Tag Archives: racism

“Black” voting districts are unconstitutional, unfair, and condescending

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The map shows the contorted Congressional District in Louisiana that is at issue in the Supreme Court case that was argued yesterday.

You won’t see this map in most of the news reports on the case – not because it’s not newsworthy, but because it is. This picture speaks a thousand words about the absurdity at issue.

All parties to the case – and the Supreme Court Justices, as well – agree that this strange amalgamation was created for the express purpose of establishing a district that is supposedly Black* so that Blacks could be assured of electing Black representatives.

(I say “supposedly Black” because most Blacks in Louisiana, as in other American states, are actually of mixed race.)

There are several problems with this notion of Black Congressional Districts. First, it assumes that people identifying as Blacks can be represented in Congress only by other people identifying as Blacks. Why is that the case? I’m white and I’ve voted for Black candidates, and I’m sure many Blacks have voted for white candidates. In fact, Donald Trump got a substantial share of the Black vote last year.

Second, the flip side of concentrating Blacks into Black districts is to concentrate whites into white districts. If we’re to have separate Congressional Districts, should we also have separate schools? Separate drinking fountains?

In a region of the country with a sordid Jim Crow history of “separate but equal,” having separate Congressional Districts strikes me as a vile throwback.

Third, what happens if one of the white districts in Louisiana elects a Black? That would result in Blacks having too many seats, right? Conversely, what happens if a Black district elects a white? Does that mean we need to go back to the racial gerrymandering board to re-draw the districts again?

Fourth, this notion that Blacks are entitled to Congressional representation in exact proportion to their population (or more in the event a Black gets elected in a white district) would seem to apply equally to other races.

In Washington State, for example, about 10% of the population is of Asian descent. Many of their ancestors were exploited and discriminated against. Should we gerrymander the Congressional Districts in Washington to ensure that 10% of the representatives are Asian?

What do we do if the Asian voters don’t go along? What do we do if they “wrongly” vote for a white or Black or Hispanic rather than for the Asian candidate that they’re supposed to vote for? What if they vote for politicians on the basis of policy, not race? Or on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin?

Gee, that’d be horrible, huh?

What about other minorities? In New York State, about 11% of the population is Jewish. Should we gerrymander some Jewish districts? Does it matter whether the Jews are observant or not?

What about transexuals? In California, about 97% of the population is transexual.

OK, I made that up, but you get the point.

The premise to this racial gerrymandering is that Blacks are unique among minorities, in (1) possessing “Black issues” that only they care about, and (2) lacking the ability to persuade non-Blacks to their side of those issues.

I disagree. I think Blacks are fully functional citizens who can vote their minds on all issues, side-by-side with the rest of us, and they have the ability to persuade the rest of us on those issues. They are not in need of child-like allowances any more than Asians or Jews or transexuals or Hispanics or Scots. It’s time to end the separate-but-equal Congressional Districts and end the soft bigotry of racial condescension.

*Although much of my tribe disagrees with me on this, I use “Black” rather than “black” when referring to American Blacks. That’s not because the AP Style Manual calls for it, but because I’m willing to call a race by the name that a majority of the race prefers. If a majority of whites start asking to be called “Whites,” or a majority of Scots start asking to be called “scots,” then I’ll go along with that, too.

These four women destroyed the Democratic Party with race

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Four young Congresswomen – not even Senators – accomplished something that eluded years of Democratic Presidents and their woes.

Jimmy Carter in his malaise, Bill with Monica and his cigar, Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War – none of that was able to accomplish what these four young Congresswomen accomplished.

They destroyed the Democratic Party.

It was a perfect storm that began around the year 2020. China leaked a bioengineered virus from its biowarfare lab – probably accidentally – to produce worldwide mass hysteria and lockdowns of billions of people.

It gathered steam when a thug died in the hands of a white cop. Protests and riots ensued, weirdly exempted from the lockdowns.

At the time, the country was already weary of Donald Trump and his often productive but typically provocative antics.

These four Congresswomen seized the moment. Never great fans of America, they seized that time of weakness to destroy her, or at least act out their anger at her.

