You Must Talk About Race, Be Gracious
Racism is no longer systemic in the United States. Trust me.
By Rodney Stevens
Dec. 28, 2020 5:59 pm ET
WSJ
America is still obsessed with race, and these days people seem to see only strife and injustice. But as the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict once wrote in her journal, “The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.”
I grew up black in the 1960s in a small South Carolina town. Trust me, today’s America is nothing like it was then. And even under segregation, the marginalization was not total. My father was a plumber, my mother a school librarian. We were treated kindly. The local shopkeepers wanted our business, but they also wanted to avoid trouble from the few who believed wholeheartedly in racial segregation.
The segregation wasn’t uniform. One doctor had a separate waiting room; the other didn’t. Ditto for the town’s two dentists. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed separate facilities, things opened up very quickly.
Many of the authors, commentators and journalists who spend all their energy thinking and talking about race today fail to acknowledge how much has improved with regard to race in this country. There are countless successful black Americans today—doctors and lawyers, entrepreneurs and academics, journalists and artists, compassionate politicians and famous Hollywood actors. Their numbers will keep growing as long as we remember six things:
First, every life matters. Mine is not one cell more or less valuable than anyone else’s. That this idea has to be debated or defended is lunacy.
Second, racism still exists but it is no longer systemic. Those who claim that racism is everywhere today are delusional.
Third, we tend to think too highly of our individuality. My color, weight, sex and sexual orientation are four of the least interesting things about me. I am a Southerner and love Southern food. Now that is interesting.
Fourth, policemen have to be held accountable for their actions, as is being done more and more.
Fifth, do what law enforcement officers ask you to do. Obviously that won’t solve every problem because policemen are humans, not angels. But that’s part of life. Simply doing what the people in blue ask you to do would drastically reduce needless confrontations, injuries and deaths.
Sixth, if you must talk about race, be gracious and respectful. Discussions about it shouldn’t be antagonistic—one’s race isn’t a choice, after all—but for some reason many popular figures insist on making the subject as unpleasant as possible.
Genuine insight generally doesn’t make you angry and anxious. It makes you smile, and generates gratitude.
Mr. Stevens is a writer and life-coach in Columbia, S.C.
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"racism still exists but it is no longer systemic"
- You are not allowed to say that in much of America.
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Woodson in the WSJ. This is some quality writing IMHO:
====================
The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens. King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise.
Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.
The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.
First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.
Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.
Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course.
Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism.
In the 20th century, that same creative conflict between these three schools of thought reappeared. Debaters included the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa, which sought to establish a separate black state within our borders as an exit strategy.
King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice. In 1960, when students in Greensboro, N.C., became frustrated with the slow pace of legal action favored by Thurgood Marshall, King was sent to discourage them from engaging in civil disobedience. The students told King to lead, follow or get out of the way. They were determined to liberate themselves. They understood the difficulties and were undeterred by the obstacles. Like King, they were willing to persevere toward justice even when it was inconvenient, and to suffer the consequences of their actions. Hope, not hopelessness, animated all that they did.
King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable. Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed. Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.
One of the original arguments to justify slavery was that blacks were morally inferior and thus incapable of self-government. John C. Calhoun famously asserted: “There is no instance of any civilized colored race of any shade being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.” Black efforts at self-liberation in the 19th and 20th centuries were based on the opposite assumption.
Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”
Civil-rights organizations and their leadership, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, need to wake up before it’s too late. A faction of black leaders has been silent about, or complicit in, the takeover of the civil-rights movement by the radical left. The effect of this is not to glorify black achievement but to crucify low-income blacks, who are represented in national media outlets by their worst-behaved members, and bear the brunt of the attacks by the woke radical left on the cities where they live.
“Justice” for black America cannot be achieved by framing it solely through the distorted lens of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in fatal police encounters. For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides.
Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown. When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy? These positions of the organization—language that has largely been scrubbed from its website—in no way improve the lives of black Americans. They give up on black America and encourage its needless suffering.
Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility. In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass found reading to be the key to his own personal liberation amid slavery, and he understood that whites deliberately withheld literacy from blacks precisely because it was so valuable. Bourgeois values drove blacks to build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow and cultivated the essential virtues in the next generation.
There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture. The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline—indulging in the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or other unsalutary forms of expression. The radical left—disdaining exhortations toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable of self-restraint.
The slave masters’ trick of old was to dissuade blacks from adopting bourgeois values precisely so they could be kept in servitude. Marriage was forbidden and families were split apart.
Douglass observed that slaves were encouraged to indulge in drink and debauchery during the holidays so they would be “led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.”
But there were always those who saw through the trick and used the holidays to hunt, make items for sale, visit distant family members, and hire out their own labor. Some of these were even able—eventually—to purchase their freedom.
Tellingly, leftist elites teach their own children the values of working and studying hard even as they encourage behavior among blacks that will make sure they remain uncompetitive but “authentic.” By the time young blacks today discover, as did the slaves of Douglass’s time, that freedom understood as “do whatever you feel like” is no way to build a worthwhile life, it will be too late. The fruits of the civil-rights movement’s hard labor—teaching the young to be so self-disciplined that they were able to resist responding in kind to hatred and abuse from whites—will have been lost.
We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us all.
Mr. Woodson, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, is founder and president of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles.” Mr. Mitchell is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Center for the American Way of Life and author of “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”
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https://dc.claremont.org/translating-social-justice-newspeak/?fbclid=IwAR09oFmBm-nzkh_aC_hTKd02PegCvK5dUdF-7Yq46b4_L9FiORh8cGmwSfU
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Charles Murray's Brave New Book
Douglas Andrews
Tuesday of this week marked the four-year anniversary of one of the most shameful episodes in the modern history of the American university. It happened at Middlebury College in Vermont, where political scientist, author, and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray was, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "shouted down by an angry mob clearly unable to challenge him intellectually."
Murray was ultimately taken to another location on campus, but not before Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor who escorted him away, was injured and sent to the hospital. (And we're told students need safe spaces?)
Murray, a libertarian, has been a favorite whipping boy of the Left since the 1994 publication of his book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. As Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, writes, "[The book] has very little to say about race. But it argues that a considerable portion of intelligence — 40 to 80 percent — is heritable; and it also argues that intelligence tests are generally reliable. Those ideas irritate people who have a deep investment in three beliefs: extreme human plasticity; the social origins of inequality; and the possibility of engineering our institutions to create complete social justice."
No wonder the infantile little Maoists at Middlebury got so riled up. Their target, though, whom Power Line's John Hinderaker dubbed "the bravest man in America," has been undeterred.
Murray has a new book coming out on June 15 titled Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In it, he takes on the twin leftist cudgels of "white privilege" and "systemic racism," and he does so by exploring what he calls "two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt" — namely, that our nation's major racial and ethnic groups have different rates of violent crime and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.
Why would Murray want to explore such a sensitive topic? Perhaps, as George Mallory once replied when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, "Because it's there."
"America's most precious ideal," says the book's description on Amazon, "is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation."
The lie that must be repudiated, however, is that the U.S. is a nation irredeemably shot through with racism and white privilege. As Hinderaker points out, "As of 2018 Census Bureau data, whites are 17th among ethnic groups in median income, trailing not only just about every Asian minority, including Iranians and Pakistanis, but also African immigrant groups like Nigerian-Americans and Ghanian-Americans. The case for American 'white supremacy' is ludicrously weak, but it may be a capital offense to point that fact out."
It'll be interesting to see whether Jeff Bezos and his fellow book-banners at Amazon have the guts to keep Charles Murray's book listed on their website.
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Funny how math being white supremacy and all, has Indians and Chinese dominating the subject.
Charles Murray's Brave New Book
Douglas Andrews
Tuesday of this week marked the four-year anniversary of one of the most shameful episodes in the modern history of the American university. It happened at Middlebury College in Vermont, where political scientist, author, and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray was, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "shouted down by an angry mob clearly unable to challenge him intellectually."
Murray was ultimately taken to another location on campus, but not before Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor who escorted him away, was injured and sent to the hospital. (And we're told students need safe spaces?)
Murray, a libertarian, has been a favorite whipping boy of the Left since the 1994 publication of his book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. As Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, writes, "[The book] has very little to say about race. But it argues that a considerable portion of intelligence — 40 to 80 percent — is heritable; and it also argues that intelligence tests are generally reliable. Those ideas irritate people who have a deep investment in three beliefs: extreme human plasticity; the social origins of inequality; and the possibility of engineering our institutions to create complete social justice."
No wonder the infantile little Maoists at Middlebury got so riled up. Their target, though, whom Power Line's John Hinderaker dubbed "the bravest man in America," has been undeterred.
Murray has a new book coming out on June 15 titled Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In it, he takes on the twin leftist cudgels of "white privilege" and "systemic racism," and he does so by exploring what he calls "two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt" — namely, that our nation's major racial and ethnic groups have different rates of violent crime and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.
Why would Murray want to explore such a sensitive topic? Perhaps, as George Mallory once replied when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, "Because it's there."
"America's most precious ideal," says the book's description on Amazon, "is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation."
The lie that must be repudiated, however, is that the U.S. is a nation irredeemably shot through with racism and white privilege. As Hinderaker points out, "As of 2018 Census Bureau data, whites are 17th among ethnic groups in median income, trailing not only just about every Asian minority, including Iranians and Pakistanis, but also African immigrant groups like Nigerian-Americans and Ghanian-Americans. The case for American 'white supremacy' is ludicrously weak, but it may be a capital offense to point that fact out."
It'll be interesting to see whether Jeff Bezos and his fellow book-banners at Amazon have the guts to keep Charles Murray's book listed on their website.
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"Funny how math being white supremacy and all, has Indians and Chinese dominating the subject."
I actually owned the book at one time but only read part of it
the races in terms of intellectual abilities
with extreme overlaps
ranked this was
Asians top
Whites middle
Blacks bottom
I know Blacks who are far smarter then me
and Asians who are not
I can't vouch for intelligence but to deny racial differences in sport is just stupid:
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290809-lemaitre-why-it-matters-the-fastest-white-man-on-earth-is-well-white
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https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php
"Funny how math being white supremacy and all, has Indians and Chinese dominating the subject."
I actually owned the book at one time but only read part of it
the races in terms of intellectual abilities
with extreme overlaps
ranked this was
Asians top
Whites middle
Blacks bottom
I know Blacks who are far smarter then me
and Asians who are not
I can't vouch for intelligence but to deny racial differences in sport is just stupid:
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290809-lemaitre-why-it-matters-the-fastest-white-man-on-earth-is-well-white
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wjc3M_bGP8&t=250s
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/11/why-asking-about-race-should-be-illegal/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/11/why-asking-about-race-should-be-illegal/
Right. First question on a mortgage application is race. FAFSA student loans, same. First question should be content of your character per MLK. BLM and 'woke' have taken us 180 degrees in opposite direction, which is all wrong. Enhanced race awareness is the problem, not the solution. More important than race is whether you pay your bills, show up to work on time, or in tennis, can he or she hit a second serve with spin and accuracy, not color of skin.
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The race question is on every state medical license application
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quote author=ccp
"The race question is on every state medical license application."
Because nothing is more relevant to medical care than race??
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are these graphs about race or about education?
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/05/Math-Scores.jpeg?w=790&ssl=1)
Why are we measuring individuals by group? Race is one way to group people. Another might be the education of the parents. Number of parents in the home. Curfew time on school nights. Hours spent on homework. Nutrition, sugar intake or how many eat a full serving of vegetable with dinner. But no. It's ALL about race.
The group we rightly worry about is called underperforming children, not people of color. Also proven in the graph is that many blacks and Hispanics are doing well. Interesting that Asians (also not one group) are people of color, people facing hate according to the left, and are out-performing whites. IT'S NOT ABOUT RACE.
Even if you accept this artificial frame of thinking, an educator's reaction to it should be:
How can we raise the line for ALL these groups? Movement toward equalization would happen far better if the emphasis were on all the other factors, not the thing you can't do anything about.
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/20/the-dirty-little-secret-of-anti-asian-violence-and-how-the-left-stopped-talking-about-it-n1448403
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/05/23/joe-biden-hosting-george-floyd-family-at-the-white-house-to-mark-anniversary-of-his-death/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bpr-y9yo0E
This is one scary politician.
"...Because if you're going to come to this table, all of you who have aspirations of running for office. If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don't need any more brown faces that don't want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don't want to be a black voice. We don't need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don't want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don't even show up because we need you to represent that voice."
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Well, that was flagrant , , ,
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Well, that was flagrant , , ,
It was revealing. Gaffe for a Leftist is when they reveal what they really believe. Stay in your lane, you people of color. Don't wander off. Don't have a fresh point of view. We don't need another viewpoint. Agree with us of STFU. What could be more demeaning.
What I think it means is that black conservative have finally hit a nerve, reached critical mass. The Left can feel it. They're losing ownership of blacks and minorities, finally.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/07/new-york-psychiatrist-admits-in-yale-lecture-to-fantasizing-about-shooting-white-people/
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Interesting time graph of abolitions around the world, all seems to start with some Americans declaring all men are created equal and their rights come from God.
https://amac.us/the-graph-that-shatters-crt-july-4-1776-set-slavery-on-the-path-to-worldwide-extinction/
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Nice find!
