According to an Australian newspaper, the South African cricket team was forced to include an injured Coloured (mixed-race) player in their line-up for the Cricket World Cup in order to adhere to the government’s racial quotas for sports. This may have cost the country, one of the world’s foremost cricketing and rugby nations, the championship as it lost in the semi-final against New Zealand which is less highly rated.
Vernon Philander
The injured Vernon Philander (see picture) was selected and star bowler Kyle Abbott ousted on account of belonging to the white race. For the semi-final played last Tuesday, the South African minister of sport, Fikile Mbalula, ordered that “at least four players of colour” had to be included in the team.
According to reports, captain AB de Villiers was highly upset about the political and racial interference in the selection process. A source close to him said:
“AB didn‘t want to play in the semi because of this; it is a clear case of interference by the board — they ordered Philander‘s selection.”
“It was a purely political decision. The players are fuming about it but they won‘t say so.”
De Villiers declined to comment publicly.
Tony Irish, chief executive of the SA Cricketers‘ Association, merely said:
“I will be talking to the players [today] when they get back [from Australasia].”
The ANC sports minister is unrepentant, however. He has threatened national sports bodies with deregistration if they do not axe more white players from both rugby and cricket.
“We will …withdraw national colours; we will ensure that we deregister those that are intransigent,” Mbalula threatened.
You know just how scholarly a policy paper is when it is studded with a clichéd expression like “we need to have a conversation about …” The pop-phrase is familiar from these farcical usages:
“We need to have a conversation about race”—when, in reality, we do nothing but subject ourselves to a one-way browbeating about imagined slights committed against the pigmentally burdened.
“We need to have a conversation about immigration”—when such a “conversation” is strictly confined to a lecture on how to adapt to the program of Third World mass immigration. This particular “conversation” involves learning to live with a lower quality of life, poorer education, environmental degradation; less safety and security, more taxation and alienation.
In this mold is a policy paper by Jennifer Bradley, formerly of the liberal Brookings Institute. Bradley had a stroke of luck. Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report found fit to link her essay on his eponymous news website site. Titled “The Changing Face of the Heartland: Preparing America’s Diverse Workforce for Tomorrow,” Bradley’s Brookings Essay would have been more honestly titled “Get-With the Program, Middle American. Demography Is Destiny.”
Disguised as scholarship, the Bradley essay schools Middle America at length on how to prepare its diversifying workforce for tomorrow. Thus, for example, she states that “America is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, where new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economics, and politics.” The implication here is that this seismic shift is due to a mystic force beyond the control of the host population, rather than to willful policies in which the native population has never had a say and will likely never have one.
Bradley’s particular concern is with “two demographic shifts.” The one is the aging of the predominantly white (and presumably productive) generation of Americans born after World War II. Another is the concomitant influx of “Mexicans, Hmong, Indians, Vietnamese, Somalis, Liberians, and Ethiopians.”
“According to the Minnesota State Demographic Center, the Asian, black, and Hispanic populations in the state tripled between 1990 and 2010, while the white population grew by less than 10 percent. This trend will continue,” warns Bradley: “From 2010 to 2030, the number of people of color is expected to grow twice as quickly as the number of whites.”
There goes that mystic force again.
“As Minnesota and the region go, so goes the nation,” states Bradley, matter-of-fact.
As Bradley sees it, a feature of the diversity explosion in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Midwest microcosm is a widening “race-based education and achievement gap” that will “become a drag on workforce growths unless something was done to reverse these trends.”
Translated, this means the immigrant population isn’t measuring up.
I can think of a few unexplored options to narrow the gap described. One is to welcome immigrants who’ll add value to the economy, rather than drain taxpayer resources. Bradley, however, is here not to strike up a true conversation—which would include exploring all options—but to dictate the terms of the “conversation.”
Indeed, the raiment of scholarship she sheds as quickly as a prostitute sheds her clothes (only less admirably; working girls deserve respect). Bradley brays about the need to “reframe the conversation about race-based education and achievement gaps in Minneapolis-St. Paul—turning what had been a moral (and insufficiently effective) commitment to its underserved communities into an economic necessity. Leading figures from the worlds of government, business, and academia, and public and private groups throughout the region [all stakeholders, but you] are now trying to figure out how to undo the effects of decades of neglect, tackling the problem from many perspectives and with an ever greater sense of urgency.”
Because the imported population is failing to achieve parity with the host population, Bradley has inferred that the newcomers are “underserved”; that they require more resources, when the fault could just as well lie in the kind of incompatible immigrant being privileged by policy makers. The essay’s premise is that America is “underserving” her immigrant population, when it is the other way round:
Averaged out, the immigrant population is underserving the American economy.
In this “conversation,” the social “scientist” recommends throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the causality quagmire. The mass-immigration imperative, moreover, is presented as the antidote to a declining birth rate and an aging population, when in fact mass immigration is the excuse statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to further undermine civil society and shore up the welfare State.
Demographics need not be destiny. The West became the best not by out-breeding the undeveloped world—not due to huge numbers—but because of human capital; people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.
A review of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America, by William H. Frey. By Christopher Caldwell
“We believe our diversity, our differences, when joined together by a common set of ideals, makes us stronger, makes us more creative, makes us different,” Barack Obama pronounced at a citizenship ceremony last Fourth of July. Until half a century ago most serious historians would have called such an opinion ignorant or naïve. Ethnic diversity implies cultural diversity—if it did not, ethnic diversity would soon disappear.
Cultural diversity means division, division means weakness, and weakness means, eventually, unfreedom. Such, at least, is the traditional view, and history appears to vindicate it. “Diversity” has been an attribute of subject populations: medieval elites communicated in Latin, laborers in various vernaculars. Diversity has been the form of belonging that typifies empires, just as nationality has been the form that typifies republics.
The British Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Habsburg Empire—these were diverse. England, Italy, and Austria, until recently, were not. The motto E pluribus unum is a sign that the founders saw diversity as a challenge to be mastered, not a resource to be tapped. Yet “diversity” today is a sacred term.
It carries lots of power but resists easy definition. It entered popular constitutional understanding with the Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Justice Lewis Powell held that an affirmative action program that reserved spots for minorities at the U.C. Davis medical school violated the equal rights of white applicants, but that “the goal of achieving a diverse student body is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions under some circumstances.” Diversity thus became a euphemism, allowing authorities to connive at public-policy goals that they could not openly avow.
The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey would seem a good candidate to lead readers to a clear, propaganda-free understanding of what diversity is. The title of his new study on ethnicity and population change is Diversity Explosion. While he never defines the word explicitly, he means the decline—in both population and vitality—of America’s European-descended population, and its replacement by more recently arrived population groups from everywhere in the non-European world.
Frey sometimes describes this change as “the browning of America.” More than half (53%) of the country’s 3,100 counties had declining white populations by the first decade of the century. In the current decade the white population has begun to decline in the nation as a whole. Metropolitan New York and metropolitan Los Angeles have each lost a million white people since 1990. Fewer than half the babies born in 2011 were in the U.S. Census category of “non-Hispanic whites.” Three years from now most Americans under 18 will be “minorities” of one kind or another.
In 1970, there were only two cities with more than a million black residents: New York and Chicago. Now there are seven. Los Angeles County and adjoining Riverside County have 6.1 million Hispanics. In days when people spoke more freely about such matters, dramatic change in the dominant population of the world’s dominant power would have been occasion for speculation and worry. About whether, for instance, as more of its citizens come from non-European backgrounds, the United States will change its idea of its cultural heritage. Or whether, considering the occasional tawdriness of whites’ behavior toward minorities in centuries past—displacing Indians, enslaving Africans, deporting Chinese—there is cause to worry about race relations once the shoe is on the other foot. Or whether European civilization, which from the time of Columbus to the time of Goodbye, Columbus, seemed to roll ever westward as if by a law of nature, is now beginning to ebb.
Frey’s attitude toward these changes is much the same as President Obama’s: demographically, America is bound for glory. “Rather than being feared,” Frey writes, “America’s new diversity—poised to reinvigorate the country at a time when other developed nations are facing advanced aging and population loss—can be celebrated.”
