Tag: racism

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ballot access national politics & policies

The Other Big Lie

Joe Biden

“Let me be clear,” President Joe Biden told a Georgia crowd yesterday, addressing changes proposed by the Democrats to election laws nationally, “this is not about me or Vice-President Harris or our party.”

Of course not. Who would even suggest such a thing? 

On this same “voting rights” subject six months ago, Biden called Republicans “bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies” who “are threatening the very foundation of our country.” Though less colorful, yesterday’s address was merely more of the same. 

“Pass the Freedom to Vote Act! Pass it now!” the president shouted, arguing that it “would prevent voter suppression.”  

How? Well, that’s less than clear. 

For years, Democrats slammed laws requiring voters to show photo identification as “racist,” contending the requirement disproportionately suppressed black voters. But then, when polls demonstrated that voters “of color” are even more supportive of Voter ID laws than are whites, Democrats quickly insisted they had always been for such laws.

Now — keep up! — voter ID laws are back to being suppressive. And the very purpose of the Dems’ Freedom to Vote Act is to strike down all such state laws.

When Georgia’s Secretary of State called for photo ID requirements last Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan offered, “The Freedom to Vote Act actually does promote a national standard for states that have an ID requirement for in-person voting,” adding, “You could use a bank statement or utility bill.”

Neither of which constitutes a photo ID, as the secretary pointed out.

Democrats battling former President Trump’s so-called Big Lie have concocted one of their very own.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Black & White & NPR

three white men, racism

The NPR headline mentioned race: “3 white men are found guilty of murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery.”

Before the verdict, I had mentioned the case on my This Week in Common Sense podcast, expecting and supportive of that ultimate outcome. So I left it at that.

But Sean Malone, the brilliant videographer, had something to say about that headline: “Dear NPR: You don’t need to put race in every headline. Please stop. Alternatively, if you’re hell-bent on doing this, then do it consistently.”

Legacy news media outfits seem committed to a racial double standard, which Mr. Malone calls our attention to: “I notice that you didn’t put ‘black suspect’ in this article,” linking to “The Waukesha death toll rises to 6, and the suspect faces homicide charges.” The suspect in this horrific crime is African-American, but NPR doesn’t give that fact banner billing in this or a separate headline on the same horrific incident.

Yet, on November 4, the title was “A nearly all-white jury will hear evidence in the Ahmaud Arbery case.”

Selective race identification is journalistic practice. 

The pattern used to be that newspapers went out of their way to identify black criminals and white victims, but not vice-versa. Now it seems to be the reverse.

Are NPR and other outfits deliberately fanning the flames of racism, with a constant stream of implied and sometimes explicit ‘Hate Whitey’ themes? 

Relentlessly focusing on race as the ultimate driver of our society is not likely to reduce racism but to encourage it. 

To the detriment of individuals of all races.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Hang Up on Corporate Racism

att&t, race, racism, skin

AT&T is one of a growing number of corporations demanding that employees become “antiracist” hair-shirt-wearers.

“Antiracist” is the now-familiar code adjective for a racist agenda with whites as the targeted group.

What do AT&T’s “antiracist” programs inculcate? Christopher Rufo has the scoop in a post for City Journal, based on documents and testimony provided by an AT&T employee.

According to the whistleblower, managers are now assessed with respect to dedication to “diversity” and must attend training where white employees tacitly admit complicity in things like “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” The training materials aver that “American racism is a uniquely white trait” and — tiredly, vexingly, preposterously — that “Black people cannot be racist.”

AT&T employees are supposed to periodically perform an action that helps them better grasp “power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.” Etc.

No use asking what all this has to do with improving the quality of phone calls. No use asking whether it’s kind of racist to assume that skin color determines ideas and attitudes. The reality of moral choices and the utility of common sense have nothing to do with this reeducation-camp agenda.

What to do?

Refuse to sanction such travesties. Employees should quit en masse in protest. Granted, not everybody is in a position to just up and quit his job. But if you work for AT&T and switching to a less toxic workplace is at all possible, do so.

There’s no barbed-wire-topped Berlin Wall to prevent it. You can just walk away.

Or, alternatively, unite with like-minded co-workers and sue the pants off of the Ma Bell relic — on grounds amply allowed by “toxic work environment” and anti-discrimination laws.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture

Bright Sheng Dimmed

Lawrence Olivier, Othello, race, censorship

Resolved: pedagogic enthusiasm plus naivety about the likely reactions of the “safe space” brigade shouldn’t be a burning-at-the-stake kind of offense. 