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Interesting time graph of abolitions around the world, all seems to start with some Americans declaring all men are created equal and their rights come from God.
https://amac.us/the-graph-that-shatters-crt-july-4-1776-set-slavery-on-the-path-to-worldwide-extinction/
Still lots of slavery in Africa and the Islamic world. Funny how that avoids mention so often.
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https://babylonbee.com/news/mounting-evidence-indicates-critical-race-theory-escaped-from-a-lab-in-a-college-humanities-department/
Babylon Bee is looking into the possibility that this weapon escaped from a lab on an American college campus.
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Funded by China!
https://babylonbee.com/news/mounting-evidence-indicates-critical-race-theory-escaped-from-a-lab-in-a-college-humanities-department/
Babylon Bee is looking into the possibility that this weapon escaped from a lab on an American college campus.
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https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2021/07/11/conservative-national-radio-host-wayne-allyn-root-announces-support-for-black-reparations-n2592315
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White Supremacy is the biggest problem we face?!
Even though we can only identify a hundred of them in a nation of 330 million.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/02/20/where-is-all-the-white-supremacy-stuff-bill-oreilly-debunks-dem-claims-with-cold-hard-facts-1032784/
... DoJ data showing that in all of 2019, there were only five federal cases brought against alleged white supremacists. In 2020 there were just five more cases brought against suspected white supremacists.
---------------------------------------------------------
The problem is all inside their own head. They think all conservatives are racist because they don't want to give blacks special treatment. Conservatives don't recognize the inadequacies that liberals see in blacks, like being unable to do math or show ID. Conservatives think blacks will do fine by just being given basic levels of educational and economic freedom, like school choice, free markets and limited government. Those who believe that strongly are dangerous! More dangerous than Islamic jihad. More dangerous than Chinese expansionism. More dangerous to think blacks perfectly capable than to continue policies that bring us 200 shootings per weekend in Chicago.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFicDB1Kt4w
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGUi7ezxcTk
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https://www.deseret.com/2005/7/5/19900747/thomas-sowell-redneck-culture-to-blame-for-lack-of-intellectual-development?fbclid=IwAR3kcETgY5jYQR9QPjucS68QQuFPi4Z9TkmO86OAXvzIMOHshKO0yR5L6aI
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4th post
Why the Lawyers Cartel Is Pushing for Woke Law Schools
The ABA’s proposed accrediting standards would impose uniformity and call it ‘diversity.’
By John O. McGinnis
July 15, 2021 1:01 pm ET
The American Bar Association is proposing new accrediting standards for law schools that would make them more race-conscious, more politically correct and less intellectually diverse. The proposal should fail on the merits. It’s so bad it should also prompt reconsiderations of the ABA’s role as accreditor of law schools and of the U.S. Supreme Court precedent on racial preferences in law-school admissions.
Having lawyers regulate entrance into their own profession has always been anomalous. The ABA has an abiding interest in making entry more expensive—it decreases competition for its current members. But now the ABA wants to use wokeness to raise operating costs, impose ideological uniformity, and reduce academic freedom. The new standards would require law schools to show continuous “progress” toward diversifying their faculties and student bodies. They would be encouraged to do it on a timetable, as if a school can predict when someone of a particular race who meets often specialized curricular and research needs will show up. The ABA also wants to add new diversity requirements for ethnicity and gender identity.
Notably absent is any requirement that faculty be intellectually diverse. The ABA is content to have professors singing from the same political hymnal so long they create the favored mix of races, genders and sexual preferences. A recent study in the Journal of Legal Studies shows that a hiring focus on many of the ABA’s preferred characteristics makes law faculties even more left-wing than they already are.
The ABA’s total disregard for viewpoint variety undermines the diversity rationale that has been used to justify discrimination in law-school admissions. If adopted, it could finally encourage the Supreme Court to abandon the notion that choosing students by demography advances the life of the mind.
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Many states have laws on the books prohibiting public universities from considering race and sex in hiring and admissions. The new proposal explicitly states that such laws provide no justification for noncompliance with its diversification requirements. The pre-eminent organization of American lawyers is inviting lawlessness.
The standard also would require law schools to create an “inclusive and equitable environment for students, faculty and staff.” Inclusivity and equity are euphemisms that in the current climate almost certainly mean the opposite of what you’d expect them. The ABA’s guidance on how to comply encourages evaluation of “academic outcomes disaggregated” by minority status. At many law schools groups identified by minority status are admitted with different median grades and test scores. Yet these measures are required of all applicants because they predict law-school performance. Thus, assuring “equitable” outcomes would over time likely make grading and other benchmarks less accurate. And it could well upend established methods of instruction. While the Socratic method is inclusive in that everyone gets grilled, some theorists of “inclusivity” complain that aggressive questioning makes some students uncomfortable.
The guidance also would encourage “diversity, equity and inclusion training.” Such training can amount to indoctrination. It is a violation of academic freedom to require faculty to accept value-laden propositions about the ideological concepts of diversity and equity.
The ABA also would require that students be educated in “cross-cultural competency.” Again the concept isn’t clear, but its indeterminacy offers a convenient vessel for pouring in propaganda about race and ethnicity. A law school should not be required to teach such a course any more than it should be required to teach courses in relations among the sexes or the sociology of class.
The proposed new standards would undoubtedly provide jobs for diversity bureaucrats and consultants. Thus the cost of legal education would rise, making it less affordable, particularly for those of modest means.
To be sure, some law schools asked the ABA to add the new requirements. But that is what cartels do: require standardized services rather than the product differentiation that encourages competition. Nonprofits, like law schools, also have incentives to indulge in politics as well as price distortion, because their stakeholders substitute ideological satisfactions for the additional profits a corporate cartel could earn. Thus, there is even less reason to have lawyers control the production of lawyers than there is to have milk producers regulate the production of milk. At least farmers don’t have dogmas to impose.
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5th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjuK4x1o5bg&t=1s
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH72f62kCIU&t=252s
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/university-of-maryland-adds-new-ethnic-category-for-students-of-color-minus-asian/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/university-of-maryland-adds-new-ethnic-category-for-students-of-color-minus-asian/
Just formalizing something that has been a practice for a long time.
Funny how things run by dems end up with detailed racial discriminatory structures.
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https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1458985538334068740?s=20
I was assured this would not happen.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/25/stfu-about-racial-justice-if-you-dont-raise-your-voice-about-our-failing-schools/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/critical-race-theory-used-to-usher-in-communist-agenda-says-philosophy-professor_4126930.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-12-06&mktids=66665d50c01c691b90e3c21ab9f25ce0&est=8RWaz617jpMC44t6%2Fwh6TaF1n8q1eQAEJoeK%2FA2xcJPWqEFBO7bsW2F%2BT3I8eNdHYEdE
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".Derrick Bell, an African American and civil rights lawyer often credited as one of the originators of CRT, held that racial progress only occurred in America when it aligned with the interests of the white population, and doubted whether racial equality would ever be achieved in the country."
yeah right
whites perceived the Civil War was good for them.
yes it was to save the Union but the Union was in peril because of slavery .
and the 1964 civil rights act..........
and I could go on.
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http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=397331
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http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=397331
The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition
—CBD
punk-monkey.jpg
So 50 years after the Stonewall riots, this is what Homosexual Incorporated has devolved to? I find it increasingly difficult to feel any sympathy for the poor downtrodden homosexual communities of America that are represented by maniacs who want nothing less than total and complete obeisance to whatever they conjure in their bigoted heads as the next gay rights insanity.
Where is the typical gay couple I hear so much about? I thought all they wanted was to be left alone and treated just like everyone else? What happened to respecting other people's freedoms? Why aren't they writing letters to the editor and protesting and withholding their donations? The silence is deafening!
LGBT Activists Have Been Using Courts To Harass This Christian Baker For Ten Years
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court found Phillips was essentially the victim of government entities prejudiced against Christians and other traditional religions, noting the personal hostility expressed against him by commission members.
“Colorado officials compared Jack’s plea for religious freedom to some of the worst things in American history, such as the Holocaust and slavery,” noted Phillips’s current lawyer, Jacob Warner, in a phone interview. Warner works for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has defended Phillips pro bono in court. “The Supreme Court didn’t need to reach the free speech issue because of that animosity and that left the door open for other litigation.”
According to court documents, Scardina has sought for many years to harm Phillips due to his religious beliefs and public stand on their behalf. During trial, for example, Scardina said the goal of this suit was to “correct” the “errors of [Phillips’s] thinking.”
Also during the current case, “Scardina promised Phillips that, were this suit dismissed, Scardina would call Phillips the next day, to request another cake and start another lawsuit,” notes Phillips’s most recent court filing (emphasis original). Court document say Scardina has also harassed Phillips by email, calling him a “bigot” and “hypocrite.”
This is the leftist playbook, as anyone who has been paying attention will appreciate. Break down traditional norms...blur the bright lines that constrain a moral society's behavior...destroy objective measures of behavior. Oh, and on the way increase the power of the state to demand specific behaviors that are contrary to established law and antithetical to a free society.
The useful idiots that Lenin identified are in this case the homosexual rights movement. And they are doing fine work! Although I wonder whether they have sufficient historical perspective to understand that homosexual rights are not high up on the list of important things among the hard left that will take advantage of all of their work.
How are gay rights in China? Cuba? Venezuela?
Until that typical gay couple takes the freedoms of others seriously and disavows the overtly political behavior of many of their national organizations, why should I pay any attention to their freedoms?
Am I holding them accountable for the behavior of those who claim to represent them? Damned straight! Just as I hold my relatives accountable for the arrant stupidity of many national Jewish organizations that seemingly work for the destruction of the West, Israel and Judaism.
Is that fair? No, and I don't care. We are long past the time when rational men can have rational political and social disagreements and then simply move on to other things. Forcing a baker to work against his religion and political philosophy is evil. Those who support that coercion -- whether it is active or passive support -- support evil.
This is the fight. There is no other hill. There is no other fight for which we should conserve our ammunition. The West is under siege. Freedom is under siege. American Exceptionalism is under siege.
Can anyone look to the future and see a free America if we do not fight now?
Because I can't.
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/marxist-los-angeles-da-george-gascon-charges-26-year-old-transgender-juvenile-sex-assault-10-year-old-girl/
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397509.php
Jim Snow laws
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Update on Pennsylvania Woman Who Came Into Contact With Escaped Monkeys
By Jack Phillips January 27, 2022 Updated: January 27, 2022biggersmaller Print
A woman who said she came into contact with escaped monkeys in Pennsylvania several days ago said that she’s not sick.
“I want people to know I am not sick, I found out I was at a birthday party Friday night and people there had COVID-19,” Michelle Fallon told local news outlet the Daily Item. “I was exposed to the monkeys and exposed to people with COVID. It was the worst day of my life.”
Fallon, meanwhile, said she was only taking precautions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state health officials.
“I explained what happened and they said I was at very low risk of anything but I went to get checked out anyway because I started to not feel well,” Fallon told the newspaper. “I want people to know I am not sick regardless of what they are reading that has been put out there in the media,” she continued. “I only spoke to a few media outlets but I have been talking to PETA.”
Pennsylvania State Police said on Jan. 21 that a trailer collided with a dump truck causing crates of monkeys to be dumped near Route 54 and Interstate 80 in Danville, Pennsylvania. Three of the animals escaped but were eventually captured and euthanized, officials said.
In a Facebook post and in interviews with local media, Fallon said she came into close contact with the monkeys after believing they were cats. She said she developed pink-eye and other symptoms after coming into close contact with one of the primates.
“I was behind the truck that was in the accident and I saw when the truck veered off the road and saw the incident,” she said.
When approaching the crates that fell from the truck, Fallon recalled, “So I was like ‘well let me make sure these cats are OK’ so I approached a crate and saw the fur and heard a grunting sound. … I was confused about what kind of cats they were until I picked up the green cloth.”
“When I picked up the cloth a monkey popped up and hissed at me,” she added. “I said, ‘oh, my God it’s a monkey’ and I backed away and the driver told me to not go near them because they were not quarantined and he had to get back to Missouri.”
The monkey escape incident is being investigated by the U.S Department of Agriculture, or USDA, following a complaint that was filed by the activist group the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
The Epoch Times has contacted Fallon for comment.
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using their self appointed girl status to get out of the country
probably to traverse the Southern US border (easy to cross that)
and apply to UCLA or Yale for a swim scholarship
:wink:https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/03/23/youre-a-guy-go-to-war-fleeing-ukrainian-trans-woman-turned-back-at-border/
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Cognitive dissonance for CRT/Systemic Racist theories?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans...