The death of the thug became emblematic of white police brutality. Never mind that this particular thug probably died of drugs, not a chokehold. Never mind that more Blacks die at the hands of Black police officers than at the hands of white ones. Never mind that the leading cause of death among young Black men is other young Black men. Never mind that the murder rate among Blacks is seven-times that of whites, and nearly all Black murders are at the hands of other Blacks.

Led by these Congresswomen, the Left decided that sticking to those inconvenient facts was . . .

RACIST!

The narrative was more important than any dumb facts. To disagree with their false narrative or their false charge of racism served only to prove you’re a . . .

RACIST!

Your only salvation was confession, and then they might let you off easy with just a few hundred hours of DEI training.

Oh yes, DEI. The Left’s long-standing reverse discrimination called “Affirmative Action” had failed, and their effort to sustain their failed discrimination was also failing.

So, the Left did what they do when their policies fail: They rebranded it. (See, e.g., communism rebranded as socialism, rebranded as liberalism, rebranded as wokeism, rebranded as progressivism.)

The new brand for “Affirmative Action” was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This new brand was the same as the old brand, except, this time, it was coupled with brainwashing.

You had to not only engage in reverse discrimination; you had to believe in it. You had to believe that the company (or college or whatever) was stronger if the guy down the hall had dark skin.

Painting the skin of employees a la Justin Trudeau blackface was not Kosher, but almost. You could hire into a company or admit into a college a privileged Black kid (or ¾ Black kid like Barack Obama’s daughters admitted to Harvard) and get full DEI credit.

The problem was that DEI, like Affirmative Action, tended to conflict with a meritocracy. But the DEI supremacists had a solution to that problem: Do away with merit. Merit became a code word for . . .

RACIST!

The only content of your character that mattered was the pigmentation of your skin. If that meant Boeing planes fall out of the sky because 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of the skin color of engineers who would like to say otherwise, well, that’s . . .

RACIST!

The planes are just . . .

RACIST!

While we’re at it, they thought, let’s do away with sex. A nominee for the Supreme Court announced rather proudly that she could not define “woman.”

That proved to be a slippery slope. Next thing we knew, people that everyone else defines as not women – you know, people with a Y chromosome, high testosterone levels, a penis and testicles – were calling themselves “women” and competing in women’s sports like swimming and even boxing. Unsurprisingly, in view of their testosterone levels and male musculature, they usually won. By a pool length or a knockout.

At which time they joined the women in the showers. If you complained, you were the sex equivalent of . . .

RACIST!

You were alphabet-people-phobic. For that, you get another few hundred hours of DEI training, and then you get cancelled. No soup for you, and no career either.

Two more things. Bear with me.

They spent taxpayer money like drunken sailor-ettes. The Orwellian-titled Inflation Reduction Act threw a trillion dollars in borrowed fuel onto an inflation inferno. That was after previous boondoggle bills literally paid people not to work.

So . . . you pay people not to work at producing goods, and then you wonder why demand seems to be outpacing supply to produce price inflation.

Ah, they knew that would be the effect. But it was worth a little inflation to get money out of the hands of people who earned it and into the hands of people who voted for them.

Speaking of people who vote for them, they opened the southern border. A gazillion people came. All were illegal, many were criminals, some were murderers.

But almost all had darkish skin. So, if you don’t like them illegally entering our country, and some of them committing criminal acts here, and many sponging off our welfare state, well, then you’re a . . .

RACIST!

It all worked for a little while. But reality has a way of intervening. Systems that disregard merit tend to become unmeritorious. They get reputations for that, and there are consequences. People get turned off by planes falling from the sky, applicants being evaluated on the basis of their skin, illegal immigrants whom we can’t call illegal, prices going through the roof, lockdowns keeping the kids in the damn house all day, teachers who won’t teach, and all the rest.

In the end, the Squad’s passion to destroy America failed because America is, even now, very powerful and basically sensible.

But they did destroy the Democratic Party. The people voted the bums out. Not the Squad – most of them are in safe Democrat districts – but their Democrat colleagues. Especially their senile President and his smiley, witless, joyless VP.

So far, the judgment of the people has been without regrets. My sense is that if the election were held today, the Democrats would lose even more resoundingly.