Or any kind of firing offense.

Bright Sheng, University of Michigan professor of composition and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, showed his class the 1965 movie “Othello,” which stars Laurence Olivier. Olivier was in blackface. 

Sheng failed to give a trigger warning so that safe-space aficionados could either gird their loins or skip the class.

Uh oh.

As Reason magazine’s Robby Soave notes, Olivier’s use of blackface “was controversial even at the time.”

Given the sub-venial nature of the sin, what might any sane-but-offended student have done? Go up after class and say, “Gee, Professor Sheng, love your class, but shouldn’t you have made some preparatory comment about the blackface? Well, have a nice day.”

But no. It’s got to be a wailing reenactment of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with rabid students (and others) demanding Sheng be booted. No attention to context, no proportionality, no common sense.

Sheng has offered an abject apology, saying, in part, that “time has changed, and I made a mistake in showing the film, and I am very sorry.”

Was the mob demanding his ouster appeased? No. The mob never is.

The professor has for now stopped teaching his class, and the university is “investigating.”

The investigation actually needed, alas, will not be done. What administrators must discover is a backbone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The A-word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk. 

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a-word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-oriented, class-based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-and-social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.” 

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling tax policy

Race, Ignorance, Racism

Harrison Bergeron

Not spending millions more to hire and train swarms of Internal Revenue Service agents to poke, audit, investigate and squeeze more tax dollars from wealthier Americans would be — you knew this was coming — racist. 

That’s the new argument for siccing the IRS on wealthier Americans; they’re more likely to be white than black.

“The federal government is losing billions in unpaid taxes,” informs a Washington Post headline, “in part due to racial disparities in the tax code.”

What racially based inequalities, precisely?

“The inequity rests on long-established tax breaks that favor White Americans over Black Americans in three areas — marriage, homeownership and retirement, according to Dorothy A. Brown, an Emory University law professor,” writes Post columnist Joe Davidson. Because, for instance, “White people . . . are much more likely to be homeowners,” and more likely than blacks “to work for companies that offer tax favored retirement plans.”

Davidson offered no further discussion of marriage.

One can argue for or against hiring more IRS agents. (I’m against.) But to calculate the merits based on the skin color of the people most likely to be investigated is . . . racist.

Where does such skewed logic lead?

“The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade,” Fox News reports, “effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.”

This statewide policy designed to hurt so many individual students — and to help none — is predicated on closing a racial gap in math performance. By knee-capping the higher performing students of all races.*

So which is worse? That it’s a human rights violation . . . or that it is so incredibly stupid?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* As a candidate in this year’s Virginia House elections explained to The Federalist, the proposed statewide policy “is incredibly belittling, arrogant, and racist in assuming that children of color cannot reach advanced classes in math.”

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Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron

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crime and punishment media and media people

With Our Own Eyes

Police body-cam video cannot bring back the dead. Nor end racism or prevent tragedy. 

What point-of-policing video can capture is solid and critical evidence. After a deadly police encounter, body-cam footage gives the public confidence that the truth will soon come out. 

But only if police consistently and promptly release relevant video to the public.

Consider last week’s tragedy in Columbus, Ohio, where a policeman shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant as she was preparing to stab another young women. Many politicians and those in the media were ready to herald it as “the latest in a string of deadly videos documenting the final moments of a person of color killed by law enforcement.” 

The cop-cam video, however, clearly showed a policeman firing his gun to prevent one person of color from stabbing another. Just what we want police of any color to do.

NBC Nightly News still managed to mangle its reporting, editing out the image of the knife. In the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, you may remember, NBC News broadcast Zimmerman’s 911 call but dishonestly edited part of the conversation to inject a racial element where none had been.*

And, sure, even staring at incontrovertible videotape evidence of good police behavior, some took to defending knife-fighting as a youthful rite of passage.

But everyone can see the footage for themselves.

In another fatal shooting last week, police attempted to serve an arrest warrant in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. But under state law police are not required, short of a court order, to release police body-cam video. 

Citizens are going to court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The local Jacksonville, Florida, NBC affiliate fired three employees over the incident.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Disparate Outcomes, Desperate Logic

race, racism, education, testing, quota

“Virginia AG’s office finds elite Loudoun STEM school discriminates against Black, Hispanic students,” declared The Washington Post headline. 