Socioeconomics
Education
Oyekunle Olukotun, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, known as the "father of the multi-core processor"[20][21]
According to Rice University research, Nigerian Americans are the most educated group in the United States.[22][23]
According to the 2008-2012 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 61.4% of Nigerian Americans aged 25 years or older hold a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to 28.5% of the total U.S. population.[24] The Migration Policy Institute reports that 29% of Nigerian Americans have a master's degree, PhD, or an advanced professional degree (compared to 11% of the U.S population overall).[3] Nigerian Americans are also known for their contributions to medicine, science, technology, arts and literature.[25]
Nigerian culture has long emphasized education, placing value on pursuing academic excellence as a means to financial security.[26] Examples of Nigerian Americans in education include Akintunde Akinwande, Oyekunle Olukotun, Jacob Olupona and Dehlia Umunna, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Harvard University respectively. Recent famous examples include ImeIme Umana, the first Black woman to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review,[27] Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman to become the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO),[28] and Tanitoluwa Adewumi, a homeless child refugee who went on to become a chess prodigy.[29][30][31][32][33] Examples of Nigerian Americans in popular media include Dr. Bennet Omalu, portrayed in the 2015 film Concussion,[34] and Emmanuel Acho, host of the weekly activist webcast Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.[35]
A large percentage of Black students at highly selective top universities are immigrants or children of immigrants. Harvard University, for example, has estimated that more than one-third of its Black student body consists of recent immigrants or their children, or were of mixed-race parentage.[36] Other top universities, including Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Rice, Duke and Berkeley, report a similar pattern.[37] As a result, there is a question as to whether affirmative action programs adequately reach their original targets: African Americans who are descendants of American slaves and their discriminatory history in the US.[36]
According to the 2021 Open Doors report, the top five U.S. institutions with the largest student population of Nigerian descent (in no particular order) are Texas Southern University, University of Houston, University of Texas at Arlington, University of North Texas, and Houston Community College.[38][39] According to Institute of International Education's 2017 Open Doors report, 11,710 international students from Nigeria studied in the U.S. during the 2016–17 academic year, the 12th highest country of origin and highest of any African country.[40]
Income
In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households. [41] In 2012, Nigerian-Americans had a poverty rate of 12.8%, lower than the U.S. national average of 14.9% and lower than the total African-American poverty rate of 27.2%.[42][43]
Relations with other black Americans
In 2017, sociologist Onoso Imoagene argued that second generation Nigerian-Americans are forming a distinct "diasporic Nigerian ethnicity" rather than assimilating into the mainstream African-American culture, in contrast to what should have been predicted by segmented assimilation theory.[44] Limited sociological research suggests that Nigerian-Americans may have a more positive opinion of the American police compared to the broader black community.[45] The Marshall Project and Prison Legal News have reported that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice heavily recruits Nigerians to serve as guards in Texas prisons, where a significant proportion of the prisoners are black.[46][47]
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/resegregating-american-education/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202022-07-17&utm_term=WIR-Smart
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Everyone is full of shit on this topic.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/resegregating-american-education/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202022-07-17&utm_term=WIR-Smart
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thj7YcALgmE&t=14s
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PUBLIC HEALTH
Monkeypox link to sex, gay men divides officials over guidance
BY TOM HOWELL JR. THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Public health officials are grappling with how far to go in advising gay men to alter their sexual behavior as the monkeypox virus spreads mostly through their social networks but is a threat to anyone.
The World Health Organization chief specifically advised gay men to reduce their number of sexual partners, but other health officials, including the health commissioner in New York City, have warned that abstinence messages don’t work.
The Biden administration is taking a middle road. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent days updated its guidance to say anyone — not just gay men — can limit their exposure to monkeypox by limiting sexual partners and avoiding “spaces like back rooms, saunas, sex clubs, or private and public sex parties, where intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners occurs.”
The updated CDC page features an illustration of
two men lying together, but its language is broad-based and refers to female body parts, too.
“Every American must do their part to help us beat back monkeypox,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Tuesday.
Although recent cases in non-endemic countries are concentrated in men who have sex with men, experts say it is only a matter of time before the virus spreads more widely. Illinois health officials on Friday said an adult at an Illinois day care center tested positive for monkeypox, setting off an effort to figure out whether children were exposed and infected.
“We’re looking for cases in [the LGBTQ] community, so we’re finding them there. But we need to start looking for cases in the broader community,” former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
For now, officials estimate that 98% of cases are in men who report having sex with men.
Some experts say messaging is not an either-or debate and the public health community can help gay men who have been hit the hardest by monkeypox without stigmatizing them.
“If we don’t want to repeat the blunders of early days of HIV, then we must focus on gay men — that is where the disease is in [the] USA,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Explain why it is there. Expand testing fast to this group. Initiate contact tracing. Promote healthy sex and healthy hygiene practices. Get the damn vaccines into at-risk arms. Stigma is bad — infected is worse.”
He said it would be best for policymakers to link talk of abstinence with messages on safer sex or good hygiene, akin to general sexual education messaging that includes contraception or counseling about pregnancy alongside abstinence.
The U.S. has reported more than 8,900 cases of monkeypox, which is endemic to parts of Africa but started spreading in the U.S., Europe and other non-endemic countries this spring.
Monkeypox is not classified as a sexually transmitted infection and can be spread through other forms of close personal contact.
The virus is related to smallpox and features a rash with painful lesions. A small percentage of cases are fatal, though the CDC hasn’t reported any deaths in the U.S. since cases started to appear.
Other countries, including Brazil and Spain, have reported the first deaths outside of Africa in recent weeks.
Biden administration officials say they are scrambling to distribute Jynneos vaccines to at-risk people to wrangle the virus and avoid bad outcomes.
The White House on Tuesday announced a “dose-sparing” plan that involves injecting one-fifth of a dose into the upper layer of skin rather than deeper. The idea is to spur a decent immune response while getting five times as many doses from a single vial of the vaccine.
Demetre Daskalakis, the deputy monkeypox coordinator for President Biden, said advice about sexual activity is “not a forever thing” but a “for-now thing” as officials develop and distribute vaccines and drugs to try to stop the disease.
“Given the current limited supply of vaccine, consider temporarily changing some behaviors that may increase your risk of being exposed. These temporary changes will help slow the spread of monkeypox until vaccine supply is adequate,” the updated CDC page says.
The White House, meanwhile, said those in at-risk communities should talk to their doctors about curtailing sex while waiting for a vaccine.
“I am not a medical provider,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday. “But I would say talk to your medical provider and get the information that you need so that you are protecting yourself and you know how to move forward.”
Health officials in New York have toured gay bars and taverns to get the word out about monkeypox and vaccines in the hard-hit community. However, New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan has said that trying to police the LBGTQ community’s sex practices is stigmatizing and self-defeating.
“Abstinence as a message doesn’t really work. We know this. It’s not a good public health tool because it’s really about giving people the information to make good choices,” he told CNN last month.
Not everyone agrees with the approach. Don Weiss, an epidemiologist in the city health department, has urged New York leaders to be more forceful in advising men to abstain from anonymous sex.
“We cannot vaccinate our way out of this, nor can we isolate our way out of this. The only way out is to abstain. I know I sound like a bible-thumping preacher, but this is the exposure we need to PREVENT. We don’t have much time to intervene and it may already be too late,” he said in a June email posted online.
Others have taken to social media to point out that members of society were asked to mask up, socially distance and close their businesses during COVID-19, but officials seem unwilling to single out certain behaviors around monkeypox.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said curtailing sex partners is a practical step for gay men, though countries should be careful not to alienate certain communities.
“For men who have sex with men, this includes, for the moment, reducing your number of sexual partners, reconsidering considering sex with new partners, and exchanging contact details with any new partners to enable follow-up if needed,” he said in late July, though added: “The stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus.”
Cameron Bartosiewicz, president of the Youth Pride Association, said the best way to avoid harm or unintended stigma is for officials to focus on providing accurate information and effective guidance to the public so all people can assess their personal risks and act accordingly.
“The current approach by some public health organizations in telling gay men to practice abstinence is only perpetuating stigmatization and providing a false sense of security among non- LGBTQ populations,” he said.
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https://nypost.com/2022/08/16/white-minnesota-teachers-would-be-laid-off-first-under-new-contract/
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Two cases on colleges first steps to erase race
Activist pursues colorblind culture
BY ALEX SWOYER THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Checking a box for race on an application has become as common as providing an email address or a phone number. Edward Blum wants it to stop.
And he thinks he’s got the court case that can begin to do it.
Mr. Blum is president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that will appear before the Supreme Court this year in two major cases challenging the way race is factored into selecting students at Harvard University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He hopes the justices will issue a ruling that will reach far beyond the ivy walls of academia.
“This case may end the use of race in college admissions, but hopefully also create a road map for ending these ever-present racial classification boxes that are used in other areas of our lives such as employment and contracting,” he said in an interview with The Washington Times. “These race boxes are the pathways to discrimination.”
It’s an audacious goal, particularly while race is becoming even more entrenched as the defining classification for much of American society in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 in the custody of Minneapolis police officers and the ensuing debate over the centrality of discrimination in American society and history.
The justices will step into that conversation on Oct. 31 when they hear Mr. Blum’s cases, which are among the most anticipated of the upcoming term.
Mr. Blum says the schools’ interest in enrolling more Black and Hispanic students has led to discrimination against Asian and Asian American students, who would comprise a higher percentage of admissions if the schools made decisions only on objective measures such as grades and test scores.
The schools counter that diversity is an important part of a well-rounded education and they should be allowed to consider race as one of multiple factors in admissions.
The universities say they are on firm footing given the Supreme Court’s precedents, including a 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the justices said in a 5-4 decision that race could be
considered as long as it is “narrowly tailored.”
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the key opinion in that case, put an informal time limit on how long she thought the practice should last. She acknowledged that affirmative action programs clashed with the ideal of a colorblind, merit-based society.
“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” she wrote.
Mr. Blum is bringing his challenge six years before that deadline, but he told The Washington Times that it’s past time to fix a wrongly decided case.
“Students for Fair Admissions has argued that the Grutter opinion was wrong the day it was decided, which includes the 25-year cutoff point for racial classifications and preferences. No amount of time should have been given to any university to treat applicants differently because of their skin color or ethnic heritage,” Mr. Blum said.
This isn’t Mr. Blum’s first attempt to get the high court to rewrite the way the federal government treats race.
In 2013, he went toe-to-toe with the Obama administration and won a ruling scaling back rules implemented under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision, Shelby County v. Holder, upended the decades-old system of labeling states as so racist historically that they needed approval from the Justice Department for any changes to voting standards and systems.
Without that ruling, states such as Georgia and Arizona would have had a much tougher time tightening some of their voting procedures after the 2020 elections.
Three years before he took the voting rights case to the high court, Mr. Blum was instrumental in bringing another affirmative action case to the justices, the 2010 Fisher case, in which the high court largely upheld the University of Texas-Austin’s affirmative action policies in a reaffirmation of the principles of the Grutter ruling.
The plaintiff in that case, high school student Abigail Fisher, was White and said she was denied admission to the Texas flagship university because of racial preferences.
Mr. Blum figured he might get a different outcome if he could show that the policies were harming another racial or ethnic minority, so he created three websites looking for plaintiffs of Asian heritage and found them. The legal challenges claim Harvard discriminated against Asian American students with admissions policies that favor other races, while the North Carolina lawsuit says the school’s race-conscious admissions standards violate the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The approach instantly transformed the case from a narrative of “Whites versus minorities” to a more nuanced look at the actual winners and losers in racial preference programs such as the ones at Harvard.
Critics on the left say Mr. Blum is being disingenuous with his challenge and increasing animosity between racial groups as a way to boost his own agenda.
In a 2018 profile, the American Civil Liberties Union called the challenge a “cynical attempt to use members of the Asian-American community” and that Mr. Blum “seeks to pit people of color against one another.”
“If Blum gets his wish, statistical projections show that white applicants will be the primary beneficiaries,” the ACLU said.
In the case now before the justices, the ACLU has filed a brief siding with the schools. The brief says the courts should defer to the universities’ judgments on education matters and the way to build the best student population.
“Racial diversity is essential to their intellectual and pedagogical missions,” the ACLU argued.
Harvard didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.
UNC, which unlike Harvard is a publicly funded school, responded by pointing to Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz’s comment this summer to a campus news site, The Well, where he defended the university’s approach.
“At Carolina, we have long been recognized for making an affordable, highquality education broadly accessible to the people of North Carolina and beyond,” he said. “Carolina is passionately public, and we’re proud to be one of the few flagship universities to practice need-blind admissions and provide lowdebt, full-need student aid. Our approach to admissions serves the university’s mission and reflects our core values. Every student earns their place at Carolina.”
In both the Harvard and UNC cases, lower courts have sided with the schools.
The Biden administration has weighed in on the side of Harvard and UNC. The Justice Department is urging the high court to maintain the legal precedents allowing race-based affirmative action policies.
“The United States has a vital interest in ensuring that our nation’s institutions of higher education — including the military’s service academies — produce graduates who come from all segments of society and who are prepared to succeed and lead in an increasingly diverse nation,” the federal government wrote in its brief in the case
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second
Catholic schools draw clear lines on gender
Dioceses want no identity crises
BY MARK A. KELLNER THE WASHINGTON TIMES
An official statement saying its parochial school students will have to conform to the gender with which they were born or leave school has put the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha squarely in the middle of a raging national debate over gender, identity and faith.
