racism – Page 8 – praag.org

New York fireman to lose his job for wearing a “Merit matters” T-shirt

A T-shirt could cost this firefighter his job.

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" — 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 Post first reported in September that Buttaro, who is white, was facing disciplinary charges for wearing a Merit Matters shirt to work.

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

Even if you don’t see race, you’re still racist – Guardian columnist

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

‘Racism exists across Canada and is part of the human condition’

WINNIPEG—The mayor of Manitoba’s capital tearfully promised Thursday to fight racism and intolerance after his city was branded Canada’s most racist by a national magazine.

Brian Bowman stood surrounded by dozens of aboriginal and community leaders and admitted that Winnipeg has a problem with racism. The city’s first Métis mayor broke down in tears as he talked about passing on his heritage to his young children.

“My wife is Ukrainian heritage. My family is Métis,” he said as he choked back tears. “I want my boys to be as proud of both of those family lines.”

Macleans magazine published a cover story that gave Winnipeg the dubious distinction. It cited the huge gap between aboriginals and non-aboriginals, as well as the recent high-profile death of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was found in August wrapped in plastic in the Red River.

It also comes shortly after an inquest report into the death of Brian Sinclair, an aboriginal double-amputee who died during a 34-hour wait for care in a city hospital’s emergency room in 2008. Some staff testified that they assumed he was drunk — “sleeping it off” — or homeless.

The reaction to the article from city hall was swift. The police chief, the provincial treaty commissioner, chiefs and community leaders assembled — not to refute the article — but to promise to do something about the issue it highlighted.

“We do have racism in Winnipeg . . . You can’t run away from facts,” Bowman said following a closed-door traditional smudging ceremony. “Ignorance, hatred, intolerance, racism exists everywhere.

“Winnipeg has a responsibility right now to turn this ship around and change the way we all relate.”

Bowman said that means having an open dialogue with aboriginal leaders before taking concrete action, which he said is coming.

Grand Chief Derek Nepinak with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said keeping the lines of communication open is key. But he warned that combating racism is a huge challenge.

“I guarantee you that, right now, somebody is having a racist experience in a restaurant or on the streets in Winnipeg somewhere. I’m not here to pacify that or to say that it’s okay,” Nepinak said.

“There are people who are wilfully blind, wilfully ignorant to the reality of indigenous people in this society. But we will challenge them.”

Ovide Mercredi, a former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said he has experienced racism, but has not let it embitter him. There are many within the aboriginal community with the energy to fight prejudice and ensure there is “zero tolerance” for racism, he said.

“I have a right to be different. If we as a society make that a basic principle — that all human beings have a right to be different — we’d go a long way to solving the intolerance that many people experience,” Mercredi said. “Instead of putting each other down, we should be trying to lift each other up.”

Winnipeg police Chief Devon Clunis, who is black, said he doesn’t believe Winnipeg is the only city grappling with racism. Racism exists across Canada and is part of the “human condition,” he suggested.

“We need to have a difficult conversation in our city respective of race,” Clunis said. “I think you are seeing who is starting that conversation today.” – Toronto Star

Cynical slogans as black abortions spike

“Black lives matter” has become the slogan of anti-police protests across the nation, but the target of the protests is so misplaced that the motives of the so-called civil rights leaders behind the movement must be questioned. Do they really care about black lives? Or are they cynically exploiting isolated incidents, such as the death of Michael Brown, to inflame the black population and advance their own political interests?

Today, on the somber anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, it’s time for black leaders to face up to the real danger threatening black lives in America. It isn’t the police. According to an anti-police brutality organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 313 blacks were killed by “police, security guards and vigilantes” in 2013. It isn’t even black criminals, who, as Rudy Giuliani famously pointed out on “Meet the Press,” are responsible for 93 percent of violent deaths among blacks. Sources estimate that between 6,000 and 8,000 blacks are murdered each year.

No, the greatest danger to blacks is found precisely where we ought to be safest: in our mothers’ wombs. In 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 138,539 black babies were aborted.

Thankfully, abortion is on the decline in America, down 3 percent between 2007 and 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Strikingly, the number of surgical abortion clinics has plummeted, from 2,176 in 1991 to 551 today. Nevertheless, the CDC report that in 2010, a staggering 765,651 abortions were performed in the United States. Black women continue to have the highest abortion rate of any ethnic group, with a gruesome 483 abortions for every 1,000 live births.