Any “resistance” to diversity can be explained by Americans’ “fear of change, fear of losing privileged status, or fear of unwanted groups in their communities.” Now there are certainly good reasons to be glad of the size of our recent immigration. The U.S. labor force will grow 5% between this decade and 2030, and it would have shrunk considerably otherwise. Yet Frey could do with a reminder that what he is celebrating in passages like these is youth, not diversity, that natives ought to be as capable of bearing the next generation of children as the foreign-born, that their failure to do so may be an effect of something dire rather than the cause of something to be “celebrated,” and that policymakers have seldom been able to predict the outcomes of wholesale demographic change.
Clashes await. Frey sometimes has a sharp eye for them. Only 23% of those born in the Baby Boom generation and before believe America’s new diversity is a “change for the better”; 42% call it a change for the worse. The interests of America’s aging, infertile white population and its young, fecund immigrants will necessarily diverge, in ways that have nothing to do with anyone’s good or ill will. Both groups are dependent on government services, but in different ways. Sixteen percent of whites are over 65, versus 7% of minorities.
The former, broadly speaking, want cheap drugs, lavish pensions, and a labor market in which young people will push wheelchairs and fix meals for next to nothing; the latter want new schools for their children, government-funded day care, and a so-called living wage. This year, for the first time, white families are supporting more dependent seniors than children. For them, the welfare state is no longer in any sense an “investment,” the way its social-democratic designers used to claim. It is, to use an appropriately Baby Boom expression, a drag.
Such statistics lend themselves to reflections about decadence and to questions about what it is we are really importing. It is not so much diversity, perhaps, and not so much labor, as traditional families. A third of Hispanic households consist of families in which a married couple lives with children, and a third of Hispanics are under 18.
A third of Asian-American households consist of these families, too, and the country’s Asian population is now ten times what it was in 1970. Among whites, by contrast, such families make up only a fifth of households—except in those rare communities nationwide where the white population is growing. There, white habits resemble those of immigrants, with a third of families consisting of married couples and children. Frey notes that over time Hispanics “tend to become ‘Americanized’ with regard to family and household relationships.”
But, for now, new immigrant groups—or at least those individuals visible to the IRS—bear a disproportionate burden. Pay-as-you-go welfare states, in which all benefits are drawn directly from present earnings, are spectacularly unfair to those who procreate. Everyone, in time, has a claim to the benefits. But one group pays almost all the costs of producing, nurturing, and educating the next generation’s workforce: parents. For taxpayers, welfare states offer massive disincentives to having children.
Both the old (who have already paid for others’ benefits) and the young (who will pay in the future) have legitimate but incompatible claims on the welfare state. Trying to honor both is one reason the country is now in such a fiscal predicament. Frey’s solution is to “persuade seniors that the key needs among striving young minorities—education, affordable housing, and steady employment—will work to benefit the Social Security and medical care programs that seniors will need in retirement.” Persuade all you like, but it’s not true, or at least not soon enough. In a pay-as-you-go system, there’s a lag of half a generation or a generation before education produces benefits (which, of course, not all education does). Politicians might reasonably ask seniors to consider posterity; but if anyone were capable of doing that, we wouldn’t have got ourselves so deep in debt in the first place.
An economy built around mass immigration may lead to underinvestment in the future. Indeed, this may constitute an off-balance-sheet liability that makes the apparent economic benefits of immigration illusory.
Frey’s book includes an innovation that renders his statistics either clearer or less trustworthy, depending how you look at it: he treats the U.S. Census category “Hispanic” as a race. That is a fateful change, because Hispanics account for more than half of the country’s new “diversity.” Is this move defensible? “Hispanic,” as defined by the Census Bureau, as well as by common sense, is not a race. It is rather a designation of immigrant provenance that has been applied in ways ever more bizarre as the years have passed. It classifies people by national language—not the language of the immigrant—so that a youngster from the Dominican Republic gets lumped together with an Indian from the Bolivian highlands (even if that Indian does not speak Spanish), not with a Haitian who grew up ten miles away (even if that Haitian does).
The problem is that government, however punctilious its definitions, has treated Hispanics as if they were a race. Ethnic lobbies, too, mix foreigners and Americans, non-citizens and citizens, under the same “Hispanic” category, in a way that renders meaningless many of the statistics that rank their progress. The prospects of Ramón “El Pachuco” Rodríguez of Maryvale, Arizona, who arrived from Sinaloa in his 30s a couple years ago without a high school degree or even a green card, are deemed somehow relevant to those of Lowell “Skippy” Rodriguez of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Groton. The linguistic/national nonce-adjective “Hispanic” gets passed on as if it were a genetic inheritance so that Skippy (who may be “Hispanic” only because his great-grandfather owned the largest newspaper in Buenos Aires) can collect, on behalf of newly arrived El Pachuco, a “diversity” bonus that will allow him to bump a more deserving applicant from a spot at Yale.
“It is safe to predict that racial classifications will be modified in the future as multiracial marriages and populations proliferate,” Frey writes. But this prediction is not safe at all. There now exists a market of racial classifications. Whether such classifications as “black” and “Hispanic” get modified will depend on whether they continue to produce jobs, promotions and college placements.
In the case of “Hispanic,” if a classification is something you can be incentivized to belong to, then it doesn’t meet anyone’s commonsense definition of a race. A faulty classification produces a faulty reading of society. To argue that Hispanics should or should not be eligible for programs of racial integration designed for blacks in the shadow of Jim Crow is to put the cart before the horse. We have these categories in the first place only to promote people’s insertion into race-based programs.
Frey is more interested in tracing the arrival, spread, and assimilation of immigrants than in examining the centuries-old divide between whites and blacks. Black population growth is steady but not spectacular—midway between the exploding populations of new immigrants and the declining one of whites. Still, his discussion of black population trends contains some of the book’s most surprising data. For the first time since slavery, immigration accounts for as much population growth among blacks as it does in the country at large.
Over the past 20 years millions have arrived from West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Caribbean—a wave so large that a tenth of American blacks are now immigrants. Meanwhile, the trickle of native blacks to the American South, which began in the 1970s, has in the last two decades become a torrent. It has reversed the migration to Northern cities that went on uninterrupted for most of the 20th century.
The South is the only part of the country that is gaining native-born blacks, but it is gaining a lot of them, and the gains in Georgia have been particularly large. Atlanta recently passed Chicago as the country’s second-largest black metropolis.
Blacks are moving to the South in part because they are being welcomed there. The five most residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the country are Milwaukee, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. The ten least segregated cities are all in the South or Southwest, including Charleston, Raleigh, Greenville (South Carolina), Lakeland (Florida), and Augusta (Georgia). This may be because Southerners are nicer than Northerners, but Frey argues persuasively that the federal government was more able to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in new housing than in old, and most new housing built after 1968 was in the Sunbelt.
By measures not just of segregation but also of income, poverty, and educational attainment, blacks today do considerably better in states that were segregated until the 1960s than in states that were not. The Supreme Court has been much criticized for deciding, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), that the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that call for special scrutiny of Southern institutions were unconstitutional. But if voting institutions resemble the ones Frey describes, it would have been arbitrary to rule otherwise.
Since the 1990s, when Frey noted that whites were fleeing areas of high immigration, the separation between whites and all minorities has, he says, “softened.” He speculates that immigration may have helped blacks and whites get along because other minorities have provided a “buffer” between them, although he offers no data to back up his assertion. A sixth of newly married whites are married to someone of another race, but it is not easy to figure what this means since the non-racial category of Hispanics is, again, involved.
Such intermarriage may be rising because whites are growing more tolerant or because new “races” have been introduced into American life that stand outside the historic black-white clash. White-Asian marriages outnumber white-black marriages, despite a vastly higher black population. Yet white-black marriages have been rising since the 1960s, by about 50% per decade, and now amount to roughly one eighth of the number of black-black marriages.
Frey finds a strange asymmetry in such racially mixed marriages: three quarters are between black men and white women. Frey does not give an explanation of where this imbalance comes from, though in a footnote he hints that it might involve a trade of the man’s economic status for the woman’s social status. Whatever the cause, something other than straightforward assimilation is at work—some social force that acts very differently on whites than on blacks.