At least two other U.S. Catholic dioceses also have issued statements affirming what they say is church teaching on gender dysphoria. The Omaha, Nebraska, document has drawn local attention for its assertion that students who won’t conform to their biological gender may not be “a proper fit” for Catholic school education.
“Students will conduct themselves in accord with their biological sex on parish and school campuses as well as during parish and school-sponsored activities off campus,” the “Archdiocese of Omaha Pastoral Guidelines for Gender Dysphoria” document reads. The rule will apply to “restrooms, dress codes, athletics, single-sex small groups, housing at overnight events and dates for parish and school-sponsored events,” a local church official said.
In addition, the document said, “Catholic parishes and schools will not allow or otherwise cooperate in the administration of puberty-blocking or cross-sex hormones on school property.”
The rules will take effect on Jan. 1, the Omaha World-Herald reported. Archbishop George Lucas said the newspaper endorsed the policy.
The diocese of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, also released guidelines this month. The diocese advises that “those who cannot accept” the church’s norms on gender can go elsewhere for education.
Students in Sioux Falls diocesan schools “are to wear only those uniforms and conform to all dress codes in accord with his or her biological sex,” the rules state, and restroom use “will align with his/her sex.”
The Sioux Falls statement also says “students, teachers and school personnel must use accurate gender references and language in all circumstances and at all times” and when classmates use “inconsistent” pronouns for a given student, “this behavior shall be addressed immediately.”
Bill Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League, praised the Sioux Falls document as “fair, yet firm, and in complete agreement with Catholic moral theology and social teachings.”
He said Sioux Falls Bishop Donald E. DeGrood “has the wisdom and courage not to duck the hard questions that such a policy entails, especially these days.”
The Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, put forth its statement on gender last year. In a policy document for schools, the diocese said cases of gender dysphoria “need to be handled with gentle and compassionate pastoral skill and concern, with the utmost sensitivity and charity, while avoiding all unjust discrimination.”
It notes that Catholic teaching “emphasizes the personal unity of body and soul, and the importance of accepting one’s sexed body as a gift from our Creator. Consequently, the Catholic Church opposes all interventions intended to facilitate the individual’s rejection of his or her biological sex, or to facilitate the individual’s assertion of an identity at odds with biological sex.” Requests to use “an identity at odds with biological sex … will be denied.”
The Arlington policy does not say nonconforming students will be denied admission, but it is firm on such hotbutton issues as the use of personal pronouns favored by the individual: “All young people and their family members will be addressed and referred to with pronouns and names or nicknames consistent with their God-given biological sex. If a young person or family member proposes the use of any different name or nickname (male, female or neutral) in connection with the assertion of an identity at odds with biological sex, that request will be denied.”
The Archdiocese of Washington did not respond to a request by The Washington Times for comment on its policies for gender dysphoria among its students.
However, a posted “Admissions and Non-Discrimination Policy” states that while its schools “are not required to adopt any rule, regulation or policy that conflicts with the religious or moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church,” Maryland law requires such schools not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Not everyone in the Roman Catholic community endorses the statements. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest whose Outreach faith website seeks to “build bridges” with the LGBTQ community and has been lauded by Pope Francis, said in an email that the church “should be listening more to transgender people themselves.”
“This phenomenon is still being understood by physicians, biologists and psychologists. So before the church issues documents, with restrictive rules and regulations that end up excluding transgender people, we need to listen and learn.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/24/harvard-affirmative-action-challengers-want-suprem/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=dtvHUG0B3Lo7Mt8XGSp51I3JSHlf0CUUSurqkp4SYgB4Sd81%2FcWwZVc010pD7l6A&bt_ts=1661776732571
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/ex-transgender-teen-recounts-horrifying-experience-of-transition-surgery_4694543.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-08-30-1&utm_medium=email&est=Lj57Rap6k3K4sWgpndBGQWWqw6ff4381dyAzxDnd1Mhqco93G%2BlaTYFoZx8x%2FUC8DRYu
Ex-Transgender Teen Recounts ‘Horrifying’ Experience of Transition, Surgery
By Brad Jones August 29, 2022
Chloe Cole was 15 years old when she agreed to let a “gender-affirming” surgeon remove her healthy breasts—a life-altering decision she now deeply regrets.
Her “brutal” transition from female to male was anything but the romanticized “gender journey” that transgender activists and medical professionals had portrayed, she told The Epoch Times.
“It’s a little creepy to call it that,” she said.
Cole, who is now 18, feels more like she’s just awoken from “a nightmare,” and she’s disappointed with the medical and school system that fast-tracked her to gender transition surgery.
“I was convinced that it would make me happy, that it would make me whole as a person,” she said.
Although she feels “let down” by most of the adults in her life, she doesn’t blame her parents for following the advice of school staff and medical professionals, who “affirmed” her desire for social transitioning, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole holds testosterone medication used for transgender patients, in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Most of the medical professionals did nothing to question or dissuade her or her parents, she said.
“They effectively guilted my parents into allowing them to do this. They gave them the whole, ‘Either you’ll have a dead daughter or a live son,’ thing. They cited suicide rates,” she said. “There is just so much complacence on the part of educators—all the adults basically. I’m really upset over it. I feel a little bit angry. I wasn’t really allowed to just grow.”
Her parents, though skeptical, trusted the medical professionals and eventually consented to their daughter’s desire for medical interventions, including surgery, which was covered by their health insurance policy.
“It shouldn’t be put on adolescents to make these kinds of decisions at all,” she said.
Transgenderism
Transgenderism, while widely celebrated in popular culture and on social media, is a much more divisive issue than people may think, Cole said.
Today, Cole is one of a growing number of young “detransitioners” who reject current trends in transgender ideology and oppose the “gender-affirming” model of care being pushed by progressive lawmakers at state and federal levels.
She recently testified against California Senate Bill 107, proposed legislation authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), that would shelter parents who consent to the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender transition surgery on their children from prosecution in other states that view such actions as child abuse.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole speaks at an Assembly committee hearing for Senate Bill 107 in Sacramento on June 28, 2022. (Screenshot via California State Senate)
“I think that is really dangerous for families across the US. It can tear families apart,” said Cole, who is expected to testify against the bill again this week.
Cole has been harassed on social media and received a couple of death threats from trans activists since she announced her detransition and took a stand against “gender-affirming” policies.
“Now that I’m completely disillusioned from all of it, it’s really shocking that we’ve even gotten to this point,” she said.
The Struggle
Diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, Cole now believes she’s “on the spectrum.”
“There is really a high comorbidity rate between gender dysphoria and autism,” she said.
Though “very feminine” as a young child, Cole was “a bit of a tomboy,” as she grew older.
“I just really hated dresses, skirts, and things of that sort,” she said.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole holds a childhood photo in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Children’s TV shows had left her with the message “girls are less significant,” because they often depict characters who are more girly or feminine as “stupid, airheaded, and like just get in the way of things,” she said. “And that kind of imprinted on me.”
However, her real fear of femininity and early disdain for womanhood began years ago on social media and LGBT websites, she said.
“I had started puberty fairly young, about nine years old, and I started to struggle with growing into a woman,” she said.
She started her first social media account at 11 on Instagram, and with nearly unrestricted access to the internet, she was exposed to inappropriate content, including pornography and “sexting” in the online communities.
On Instagram, she was first approached by boys who identified as gay and bisexual through the platform’s messaging feature, but eventually began spending more time on recommended websites for 12-to 19-year-old “trans” teens.
“There was one particular page that stood out to me. It was a bunch of adolescents who identified as FTM [female to male]. It seemed like they were very closely knit, a very supportive community, and that just kind of spoke to me because I’ve always struggled with making friendships and feeling excluded. I’ve never really fit in with other kids my age.”
Cole seldom interacted with the transgender community in real life, but she noticed from online discussions with trans teens that many of them had deep emotional scars and mental health issues.
“Pretty much every transgender person I’ve ever met, especially around my age either has really bad family issues, or they’ve been sexually abused or assaulted at a very young age, and it’s really concerning that nobody really talks about that association,” she said.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole stands near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
At 11, Cole also didn’t understand she wasn’t supposed to look like the sexualized images of scantily clad women she saw online.
“I didn’t know that then,” she said. “I started to develop body image issues. I started thinking, ‘Why don’t I look like this? Am I not a woman?’ And a lot of the feminist content pushed by other girls was making womanhood out to be this terrible thing.”
The Transition
By the time she was 12, Cole told her parents she was transgender and they sought out professional medical help.
Cole went to a gender specialist, who referred her to an endocrinologist. When the endocrinologist refused to prescribe blockers or hormones, citing concerns about how they could affect Cole’s cognitive development, he became the first and last doctor to ever deny her gender-affirming care.
“It was very easy to just find another endocrinologist who would affirm me,” she said.
After two appointments, a second endocrinologist approved both puberty blockers and testosterone.
Cole was 13 when she began physically transitioning. The puberty blocker injections reduced the estrogen in her body, and about a month later she started injecting herself with testosterone, a process medical professionals call hormone therapy.
“They put me on blockers first,” she said. “I would get hot flashes. They were pretty bad. They would happen kind of sporadically, and it would get to the point where it would feel really itchy. I couldn’t even wear pants or sweaters in the winter. It’s like an artificial menopause.”
Once on testosterone, Cole’s voice “dropped pretty low” and her breasts got smaller and lost their shape over time, she said.
Cole stayed on puberty blockers for about 18 months and testosterone for about three years.
The hot flashes ceased when she stopped taking the puberty blockers, she said.
Binding Decision
At school, Cole was “an awkward kid,” but had made a few more friends online and in person. But, because she had only come out to her closest friends, she had to deal with anxiety over the possibility of being outted.
“I never even told teachers my preferred name or anything up until high school, but I was presenting in men’s clothes and shorter haircuts,” she said.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole holds a body brace that she used while she was taking transgender hormonal treatments, in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
A few months after she was prescribed testosterone, Cole was groped by a boy in the middle of her eighth-grade history class, which was so chaotic, no one noticed—including her teacher, she said. The incident sealed her decision to wear binders to flatten and conceal her breasts.
“I had a relatively small chest, but it still did a bit of damage to me. My ribs are a little deformed because of them. The way they work—it’s not like the breasts just disappear—they push the breast into the ribcage,” she said.
Cole recalls her binder sticking to her skin in the hot Central Valley California weather and her chest feeling constricted. “It was just the most uncomfortable thing,” she said.
She used the men’s bathroom, but always feared she might be sexually assaulted.
However, she didn’t change in the boys’ locker room because she was afraid of being seen with her binder, and “that somebody would make a comment on it, and target me for it,” she said.
Most of the students, except those who had known her as a younger child, knew her as a male, but a boy in her Phys-Ed class eventually noticed her feminine features.
“There was one time during P.E. when we were swimming. I took my shirt off. I was wearing a binder, and somebody pointed out my body shape. That was another thing that made me want to get rid of my breasts,” Cole said. “He said something along the line of, ‘I don’t know what it is, but you’re looking kind of feminine,’ and that kind of hurt me.”
Before the first day of her freshman year in high school, Cole went to the principal’s office with her parents and asked for her name and records to be changed to “Leo.”
‘Top Surgery’
Before her operation, Cole attended a “top surgery” class with about 12-15 other children and their parents to learn about the different types of incisions.
In hindsight, she said, “it kind of felt like propaganda—the words they use like ‘gender-affirming care’ and things of that sort,” she said. “It does feel like I was sold a product.”
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole stands near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Cole recalls looking around the room and noticing about half of the other kids appeared they were a few years younger than her. “Looking back on it now is a little horrifying. It’s a little weird considering … they were already considering surgery,” she said.
But, at the time, seeing other kids and knowing she wasn’t alone, solidified Cole’s decision to go ahead with the most widely performed type of double mastectomy called a “double incision with nipple grafts” in June 2020. She was 15.
The surgery involved removing breast tissue and contouring the chest to make it look more masculine.
“They take off the nipple and reattach it in a more masculine position, and there are a few side effects associated with it,” Cole said.
Not only is there loss of sensation from cutting away the breast tissue, but repositioning the nipple requires severing the duct that supplies breastmilk to the nipple, she said.
The surgery left Cole with deep muscle soreness for which she was prescribed an opioid-based medication, but because the pain from the resulting digestion problems was worse than the pain in her chest, she stopped taking the pills.
“I was actually disabled for a while. I had a really limited range of motion, especially in my arms and upper body. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do. I couldn’t even leave the house for a few weeks,” she said. “I remember that being really upsetting.”
The most devastating part of the recovery process has been ongoing post-op issues with her nipples, she said.
“It’s been two years, and I’m still having some really bad skin issues,” she said. “The way the skin heals over the grafts … is just awful. It’s really quite disgusting.”
Cole said she had trouble contacting her surgeon afterwards, and although she was supposed to have a follow-up appointment with him, she ended up having a call with two nurses who were in the operating room instead.