The bottom line? I’ll say it again: 138,539 black babies, nearly one baby in three, were killed in the womb in 2010. According to the CDC, between 2007 and 2010, innocent black babies were victimized in nearly 36 percent of the abortion deaths in the United States, though blacks represent only 12.8 percent of the population. Some say the abortion capital of America is New York City. According to LifeSiteNews, the city’s Department of Health reported that in 2012, more black babies were aborted (31,328) than born (24,758). That’s 55.9 percent of black babies killed before birth. Blacks represented 42.4 percent of all abortions.

Legalized abortion is working out exactly as Margaret Sanger intended. Sanger, the founder of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was part of the eugenics movement back in the 1930s. Her goal was to use abortion to cull what she considered inferior races from the human gene pool. According to Sanger, “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.” She opened her first abortion clinics in inner cities, and it’s no accident that even today, “79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in black or minority neighborhoods.”

We mustn’t forget that babies aren’t the only victims of abortion. Sadly, more and more of the mothers are suffering and dying as well. Though many people continue to deny it, the link between abortion and breast cancer has been amply documented, and this deadly consequence of abortion is plaguing greater and greater numbers of black women.

Ironically, black women used to suffer from breast cancer less frequently than white women. Not any longer. The Black Women’s Health Imperative notes that according to an American Cancer Society report, black women now develop breast cancer almost as frequently as whites, and are more likely to die from the disease. LifeSiteNews also cites an American Cancer Society report that black women under age 40 now are more likely to develop breast cancer than their white counterparts. They can thank Margaret Sanger — and some of today’s so-called civil rights leaders.

Sanger relied on black ministers to act as Judas goats leading their sisters to abortion mills. According to LifeSiteNews, Sanger wrote in 1939, “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Some black leaders are still acting as Judas goats today. LifeSiteNews cites black pro-life activist Ryan Bomberger: “Back in 2005, the NAACP praised the high black abortion rate as compared to the percentage of the population at a NARAL fundraising gala. When more black babies are aborted than are born alive in NYC and the NAACP responds by supporting Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo’s radical abortion expansion via the misnamed ‘Women’s Equality Act,’ one can understand how the targeting of minorities continues unabated.”

Abortion is the greatest threat to black lives in America today. People who claim to represent the black community while also abetting the black holocaust — abortion — are hypocrites. Any “civil rights leader” who genuinely believes that “black lives matter” should be working to see that every black baby is accorded the very first civil right — the right to life.

J. Kenneth Blackwell is a policy board member of the American Civil Rights Union.

Source: Washington Times

Hollywood star Mark Wahlberg haunted by racial incident from 30 years ago

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.”

School slammed for labeling toddlers ‘racist’

Professionals have slammed teachers who have been reporting children as young as five for being racist, saying that making children frightened to ask questions is unhealthy.

The comments come after parent Hayley White was summoned to her seven-year-old son’s primary school and told that her some Elliott had been at the centre of an ‘incident’ with another pupil, the Daily Mail reports.

She was told that the situation was so serious she would have to sign an official form admitting he was racist; something Ms White refused to do.

The reason for this demand was because her son had asked a four-year-old pupil during break time if he was “brown because he was from Africa”.

“When I arrived at the school and asked Elliott what had happened, he became extremely upset,” said Ms White, a 32-year-old NHS worker.

She said her son was distressed about the reaction from staff, saying to his mother: “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty”.

The row over the question escalated when the black child told his mother about the question when he returned home from school, who then informed the school hoping they could “have a quiet word with Elliott”.

Elliott’s mother was given a copy of the school rules to read with particular focus on its ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on racism.

“I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark, which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,” she said.

“I refused to sign it, and I told the teacher that in no way did I agree the comment was racist. My son is inquisitive. He always likes to ask questions, but that doesn’t make him a racist.”

The singling out of children as ‘racist’ or ‘prejudiced’ for making comments which the politically-correct brigade rule as unacceptable can have serious consequences for young children, with the record staying on their school report and the child being branded as a bigot for the whole of their school career for asking a simple question.

Source: Breitbart

The real racial bias: Cops more willing to shoot whites than blacks

It’s widely assumed that white police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects as a result of racial bias, but recent research suggests the opposite is true.

An innovative US study published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that participants in realistic simulations felt more threatened by black suspects yet took longer to pull the trigger on black men than on white or Hispanic men.

“This behavioral ‘counter-bias’ might be rooted in people’s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial or ethnic group,” said the paper, which went practically unnoticed when it was published online on May 22, but took on new significance in the wake of a series of high-profile police-involved shootings involving black victims over the summer.