In a 1973 episode of “All in the Family,” Archie Bunker spoke of a co-worker everyone called Black Elmo, “so’s not to get him mixed up with regular Elmo.” Sophisticates have long belittled the worldview that white people are the only “regular” Americans. Yet we have built our official racial policy around exactly this conception. Our politics, as rejiggered by civil rights laws and affirmative action, assumes a mainstream culture, and the ebbing of the white majority in the United States is going to present genuine governing problems.
Frey consistently fails to see this. “Although whites are still considered the mainstream in the United States,” he writes, “that perception should eventually shift.” But how can it and why should it? Affirmative action has become such a lucrative source of privilege that lobbying has made it impregnable, even in a country that has shown, by twice electing a black president, that it has no need of it. But our regime of affirmative action requires a majority sensitive to pangs of conscience.
When Frey offers policy prescriptions, he focuses on closing this or that “gap” between minorities and whites—as if the case for vigorous government action then required no further elaboration. Activists and government make a similar assumption. But once whites are a negligible part of the electorate, whose incomes (or life expectancies, or college achievements) are aggrieved minorities’ to be contrasted with? If blacks remain poor when whites are merely another L.A. minority, what kind of remedies will be suggested by the Mexican-American power structure and its Asian supporters? If whites are poorer than, say, Asians, against whose incomes will the poorest minorities’ be calibrated? Assuming whites cannot be transformed from a repentant majority into a scapegoat minority (on the model of European Jews historically, or the Chinese in Southeast Asia more recently), then our ability to make “voluntary” inter-ethnic transfers of money, jobs, and prestige may be nearing its end.
We have not prepared a regime to follow our half-century-long experiment with affirmative action. The transition will be more complicated than we assume. Should whites cease to be the majority, they will then become, by definition, just another subgroup. They show signs of following the interest-group logic that, since the 1960s and especially in the last decade, has “racialized” the politics of all other subgroups. “[T]he social, economic and demographic makeup of the white population is becoming ever more distinct,” Frey writes, also noting their increasing tendency to vote Republican. Whites, even the very youngest, favored the underwhelming Mitt Romney in the last presidential election by between 7 and 23 points, depending on age cohort.
This is not as extreme a polarization as that of nonwhites, who in 2012 gave Obama margins of victory between 58 and 64 points, but it is a significant change. It will have repercussions for our politics. In Georgia last fall, Democrat Michelle Nunn, an impressive candidate and the daughter of a long-beloved U.S. senator, lost after getting only 23% of the white vote. Weeks earlier, political analyst Nate Cohn had written in the New Republic that by 2016, due to the influx of blacks to Georgia, it should be possible for a Democrat to win Georgia with that many white votes. A racially polarized democracy is a terrible prospect. “Future elections like this one,” Frey writes of 2012, “will not be demographically sustainable.” One fears he means politically sustainable.
Like “multiculturalism,” the word “diversity” is both a sociological description and an ideological program. Prop-aganda is baked into it from the beginning. Frey is as independent-minded a demographer as there is working today, and yet he cannot employ the term without getting sucked into the bien-pensant maelstrom: Given the growing, more diverse racial populations that are central to the nation’s future, it is imperative that the kinds of laws and policies put in place to ensure equal access to employment, housing, education and voting are enforced, monitored, and—where necessary—augmented to accommodate new groups and needs, including the integration of immigrants and their families. …[T]he demographic die is cast…racial minorities will not just “fit in” but will hold sway….
A need to atone for slavery and segregation was once the justification for the “laws and policies” Frey describes. Many and perhaps most Americans have lost the thread of this historical narrative. These laws and policies now seem to require no justification. So to whom, ultimately, will the “new groups” address their “imperative” demands for “equal access” when “sway” is held by people with no felt responsibility to atone for America’s historic sins?
Into what kind of society will these new groups fit? Of what will these “augmented” monitoring programs consist, and against whom will they be directed? “Diversity” is leading us down an ominous and unfamiliar stretch of road.
I was nine years old and knew nothing about boxing, but my eye was caught by a newspaper picture of the victorious Patterson standing over Johansson, out cold on the canvas.
I read the article and asked my father if this meant no one on earth could beat Patterson. He said that was right; Patterson was the best boxer in the world.
I remember thinking to myself that this just wasn`t right. Surely, there must be one of our guys—a white guy—who could beat him. Floyd Patterson was an American like me, while Ingemar Johansson was a foreigner, a Swede, but I still wanted the white man to win.
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Readers will no doubt dismiss thoughts of a nine-year-old child as “racism”—as prejudice I learned from my surroundings—but they should not be so hasty. My parents were missionaries, and I was born and reared in Japan. At age nine I had no experience of black people. My parents had always said that all races were equal and that all people were children of God.
I also had no special objection to Patterson because he was black. I think I would have been just as perplexed if Johansson had been knocked out by an Arab or a Chinese.
As I grew up I adopted my parents` liberal views of race, and forgot all about Patterson and Johansson. In fact, as a young liberal I would have been ashamed to recall that I had rooted for the white man rather than the American. It was only when I was in my 40s and began to question conventional assumptions about race that I even remembered what I had thought about that 1961 title fight.
As we will see in Chapter 4, children of all races have untutored racial preferences that may be part of their nature. It serves little purpose to call these preferences “racism”, as if they were a moral failing. They appear to be an expression of natural racial identity, which arises far earlier than most people realize and can persist despite efforts to suppress it. Clever experiments in adults show that they retain these preferences, even when they are convinced they do not. Racial identity can be condemned, fought, ignored, or cultivated, but it is unrealistic for a society to pretend it does not exist.
The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was based on the assumption that consciousness of race is a prejudice that is learned from a prejudiced society. The movement`s goal was to eliminate racial prejudice and even consciousness of race, and build a society in which race would not matter.
That effort failed; generation after generation race continues to matter.
And yet, official American assumptions about race—that it is a trivial distinction it is our destiny to transcend—have not changed. The result is a stubborn gap between what Americans say and claim to think about race, and how they act. This stark contrast is described in the first chapter of this book.
Though they seldom talk about it, at some level most Americans know how little their behavior resembles what are supposed to be their ideals. The result is frustration, confusion, and not a little hypocrisy. I believe decades of frustration were behind the wishful thinking that surrounded the election of the first black American president in 2008.
Shortly before Barack Obama took office, I was invited to join a radio debate on the significance of the election. The other guest, a professor at Yale, used language that was then nearly universal. He called the election “transformational”, saying it would dramatically change the lives of both blacks and whites.
I said it was a mistake to expect “transformation”, or perhaps even much change at all. I asked whether the fact that we had a black president would reduce rates of black crime, illegitimacy, and school failure, and whether whites would now welcome black and Hispanic neighbors.
I noted that in 1990, Virginia—the heart of the old Confederacy—elected a black man, Douglas Wilder, as governor, and that his election was greeted with similarly extravagant expectations. At the end of four years, the circumstances of blacks and the state of race relations were unchanged.
The host of the program so resented my suggestion that “transformation” should be expected to show concrete results that he accused me of trying to deceive his listeners. Clearly, he had been swept up in the heady excitement of the moment, an excitement caught by Paul Krugman, who wrote in the New York Times that if Mr. Obama`s election “didn`t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there`s something wrong with you”. [ The Obama Agenda, New York Times, November 7, 2008.]
Why would an election cause a radio host to take offense at the idea that “transformation” should bring measurable gains? Why would it bring a Nobel laureate in economics to tears?
It is because so many people saw the election as expiation for America`s sins and the final achievement of the goals of the civil rights movement. The election of a black president meant victory had finally come.
There had already been a half century of effort. School integration, civil rights laws, affirmative action, the Great Society, Black History Month, the King holiday, black appointments to cabinet and Supreme Court—all reflected a deep desire to do away with distinctions of race. Every institution and authority figure in the country condemns racism and urges that it be fought on all fronts. The United States has poured more moral energy into improving race relations than into anything else in its history.
And yet, in November 2008, race was still the American dilemma. The fact that it was still a dilemma despite so much effort fostered something like a yearning for miracles. That yearning gained force with every step Mr. Obama took towards the White House and reached a climax at his inauguration.
