Tag Archives: race

Racial discrimination is a lousy way to overcome racism

Posted on by
4

There’s a rule of law that Americans of all races have long asked for, and thought they had. That rule is the one that outlaws racial discrimination.

First, consider where we are now as we approach two centuries since the Civil War and three generations since the first Civil Rights Act. We’ve elected a Black President and a Black Vice President, we currently have a stellar Hispanic Secretary of State, we’ve had 14 Black Senators and 183 Black members of the House (including many from states that were part of the Confederacy), and oddsmakers say a Black man is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.  

America has plenty of flaws that need fixing, but, given these facts, it’s hard to make a case that one of those flaws is systemic racism. Are there a few racist people in America? Of course, everywhere has that, and most places have a lot more of them than America does.

But is America a systemically racist society? No. America is probably the least-racist place on earth.

America’s world-leading progress wasn’t enough for an alliance of well-intentioned social engineers seeking to improve us and ill-intentioned fascists seeking to end us.

They decided that our color-blind society has too little color – too few Black people – in prestige universities, company board rooms, and status professions like law and medicine, because Black presence in those fields was less than their 13% presence in the population at large.  Consistent with the pre-conceived goal of improving us (or ending us), these do-gooders (and do-baders) attributed that shortfall to our racism.

They conveniently ignored the abundance of Blacks and the paucity of whites in lucrative sports such as basketball and football in our purportedly racist nation. When facts don’t fit the narrative, these people ignore the facts.

To “remedy” the perceived “problem” that America had racially discriminated against Blacks, the social engineers and fascists schemed to discriminate in favor of them. They embarked on a campaign to correct racial discrimination by . . . racially discriminating.  

They didn’t call it racial discrimination, of course. They used euphemisms like “affirmative action.” When “affirmative action” came to be recognized as racial discrimination, they rebranded it “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Now that “diversity, equity and inclusion” has likewise been recognized as racial discrimination, they are re-branding yet again.

Whatever their name, these programs were all based on the notion that Blacks should be favored in non-athletic competition that is ordinarily based on merit, in order to achieve a number of Blacks that is proportionate to their representation in society.

The degree of discrimination necessary to produce this outcome has been extreme, as shown by objective measures. The average test scores of people admitted to prestige colleges or to medical school are wildly different depending on the race of the applicant. As a matter of pure statistics, it is a simple and undeniable fact that the average Black physician would never have been admitted to med school if he’d been white.

This racial discrimination for the purpose of achieving proportionate representation was extended to every nook and cranny of American society (with that notable exception of sports). Businesses, clubs, fraternities, company board rooms, hospitals, law firms, colleges and every other group of people were pressured, coerced and often sued. They were forced to compromise merit in favor of proportionate racial representation.

Our elected leaders chose not to stand up to this. Democrats instead egged it on, because they benefited politically. Republicans just watched silently, because they were too damned cowardly to risk, ironically, being name-called “racist” for standing against racial discrimination.  

We now teeter over a racial abyss where people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. As a society, we’ve almost succeeded in snatching a racist defeat from the jaws of a colorblind victory.

But a rescue is coming from the Supreme Court. Beginning a few years ago, the Court has re-affirmed the rules against racial discrimination in hiring, contracting and college admissions.

A case issued last week (though it was apparently decided many months ago – more about that later) built on this start. The topic was the drawing of Congressional Districts by race. I’ll discuss it in my next post.

BlaCKs* do poorly on the bar exam, so, naturally, progs want to abolish it

Posted on by
2

Anna (Shelley Long):
“That is such a dumb idea. Sometimes it amazes me you ever passed the bar.”

Walter (Tom Hanks):
“I’m not surprised. You’ve never passed a bar in your life.”

The Money Pit

Washington State is planning to join Oregon in banning the bar exam. That’s the two-day or three-day test taken by recent law school graduates (and, in the case of the Kennedys, not-so-recent law school graduates) to prove they’re fit to hold a state license to practice law. It tests the student’s knowledge of the rules of law as learned in law school (or, more likely, in studying for the bar exam, since hardly anything useful is learned in law school) and their skill at applying that knowledge to hypothetical scenarios.

The bar-banners are candid about the reasons for their ban. It’s because BLacks* disproportionately fail to pass the exam as compared to whites and even as compared to other minorities (including minorities from homes where the language spoken at home was not English).