She also worries the puberty blockers might have affected her brain development as her first endocrinologist had warned, but her greatest regret is how the surgery has permanently affected her as a woman.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole stands near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
“I was 15. You can’t exactly expect an adolescent to be making adult decisions,” she said. “So, because of a decision I made when I was kid, I can’t breastfeed my children in the future. It’s just a little concerning that this is being recommended to kids at the age I was, and now even younger. They’re starting to operate on preteens now.”
Detransition Dilemma
During the COVID-19 lockdowns and distance learning, Cole resorted to social media for virtual interaction and noticed girls her age were posting “super-idealized” pictures of themselves. Although she realized the images were edited and enhanced, they triggered the same body image issues she had experienced as a child.
“For a while it made me wonder, ‘Is this really a woman’s worth? If I don’t do this, does that make me not as good as these other women?’” she said.
But eventually, Cole bought some feminine clothing and makeup, which she only wore in the privacy of her room. “I guess subconsciously I started to realize like what I was losing started to miss presenting more femininely, like being pretty,” she said.
Over time, she grew increasingly more disillusioned with the idea of living as a man.
“I realized I wasn’t really up for a lot of the responsibilities that come with it,” she said. “There were times when I felt like I wasn’t good enough as a girl, but maybe I’m not good enough as a boy either, and maybe I just can’t be good enough to be either, so I don’t really know what I am.”
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole stands near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Over the next few months, the isolation of the lockdowns and school closures took their toll on Cole’s state of mind. She was depressed and fell into an emotional tailspin.
During the second semester of her junior year, Cole’s grades plummeted, and her parents decided to put her into an online-only school program.
“It was sort of like a homeschooling program, except I would have to go to the district office at least once per week for testing purposes,” she said. “My school performance actually got a lot worse, because now I was truly isolated.”
But Cole admits less social interaction gave her time for more introspection.
During the last quarter of her junior year, she took a psychology class for the first time and learned about child development. One of the lessons covered the Harlow experiments on infant rhesus monkeys with a theme of maternity, mother-child bonding, and breastfeeding.
“I started to realize this is what I’m taking away from myself. I’m not going to be able to bond with my children the same way that a mother does by taking on a male role and I’ve gotten rid of my breasts, so I can’t feed my children naturally or be involved with them in that way. And I think that was like the biggest catalyst in me realizing how wrong all of this was,” she said.
Embracing Womanhood
Cole announced her detransition in May 2021, about 11 months after the surgery, and has embraced womanhood.
“I am a woman,” she said.
Despite her transition, Cole said she has always been mainly attracted to masculine men and had only ever been “marginally attracted” to women. She is now “straight,” she said, and knows now that her gender confusion as a child was based on insecurity and her fear of being a woman.
Cole has enjoyed “cultivating” a new feminine look for herself, but says she still isn’t really into makeup and doesn’t have time for it most days.
Epoch Times Photo
Chloe Cole near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
“I’m almost always in a dress or a skirt because, honestly, it’s really comfy,” she said.
She’s learned to accept her body the way it is, she said, and doesn’t want to go through the process of reconstructive surgery or get breast implants.
“There are multiple options for reconstruction, but I honestly don’t think it’s worth it,” she said. “I will never get the function back no matter what I do, so there’s not really a point in doing it.”
Cole graduated from high school in May and she has applied for college.
Message of Hope
Though she has been harassed on social media and threatened by activists, Cole said she’s committed to sharing her story.
“I want to prevent more cases like mine from happening,” she said.
She wonders why educators have become complicit in the “gender-affirming” process.
“The problem is they’re not really pushing back on this whole trans thing. When I told the high school to change my name, and my email, and their records, there was really no pushback or anything,” she said.
Cole urged children who may be thinking about gender transition surgery “not to get caught up in the whole romanticization” of what it might be like to be the opposite gender and suggested they consider that there may be “other reasons” underlying gender dysphoria, including autism or other mental health issues.
“I very much suggest waiting, because the brain doesn’t stop developing for most people until about their mid 20s, if not a bit later, and teenagers are known for making rash decisions. It sucks hearing that, especially as a kid, but it’s the truth,” she said. “There is a reason why you can’t buy cigarettes or alcohol or vote or rent a car under a certain age.”
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second
Undercover Mom Discovers ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Depravity in Trans Youth Organization’s Chatroom
By CAROLINE DOWNEY
August 30, 2022 6:30 AM
Editor’s Note: The article that follows contains sexually explicit content that will likely be disturbing to readers; this includes explicit messages the article links to in order to provide corroboration for the undercover mom’s account.
“I have been looking for a binder, but I have no clue where to get one? Does anyone know where I could get a reliable binder?” a gender-confused adolescent asked on TrevorSpace, the anonymous online forum for LGBT youth hosted by the well-funded and influential Trevor Project.
An adult user replied with a list of brands that sell binders, which are devices worn under the clothes to conceal female breasts, adding “I really recommend TransTape.”
“If it’s your first time I started with TomboyX compression tops,” another adult wrote.
This is the startling scene Rachel, a Brooklyn mom with a gender-dysphoric child, discovered when she went undercover as a pre-teen in the chat, searching for resources for detransitioners. She found none.
Instead, she opened a “Pandora’s box” of sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. She shared screenshots of the chat with National Review.
Rachel says she looked to the Trevor Project in desperation, “when I thought my child was going to kill herself.” The organization frequently claims that LGBT youth are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. It claims to be a refuge for these people with its crisis services including TrevorLifeline, TrevorText, and TrevorChat.
Under the advice of a “highly credentialed” medical and mental-health team, Rachel and her husband decided to socially transition their child a few years ago, she told National Review. After that, her child was hospitalized three times for self-harm and suicidality, including at least one suicide attempt. In New York, due to a ban on psychotherapy, so-called gender affirmation was the only legal option they could pursue, she said.
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They were at their wit’s end, until her spouse sat her down and presented her with a PowerPoint, showing statistics that people who transition are, by a huge factor, much more likely than the general public to commit suicide.
“My jaw hit the floor. I said, ‘Oh my God we’ve been lied to’,” she says.
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Federal Court Blocks Biden Admin from Forcing Doctors to Perform Gender Transitions
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Since then, Rachel, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, has been dedicated to exposing the child gender-transition craze, which she argues is driven by “predatory medicine” incentivized by the government.
In TrevorSpace, she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger, she said.
She documented kids talking about how to buy binders, an undergarment that constricts breasts, behind their parents’ backs. “I know the way people usually do this is by ordering it to a friend’s house or something of the sort, but I don’t have anyone to do that with,” wrote a girl whose account says she’s under 18. “I have money and know where I want to get it from and all that. I just need a means of getting it.” Another user suggested she have the binder sent to a post office where she could pick it up without her parents’ knowledge. Other users were referred to eBay to purchase a packer, or an artificial appendage meant to mimic a penis.
When people sign up for TrevorSpace, they have the option of placing themselves within the age ranges of “under 18” or “18-25.” The community is open to people 13-24, according to the site. There is no system in place to confirm a person’s age, Rebecca says and National Review confirmed. She also said she noticed entries from people claiming to be over 25 too, as well as guest accounts with no age listed.
Other teens, presumably girls transitioning to boys, testified to the effectiveness of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter medication that stimulates facial hair growth. “Can I get and use Minoxidil without my parents knowing?” a girl asked.
The kids Rachel followed on TrevorSpace spanned a diverse spectrum of gender disorientation, some confident in their belief that they were the opposite sex and some just gender curious. But, as Rachel observed, they were all pointed in one direction: gender transition. In a significant number of cases, adults gave minors this validation.
“I still feel more masc and more fem on days, but it doesn’t matter what I’m feeling I will always prefer to be a girl,” one youth wrote. “Does that make me trans or am I still genderfluid? Help I don’t know.”
An adult replied: “If I had to guess based on your post, I’d say it sounds pretty trans.”
The Trevor Project has subforums on “Transitioning,” “Fashion and beauty,” “Dysphoria,” and “Gender queer, non-binary, and gender fluid,” but none on detransitioning or desistance — the common phenomenon of children “growing out of” their transgender identity as they age.
One adult posted a message touting previous invasive medical interventions, noting a willingness to pursue nullification surgery, which involves removing all external genitalia from the abdomen to the groin for the purpose of appearing non-binary. “I am loving my medical transition now, and have discovered FtN/MtN surgeries that I am now considering. I’m glad I took my time in figuring out what felt best for me,” the user wrote.
Rachel then dove into an abyss of concerning sexual conversation. Some transgender-identifying adults confessed in detail their masturbation addictions and experiences with autogynephilia, or the propensity of a male to become sexually aroused by the thought of himself as female, as well as autoandrophilia, or the propensity of a female to become sexually aroused by the thought of herself as male.
An adult male wrote, “So I woke up this morning with a huge urge to masturbate, even though I knew I couldn’t, and it would hurt me if I did, I went and did it anyway. And it felt awful, the sensations I felt, the kind of orgasm I had, it was all male, and it just completely shattered my womanhood and served as a cruel reminder of the female sensations I can’t hope to feel because of the male body I was born in.”
In some cases, users under 18 spoke with adult users about their sexual preferences, including BDSM, polyamory, and others. Users over 18 asked about paraphilia: “What’s the weirdest sexual thing you know?” People responded with “gokkun” — the act of drinking multiple male ejaculations from a container; “bukkake” — the fetish of being covered with ejaculate; “scat play” — deriving sexual gratification from fantasies involving feces; and “forniphilia” — a form of bondage in which a person’s body is incorporated into furniture for sexual acts.
An 18-25 age user posted: “Can I just say they’re all rough doggystyle??.” An under-18 user replied, “I’ve heard doggystyle hurts in a good way, but I wouldn’t know. I will say I’m not going to die a virgin. If I have to pull an Evan Hansen and bang a tree, I will.”
Rachel also ran into references to animal kinks, something which professed non-binary drag queen Sam Britton, a recent hire of the Biden administration and now nuclear waste deputy at the Department of Energy, has dabbled in. Britton worked at the Trevor Project for four years, first as the Head of Advocacy and Government Affairs and then as Vice President of Advocacy and Government Affairs. He has bragged about participating in kink relationships as a “pup handler” — a person, typically a gay man, who enjoys taking care of other typically gay men who pretend to be dogs.
Alix Aharon, an anti-pornography campaigner and the creator of Gender Mapper, which tracks gender-clinic locations across the country, was particularly alarmed that the Trevor Project encourages contact between kids and adult strangers.
“There should never be a situation in which a young girl is talking to a man. What was most disturbing was their forum and their chat service where you can chat to an adult if you’re a child,” said Aharon, who is on the board of the radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front.
Many messages obtained by National Review showed users attempting to connect privately, on apps such as Discord, an instant messaging social platform.
The Trevor Project did not respond to request for comment.
Blinded by its mission to affirm transgender-identifying youth, the Trevor Project ignores the underlying issues turning children, especially girls, to its offerings, Aharon said. For girls, “we call it the trifecta: eating disorder, mental illness, and early exposure to porn,” she says. Instead of targeting those root causes, however, the organization leads youth deeper into delusion that they can become what they innately are not, she suggests.
In Republican-dominated states, the Trevor Project has fought to oppose bills outlawing reconstructive surgery and hormone therapy for children, as well as legislation barring males from competing in women’s sports.
Trevor Project has also infiltrated classrooms nationwide. Steadily, it has increased its involvement in K-12 education, boasting that it has trained over 20,000 educators “to create safe spaces in schools.” And during the outbreak of Covid-19, many more youths found an outlet there. During the peak of the pandemic, between February and March 2020, TrevorSpace experienced a surge of 40 percent in new registered users. By April, new registrations were up 139 percent compared to February.
Between August 2019 and July 2020, the Trevor Project added $35 million to its coffers, thanks to the largesse of many household name brands. Rainbow-tier sponsors, which gave $1 million or more, include Google, Lululemon, Abercrombie and Fitch, Puma, and Macy’s. Premier-tier sponsors, who gave $500,000 or more, include Proctor and Gamble, Harry’s, AT&T, Pinterest, and others. Platinum-tier sponsors, who gave $250,000 or more, include Coca-Cola, Chipotle, Wells Fargo, YouTube, and others. There are dozens more gold, silver, bronze, and chrome-tier corporate donors, including State Farm, Aetna, Bank of America, Fed Ex, the Walt Disney Company, American Express, Best Buy, and others.
-
The adults involved in this need to be found and held accountable.
second
Undercover Mom Discovers ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Depravity in Trans Youth Organization’s Chatroom
By CAROLINE DOWNEY
August 30, 2022 6:30 AM
Editor’s Note: The article that follows contains sexually explicit content that will likely be disturbing to readers; this includes explicit messages the article links to in order to provide corroboration for the undercover mom’s account.
“I have been looking for a binder, but I have no clue where to get one? Does anyone know where I could get a reliable binder?” a gender-confused adolescent asked on TrevorSpace, the anonymous online forum for LGBT youth hosted by the well-funded and influential Trevor Project.
An adult user replied with a list of brands that sell binders, which are devices worn under the clothes to conceal female breasts, adding “I really recommend TransTape.”