Two years later, there is so little euphoria left that it is difficult for most Americans to remember how giddy with hope they were on January 20, 2009 when Mr. Obama took the oath of office. The CNN news channel hinted at miracles when it offered viewers an inaugural T-shirt that read, “Obama raises hand, lifts a nation“. Actress Susan Sarandon was hoping for miracles when she said of the new president, “He is a community organizer like Jesus was. And now, we`re a community and he can organize us”.
Indeed, the whole world was hoping for miracles. The London Times headlined its inauguration story The New World. England`s Sun newspaper titled its story One Giant Leap for Mankind.
There was such a frenzy over the new president that former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers was no doubt right to call him “the most famous living person in the history of the world”. Mr. Obama had been president for less than a month when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and had been president for only eight months when the Nobel Committee declared him the winner.
All this explains the hostility to my question about the tangible consequences for race relations of an Obama victory—whether there was going to be real change or just happy talk. People hoping for miracles do not want to be asked practical questions.
But there have been no miracles. The Gallup organization recorded a huge spike in optimism about American race relations at the time of the inauguration, but one year later it found that “optimism about race relations is now almost identical to where it was 46 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question”.
This book tries to explain why there have been no miracles. It does so by examining the enduring phenomenon of racial consciousness. For many Americans—probably most Americans—race remains an unspoken consideration in decisions about where to live, what schools to attend, what clubs to join, whom to marry, and what parts of town to avoid at night.
The closer we look at how Americans live, the more clearly we see how much race continues to matter. At the same time, the moral imperative of the civil rights movement—that race should mean nothing—remains so strong that many whites deny, even to themselves, that race plays any role in these decisions.
We insist that “diversity” is a great strength, but for most Americans this is mere lip service. They rarely seek diversity in their personal lives, living instead in homogeneous islands that look nothing like the racial and cultural mix this country has become. Anti-discrimination laws ensure integration at work, at school, and in public, but in private the races generally separate. A dinner party, poker game, wedding reception, church service, or backyard barbecue is rarely a multi-racial mosaic. When they are beyond the reach of the law, Americans revert to the patterns of segregation the law forbids.
Why is this? Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, together with the scientific findings reported in Chapter 4, should leave no doubt that diversity is not a source of strength but a source of conflict.
Americans therefore live a contradiction that makes it difficult to talk honestly about race. There is probably no other subject about which there is a greater divergence between what is said publicly and thought privately, or between official pronouncements and personal behavior.
At least that is true for whites. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the open rejection by Blacks and Hispanics of the civil-rights ideal of transcending race. For many minorities, race or ethnicity is central to their identity. The Congressional Black Caucus exists to shape legislation from a limited perspective: What`s in it for blacks? The Hispanic caucus has an equally narrow perspective.
Non-white racial/ethnic solidarity is an entrenched part of the political landscape, and the pressure tactics to which it gives rise have been very successful. As we will see in Chapter 7, Asians are now adopting the same tactics. Non-white leaders are so accustomed to promoting explicitly racial interests that they would be dumbfounded at the suggestion that they should broaden their horizons and work for all Americans. And yet that is the goal all Americans must have if the country is to “move beyond race”.
Chapter 8 describes the radical transformation of white racial attitudes that has occurred in the last half century. Up until the 1950s, most white Americans felt the same kind of racial identity that is common among non-whites. These sentiments have almost completely disappeared—certainly from public sight.
No politician would dare examine legislation by asking what was in it for whites. No city in America has a white firefighters` union or a white caucus on the city council. Across the political spectrum, Americans assert that any form of white racial consciousness or solidarity is despicable.
Whites, therefore, have tried to keep their end of the civil rights bargain. They have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same.
Why, though, is it so hard to build a society in which race does not matter? To the extent that Americans even ask themselves this question, they would say that it is because Americans—whites, especially—have not tried hard enough. And yet, how much harder can a people try? Today, after 50 years of trying, most whites cannot muster much more than exhausted resignation in the face of reports on school resegregation and yawning gaps in test scores or poverty rates.
This book departs from convention in that it does not ask that we just keep trying harder. Instead, it suggests that we would do well to rethink our assumptions. If, generation after generation, Americans tend to segregate themselves, is it possible that the expectations for integration were not reasonable? If diversity is a source of tension, are there risks in basing policies on the assumption that it is a strength? If non-white groups continue to advance race-based interests, is it wise for whites to continue to act as if they have none?
The ideal of moving beyond race still appeals to the vast majority of whites. They dream of an America in which there is no such thing as racial conflict, in which all Americans work together for common goals. They love to quote Martin Luther King`s “I Have a Dream” speech about judging people by “the content of their character“.
And yet, two generations after that speech was delivered, how many blacks judge whites by the content of their character? And when whites take a wrong turn off the freeway, do they lock their car doors because they can read the character of the people on the sidewalk?
Perhaps it is time to question goals that run counter to near-universal behavior. There may be lessons for us in the failure of Soviet-style Communism. It is our era`s foremost example of a system that made mesmerizing promises of an earthly paradise but betrayed those promises. Millions of people were inspired by an ideology that would do away with capitalist exploitation. Marxists believed that the working class would seize the means of production, the state would wither away, selfishness would disappear, and man would live “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”. In the name of this ideology millions gave their lives—and took the lives of millions of others.
But Communism failed. It failed for many reasons, not least because it was a misreading of human nature. Self-interest cannot be abolished. People do not work just as hard on collective farms as they do on their own land. The almost universal rejection of Communism today marks the acceptance of people as they are, not as Communism wished them to be.
Is it possible that our racial ideals assume that people should become something they cannot?
If most people prefer the company of people like themselves, what do we achieve by insisting that they deny that preference?
If diversity is a weakness rather than a strength, why work to increase diversity?
I believe that mistaken assumptions about race are leading us in dangerous directions. Merely to raise these questions, however, is to dissent from the deeply held convictions of many thoughtful Americans—and they are more than mere convictions. For many Americans, perhaps even most Americans, they are the foundations of morality; even to question the assumptions of the civil-rights vision is illegitimate.
Of course, we can never speak honestly about race if the majority brooks no dissent. There cannot be dialogue if doubters are thought to be not merely mistaken but immoral. In fact, it is a sign that the defenders of orthodoxy are unsure of their ground when they close their ears to disagreement. Real solutions to real problems require honest discussion, and honest discussion comes at a cost. As Thomas Paine said: “He who dares not offend cannot be honest”.
When it comes to race, few dare to offend. In February 2009, Mr. Obama`s black Attorney General, Eric Holder, caused a stir when he noted that workplaces are integrated but that in their private lives Americans live in “race-protected cocoons”, as if we were still living in “the country that existed almost 50 years ago“. He said Americans were “a nation of cowards” because they do not talk about race, and urged us to “be honest with each other”.[Obama`s attorney general claims US is `voluntarily segregated` , By Alex Spillius, Telegraph[UK], February 19, 2009 ]
But did Mr. Holder mean it? Is he willing to consider that, if in some important ways our country has not changed in 50 years, it may mean it was unrealistic to expect it to change?
Of course, it is likely that Mr. Holder just wanted whites to break out of their “race-protected cocoons”, embrace people of other races, and apologize for racism. And, as we will see in Chapter 8, whites are more than ready to apologize. When they speak as whites it is almost always to apologize. But apologies for slavery and Jim Crow—things for which no living white person is responsible—take neither bravery nor honesty.
Attorney General Holder was right to say Americans are cowards about race. But he was wrong about why. White Americans are cowards, but not because they are unwilling to admit guilt and atone for the past. They are cowards because they fear that any departure from carefully scripted opinions about race—to suggest, for example, that the very fact of multi-racialism gives rise to serious problems no matter what whites do—will be met with charges of “racism”.
And they are right. Charges of “racism” are not a form of debate; they are meant to silence debate. Accusations of racism are often transparent attempts to choke off honest discussion.
This book is an attempt to understand race relations as they are—not as we might wish them to be. We cannot understand the world we live in if we refuse to rethink assumptions that may be wrong. Nor can we make progress if we are knocked off course for fear that others may call us names.