It won’t be easy for the Democrats to recover. In theory, they can change their policies, but it’s hard to abandon a position when you’ve already announced that to do so is . . .

RACIST!

It’s one thing to argue that your position is the better one on the merits. That argument allows for negotiation and compromise. It’s another thing to climb down from a moralistic perch where you shout that your opponent’s focus on merit simply proves he’s a . . .

RACIST!

We’ve never seen a political climate quite like the current one. The Democrats went way out on a race limb, sawed it off, and are now surprised that they and their limb – not the tree – have fallen.

Does JD’s wife know he’s a racist?

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President Trump’s pick for his running mate, JD Vance, is a little hard to criticize. His mom in hillbilly Kentucky was a drug addict. He was saved, and raised, by his grandmother.

JD returned the favor in a way; he later saved his mom. He announced at the Republican National Convention that she’d been sober for many years (though he failed to mention that it was with his help). She beamed, and the crowd cheered.

JD joined the Marines, got a degree from Ohio State, and went to Yale Law School where he was an editor of the Yale Law Review. He became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He wrote an account of growing up called “Hillbilly Elegy” which became a best seller. He was elected to the United States Senate at age 37.

The left hates achievers. Especially when they do it on merit rather than skin color or sexual preference. If they’re conservative, they get dubbed “racists” for that.

To support the “racist” smear, the left will spin and even invent stories. In JD’s case, they’ve focused on his venture capital work.

After working for two venture firms, JD started his own. He named it after a power in the J.R.R. Tolkien books – Narya, which was a power to resist tyranny and despair.  

Rachel Maddow sees something ominous in this. She notes that if you take the “N” at the start of “Narya” and reposition it to the end, you have . . . [drum roll] . . . “Aryan.”

So, there you have it. Irrefutable proof that JD is a secretly self-identifying “Aryan.” As in the Hitlerian kind.

As for Tolkien, the left has long hated his depiction of a world with good and evil. The left doesn’t believe in evil, you see.

Pause to consider the reasons that a group of people would deny the existence of evil. And then consider the consequences of that denial.

Maybe I’m a little too hard on them. They do believe in one type of evil. They believe that conservative people are evil – like JD. They believe that such people deserve to be smeared with the “racist” label, as Maddow has smeared JD, and any other vile label.

Speaking of racism, some of the real thing was on display this week. In what the media dubbed “an antiwar protest,” the left marched in DC during Bibi Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Half the Democrats boycotted the speech. This “antiwar protest” was an appalling antisemitic march depicting Netanyahu as a horned monster with bloody fangs. Numerous signs called for a “final solution” to the Jewish “problem.”

One other thing about JD. He met a woman in Yale Law School and married her. She happens to be a Asian-American who practices Hinduism. Both her parents immigrated legally from India.

JD and Usha have been married ten years and have three half-Asian children. During their marriage, he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism.

I wonder if Usha and the kids know JD is a racist. Count on Rachel Maddow to break the news.

Biden tells Black graduates that America hates Blacks, and assumes they’re stupid enough to believe him

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Joe Biden sank to a new low last week. He was the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony for a Black college called Morehouse College. (Consider the irony of a serial plagiarist, story-telling fabulist, and academic cheat being a graduation speaker.)

Rather than presenting a message of hope and change, as Barack Obama did at a Morehouse graduation ceremony some years ago, Biden did a race-baiting imitation of Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. Here’s a sampling:

“You started college just as George Floyd was murdered and there was a reckoning on race. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you.

“What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street?

“What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?

I understand that Biden is running for reelection, and is badly behind – about 6-8 points behind where he was in the polls at this time in 2020 when he ultimately won by a sliver (at most).

And I understand that Biden didn’t write this speech – and he may have read it for the first time as he was reading it off the teleprompter at the ceremony.

And I understand that politicians take liberties with the truth, and Biden takes more than most because he’s been a politician for longer than most.

And I understand that, especially in election years, politicians pander to various constituencies. For example, Biden has pandered to kids who took out six-figure loans to pay for worthless degrees.

He has pandered to potheads with a promise to re-classify pot as something other than a dangerous drug even as evidence mounts that it causes schizophrenia and other permanent cognitive impairments.