Continue reading →

Is capitalizing “Black” the ultimate condescension?

Posted on by
4

I capitalize the word “Black” when referring to Black people. Many of my tribe object to that, since I don’t capitalize “white.” Those objections were expressed by readers most recently in reaction to my latest column.

Here are my reasons for using “Black” to refer to Blacks, in reverse order of importance.

First, the AP Style Manual calls for “Black” to be capitalized. That Manual is not the Bible, but it’s a highly recognized authority in what used to be called journalism.

Relax. As I stated, my reasons are presented here in reverse order of importance. The AP Style Manual is the least important one.

Second, of a little more importance, is that many Blacks want the big “B.” I tend to defer to people’s preferences when it comes to their name, their nationality, their religion and their race. (Not so much their sex.)

If a person named Javier wants a hard pronunciation of the “J” as in “Java” then I’ll give him one even if I think it’s a linguistic butchering. I’ll also give him Gavier and pronounce it Javier if that’s what he prefers.

Continue reading →

Which of these people is a different species?

Posted on by
3

Are Neanderthals us?

A guy named Joachim Neander lived in a German valley about 400 years ago. He was a bigwig in the valley, and it came to be called “Neander’s Valley” or, in German, “Neanderhohle.” The name evolved with the language, and it morphed into “Neandertal” or “Neanderthal.” (Pseudo-linguists still debate which is right.)

In a weird coincidence, the Neanderthal Valley is where they first discovered fossilized remains of an ancient human called “Neanderthal.” (What are the odds of that?)

The fossils suggested that this particular Neanderthal was no ordinary human. He/she/they/it was very sturdy. The people who found him decided he was brute, in a bad way. He became the prototypical caveman.

Never mind that caves were the best homes available at the time this Neanderthal lived – certainly better than a sidewalk tent.

Continue reading →

Democrats are shocked to discover that law-abiding minorities don’t support law-breaking ones

Posted on by
23

The world of woke is rife with incorrect assumptions about racial minorities. First is the assumption that racial minorities are criminals.

That assumption is wrong. It’s true that a disproportionate amount of crime – especially the violent kind – is committed by racial minorities. That’s true even after normalizing the numbers for the increased poverty level of minorities. I suspect this is due to a familial breakdown caused by many complicated factors.

But it’s certainly not true that minorities are all, or even generally, criminals. To the contrary, the great majority of minorities are law-abiding citizens.

Before leaving that first erroneous assumption to move on to the second one, consider the racism of it: The left operates under the assumption that racial minorities are criminals.

Continue reading →

Whoopi Goldberg believes the Holocaust was not racist

Posted on by
31

A woman named Caryn Elaine Johnson who goes by the stage name “Whoopi Goldberg” informed her television viewers the other day on a program I’ve never seen called The View that “The Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race.”

Whatever happened to the leftist trope that there’s no such thing as race? The left has rediscovered race and now it’s everywhere they look, except in the Holocaust. America is racist – systemically! – but the Nazi’s were not.

The Germans and Jews certainly thought the Holocaust was about race. When Nazi’s said “we will exterminate the Jewish race” and thereupon murdered over six million of them, the Jews took it personally. Go figure.

Whoopi’s co-hosts, though not the most informed crowd, tried to correct Whoopi. But they couldn’t change her “mind.” Whoopi instead dug her hole deeper. She Whoopi-splained that the Holocaust was merely “about two white groups of people.”

Criticism ensued from Jews including Holocaust survivors, the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and the Anti-Defamation League, and many non-Jews as well (but not “The Squad” of Democrat progs). They noted that the Nazi’s explicitly considered the Jews a different and inferior race, and many Jews themselves consider their culture different from typical white culture.

Continue reading →

Olympics ads portray blacks as America’s good and dominant race

Posted on by
18

My TV has been broken for over a year (OK, maybe I don’t know how to work the remote) but I watched a little of the Olympics at a friend’s house this week. “A little” seems to be all that anyone is watching this time. Ratings are down 49%.

The events were dull but I learned something from the advertisements. I learned that most people in this country are black, and all of the good ones are.

Blacks, who comprise about 13% of the U.S. population, comprise most of the actors in the advertisements. Aliens in faraway worlds receiving television signals from earth are apt to conclude that the most powerful culture on Earth is run by good black people.

Continue reading →