“If it’s your first time I started with TomboyX compression tops,” another adult wrote.
This is the startling scene Rachel, a Brooklyn mom with a gender-dysphoric child, discovered when she went undercover as a pre-teen in the chat, searching for resources for detransitioners. She found none.
Instead, she opened a “Pandora’s box” of sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. She shared screenshots of the chat with National Review.
Rachel says she looked to the Trevor Project in desperation, “when I thought my child was going to kill herself.” The organization frequently claims that LGBT youth are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. It claims to be a refuge for these people with its crisis services including TrevorLifeline, TrevorText, and TrevorChat.
Under the advice of a “highly credentialed” medical and mental-health team, Rachel and her husband decided to socially transition their child a few years ago, she told National Review. After that, her child was hospitalized three times for self-harm and suicidality, including at least one suicide attempt. In New York, due to a ban on psychotherapy, so-called gender affirmation was the only legal option they could pursue, she said.
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Well, Someone Does Seem Angry and Aggrieved
The Left Hates Talking about the Cold Hard Numbers
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The Disingenuous Effort to Normalize Biden’s Illegal Student-Loan Plan
Hey, Remember Ukraine?
They were at their wit’s end, until her spouse sat her down and presented her with a PowerPoint, showing statistics that people who transition are, by a huge factor, much more likely than the general public to commit suicide.
“My jaw hit the floor. I said, ‘Oh my God we’ve been lied to’,” she says.
More on
TRANSGENDER
Federal Court Blocks Biden Admin from Forcing Doctors to Perform Gender Transitions
Why Transgender Extremism Is Worse in the United States
This Day in Liberal Judicial Activism—August 26
Since then, Rachel, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, has been dedicated to exposing the child gender-transition craze, which she argues is driven by “predatory medicine” incentivized by the government.
In TrevorSpace, she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger, she said.
She documented kids talking about how to buy binders, an undergarment that constricts breasts, behind their parents’ backs. “I know the way people usually do this is by ordering it to a friend’s house or something of the sort, but I don’t have anyone to do that with,” wrote a girl whose account says she’s under 18. “I have money and know where I want to get it from and all that. I just need a means of getting it.” Another user suggested she have the binder sent to a post office where she could pick it up without her parents’ knowledge. Other users were referred to eBay to purchase a packer, or an artificial appendage meant to mimic a penis.
When people sign up for TrevorSpace, they have the option of placing themselves within the age ranges of “under 18” or “18-25.” The community is open to people 13-24, according to the site. There is no system in place to confirm a person’s age, Rebecca says and National Review confirmed. She also said she noticed entries from people claiming to be over 25 too, as well as guest accounts with no age listed.
Other teens, presumably girls transitioning to boys, testified to the effectiveness of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter medication that stimulates facial hair growth. “Can I get and use Minoxidil without my parents knowing?” a girl asked.
The kids Rachel followed on TrevorSpace spanned a diverse spectrum of gender disorientation, some confident in their belief that they were the opposite sex and some just gender curious. But, as Rachel observed, they were all pointed in one direction: gender transition. In a significant number of cases, adults gave minors this validation.
“I still feel more masc and more fem on days, but it doesn’t matter what I’m feeling I will always prefer to be a girl,” one youth wrote. “Does that make me trans or am I still genderfluid? Help I don’t know.”
An adult replied: “If I had to guess based on your post, I’d say it sounds pretty trans.”
The Trevor Project has subforums on “Transitioning,” “Fashion and beauty,” “Dysphoria,” and “Gender queer, non-binary, and gender fluid,” but none on detransitioning or desistance — the common phenomenon of children “growing out of” their transgender identity as they age.
One adult posted a message touting previous invasive medical interventions, noting a willingness to pursue nullification surgery, which involves removing all external genitalia from the abdomen to the groin for the purpose of appearing non-binary. “I am loving my medical transition now, and have discovered FtN/MtN surgeries that I am now considering. I’m glad I took my time in figuring out what felt best for me,” the user wrote.
Rachel then dove into an abyss of concerning sexual conversation. Some transgender-identifying adults confessed in detail their masturbation addictions and experiences with autogynephilia, or the propensity of a male to become sexually aroused by the thought of himself as female, as well as autoandrophilia, or the propensity of a female to become sexually aroused by the thought of herself as male.
An adult male wrote, “So I woke up this morning with a huge urge to masturbate, even though I knew I couldn’t, and it would hurt me if I did, I went and did it anyway. And it felt awful, the sensations I felt, the kind of orgasm I had, it was all male, and it just completely shattered my womanhood and served as a cruel reminder of the female sensations I can’t hope to feel because of the male body I was born in.”
In some cases, users under 18 spoke with adult users about their sexual preferences, including BDSM, polyamory, and others. Users over 18 asked about paraphilia: “What’s the weirdest sexual thing you know?” People responded with “gokkun” — the act of drinking multiple male ejaculations from a container; “bukkake” — the fetish of being covered with ejaculate; “scat play” — deriving sexual gratification from fantasies involving feces; and “forniphilia” — a form of bondage in which a person’s body is incorporated into furniture for sexual acts.
An 18-25 age user posted: “Can I just say they’re all rough doggystyle??.” An under-18 user replied, “I’ve heard doggystyle hurts in a good way, but I wouldn’t know. I will say I’m not going to die a virgin. If I have to pull an Evan Hansen and bang a tree, I will.”
Rachel also ran into references to animal kinks, something which professed non-binary drag queen Sam Britton, a recent hire of the Biden administration and now nuclear waste deputy at the Department of Energy, has dabbled in. Britton worked at the Trevor Project for four years, first as the Head of Advocacy and Government Affairs and then as Vice President of Advocacy and Government Affairs. He has bragged about participating in kink relationships as a “pup handler” — a person, typically a gay man, who enjoys taking care of other typically gay men who pretend to be dogs.
Alix Aharon, an anti-pornography campaigner and the creator of Gender Mapper, which tracks gender-clinic locations across the country, was particularly alarmed that the Trevor Project encourages contact between kids and adult strangers.
“There should never be a situation in which a young girl is talking to a man. What was most disturbing was their forum and their chat service where you can chat to an adult if you’re a child,” said Aharon, who is on the board of the radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front.
Many messages obtained by National Review showed users attempting to connect privately, on apps such as Discord, an instant messaging social platform.
The Trevor Project did not respond to request for comment.
Blinded by its mission to affirm transgender-identifying youth, the Trevor Project ignores the underlying issues turning children, especially girls, to its offerings, Aharon said. For girls, “we call it the trifecta: eating disorder, mental illness, and early exposure to porn,” she says. Instead of targeting those root causes, however, the organization leads youth deeper into delusion that they can become what they innately are not, she suggests.
In Republican-dominated states, the Trevor Project has fought to oppose bills outlawing reconstructive surgery and hormone therapy for children, as well as legislation barring males from competing in women’s sports.
Trevor Project has also infiltrated classrooms nationwide. Steadily, it has increased its involvement in K-12 education, boasting that it has trained over 20,000 educators “to create safe spaces in schools.” And during the outbreak of Covid-19, many more youths found an outlet there. During the peak of the pandemic, between February and March 2020, TrevorSpace experienced a surge of 40 percent in new registered users. By April, new registrations were up 139 percent compared to February.
Between August 2019 and July 2020, the Trevor Project added $35 million to its coffers, thanks to the largesse of many household name brands. Rainbow-tier sponsors, which gave $1 million or more, include Google, Lululemon, Abercrombie and Fitch, Puma, and Macy’s. Premier-tier sponsors, who gave $500,000 or more, include Proctor and Gamble, Harry’s, AT&T, Pinterest, and others. Platinum-tier sponsors, who gave $250,000 or more, include Coca-Cola, Chipotle, Wells Fargo, YouTube, and others. There are dozens more gold, silver, bronze, and chrome-tier corporate donors, including State Farm, Aetna, Bank of America, Fed Ex, the Walt Disney Company, American Express, Best Buy, and others.
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https://breaking911.com/breaking-leaked-video-purportedly-shows-dem-senate-candidate-explaining-why-she-treats-white-people-like-shit/
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https://breaking911.com/breaking-leaked-video-purportedly-shows-dem-senate-candidate-explaining-why-she-treats-white-people-like-shit/
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/09/07/how_blatant_anti-white_racism_won_acceptance_in_elite_america_850879.html?mc_cid=f35635c7b5
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https://breaking911.com/breaking-leaked-video-purportedly-shows-dem-senate-candidate-explaining-why-she-treats-white-people-like-shit/
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/09/07/how_blatant_anti-white_racism_won_acceptance_in_elite_america_850879.html?mc_cid=f35635c7b5
https://summit.news/2022/09/09/memphis-police-sound-alarm-over-two-black-suspects-boasting-of-plan-to-kill-white-people/
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Let the End of the George Floyd Case Mark the End of a National Psychosis
Thousands of protesters fill the streets in a march to demand justice for George Floyd in Brooklyn, N.Y., June 2, 2020. (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
October 29, 2022 6:30 AM
The results of the midterms could help to close this sad chapter in our nation’s history.
The state prosecution of the two remaining former Minneapolis police officers implicated in George Floyd’s May 2020 death is drawing to a close. One has pleaded guilty. The other will face a bench trial on stipulated facts — meaning no jury, no witnesses, and no in-court presentation of evidence.
Appeals loom, but the end of the trial-court proceedings closes an important chapter in a national nightmare. Its ramifications will be with us for a long time to come . . . including in the midterm elections just ten days away.
On Monday, J. Alexander Kueng pled guilty to manslaughter, as the result of an agreement with Minnesota state prosecutors. In the deal, the murder charge was dropped, and the parties agreed to a sentence of three and a half years. That term is to run concurrently with the three-year sentence imposed on Kueng after he and two other ex-cops, Thomas Kane and Tou Thao, were convicted by a federal jury on civil-rights charges.
As readers may recall, I believe the civil-rights convictions should be reversed because the Biden Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division essentially made up two crimes — the deprivation of a person’s supposed rights (1) “to be free from a police officer’s deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs,” and (2) to have police officers intervene in another police officer’s use of excessive force. (See, e.g., here and here.) You may think these should be federal rights and thus that the deprivation of them should be a civil-rights crime. They are not in the Constitution, however, nor has Congress enacted them into statutory law. Instead, they reflect the Biden administration’s preferred policing policies, which the Justice Department is treating as if they had the status of law. For whatever reason, the presiding judge, Paul Magnuson of the federal district court in Minnesota, waited until after the defendants were convicted to notice the “dubious constitutionality” of the prosecution’s case
The Justice Department had to concoct civil-rights crimes because there was no evidence of the theory that fueled its determination to prosecute the case: the woke-progressive story line that racial prejudice explained the police detention that resulted in Floyd’s death. To the contrary, Floyd was detained because he committed a crime and violently resisted arrest, and his vulnerability to being held in a position that police should not have applied was exacerbated by his use of illegal drugs and other medical issues.
There is, of course, no excuse for the cops’ persisting in restraining Floyd when he had stopped breathing and had no pulse. That is why the state manslaughter charges were warranted, and why a state jury validly convicted the main defendant in the case, Derek Chauvin, of murder. But the civil-rights prosecution is a different story. Kueng, who is black and was a new rookie cop at the time of the incident, has always complicated the Left’s narrative of the case as part of the supposed crusade of American police departments to hunt down young black men.
The state guilty plea means that Kueng will serve roughly the sentence that was imposed in the civil-rights case even if that conviction is eventually overturned. And in the interim, he is serving his time in federal custody, which (as we observed in connection with Chauvin’s case) is preferable for the inmate to incarceration in a state prison.
In his state jury trial, Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter. He was also found guilty of a depraved-indifference-murder charge that should not have been in the case, so his conviction on that count will undoubtedly be reversed on appeal. The other two convictions, however, are likely to stand despite significant violations of his fair-trial rights. After his state conviction, Chauvin pled guilty in the federal civil-rights case and thus waived his right to appeal those charges. He is serving his time in federal prison and was given a 21-year federal sentence that roughly equates to his 22-and-a-half-year state sentence. Ergo, if the latter were ever reversed, he would still do the time under the former.
As noted above, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao were also convicted in the federal civil-rights trial. Afterwards, Lane struck a plea agreement with state prosecutors in Minnesota. As with Kueng’s state guilty plea, in Lane’s deal the murder charge was dropped in exchange for his guilty plea to a less-serious manslaughter charge. Last month, Lane was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, to run concurrently with the sentence of two and a half years he is now serving in federal custody for the civil-rights conviction. Thus, again like Kueng, Lane will serve roughly the same sentence even if the civil-rights conviction is eventually overturned.
Lane clearly got the lightest sentence because, in a normal case without political overtones, he probably would not have been charged. Lane was another rookie cop, and he advocated that Floyd be rolled over, which would have made it easier for him to breathe. Lane’s suggestions were rebuffed by Chauvin, the senior cop on the scene.