Reexamining our assumptions about race could have far-reaching consequences, which are explored in the final chapter. Disturbing as such a reexamination may be, it will help us understand the choices our country faces today and the choices we made in the past. We can continue down a path that is likely to ensure tension and social dislocation—or we can reorient policies in more realistic directions.
This book is about racial identity, something most people who are not white take for granted. They come to it early, feel it strongly, and make no apologies for it.
Most American whites do not have a strong sense of racial identity. But they would do well to understand what race means for others.
They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.
These questions—certainly the most controversial in this book—are taken up in the final chapter.
Buy this book now for R200 or €15, world-wide delivery
A judge has recommended the FDNY sack Brooklyn firefighter Thomas Buttaro for wearing anti-affirmative-action T-shirts to work, creating what she called a hostile work environment.
Firemen with “Merit Matters” T-shirts. According to the judge, such a T-shirt constitutes “harassment”
“The FDNY is a para-military organization and may restrict a uniformed member’s appearance so long as the restrictions are rationally related to the department’s legitimate interests,” Administrative Law Judge Alessandra Zorgniotti decided.
She found Buttaro, a 17-year FDNY veteran who earned $111,209 in 2013, disobeyed orders after May 2012 to wear regulation gear and not T-shirts with provocative slogans.
The judge said Buttaro engaged in a “persistent and long-term pattern of harassment” and was guilty of “repeated acts of insubordination.”
Buttaro, of Ladder Co. 123 in Crown Heights, would wear T-shirts on duty bearing the logo and slogans of Merit Matters, a group opposed to altering the FDNY’s admissions test to accommodate minority recruits.
Speaking through his lawyer, Buttaro said he planned to challenge the judge’s findings, which are not binding on the FDNY.
“We’re going to fight this for as long as it takes to get vindicated,” said lawyer Adam Weiss. “There are only two sides to the story, and it looks like [the judge] took the prosecution’s side of the story and ignored ours.”
The shirts became an issue after Buttaro got into a heated exchange on May 6, 2012, with a black colleague over a suit filed by the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters that has called the FDNY’s hiring practices discriminatory.
Weiss, Buttaro’s lawyer, said he expects Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro to make a decision on his client’s fate in the next month.
“Obviously, we disagree with the ALJ’s decision,” he said. “It’s a very skewed version of what happened.” – The New York Post
People love to tell me that they often forget that I’m black. They say this with a sort of “a-ha!” look on their faces, as if their dawning ability to see my blackness was a gift to us both.
When I point out that their eyesight had never left them, that my skin has never changed colors, and that they probably did not really forget that I am black, they inevitably get defensive. First, they try to argue that it was a compliment; the smart ones quickly realize that complimenting someone on not being black is actually pretty racist, so they switch gears.
I don’t see race! is usually their next tactic, followed by I am colorblind, though they never give credit to Stephen Colbert. By “colorblind” they don’t actually mean that they can’t see green or red; rather, they are suggesting that they can’t ever be racist, because they don’t register skin color at all.
This ideology is very popular – like a racial utopic version of the Golden Rule – but it’s actually quite racist. “Colorblindness” doesn’t acknowledge the very real ways in which racism has existed and continues to exist, both in individuals and systemically. By professing not to see race, you’re just ignoring racism, not solving it.
Still, the idea of “colorblindness” is incredibly popular, especially with young people who believe racism is a problem for the older generation and will soon die out. According to a 2014 study done in partnership with MTV and David Binder Research, almost three-fourths of millennials believe that we should not see the color of someone’s skin, as though it’s a choice. Nearly 70% believe they have achieved this and are now actually colorblind; and the same percentage shockingly believe that we make society better by not seeing race or ethnicity.
But that ideology does present a very interesting question: If you were truly unable to see people’s skin color, could you still be racist?
Dr Osagie Obasogie, a professor at the University of California’s Hasting College of Law and the author of Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, wondered the same thing after seeing the biopic “Ray,” about legendary blind musician Ray Charles. While watching the film, he found that Ray Charles seemed acutely aware of race, despite not having sight. He left the theater thinking about blindness and racism, and then spent the next eight years exploring it in his research.
What he found is that even people who have never had sight still use visual representations of people – including a person’s perceived racial or ethnic identity – as a major marker for how they interact with them.
In Obasogie’s interviews, he found that blind people use non-visual cues to determine race when meeting a new person. They combine evidence from their other senses – hair texture, accent and other markers (with varying degrees of reliability) – to create an understanding of someone’s racial identity. And once a blind person figured out a new acquaintance’s race, they would treat that person accordingly.
In one interview, Obasogie told me, a woman told a story from her childhood in which she walked in on her mother aggressively cleaning the kitchen. When she asked why, her mother responded that her black babysitter had been in the kitchen and black people had a smell, which she needed to wash away. The next day, the woman remembers going to smell her babysitter, finding she did have a smell and from then on always associated that smell with black people, despite never having noticed it before.
Racism – both the personal kind and the systemic kind– isn’t necessarily triggered by the visual cue of another person’s skin color. Racism is about the social value we assign to people and their actions based on their physical attributes, and neither blind nor colorblind people avoid that acculturation just because they lack the visual cues.
According to Obasogie, there’s not much other research on the relationship of blindness and racism. But one important modern scholar has investigated the question: Dave Chappelle. His “Blind Supremacy” skit from 2003 – a year before Ray premiered in theaters – comes to the same conclusions as Obasogie’s research. – Zach Stafford, The Guardian
Just 16 in 1988, the boy who would become film star Mark Wahlberg assaulted two Asian men while trying to steal two cases of beer from a convenience store.
More than 25 years later, Wahlberg, a devout Catholic and philanthropist, has made a much publicized — and much debated — request for a pardon for his crime.
But now, another of Wahlberg’s victims — not one of the Asian men, but an African American woman he attacked in 1986 — says the Commonwealth of Massachusetts shouldn’t forgive and forget hate crimes, even if they were committed by a movie star.
“I don’t think he should get a pardon,” Kristyn Atwood, 38, of Decatur, Ga., told the Associated Press. She was a Boston fourth grader on a field trip to the beach when Wahlberg and his partners-in-crime threw rocks and yelled racial epithets, including the n-word, at her and her classmates.
“I don’t really care who he is,” she said. “It doesn’t make him any exception. If you’re a racist, you’re always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it I just think it’s wrong. … It was a hate crime and that’s exactly what should be on his record forever.”
The attack left a scar, she said — and trauma that won’t fade even if the actor’s record is wiped clean.
“I was really scared,” Atwood told the AP. “My heart was beating fast. I couldn’t believe it was happening. The names. The rocks. The kids chasing.”
Wahlberg was not tried and convicted for this 1986 attack. Instead, a Boston judge issued a civil rights injunction against him and his friends; as the AP put it, “essentially a stern warning that if they committed another hate crime, they would be sent to jail.”
Unfortunately for Wahlberg, Judith Beals, the former Massachusetts assistant attorney general who sought that civil rights injunction, offered her thoughts on the actor’s pardon last week in a Boston Globe editorial called “Don’t Pardon Mark Wahlberg.”
“In the 13 years I served in the attorney general’s office, I recall only one instance of a defendant violating a civil rights injunction — Mark Wahlberg,” Beals wrote, saying his 1988 attack on the Asian men at the convenience store showed “the same tendency toward serial acts of racial violence.” She added: “Wahlberg has never acknowledged the racial nature of his crimes. Even his pardon petition describes his serial pattern of racist violence as a ‘single episode’ that took place while he was ‘under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.’ For a community that continues to confront racism and hate crime, we need acknowledgment and leadership, not denial.”
Indeed, Beals said a pardon would do little but indicate Wahlberg enjoys white privilege, undermining the actor’s work with at-risk youth: “A formal public pardon would highlight all too clearly that if you are white and a movie star, a different standard applies. Is that really what Wahlberg wants?”
Besides family members in business with the actor with the restaurant Wahlburgers — and, presumably, the cast of “Entourage” — there is at least one person in Wahlberg’s corner as he seeks his pardon: Hoa Trinh, one of the Asian men he attacked in 1988.