The results back up what one of the researchers, University of Missouri-St. Louis professor David Klinger, has found after independently interviewing more than 300 police officers: While they don’t want to shoot anybody, they really don’t want to shoot black suspects.

“Across these 300 interviews, I have multiple officers telling me that they didn’t shoot only because the suspect was black or the suspect was a woman, or something that would not be consistent with this narrative of cops out there running and gunning,” said Mr. Klinger, a former cop and author of “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force” (2006).

“When it comes to the issue of race, I’ve never had a single officer tell me, ‘I didn’t shoot a guy because he was white.’ I’ve had multiple officers tell me, ‘I didn’t shoot a guy because he was black,’ ” Mr. Klinger said. “And this is 10, even 20 years ago. Officers are alert to the fact that if they shoot a black individual, the odds of social outcry are far greater than if they shoot a white individual.”

In fact, he said, officers involved in shootings have told him that they were actually relieved that the person they shot was white, not black.

“The second things is, I’ve had multiple officers tell me they were worried in the wake of a shooting because they shot a black person, and I’ve had multiple officers tell me that they were glad that the person they shot was white,” Mr. Klinger said. “Because then they knew they weren’t going to have to be subject to the racial harangue.”

The interviews, which he conducted for a book he’s planning to finish this year, run directly counter to the prevailing view pushed by social justice groups, politicians and others: that shooting victims such as 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson were victims at least in part of racial discrimination against blacks among cops.

“Police officers — at least the ones I interviewed — are very sensitive to the race issue, but not in the way this popular narrative is running, i.e., cops are out there trying to find young black men who don’t have guns so they can shoot them down like dogs in the street,” Mr. Klinger said. “That just isn’t anything I’ve found in any of the research that I’ve done.”

The study, “Racial and ethnic bias in decisions to shoot seen through a stronger lens: experimental results from high-fidelity laboratory simulations,” was conducted by Mr. Klinger and Washington State University assistant research professor Lois James and criminal justice and criminology professor Bryan Vila.

For their research, the authors used a pioneering WSU simulation involving full-size, high-definition video instead of photos and handguns modified to shoot infrared beams instead of the “shoot” buttons typically used in deadly-force studies.

About a third of the scenarios in the study were “no shoot” situations in which perpetrators of different races held cellphones or wallets, while the rest were “shoot” situations in which suspects were armed with knives or guns.

The study found that the 48 participants waited longest before firing on black suspects in “shoot” scenarios, even though the participants exhibited “stronger threat responses” when facing black suspects than with white or Hispanic suspects.

Eighty-five percent of the participants were white, and none was a police officer. At the same time, a 2013 study led by Ms. James using active police, military and the general public found the same phenomenon: All three groups took longer to shoot black suspects, and participants were also more likely to fire on unarmed whites and Hispanics than blacks.

“In other words, there was significant bias favoring blacks where decisions to shoot were concerned,” the 2013 study said, according to WSU News.

The findings challenge not only popular assumptions but also previous social science research suggesting that whites, including police officers, have an “implicit bias” against blacks. The drawback with such implicit-bias studies is that they use the push-button model and less realistic scenarios, said Mr. Klinger.

“That’s important research. It’s good research,” Mr. Klinger said. “The problem is it bears absolutely no relationship with actual shooting events. And people are not reading all the caveats that the authors put into the article saying, ‘This is not real life, this is a laboratory, we don’t know about external validity,’ and so on.”

So why are blacks shot more often by police? While the FBI’s national database has been widely criticized as incomplete, data compiled by Mr. Klinger in St. Louis over the past decade shows that 90 percent of police shootings involve blacks, even though they only make up 49 percent of the city’s population.

At the same time, he said, that figure is commensurate with the percentage of blacks involved in violent crime. Roughly 90 percent of those killed each year in St. Louis are black, and 90 percent of them are shot by other blacks, he said.

What’s more, he said, black SWAT officers make up about one-third of the St. Louis force — and they commit on average about one-third of the shootings each year.

“And this is consistent with every other study that’s ever been done,” said Mr. Klinger, who, as a rookie officer in Los Angeles, fatally shot a black man armed with a knife who had stabbed his partner, Dennis Azevedo, in the chest.

“Once you start looking at levels of violence, levels of threat, blacks are not shot in manners that are disproportionate to their involvement in illegal activity,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter if the cop is black, white or Hispanic, police officers presented with deadly threats use deadly force. Period, paragraph, end of story.”

Source: www.washingtontimes.com

Hotel tries to deny black visitors

Despite a personal apology from the manager and an invitation to return to one of South Africa’s leading luxury hotels, Tumi Mpofu isn’t interested in a free meal.