Falsely. 

On Friday, Attorney General Mark Herring — another blackface-wearing state government leader — issued a 61-page report, saying “the Office of Attorney General Division of Human Rights finds there is reasonable cause to believe that Loudoun County Public Schools’ administration of the Academies of Loudoun program resulted in a discriminatory disparate impact on Black/African-American and Latinx/Hispanic students.” 

Though the investigation found the admission process to be “facially-neutral,” The Post informs that the program “in fact barred from admission qualified Black and Hispanic students who applied during the fall 2018 cycle.”

Yet blacks and Latinos were not barred. 

This year, 7 percent of black applicants were accepted and 11 percent of Hispanics. True, the acceptance rate for Asians was 13 percent and 15 percent for whites. But this gets tricky. Given their percentage of the overall student body, Asians were 42 percent overrepresented in the applicant pool, while blacks were 4 percent underrepresented, Latinos 6 percent, and whites underrepresented by a whopping 23 percent. 

“We request that Loudoun County Public Schools eliminate its discriminatory practices,” the report concludes. But . . . it did not stipulate any specific form of discrimination. Rather, it instructed the school district to work with the Loudoun County NAACP “to begin developing revised policies within 60 days.”

What sort of revisions are likely? 

Lower the entry requirements, reduce testing and “take into consideration the principle of geography/socio-economic equity.” 

You see, the problem they’re trying to fix isn’t racism, but the lack thereof.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall

A Referendum to Reinstate Racism

reverse discrimination, racism

Fighting racism should be at least conceptually easy.

The California Assembly referred to Golden State voters Proposition 16, a constitutional amendment that would repeal a previous constitutional amendment voters had authorized in 1996, with Proposition 209. 

That amendment “stated that discrimination and preferential treatment were prohibited in public employment, public education, and public contracting on account of a person’s or group’s race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin,” Ballotpedia explains. “Therefore, Proposition 209 banned the use of affirmative action involving race-based or sex-based preferences in California.”

But important and well-monied interests really want to “use affirmative action programs that grant preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, and national origin. . . .” 

The list of supporters is a veritable Who’s Who of California Democrat pols and corporations and major lobbying organizations. They’ve spent almost $20 million and counting. 

The opposition, organized as Californians for Equal Rights, consists of a smattering of Republican pols and a few non-partisan organizations such as Students for Fair Admissions, and has spent about $1.2 million.

While fighting racism with a prohibition on discrimination in government hiring, and the like, is simple, clear, and across-the-board, fighting racism by preferring individuals of some races over those in others is cumbersome. And nutty.

And wrong.

Usually billed as “compensation” for past ills, it fosters a politics of resentment and inevitably leads to society-wide racial feuding.

Why so popular among “blue” pols? 

There’s money in divisiveness, pitting one group off another.

Over 16 times more money, apparently.

Think of Prop 16 as a litmus test. Will “blue” California buy into the politics of racial division? 

Or will Golden State voters stick with the color-blind principles most Americans favor?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

Merit No More

grades, race, school, education, prejudice, racism

San Diego’s school district is weakening its grading system because of “racial disparities.”

Yearly averaging of grades will end. Why? The practice, it is said, has penalized students who do poorly early in the year, presumably unfairly.

Teachers will also be prohibited from taking into account whether homework is submitted on time and how students behave in class. These aspects of performance will instead be incorporated into a “citizen grade.”

Richard Barrera, VP of the school district, says “to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

Student behavior has sometimes been called “deportment.” Grading it separately is nothing new. But San Diego’s rationale for doing so is bad. And eliminating a yearly average (or semester average) discourages students from working diligently all year long.

What if, under the hobbled system, grades still exhibit “racial disparities”? The logical conclusion is an end to grades and to merit-based distinctions.

Many reasons for academic disparities among different groups are possible. But let’s say that kids of certain color tend to have lousier home lives than kids of other color, and therefore do worse in school. 

If so, disparities in performance cannot be attributed to attempts to objectively assess schoolwork. 

And the problems won’t disappear if grades disappear.

Any silver lining? 

Well, if you’re a substandard teacher, meaningless grades for students will also make it harder to know when you, the teacher, are doing substandard work.

Though the metal most apt, here, is much baser than “silver.”

Lead seems about right. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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