That leaves Tou Thao as the last of the four former cops still facing state charges. His case is complicated, too, because he did not take part in holding Floyd down on the ground. Rather, Thao kept the increasingly agitated crowd at bay, mainly with his back to Floyd and the other police, during the nearly ten minutes that Floyd was being restrained. After his conviction in the civil-rights case, a 42-month federal prison sentence was imposed.
Having seen the due-process debacle that was Chauvin’s state trial, and then been convicted himself in the dubious federal civil-rights trial, Thao decided a trial before a jury marinated in prejudicial publicity — much of it generated by federal and state prosecutors and public officials — would not be in his interest. Yet, he maintains his innocence and has thus resisted pressure to plead guilty. So, he has agreed to a state bench trial before Minneapolis judge Peter Cahill (who presided over Chauvin’s trial, as well as all the state proceedings involving the other three former cops).
It will be a highly unusual trial for a criminal case. Rather than in a courtroom with live witness testimony, the presentation of evidence, and lawyer arguments, Thao’s trial will occur on paper. As the New York Times reports, the two sides will agree on a set of facts in a written stipulation that will be presented to Judge Cahill. The prosecution has agreed to proceed only on the manslaughter charge. (The Times says the prosecution “could theoretically reinstate the murder charge,” but I don’t see how Thao would agree to that, or Cahill would allow it.) On the basis of the stipulated record, Judge Cahill will decide whether Thao is guilty or not guilty, and will issue a written opinion explaining his verdict.
I would anticipate that Thao’s case will be decided in short order. This past Monday, jury selection was supposed to have begun in the state prosecution of Kueng and Thao. When Kueng agreed to a last-minute plea deal, though, that opened the door for Thao — now the lone remaining defendant — to forgo a jury trial. Since the parties were ready to go to trial, they should be in a position to present Judge Cahill with a stipulation promptly. Since the judge knows the case inside-out, he will presumably not take long to decide.
It has been a long two and a half years since George Floyd died in police custody — since he was killed in police custody, as state and federal juries have concluded. It was tragic for the Floyd family. It has been tragic for the country, catalyzing progressive Democrats to agitate for de-funding police departments and to enact pro-criminal “reforms” that have sent urban crime rates soaring. The result: surges of murder and mayhem. To be sure, inflation and the specter of recession are causing widespread anxiety. But if, as expected, voters hand Democrats a stinging defeat at the ballot box next week, the national psychosis that began on Memorial Day 2020 will also be a huge reason why.
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The Lunacy of Racial Categories
By RICH LOWRY
November 6, 2022 7:53 AM
University administrators are bad and incompetent racialists.
It’s not just that colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin. They do it badly.
This is one of the themes that emerged in the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases last week.
The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers, an arbitrary mess mostly left over from the work of federal bureaucrats in the 1970s that can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.
The administrators who rely on these categories are beholden to senseless and unscientific distinctions — they aren’t even competent or rational racialists.
Justice Samuel Alito raised this issue in the arguments, pretty clearly relying on the work of George Mason University professor David Bernstein, who eviscerated the categories in an amicus brief and has written a book on their origin and implications, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
The categories throw together a kaleidoscope of races and ethnicities in six neat categories: Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, White, African American, and Native American. Created for federal bookkeeping purposes 50 years ago, they long ago hardened into orthodoxy, with some adjustments here or there.
If you think it makes sense to — as the Bernstein brief puts it — throw 60 percent of the world’s population into one category as Asian, or to consider white Europeans, indigenous Mexicans, and Afro-Cubans as all Hispanic, you must work in a university admissions office.
“These racial categories are rife with inconsistencies and lack parallel construction,” scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant have written. “Only one category is specifically racial, only one is cultural, and only one relies on a notion of affiliation or community recognition.”
Consider the Asian category. It doesn’t make sense to many of the people collected under it. One study found that less than 40 percent of Indian, Chinese, and Filipino respondents considered themselves Asian or Asian American.
East Asians and South Asians are yoked together under the category, even though they have nothing in common, and South Asians have formed their own representative organizations. It used to be that South Asians were considered white, but they shifted over to Asian to gain the status of a minority group (it turns out that they chose the wrong group).
On the other hand, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander used to be subsumed under the Asian category, until these groups realized it was better to have a category of their own.
Yet, Filipino Americans, who would seem Pacific Islanders by definition, are still “Asian.”
Got it?
Then, there’s the Hispanic category, which is sweepingly inclusive of anyone whose family comes from a country with a Spanish culture, regardless of race or anything else.
Jonathan Borak and his coauthors wrote in the journal Epidemiology, “The term ‘Hispanic’ was created by the U.S. government; the population so identified is, in fact, an artificial rubric for a set of diverse populations that resulted from the mixture of indigenous American peoples, African slaves, and Europeans.”
The result is that no white Europeans are presumed to contribute to diversity at colleges except white Europeans from Spain.
As the Bernstein brief notes, the Hispanic category “includes people whose ancestors’ first language was not Spanish and who may have never spoken Spanish. This includes immigrants from Spain and their descendants whose ancestral language is Basque or Catalan. It also includes indigenous immigrants from Latin America whose first language is not Spanish, whose surnames are not Spanish, and whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not Spanish.”
White is just as capacious, including not just Europeans but people from North Africa and Asia west of India. It comprises, as the Bernstein brief relates, “Welsh, Norwegians, Greeks, Moroccans, Chaldeans, Afghans, Iranians, and North African Berbers.”
A freshman dorm could be hugely diverse drawing from this “white” category alone.
Of course, universities are making admissions decisions based on these random boxes, reducing enormous complexity to a few simplistic, often misleading choices.
“Neither Harvard nor UNC,” the brief points out, “has explained why a white Catholic of Spanish descent, classified as Hispanic, gets an admissions preference for contributing to educational diversity, but a dark- skinned Muslim of Arab descent, an Egyptian Copt, a Hungarian Roma, a Bosnian refugee, a Scandinavian Laplander, a Siberian Tatar, or a Bobover Hasid—all classified as ‘white’—do not.”
“Similarly,” it continues, “it is hard to see how diversity is better accomplished by admitting an additional ‘Hispanic’ student of Mexican ancestry over an equally or better qualified student whose parents immigrated from Turkmenistan, who would be the only Turkman in the entire student body, because the Turkman is arbitrarily classified as ‘white.’”
There is a good case for rationalizing and updating all of this, but an even more compelling case for scrapping it altogether.
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"WHO renames monkeypox as mpox, citing racism concerns."
- Isn't the racist the one who associates monkeys with one race or another.of humans.
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https://link.medium.com/OhFOZuKCewb
I'm not an expert or scholar on anything religion to refute this.. Interesting read.
There is a political war still going on between (some) "fundamental" Christians and gays. (Other churches are welcoming.) This makes a serious challenge to those religious interpretations.
My conclusion from it and from the world I see around me is that a small percentage of people have been gay for as long as we know. The Biblical argument against that is not as clear as some argue.
I would add that if some are born to be gay, not choose to be gay, and you believe in God, then God has a hand in that. OTOH, I don't see the same reasoning work to justify the human genital and hormone tampering involved in transgenderism, which to me fights against the will and design of the Creator.
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Denying the truth will not you FREE !
https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2023/01/29/we-are-our-own-worst-enemy-lebron-james-accused-blaming-black-people-tyre-nichols-death/
no matter how hard they try - > I ain't paying reparations.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7IfPv4vQM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7IfPv4vQM
Capture all the wisdom of Thomas Sowell you can.
Some groups, some cultures, some people have a stronger work ethic than others.
Central tenet of liberalism and leftism:
People who don't work hard or produce much should make just as much money as people who do.
Take that one step further, you should make just as much money before you acquire your skills, education, work ethic and productivity as after.
Does any one of them ever stop and think what consequences come with complete removal of incentives to work hard, improve yourself, invest and produce?
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Imagine a nation where young black men admired Thomas Sowell rather than thug rappers glorifying drugs and violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7IfPv4vQM
Capture all the wisdom of Thomas Sowell you can.
Some groups, some cultures, some people have a stronger work ethic than others.
Central tenet of liberalism and leftism:
People who don't work hard or produce much should make just as much money as people who do.
Take that one step further, you should make just as much money before you acquire your skills, education, work ethic and productivity as after.
Does any one of them ever stop and think what consequences come with complete removal of incentives to work hard, improve yourself, invest and produce?
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Some do. They just don't get on MTV or the Pravdas.
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Some do. They just don't get on MTC or the Pravdas.
How many?
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https://datahazard.substack.com/p/american-murder
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkXJojxSE0U
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-non-white-people-might-advocate-white-supremacy/ar-AA1aUFCy?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=c228df8d59304101bff41db20e088a39&ei=16
and this is where it leads:
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/286/939/original/f72004856305864e.jpeg
HT to our GM
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-non-white-people-might-advocate-white-supremacy/ar-AA1aUFCy?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=c228df8d59304101bff41db20e088a39&ei=16
and this is where it leads:
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/286/939/original/f72004856305864e.jpeg
HT to our GM
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/286/939/original/f72004856305864e.jpeg)
When your narrative is negatively impacted by facts.
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just saw image of killer with nazi tattoos
then I read this :
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-mauricio-garcia-texas-shooting-mugshots3-235054966595
So now I don't know if the images I saw of a man with clear cut nazi tattoos is the killer or another perhaps with same name
We can't read anything and be sure we are seeing the truth
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just saw image of killer with nazi tattoos
then I read this :
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-mauricio-garcia-texas-shooting-mugshots3-235054966595
So now I don't know if the images I saw of a man with clear cut nazi tattoos is the killer or another perhaps with same name
We can't read anything and be sure we are seeing the truth
Imagine how many persons with that name have been arrested in Texas. This is why law enforcement uses fingerprints to confirm ID.
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is this the guy or not?
https://nypost.com/2023/05/09/warrant-reveals-what-texas-mall-shooter-had-in-car-motel-room/
(he has good taste in women it seems )
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StlVszziHc4&t=9s
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https://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2023/05/18/biden-vs-coolidge-at-howard-n2623380
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/05/23/federal-court-upholds-thomas-jefferson-high-school-policy-asian-students-racial-balancing/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=pOd4VCpDJbIKhPnCommxHZKNvhmxSp97Nve_mO1osAJm2ZaYnDO74wDmHCCfbmu5Nh6TaIvl
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/asian-american-student-near-perfect-sat-score-4/
Don't let them tell you different.
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this sad pitiful show
reminds me of Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing"
wherein at the and you have a riot between Blacks and Italians:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/12/floyd-mayweathers-family-threatened-after-john-gotti-iii-brawl/
PS I did not see the fight in the ring but likely the post fight fights were better
glad I was not there.
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https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
Some precisely articulated thinking in this one.
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https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/booker-t-washington.html
recording made in 1908 of 1895 speech
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The Talented Mr. Obama
The former president should be leading a discussion about race. Instead, he attacks Sen. Tim Scott.
Daniel Henninger
June 21, 2023 6:00 pm ET
Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott is always worth listening to, and never more so than his remarks this week in response to critical comments made about him by former U.S. President Barack Obama.
“Whenever the Democrats feel threatened,” Sen. Scott said, “they pull out—drag out—the former president, have him make some negative comments about someone running, hoping that their numbers go down.”
Mr. Obama hasn’t appeared much in public during Joe Biden’s presidency, so the fact that he made it a point to derogate a black Republican explicitly on a racial basis deserves wide attention. An editorial on the Obama statement appeared in these pages several days ago, and my colleague Jason Riley commented Wednesday. This in part is what Mr. Obama said about Tim Scott: “I think there’s a long history of African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can all make it.’ ”
I would say that Mr. Obama’s remarks about Sen. Scott are on a par for political incivility with Donald Trump’s that John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured. As with Mr. Trump’s preposterous logic, Mr. Obama is saying that Sen. Scott lacks legitimacy and credibility as a black man because he is a member of the Republican Party.
For starters, there is that matter of “a long history.” President Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union speech. Worth noting are the causes Johnson gave for the persistence of poverty in U.S. cities. He said it was rooted “in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.” Today, in the summer of 2023, every one of those issues remains as a problem of inner-city life.
California has spent $17 billion on homelessness the past four years to little effect. Public housing projects built in the 1960s are deteriorating. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams have made the creation of affordable housing a priority, to minimal effect. Over the past holiday weekend, there were mass shootings in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee. In the Chicago area alone, some 60 people were shot.
As to education and training, the reason for the rise of the charter-school movement and school-choice programs more than 20 years ago in cities like New York, Milwaukee and Cleveland is that the public schools were manifestly failing black and Hispanic children. This Wednesday the federal report card called the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed a striking 13-point decline in reading scores for black students since just before the pandemic. Parents want alternatives, and in the past two years charters and choice have won significant legislative expansions, but only in Republican-controlled states. Democratic legislatures won’t do it.
This week, the Journal ran a canary-in-the-mineshaft story about the future of big U.S. cities under the headline “Wall Street Sours on America’s Downtowns.” It described how investment capital is shifting to the suburbs, away from city centers like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. The Catholic Archdiocese of New York has just gone through another catastrophic round of neighborhood school closings for lack of financial resources.