“I would like to see him get a pardon,” Trinh said. “He should not have the crime hanging over him any longer. … He paid for his crime when he went to prison. I am not saying that it did not hurt when he punched me in the face, but it was a long time ago.”
My man Richard Sherman said something that kicked off the 2014, year-round, banal, racial back-and-forth that parades as debate in the U.S.
Other than that the Seattle Seahawks are my team, on account that they’re from my neck of the woods; what I know about American football is dangerous. So naturally, I was rooting for, if not watching, the Hawks, when, following their victory over the San Francisco 49ers, Sherman said That Thing. And from their citadels of stupidity, U.S. mainstream media—conservatives, liberals and libertarians—went into full St. Vitus mode
“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like [Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me!”
Sherman sounded good to me. Still does. The man was pumped, as men ought to be in a testosterone-infused game. The Seahawks’ cornerback was correct to point out that his “outburst,” following the “defensive play that sealed his team’s trip to the Super Bowl,” was an extension of “his game-time competitiveness.”
“Let’s not make thug the new N-word,” pleaded John McWhorter, a scholar of color, whose intellectual and moral authority in the culture stems primarily from the concentration of melanin in his skin cells, not from the force of his argument.
Come again?
As in January of last year, I still don’t get the reason for the fuss over what Sherman said. His boisterous bit of theatre set in motion some racial, national free-association, which no man or woman with a brain cell to rub between them can follow.
Speaking of mindlessness, in February, the president of black America launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. Barack Obama claimed “this initiative” as his “lifelong goal,” “even after he leaves office.”
If to go by Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” “rising inequality and declining mobility,” as well as “widespread decay in moral fiber”—these are as serious and widespread among “white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans,” as they are among the black and Hispanic communities. It was against this backdrop that Obama signaled his intention to deploy his signature initiative to keep at least $200 million belonging to “leading foundations and businesses,” for “programs aimed at minority youth of color.”
“Winning” means “spinning.” In April, the media-run, Barack Hussein Obama witness-protection program got a boost: a secretly recorded, racially charged private conversation between one Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and his mistress du jour, a dark-haired Jenna Jamison look-alike. Joy! Here was another cover for a “news” media that had refused to cover the many outrages and scandals of the Obama presidency.
CNN took a break from its non-stop, no-news vigil for missing Malaysian Airline Flight 370 to ride the Sterling racism ass. Hard. And from abroad, the president who promised to see to it that ebony and ivory would live together in perfect harmony told the world that the U.S. “continues to wrestle with the legacy of race, slavery and segregation,” a lie he would repeat throughout the year.
August saw the start of Trayvon Martin round two. The shooting death, in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown (black) by police officer Darren Wilson (white), sparked country wide unrest among the perpetually restive, when the officer was vindicated by the grand jury. It transpired that prior to being gunned down; Brown had robbed a convenience store and tackled the cop.
In their shared hatred for white America, Attorney General Eric Holder and Mr. Obama were like two pimps in a pod. Both rushed to racialize what was strictly a law-and-order incident. “I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man,” declared the AG to his black constituents.
Hitherto, the president of black Americans had been mum about cops, soldiers or white kids coming under black attack. But he just couldn’t put a sock in it when it came to his personal affinity for Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. True to type, Obama saddled a “deeply rooted” racism plaguing the U.S. for the mishaps between cops and the communities of color they police.
One among many pig-ignorant panels on CNN—this one comprising Marc Lamont Hill and two interchangeable females—magically coalesced around a consensus parroted widely in pixels and print across the country: There was absolutely nothing racial whatsoever about the latest attack upon whites by blacks, this time of a store keeper in Memphis, Tennessee. Only a week back, the same sort of empaneled fools were intoning in unison about the ostensible racism behind the Ferguson killing ad nauseum.
Well, of course.
Read Ilana Mercer’s book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa:
Memorable to a majority marginalized was Martha MacCallum’s plainspoken, Fox News column about Brendan Tevlin. The blond, blue-eyed anchor’s words reached deeper than the convoluted fare of most: “A 19-year-old, suburban boy. Strawberry blond, athletic, bright and smiley. … When I look at this picture of Brendan Tevlin, I think, he could have been my son.” Brendan Tevlin of New Jersey was murdered by Ali Muhammad Brown, an African-American. A precious boy’s death at the hands of the detritus of humanity did not rate a mention by Big Media and its protégé.
Alas, white commentators—liberals, conservatives, even libertarians—and their fans converge on matters racial. All are constitutionally primed to convulse hysterically over race.
Take Judge Andrew Napolitano. A left-leaning, highly principled libertarian, the judge wrote a hot mess of a column, asserting that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” not to mention a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.” That’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to postmodern constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege,” the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. Thus did John Stossel mar a perfectly reasonable column on Ferguson,” with a nod to the endemic racism meme.
As far as promoting the demonstrably false racism meme—what speech is racist, which feelings are bigoted; the kind of humor that is off-color; the fears of The Other that are forbidden—conservatives too are indistinguishable from liberals. Consider the witty email exchange between a Sony executive and a producer concerning Obama and his racial proclivities. Leaked as it was by hackers, these emails were ruled by Megyn Kelly of Fox News to be wrong, racist and racially insensitive: all the dumb things liberals say about risqué expression.
Lesson no. 1: When they rabbit on about race, America’s chattering classes—blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians alike—exhibit an unthinking habit of mind. These are individuals (for they are not individualists) who’ve been trained by their political and intellectual masters to respond in certain, politically pleasing ways.
Don’t listen to them! Americans are not racist.
Despite the mindless racial merry-go-round manufactured by American media and cognoscenti, I suspect even liberals may have internalized another important lesson of survival: Never elect a black liberal president again.
A far-right Israeli group that agitates against Arabs in the name of religion and national security is forcing the Jewish state into a legal and political balancing act as it tries to contain sectarian violence.
Among their activities, Lehava activists yelling “Death to the Arabs” picketed the wedding in August of a Muslim to a Jewish woman who converted to Islam. Now three members have been charged with an arson attack on a cross-faith school in Jerusalem last month.
Members of Lehava protesting outside an Arab-Jewish wedding
Communal tension has been rising following last summer’s Gaza war, in which more than 2,000 Palestinians died, and feuding over access to Jerusalem’s holiest site. This has spilled over into Palestinian street attacks on Jews, including the killing of four rabbis and a Druze policeman at a synagogue.
Illustrating the risk of sectarian violence, a Palestinian youth was burned to death in July by Israeli assailants in alleged revenge for the killing of three Jewish teens by militants in the West Bank.
The authorities are under pressure to deal with anyone encouraging Jewish retaliation against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Efforts to tackle Lehava, however, may be complicated by guarantees of free speech and sympathy for the group among a minority of Israelis.
Lehava, whose name means “flame” but is also a Hebrew acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land,” denies wrongdoing and says it is the target of a political witch-hunt.
Police rounded up 21 Lehava members, including its leader Benzion Gopshtein, after the attack on the school where Jewish and Arab children study together. The raids suggest a crackdown on Lehava, and maybe a ban, is in the works.
The three men charged with the arson attack have yet to enter a plea, while Gopshtein argues he is being targeted for what he says, not what he does.
“I’m being investigated for public comments I made about co-existence, even though I never advocated violence,” he told Reuters after being released from police custody. Lehava’s policy was to stay within the law, he said, but he declined to condemn the school attack.
Gopshtein, who put the number of Lehava members at 5,000, said the authorities “are bothered that we have such broad support, which is why they’re carrying out arrests.”
An Israeli official described the Lehava arrests as part of a drive to stamp out hate speech. Among those facing charges are eight Palestinians from East Jerusalem accused of encouraging attacks on Israelis over social media. But the official said securing convictions against Lehava activists on possible charges of inciting racist attacks would be harder.
“Their public statements have been less unequivocal,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is a complex matter, especially as we do not want to intrude on legal rights to freedom of expression.”
Incitement to violence on racial or religious grounds carries a 5-year prison sentence in Israel, 20 percent of whose citizens are Arabs. When felonies are committed as a result of such incitement, hate-crime legislation empowers judges to double the standard penalties.