He has pandered to a few terrorist sympathizers in Michigan to keep them voting Democrat – at the expense of Israelis striving to keep their country alive against those same terrorists who threaten to re-enact Oct. 7 again and again and again until Israel is wiped off the map.

Bad as all that is – and it’s plenty bad, despicable even – this Morehead speech is a new low. For the pandering purpose of hauling some wandering Blacks back to the Democrat plantation, Biden has slandered the American people.

Blacks have to be “ten-times” better to get a fair shot? Tell that to the Asians who need a SAT score 400 points higher than Blacks to get into Harvard.

Black men are being killed in the street? Well, yes, that one is factual. But nearly all of those Black men getting killed in the street are being killed by other Black men.

To be sure, there is regrettably still some racism in America. Some of it is Black racism against whites, and some of it is white racism against Blacks. All of it is wrong.

But to tar all of white America with a false accusation of racism is unfair, unproductive, untrue, and uncivil.

Biden will do anything to win this election. Anything.

Biden’s slander of white America is matched by his contempt for Black America. He apparently thinks Black America will believe his slander of America. Recall that Biden once said of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, of all people, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains!” 

Most Blacks won’t believe this latest lie. Unlike Joe Biden, they’ve lived real lives in America. Their experience is contrary to Biden’s hate-mongering portrayal of a dystopian America.

A few Blacks will rise to the bait of Biden’s race-bait because victimhood makes a person feel noble. But most are too smart for that. Most will see it for the destructive pandering that it is.

Please go away, Mr. President. I’d take Kamala over this stupid, hateful clown.

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

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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).

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Is capitalizing “Black” the ultimate condescension?

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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.

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Should Blacks be paid slavery reparations in the form of homelands?

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Many Black activists are agitating for two things.

One, they want reparations for the enslavement of some of their ancestors centuries ago, a small fraction of which is to be paid by the people whose ancestors were the enslavers, and a large fraction of which is to be paid by people like me whose ancestors back then were raiding rival clans in the Scottish Highlands without ever setting eyes on a Black person in their entire poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.

Two, they want to reinstitute racial segregation. They want Black dorm buildings in college, Black classes, Black this and Black that, all because the White man is not to be trusted. Who knows when he’ll break out a noose?

I do not think slavery reparations, standing alone, would do much good in elevating Black achievement. Trillions spent on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, three generations of welfare, and 40 years of Black favoritism in job applications and college admissions have done little good for Blacks, and arguably a lot of harm.

And I think segregation, standing alone, is an equally bad idea. If the races are ever to get along and start to trust one another, they need to spend time together.

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If everybody is racist, then nobody is

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Now that racism has been outlawed in business, and racists have been driven from the public square, you don’t witness much racism in America. Being racist is a bad move socially and career-wise. That’s good.

But black achievement in America still lags badly behind white, Asian and Hispanic achievement. The black illegitimacy rate is triple the white rate and the black murder rate is 7x the white rate. Both figures are worse than before affirmative action, worse than before the Great Society programs of the 60s and 70s, and even worse than the days of Jim Crow laws. 

The latest explanation for this continued malaise is that there’s a type of racism that you can’t see, but can only feel, and it’s getting worse. They call it “systemic racism.”

Systemic racism in America is like water to a fish in a pond. It’s everywhere, but undetectable except in its effect. That effect is to keep American blacks uniquely – not Asians or Hispanics or even black African immigrants – oppressed.

A scientific sounding name has been assigned to this: “Critical Race Theory.” The people who dreamed up the name ironically seem to think that calling it a “theory” makes it true. As in, “It’s like Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s a scientific theory, you know.”

CRT was originally an ordinary academic idea that people tend to see their world through the prism of race. The racists and race-baiters of the world twisted that uncontroversial idea into the notion that white people systemically persecute black people, even as the white people favor the black people in admissions, hiring and promotions. The racists and race-baiters now have persuaded ordinary well-intentioned white people to chant such nonsense as, “I’m a racist.”

There’s less to this conspicuous white show of self-flagellation than meets the eye. When questioned about their racism, such people recite, catechism-like, that everybody sees things through the prism of race, and so everybody is a racist.