Race in America is running perilously off the rails following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in May 2020. The language around race has become intense, escalating to charges of irresolvable systemic racism or white supremacy. The indictment of subway rider Daniel Penny in New York over a fatal chokehold has become a racial incident. California, a nonslave state, is engulfed in a debate over racial reparation payments of up to $1.2 million per person.
If after nearly 60 years of directed federal outlays some of America’s poorest neighborhoods remain almost as economically and socially impoverished as they were then, it is reasonable to have a discussion and debate on the way forward. Mr. Obama in his Scott remarks called this status quo “crippling generational poverty,” but blamed it on “hundreds of years of racism in this society.”
There is a school of thought among Mr. Obama’s partisan detractors that he remains stuck in his roots as a politicized community organizer in Chicago. But Mr. Obama stands as the first black American voted into the presidency, and no one is better placed than he to lead a productive conversation about race.
That, essentially, is what Sen. Scott is proposing in his own candidacy. Instead, Mr. Obama reduced Mr. Scott’s side of the argument to a few tossed-off lines of moral condescension.
I’m not sure if racial mockery of Republicans is a winning political tactic right now. And if Joe Biden’s recent speeches are any indication, such as the one he gave to the unions that endorsed him this week, opposition derision is about all he’ll bring to this debate.
Whatever his presidential prospects, Tim Scott has the rest of the year to talk about race in America. I suspect most voters are willing to meet him halfway, even if Barack Obama is not
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https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/affirmative-action-was-hurting-black-students/?fbclid=IwAR2fuv6n49wZIFEtwnUNAxwd9nlZgFNCJzkqJRq_T5RkcvKjzA0xvAc_ip0
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https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/affirmative-action-was-hurting-black-students/?fbclid=IwAR2fuv6n49wZIFEtwnUNAxwd9nlZgFNCJzkqJRq_T5RkcvKjzA0xvAc_ip0
"But the only reason that Harvard excluded so many perfect-scoring Asian applicants was that they took up places that needed to be kept clear for much lower-scoring black students."
Can you explain why Asians score so much better? White supremacy?
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/a-plethora-of-evidence-for-genetic
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"Can you explain why Asians score so much better? White supremacy?"
must be legacy of slavery and James Crow! :wink:
Funny , I didn't recall in my history classes that Asians were part of the white supremacy cabal .
:wink:
Of course never mentioned is why do Asians kick white supremacists' asses with better grades?
I thought whites have such an incredible advantage .
Using Rev Al's logic should I be asked are we (whites ) just too dumb?
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"Can you explain why Asians score so much better? White supremacy?"
must be legacy of slavery and James Crow! :wink:
Funny , I didn't recall in my history classes that Asians were part of the white supremacy cabal .
:wink:
Of course never mentioned is why do Asians kick white supremacists' asses with better grades?
I thought whites have such an incredible advantage .
Using Rev Al's logic should I be asked are we (whites ) just too dumb?
Whites created a system that doesn't allow POC to succeed!
Also:
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/02/income-and-wealth-in-the-united-states-an-overview-of-recent-data
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A better line of analysis: Fatherless homes and a family environment that does not value education.
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A better line of analysis: Fatherless homes and a family environment that does not value education.
Why didn't Asians jump onto the "Great Society Gravy Train" the same way at the same time?
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Easy.
Better values, better choices, intact family structure.
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Easy.
Better values, better choices, intact family structure.
I thought it was the “Great Society” that was responsible for breaking up the black family. That isn’t the case?
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Your question was about the Asians.
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Easy.
Better values, better choices, intact family structure.
I thought it was the “Great Society” that was responsible for breaking up the black family. That isn’t the case?
Why did Asians have a stronger family structure?
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I decline your homework assignment to write a major essay, all too likely to be dismissed with a snarky (albeit often witty) remark.
Short version: They did not have Slavery, Segregation, leading to War on Poverty, etc. They were heirs of thousands of years of civilization whose Confuscian ethics emphasized family.
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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/07/14/ten_reasons_why_affirmative_action_died_149493.html
Read the whole thing but he hits a home run with point 2. Racial parity never happened because Democrats always opposed school choice in K-12. They left way too many black kids in bad schools then then set up colleges and employers to give them preference:
"Second, affirmative action was imposed on the back end in adult hiring and college admissions. However, to achieve parity, remediation early at the K-12 school level would have been the only solution. Yet such intervention was made impossible by teachers' unions, the rise of identity politics and government entitlements. All were opposed to school choice,"
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NCAAP and Sharpton should be fired !
or be arrested for racketeering,,,,
We need more African Americans to take the mantle from THEM
like Tim Scott
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyc-to-pay-1-8-billion-over-old-racist-teaching-exam-but-blacks-performed-poorly-on-newer-exams-too
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No, I didn't make that up or take it out of context. It's quoted directly from the head of the department at the University of Colorado Boulder in a published work:
"when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy"
- Professor Jennifer Ho, Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado Boulder.
https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2021/04/08/white-supremacy-root-race-related-violence-united-states
Two follow up points:
Are you sure that a person with the degree in this is more educated than a person without? Maybe the word for it is not educated.
Second, a definition: If you do not know that Black violence against Asians is rooted in white racism, you are not woke.
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/heather-mac-donald-challenges-blm-student-protesters-in-tense-talk-at-berkeley-law/
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There is a whole world where material like this is shared and the emotions it generates fester.
https://twitter.com/besiktassnews0/status/1720830644211618298
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second post
Hat tip CCP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_representation_in_Hollywood
Who was in charge of most of the studios during "old Hollywood"?
" African American roles in Old Hollywood
The roles that the African-American community were generally offered, usually fell into one or more of three themes; a tale of rags to riches, thug life, or segregation.[citation needed] These roles often followed old stereotypes.[citation needed] There was the Tom who was someone who served white people; the Coon who acted goofy (like a clown or naive); the "Tragic Mulatto" who was someone who tried to "pass for being white"; the Mammy who was seen as asexual, helped to raise the young, and helped families; and the Buck who was often a male who was hyper-sexualized and seen as a threat.[6] Though the roles were demeaning for the communities with darker skin tones, some actors and actresses were so desperate to represent their communities or to change the ways of Hollywood they knew that any part is a part.[citation needed]
Performers such as Sidney Poitier and Hattie McDaniel would do whatever they would have to in order to pave the way for other African-American actors and actresses.[citation needed]The first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, received the Academy Award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in Gone with the Wind. When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, McDaniel once stated, “I can be a maid for $7 a week. Or I can play a maid for $700 a week.”[citation needed] Despite the Academy Award, McDaniel faced struggle of both racism and sexism over the next decade, even within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[7] Its leader, Walter Francis White, looked down on her and other actors (such as Stepin Fetchit) that he perceived to "playing the clown before the camera".[7] By 1942, White and the NAACP had tried to force Hollywood into giving more opportunities for African Americans in film roles; McDaniel on the other hand believed it should be the fellow black actors of the Screen Actors Guild, not the NAACP, responsible for the push.[7]"
===========================
Quite the emotional contrast between this post and the previous one , , ,
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proselytism
what I don't understand is how this claims there is none in Islam. :roll:
did they ever hear about "infidels",
convert or die ?
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/08/a-culture-in-collapse/
Quiet, soft spoken Victor Hanson says what we all see, and says it best.
I hate to pick out one line, but this is brilliant:
When did we lump together an entire cadre of diverse ancestries, ethnicities, religions, politics, classes, and values and dub them all “white,” and then smear them collectively in stereotypical fashion?"
This could go in almost all the threads.
There are people, Claudine Gay, and Obama-Biden et al, who would rather break it and 'build [it] back better'. Our job is to defend and honor the Creed, win the middle and defeat the extreme Left. Not win a close one. Defeat them!
Of course the projectionists just framed it exactly the opposite. So let's have an open honest debate with them - which of course will never happen. Hence his closing line, "...we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable." Let's hope not.
Defend the American Creed. The rights endowed for all by our Creator are worth fighting for.
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" Kamala Harris is a wordsmith. Russian collusion really happened. So did Russian laptop disinformation. Christopher Steele’s dossier was mostly true, in the fashion of Claudine Gay’s dissertation and Barack Obama’s memoir. And 51 former intelligence authorities bravely came forward to offer their expertise in certifying that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow."
I would also add there was no election interference manipulation fraud conspiracy to change all the rules
in the '20 election.
What we saw did NOT happen
we are simply conspiracy lunes for even questioning it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_97mk6nMrwQ
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/we-are-all-white-supremacists-now.php?fbclid=IwAR3hGnL4WUFYYM4XaX3oV7B_9bUmyAIrjiaJGzuI4fR9y5rcrMSyh9AUCLs
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faPNpovMeuU
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yet lib historians rank him just behind or ahead of Ronald Reagan
if you disagree you know what happens.
:roll:
https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?page=overall
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/24/opinion/dei-hires-are-making-the-fbi-more-woke-than-qualified/?fbclid=IwAR2MUncjBcA9PKcTo7EWlOnxbWuEkv7a4ou8qcnHVNB3KTyqHo17ZxkV3uE
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/race-fantasies/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=292481852&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8q-cDNagy5mw7Pf6uFbcmVaGoQHUbKKzncTzcEON34E5yoG0hTDvNyYHHJuhbTTjB8IFfGCsxLT65jTwnuUic-vZ1uFg&utm_content=292481852&utm_source=hs_email
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/02/19/a-harvard-professor-conducted-a-study-whose-conclusions-caused-everyone-to-lose-their-minds-n2635415
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This is the MSM pundits, jurnolisters, outlets working this story:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=BR9mHzp9&id=72B071142BCBE33C5C5E1F8ECD714D09A48AFCE6&thid=OIP.BR9mHzp9Lzfluh_xFyb-IgHaE8&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.istockphoto.com%2Fphotos%2Fcleaning-house-sweeping-dirt-under-the-rug-picture-id183410688%3Fk%3D6%26m%3D183410688%26s%3D612x612%26w%3D0%26h%3DW8MTjSQBBFZ3fycX0ORROANrrLFQ4_aGEL7zCTyf6LM%3D&cdnurl=https%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FR.051f661f3a7d2f37e5ba1ff11726fe22%3Frik%3D5vyKpAlNcc2OHw%26pid%3DImgRaw%26r%3D0&exph=408&expw=612&q=image+sweeping+under+the+rug&simid=608028320222219479&form=IRPRST&ck=9F689ACB58A77882B9AFDA3D777AA053&selectedindex=0&itb=0&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0&vt=0&sim=11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxbIgVJXMuc
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I’m not much of a fan of “race” as a category, pigeonhole, or some other form of delineation. The concept is a fluid one, within a given race there can be major genetic and other differences, and indeed I believe culture has a far larger impact on behavior than some sort of intrinsic attribute of a given race, and figure further that some wouldn’t concentrate so exclusively on cultural attitudes or seek to force so many cultural changes if culture didn’t have some sort of overriding significance.
Still, the blunt instrument of race is a way or bean sorting and counting that’s woven into all sorts of societal fabrics and hence we are stuck with it, at least until concepts like “gender fluidity” and similar outcomes across bean counting groups enter into the picture whereupon other expediencies are embraced.
Perhaps what’s shown below is merely a matter of lazy bean counters entering errata, but given the current cultural climate it’s not difficult to conclude the same folks ever so willing to place their thumbs on various scales are seeking to do the same here:
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2024/03/12/here-are-some-mugshots-of-white-prisoners-n2393907?fbclid=IwAR2j-9F2jhom8OQCjkVcgfjbXvU77bz55xEzR2qxEUmCaIUbTYCoMWJwySQ
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Truly deranged , , ,
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For some reason those most likely call out real or imagined “Islamophobia” are blind full blown Christian persecution:
https://pjmedia.com/raymond-ibrahim/2024/03/13/hungary-calls-out-western-hypocrisy-on-christian-persecution-n4927288
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He is quite correct in this.
I have had great rhetorical success in discussions about the Hamashole attempts at Jewicide with the argument about the virtual disappearance of Christians from Iraq and that even our State Dept (Kerry era) has formally acknowledged genocide of Christians in Syria.
If it weren't the Jews, it would be the Christians, and if none of them are around then it is Sunni vs. Shia (and/or the Suffis in Pakistan)
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It seems to me that the time is right to forthrightly call for cutting the Gordian's Knot that is our current paradigm.
I haven't read it, but this book goes there:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671726/the-end-of-race-politics-by-coleman-hughes/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rundown&pnespid=tahqWHtDJKkQw_LBvW_xF82AvgO0Dpp2K.Cz3OJ0oBFmeIApVJI4Ry4kXD05CvEOx4naPwE4
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Meghan Kelly had discussion at length on how his performance on the 'View'
and the hosts as always displayed their angry biasis and foolishness
while he was amazing cool calm and collected. His mother is white and so they were annoyed he did not describe himself as black per se.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/megyn-kelly-takes-absolute-joy-in-views-sunny-hostin-being-calmly-and-expertly-demolished-after-tense-interview/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB7fChcEyd8
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Coleman Hughes
his thinking is a major danger to "reparations"
he must be shouted down! now!