Hard-core views
Lehava’s core cause is discouraging romances between Jews and gentiles, saying it is campaigning to preserve Judaism.
While such relationships are rare in Israel, the group has disseminated names and pictures of Arabs suspected of courting Jewish women, and critics accuse it of using vigilantes to threaten the men with violence.
Lehava has also urged Israeli businesses not to employ Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, branding them as “tomorrow’s terrorists.”
Gopshtein was a disciple of the late Meir Kahane, a U.S.-born rabbi who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Gopshtein, 45, said he had previously had run-ins with the police for disorderly conduct while active with Kahane’s movement Kach, which was banned from Israeli politics as racist in 1988.
Asked whether Lehava might similarly be outlawed, the Israeli official said: “That possibility will be examined.”
Mainstream Israeli leaders have condemned the arson attack and other racist incidents. The arrests were led by a police taskforce set up last year to tackle violent far-right Jews.
Tamar Hermann, a sociologist and pollster with the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), said state action against Lehava had only followed repeated complaints by left-leaning petitions and media commentators.
Such pressure on police, Herman added, may be offset by the growing ranks of Israelis who sympathize with Lehava. An IDI poll to be published next month found 21 percent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as “religious nationalists,” she said, while about three percent hold “hard-core” views against gentiles.
“The rise of extreme religiosity that we are seeing in the Middle East, and even in Europe and the United States, is happening in Israel, too, and I don’t see it as merely a counter-reaction to Arab hostility,” Hermann said.
Menachem Landow, a retired official of the Shin Bet security agency, argued against banning Lehava, saying its ideology “would simply morph and find a new legal home.”
“The trouble-makers here are generally from a certain sector of Israeli society, dislocated young men from pious backgrounds, who simply hate Arabs as part of a race theory and are looking for a framework in which to act on that hatred,” he said.
“They have to be tackled individually,” Landow added, noting police had used these tactics against Israeli soccer fans whose anti-Arab taunts have at times escalated into race riots. – Reuters
An unnamed producer wrote in an email to Sony chairman Michael Lynton that films with black actors — using Denzel Washington in The Equalizer as an example — don’t perform well because the international audiences are “racist,” according to documents found in the Sony hack.
The producer suggested that the two-time Oscar winner should not star in big-budget films as the international audience will not accept him in a leading role because of his race.
Denzel Washington in ‘The Equalizer’
“I believe that the international motion picture audience is racist — in general pictures with an African American lead don’t play well overseas. When Sony made Equalizer they had to know that Denzel opens pics domestically, however the international gross would be somewhat limited,” the producer wrote in an Oct. 27 e-mail.
Lynton wrote back asking if he was saying The Equalizer “shouldn’t have been made or that African American actors should be excluded?”
“No, I am not saying ‘The Equalizer’ should not have been made or that African American actors should not have been used (I personally think Denzel is the best actor of his generation),” the producer responded. “Casting him is saying we’re ok with a double if the picture works,” the producer wrote, using a baseball analogy.
Washington is “reliable at the domestic [box office], safe, but has not had a huge success in years. I believe whenever possible the non event pictures, extra ‘bets’ should have a large inherent upside and be made for the right price. Here there isn’t a large inherent upside,” the producer wrote.
The producer also wrote that he or she hoped the statement wasn’t “inappropriate or provocative.”
The Equalizer grossed about $191 million worldwide. Approximately $90 million was earned overseas. The producer said this figure would have been higher if a black man wasn’t in the lead role.
According to the emails, a sequel to the movie was set for 2017, but would be “a double, with a remote chance of a home run.”
Calls to Denzel Washington’s publicist were not immediately returned. – buzzfeed.com
A newborn baby boy was found dead and abandoned at a dumping site alongside Newlands West Drive, yesterday morning.
The baby is of Indian descent and was spotted by a resident who immediately contacted the police.
Newlands East SAPS VISPOL commander and media liaison officer, Col Richard Blood said, “We are investigating further. Residents are urged to come forward should they have any information on the baby or his mother.”
The shrinking population of white students in Hartford’s suburbs is complicating efforts to comply with Connecticut’s landmark school desegregation settlement — and even making it harder for some of the capital city’s students to attend new schools created to help meet the racial integration goals set by the American lawsuit 25 years ago.
State education officials are currently negotiating the latest changes to the agreement, reached with the plaintiffs after they won a 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, but say it is becoming harder to attract white students to Hartford’s schools because they’re living farther away.
About half the students living in the 22 communities subject to the agreement, according to state officials, are non-white. That’s up from about 38 percent in 2008, when the parties negotiated a revised timetable for progress on reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation. Another revision was made last year.
“The state is in the position of, how do you meet the requirements of the State Supreme Court given the fact that the demographics of the region have changed so completely,” said Kathleen Demsey, state Department of Education’s chief financial officer who worked for years on the issue. “Financially, it’s a burden for this transportation system, money that could be used for education is being used to bus kids.”
But lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, Sheff vs. O’Neill, say there are still plenty of predominantly white communities in the region that can be drawn from to attract additional students, or where Hartford students can attend school in a racially integrated setting.
“We’ve made some progress but we still think there’s more that can be done,” said Dennis Parker, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and director of racial justice programs for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The issue of changing demographics has come up before. In 2013, the parties redefined the standard for diversity, allowing Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to count toward the 25 percent “white enrollment” threshold. Further changes could be among the proposals in this round of negotiations.
The current agreement expires in June. The groups are conducting confidential talks and would not disclose details of the discussions, except to say a decision is expected soon.
Newly released statistics show 47.5 percent of Hartford’s 21,458 minority students are currently enrolled in “reduced-isolation settings,” a marked improvement from 11 percent in 2008. That comes after the state spent about $2.25 billion on new magnets and other programs throughout the region over a 10-year period. Yet the plaintiffs contend that progress falls far short of giving every Hartford student the opportunity to learn in a racially integrated setting.
Attorney Martha Stone said the state could create incentives to encourage suburban school districts to take in more Hartford students and foster more collaborative projects involving different entities, such as the proposed elementary magnet aerospace academy in Rocky Hill.
“There are so many different ideas that have been on the table for years that the state has not taken the initiative on,” Stone said.
Unlike other states where there has been forced busing and redrawn school districts, Connecticut’s settlement relies on voluntary desegregation and additional state funding. Parents inside and outside of Hartford can choose to enter a lottery in order for their children to approximately 45 magnet schools. Meanwhile, Hartford students can also choose to attend suburban public schools.
But the makeup of some suburbs is changing: East Hartford, for example, shifted from 23 percent minority enrollment in 1989, when the lawsuit was first filed, to 84 percent in 2013. Manchester jumped from 12 percent to 60 percent, Windsor from 31 percent to 71 percent, and Bloomfield from 74 to 96 percent.
According to the Department of Education, those four towns have the highest participation in magnet schools. That had the unintended consequence of leaving some magnet school seats empty because of the low number of white applicants made it hard to maintain the desegregation standard.
Last summer, a group of frustrated Hartford parents staged a rally claiming their children didn’t get their first, second or third choices in the lottery.
The Sheff Movement, a coalition of parents, educators and citizens, organized the protest. Phil Tegeler, the group’s staff director, said the state needs to invest more money to expand the number of available classrooms, as well as the number of schools.
“The demand is much greater than the system right now,” he said. “The state needs to be thinking more ambitiously and the state needs to think long-term.”
Grand-jury deliberations were conducted behind closed doors. The decision was announced at night. It was too dark. Jurors were given too much information to absorb. The St. Louis County prosecuting attorney was not sufficiently involved in the proceedings. The latter, Bob McCulloch, was too “cold” in sharing the cold, hard facts of the case with the public. His remarks were excessively long or redundant all. The police were too passive in their response to the pillage that followed the unpopular decision.
These are a few of the complaints voiced by the “Racism Industrial Complex (RIC)” against a grand-jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. A quorum of ordinary Americans has determined that Officer Darren Wilson was not “the initial aggressor,” that the officer “acted in self-defense”; that he “was authorized to use deadly force,” in a situation in which he found himself being punched—and then bull-rushed by a demonic-looking mountain of flesh, Michael Brown.