So all they’re really confessing is that they’re racist just like everyone else. But they think they’re actually a little better than the other racists because, unlike the others, they admit to their racism.

It reminds me of certain religious people who go around advertising that they’re sinners, just like everyone else. But they imply that they’re a little better than the other sinners because, unlike the others, they admit they’re sinners.  

I submit that the premise of the racism-admitters is correct but their conclusion is erroneous.

Their premise that humans see things through the prism of race is correct. The person who says “I don’t even notice a person’s skin color” is obviously lying. We do notice skin colors. There are good anthropological reasons for that. Hominids who didn’t distrust hominids who looked different were often invited over for dinner.

But the conclusion does not follow the premise. Seeing things through the prism of race may make us racists in an anthropological sense but it doesn’t make us racists in an evil societal sense.  

There are racists and there are racists. Yes, we all (white, black and other shades) see the world to some extent through the prism of race, just as we see the world to some extent through the prism of our gender, our height, our weight and our socio-economic background. It’s a behavioral instinct rooted in our DNA.

But such instincts do not make us evil racists, misogynists, misandrists, dwarf-tossers, fat shamers or snobs. What does make us those things is when we allow our primitive behavioral instinct to control our modern feelings and actions. Civilized people don’t let that happen. They use their minds to control their racist instincts, just as they control their violence, anger, procreation and other animal instincts.

The erroneous conclusion that we don’t control our racism instinct – that we’re all racist because we all see the world through the prism of race – is destructive in several ways.

First, it dilutes the meaning of racism. If everyone is racist, then nobody is. Racism becomes seen as the ordinary human condition. It’s normalized. And then the real racists – the rare white supremists and Islamic (and European and American) Jew-haters and the Black Panther types – are given cover. 

Second, stating that everyone is a racist implies and sometimes outright states a corollary that “everyone” doesn’t actually mean everyone. It doesn’t include non-whites. Non-whites cannot be racist, says this corollary.

But that corollary can’t be right. If racism is embedded in humans anthropologically, then it’s equally embedded in whites, blacks and Asians. Worse, that false corollary either (1) dehumanizes blacks and Asians by implying that they’re not part of the world of “everybody” or (2) condescends blacks and Asians by implying that while they’re racist like everyone else, only whites are strong enough to bear the label.

Third, this notion that whites systemically but secretly persecute blacks even as they formally favor them undermines black achievement. It sends a powerful message to blacks that the system is stacked against them and that their failings are not their fault.

The way to encourage achievement by any group is to celebrate their achievements, not to pound into them the notion that they’re permanent victims for whom achievement is impossible.  

Fourth, amplifying this premise – that race is a prism through which people sometimes see the world – into this conclusion that race-is-destiny, sets the stage for governance by race. Like so much in this field, this approach is sufficiently bad that it has earned a euphemism. The euphemism is “Identity Politics.”

And so we’ve officially started judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Today, anti-racism not only permits but perversely requires racial discrimination — all while denying and disguising it.

Interestingly, this dishonest act of anti-intellectualism is committed most often by the intellectual elites. In academia and big corporations, it’s official policy. Their unfair and immoral policy to subordinate character – or merit – to skin color does not bode well for them. Nor does it bode well for science, culture, mathematics, religion, philosophy, engineering or anything else where there is such a thing as good versus bad, right versus wrong, truth versus falseness and success versus failure.

Stated another way, abolishing merit will produce less of it and less of the advances that depend on it – which are pretty much all of them.

Good white people may feel extra good about themselves for buying into the bunk that they, alone among the races, are innately and irredeemably racist merely because they see through the prism of race. But this self-indulgent feel-goodery is expensive. It’s harmful to themselves, to our culture and to the non-whites that are the supposed beneficiaries of it. 

Such people are usually well-intentioned. But for the good of humanity, I wish they would start thinking with their heads and not their hearts.

That leaves the question, what do we do about black underachievement? I don’t know what the answer is. (By the way, I don’t think the problem is one of IQ, as the left implies in their insistence that black achievement be measured on a scale that accounts for their race.)

But I do know what the answer to this problem is not. It’s not to do more of the same. It’s not to continue the same failed policies that have enabled and perpetuated it for over half a century.