Mpofu and her family claim staff at The Twelve Apostles Hotel and Spa in Camps Bay, Cape Town, were racist towards them.

“I’m not concerned about going back. I’m just interested that people shouldn’t be treated like this,” she said yesterday.

On December 27, Mpofu’s father phoned to book a table at the hotel’s Azure Restaurant. When he was told they couldn’t accommodate a table of six, the family called a white friend, Martina Dahlmanns, for help.

Dahlmanns immediately got a table. But when the family arrived, they were told the booking didn’t exist. Again, the family called Dahlmanns, who spoke to the restaurant and a table was found. She later posted a blog about the incident.

The hotel said yesterday that during peak season “numerous challenges occur due to overbookings, lack of confirmations of bookings, last-minute cancellations, unscheduled arrivals or erroneous bookings”.

It “strongly refused to accept being branded as a racist hotel”.

Mpofu said she was made to feel uncomfortable throughout her party’ s visit.

“From the minute we arrived we were stared at as if we were lost. We were treated like some kind of aliens.”

Her father, Mlamli Papu, said the waiter who dealt with them was very rude.

Source: timeslive

2014: The year of living racially

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:

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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.

That’s lesson no. 2.

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‘Racist’ Israeli group campaigns against Jewish-Arab marriages

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

International movie audiences ‘racist’ – leaked Sony email

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.

“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

Racial tensions flare after police killings in US

The murders of two New York City officers ambushed in their car in Brooklyn by a man claiming to be retaliating for police killings of unarmed black men prompted calls to tamp down racial tensions.

The ambush of Officers Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, followed online postings by the man, identified by police as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, referring to the deaths of Eric Garner of Staten Island and Michael Brown of Missouri. In both cases, grand juries declined to charge police with wrongdoing, prompting nationwide protests.

The two officers probably never even saw Brinsely before he shot them from behind. One local who walked up to the crime scene later said that “a lot of people were clapping and laughing,” saying “serves them right.”

A fugitive trying to evade an arrest warrant shot a third white Tampa-area police officer and then ran him over early Sunday, killing the officer, police said.

The black fugitive crashed his car into a pole and another vehicle after running over Tarpon Springs officer Charles Kondek. He was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder.

The shooting did not appear to have any connection to the ambush killings of two New York police officers a day earlier.

Condek, 45, had been with the local force for 17 years. Originally from New York, Kondek previously served on the New York City Police Department for more than five years, authorities said.

Kondek was the father of six children.

#BlackLivesMatter storm Mall of America

On one of the busiest shopping days of the year, thousands of #BlackLivesMatter protesters packed the Mall of America outside Minneapolis on Saturday to call for police reform in the wake of the officer-involved deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

“I’m getting my feelings out and I’m letting the world know that we’re not going to take this anymore,” Emma Eubanks, a 18-year-old protester told Fusion just before the event began.

Upon hearing the news that two police officers had been killed in New York by a fugitive gunman, Eubanks (who is the subject of the video above), said she “didn’t condone violence” and that her heart was with the families of the slain officers. She worried that the killings could “provoke a wave of anger and hate” against black activists and those pushing for police reforms.

The mall had sent a letter to organizers warning that anyone protesting in in the mall could be “removed, arrested and banned.” As demonstrators gathered near the rotunda, an electronic billboard flanked by large Christmas trees switched from holiday shopping themed messages to an ominous warning, written in all-caps.

Protesters ignored the sign, and chants of “hands up, don’t shoot” drowned out police calls to disperse.

They held “die-ins,” laying down in front of stores when police approached.

Later, the protests broke up into smaller groups and marched through the mall.

Police blocked off certain areas, but avoided mass arrests.

Michael McDowell, a 20-year-old protester from Minneapolis told Fusion the protesters selected the Mall of America because “if we’re spending our dollar…they should step up.”

He and other organizers want said they were pushing for more direct community control over police departments.

“We want to make sure that there’s some solid policy around community control over police,” he said, “so community deciding what cops get hired in their communities and essentially making sure that the cops that get hired are from the community.”

Organizers said 20 people were arrested and cited with trespassing. Fusion saw what appeared to be a couple of handcuffed protesters being walked out the building by police.

Minnesotans weren’t the only ones to stage protests on Saturday. Protesters staged a die-in in Park City, Utah, and Baltimore, as well.

Source: fusion.net

Ferguson: Thankful for the Founding Fathers’ legal legacy

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.

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