Brown’s interactions with Officer Wilson would have been fueled by a consciousness of guilt which likely amplified the young man’s aggression. For prior to being shot, surveillance video had surfaced of Brown roughing up and robbing a shopkeeper. The “Big Kid” was no gentle giant; he was a brute. At the time of their fateful encounter, Officer Wilson suspected Brown of robbing a convenience store.
“The Racism Industrial Complex (RIC),” explains originator Jack Kerwick, “include the majority of journalists and commentators in corporate media; most academics in the liberal arts and humanities departments of America’s colleges and universities; entertainers; and politicians. In concert, they labor fast and furiously to ensconce within the American consciousness the idea that blacks and other racial minorities are perpetual victims of ‘white racism.'”
Commensurate with the “RIC” narrative, Michael Brown’s blackness is mentioned always in mitigation; Wilson’s whiteness as an aggravating condition.
Right away, the governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, promised “a vigorous prosecution.” Feeling the heat from the head honchos of the “Racism Industrial Complex” (Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama), Nixon had sought to indict the white officer as a gesture to the Brown family. It is alleged, moreover, that Missouri’s governor and the DC “RIC” are behind the meek response to the November riots, underway across the country.
I hate to say it, but these riots are an object lesson as to what transpires in certain chaotic communities when the police practice peaceful resistance.
Let’s face it: Had St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, a Democrat, opted for an open, probable-cause hearing before a judge, as opposed to convening a grand jury, the “Racism Industrial Complex”—forced to face a decision not to its liking—would be decrying the despotism of this single judge. They’d be calling for a jury of the people’s representatives, as bequeathed by the Founding Fathers, in the 5th Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The grand jury institution, as legal analyst Paul Callan has explained, “was actually created by the Founders to provide a wall of citizen protection against overzealous prosecutors.”
Had the decision been revealed in the AM, the RIC herd would have argued for a night-time reveal.
Had Mr. McCulloch meddled with the jury, he’d still be accused of rigging the outcome against Brown.
Had McCulloch hand-picked the evidence for the grand jury, instead of providing the 12 jurors with access to all of it—a “document dump,” brayed Big Media—he’d have been accused of concealing information.
Had the cops moved to curtail the crowds from “venting” over “legitimate issues,” caused by “the legacy of racial discrimination”—the president words—they’d have been convicted of police brutality.
As to the affective dimension, McCulloch’s alleged frigid demeanor: A silent majority whose “culture” is being crowded out still finds such WASPY mannerisms comforting and familiar; a sign of professionalism, dignity, decorum and rationality. Profoundly alien and disturbing was the wretched excesses of Michael Brown’s mother (Lesley McSpadden) and her new husband (Louis Head)—both of whom have had brushes with the law—howling, “Burn this bitch down.”
Regrettably, at the time of the shooting, this libertarian column had expressed the opinion that Brown was the victim of murder-by-cop. I was wrong. Far from the militarized mob, a remarkable process has unfolded in Ferguson. Praise for it belongs to Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch and a grand jury selected by a judge, in May of 2014, long before the shooting occurred.
McCulloch’s remarks were impressive. They revealed the exhaustive scope of the search for truth undertaken by a grand jury that was left to its own devices. Since the text of the statement has not been disseminated, I’ve summarized some of it for interested Americans. Particularly brilliant is the manner in which McCulloch co-opted the DC “RIC” in support of the rule of law, in Ferguson, Missouri:
St. Louis county police conducted an extensive investigation at the crime scene together with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder. Together they sought out witnesses and gathered additional information over a period of three months, beginning on the day of the shooting death of Michael Brown. Fully aware of the growing concerns in parts of the community that the investigation and review of the death would not be full and fair, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch decided to hand over to a grand jury all physical evidence related to the case, all individuals claiming to have witnessed any aspect of the events and any and all related matters. The grand jury comprised of 12 members of the community.
Federal investigators worked closely with local law enforcement, with the St. Louis county police and persecutor and Attorney General Holder and his department vowing to follow where the evidence led. These federal investigators shared information with St. Louis county investigator and vice versa. In addition, the Department of Justice conducted its own investigation and performed its own autopsy. Yet another autopsy was carried out by the Brown family and all information was shared and collated. All testimony before the grand jury was immediate forwarded to the DOJ. Eyewitness accounts were compared with the physical evidence. Many witnesses contradicted their own statements and the physical evidence.
As an example of witness testimony that contradicted the physical evidence McCulloch offered numerous statements that claimed to have seen Officer Wilson stand above Michael Brown and fire many rounds into his back. Others claimed that Officer Wilson shot Mr. Brown in the back as he was running away. Once the autopsy was released showing that the deceased did not sustain injuries to his back, statements to that effect were retracted. Others admitted they had, in fact, not witnessed the shooting.
All statements were recorded and presented to the grand jury before the autopsy results were released. There was no “document dump,” as some media claimed. Two of Bob McCulloch’s assistants presented the information to the jury in an organized, systematic manner. All jurors heard every word of testimony and examined every item of evidence presented. McCulloch described a proactive and engaged group working since August 9th to do their due diligence.
In the course of 25 days, the jury dissected over 70 hours of testimony and listened to 60 witnesses. They heard from three medical examiners and many other DNA and forensic experts. They examined hundreds of photographs and looked at various pieces of physical evidence. They were instructed in the law and presented with five possible indictments. Their burden was to determine, based on all the evidence, if probable cause existed to determine that a crime was committed and Daren Wilson committed that crime.
There is no question that Officer Wilson caused the death of Michael Brown by shooting him. However the law authorizes an officer of the law, and all people, to use deadly force to defend themselves in certain situations.
The grand jury considered whether Officer Wilson was the initial aggressor, or whether he was authorized to use deadly force in the situation and acted in self-defense. They were the only people who examined every piece of evidence and heard every witness. They debated among themselves. After an exhaustive review of the evidence the grand jury deliberated further over two days to arrive at their final decision. And it is that no probable cause exists to file any charges against Officer Darren Wilson. They returned a “No True” bill on each of the five indictments. All the evidence, witness statements included, was made public.
Not even the unethical, ongoing, subversive interventions from the attorney general of black America and the president of black America, on the side of the Brown family, swayed a grand jury guided by the search for truth. For fact-finding is the essence of the law—the law is not an abstract idea of imaged social justice that exists in the arid minds of the perpetually aggrieved. Unfortunately, “the Racism Industrial Complex (RIC), also “the hegemonic power of our generation,” sees law as a weapon, to be co-opted to its ends.
Today, we should give thanks for a prosecuting attorney and grand jury who grasped the evidently archaic idea of ordered liberty. This is a good day for American justice.
The idea of white privilege is so simplistic it’s frightening. Ignoring the past for a moment, let me share some viewpoints on the present.
With the distortions created through BEE, white males sit right at the very bottom of the food chain. Nature as is its wont, responds to anomalies.
I see white kids striving, trying harder and embarking on risky entrepreneurial ventures (and succeeding) in that would have appalled their fathers.
I see talented black kids being shoe-horned into positions for which they are ill-qualified or too inexperienced for, as institutions battle to meet targets.
These same white kids are prepared to work for a pittance or nothing at all to get experience whilst banks and the like bid up the cost of black graduates.
As the these black grads gain experience, so does their value and the bidding cycle persists, resulting in ultimately self-defeating job hopping.
Perversely, like all evolutionary pressures, adversity in an uneven landscape is forcing white kids to be more industrious and resourceful, whilst young black talent is being wasted in a world where real economic value and remuneration has gone cuckoo.
I know of so many dynamic (white) start-ups where business owners complain that they cannot afford black grads because they are being vacuumed up by not so dynamic big firms.
Where blacks are brought in, it is as shareholders not actually adding any value but rather perverse legitimacy.
So many people are used to being parasites that they have forgotten that the host eventually dies when it gives too much.
Please reflect on how much white South Africans have actually contributed to this economy for very little in return over the last 20 years.
Africans should focus on getting productive and creating wealth, not taking it away. Diatribes about white privilege are unequivocally racist.
Alisdair Sinclair
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