Tag: racism

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Doing Anti-Racism Wrong

yoga, racism, political correctness, racism, colonialism, Common Sense

The number of crazies out there may be fewer than they seem.

This weekend, at Townhall, I wrote about the University of Ottawa’s suspension of a free yoga class. What was deemed “problematic” was the class’s “cultural appropriation” of an ancient discipline.

But why was yoga a problem, -atic or otherwise?

Well, in the words of the “fainting heart” who made the decision to nix the program, because yoga hails from cultures that “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy. . . .”

Robby Soave, at the Daily Beast, pushed a bit deeper than I did: “Cultural appropriation first became a talking point in sociology circles in the 1970s and ’80s. Explicitly racist and exploitative incidents from the past — like 19th and early 20th century blackface — were deemed wrong, not merely because they were horribly insulting to black people, but because they stole from black culture.”

On this ground, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is intolerably racist.

Idiotic. Let me repeat what I wrote this weekend:

  1. Cultural appropriation is a good thing; that’s how we progress. We emulate the good in other cultures. We discard practices that do not suit us. That is what good people do.
  2. Those people who, afflicted by the mind-virus of today’s neo-progressivism, think that “cultural appropriation” is racist are themselves racist.

How are they racist? By judging a cultural matter as racial.

Racists make too much of race. So does this new breed of self-defined anti-racists.

But remember, it was just one complaint that led to the yoga class being nixed. Had the person who addressed the complaint dared snort in derision, the whole absurdity might have stopped before it started.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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yoga, racism, political correctness, racism, colonialism, Common Sense

Photo credit (endorsement of this message is not implied): Steven Depolo on Flickr

 

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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies responsibility

Supremacist Progressives?

Bernie Sanders and Black Lives 2

“Thank you, Seattle, for being one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America,” socialist-cum-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders shouted to the large crowd in the City of Goodwill.

Seconds later, two women with a local Black Lives Matter group jumped the stage, threatening to shut down the event. Quickly, they were rewarded for their extortion-by-tantrum. Sen. Sanders and company relinquished the microphone, podium and stage.

The kidnapped crowd booed the violation, only to be screamed at by Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, as “a bunch of screaming white racists,” who practice “white supremacist liberalism.”

“I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” Johnson added.

Angry audience members yelled, “How dare you?!” and “How dare she call me a racist.”

“You guys are full of bull-$@%# with your ‘black lives matter,’” she chided, acknowledging that the event had already recognized the anniversary of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

What a fascinating marriage of outrage and entitlement!

And yet . . . real grievances abound.

“Welcome to Seattle,” Johnson told Bernie, “where our Seattle Police Department has been under federal consent decree for the past three years, and yet has been riddled by use of force, racial profiling, and scandals throughout the year.”

Sen. Sanders doesn’t even stand up for his own speech rights, much less ours. Apparently fearing the loudmouths, he proved unwilling to confront them or address their complaints.

Sanders and his “progressive” Democrat comrades (governing cities like Baltimore and Seattle) must take responsibility for the results of their policies, and admit that the black voices shouting against racism are shouting at them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bernie Sanders and Black Lives

 

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies too much government

A British Puzzle

White labor and minimum wages

Most folks think minimum wage laws are there to help the poor in particular and everybody in general. But economist Scott Sumner, exploring “Britain’s new minimum wage: Is there a hidden agenda?” finds Britain’s new Tory double whammy of decreasing welfare payments while hiking mandatory minimum wage something of a mystery:

Why would a Conservative government sharply increase the minimum wage, in a budget that in many other respects favored small government? The minimum wage is currently 6.50 pounds/hour, and 9 pounds/hour is almost $14/hour in US terms. Also recall that average incomes in the UK are lower than in the US.

He finds a possible reason: to dissuade immigration. Migrants usually have low skills, in part because of language difficulties, so they cannot command high wages — market wages, of course, being defined by worker productivity.

Could the new minimum wage be there to influence migration without doing so directly?

Sumner goes on to discuss the racist origins of the minimum wage in America, Australia, and South Africa. The purpose was pretty clearly to hurt poor workers. Minimum wage laws were established to protect white workers from cheap competition by darker skinned folk.

Sumner’s postscript is interesting: “The [American] Democratic surge of interest in the minimum wage occurred soon after the GOP surge of interest in immigration restriction. Let’s see if the GOP jumps on the minimum wage bandwagon.”

Of course, for every advocate of a class-based, favoritist policy who argues deceptively, there are dozens who are merely mistaken.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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White labor and minimum wages

 

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Common Sense national politics & policies Popular responsibility

My Privilege Isn’t White

Privilege

“White privilege” is all the rage . . . on college campuses. But is there anything substantive to the notion?

As long as some folks view individuals as nothing more than their race, I suppose one can accrue a few advantages simply by being part of the largest racial group.

Moreover, as I explained at length in my Sunday column at Townhall.com, numerous government policies do indeed hit minorities harder.

The War on Drugs has ravaged the black community much more than the white community, for example. This may result more from the higher poverty rates for minorities than to race alone: Police and prosecutors are more likely to arrest and harshly prosecute the poor for no better reason than that the poor are less able to defend themselves, legally or politically.

That’s wrong. We very much need major reforms of unaccountable police power and abusive prosecutors as well as end the drug war.

But getting back to that trendy “white privilege” — it misses a big source of “unfair” advantage.

I’m white, but my privilege mostly isn’t. Of my many advantages, my skin pigmentation nowhere near tops the list.

Whatever success I’ve enjoyed derives mostly from this: I was reared by two parents who supported me, nurtured me, corrected me and cared about me every day from before I was born to now.

No government program, no amount of money, can best that gift.

The most critical element in the success of black and brown and yellow and peach and white kids is not a politician who cares, but a parent — or, better yet, two — providing a nurturing environment, including tough love.

We could all use more of the “unfair” advantage that parents provide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom U.S. Constitution

Slavery & Racism

African Slaves

On Sunday, I marked an awful event in our history: The official beginning of chattel slavery as such in Britain’s American colonies.

At first, John Casor, an African indentured servant, had gained some control of his life. He charged his master, Anthony Johnson, a free black, with having forced him to labor longer than the term of his indentureship. He won, was freed, and then indentured himself to one Robert Parker.

But Johnson sued, and, on March 8, 1655, won Casor back — as a slave for life.

The case established a civil ground for slavery, also enabling free blacks to own slaves. Even as late as the Civil War, the South harbored families of obvious African descent who themselves owned African-Americans as slaves.

On the surface, American slavery wasn’t about race. But in the 1640 case of John Punch, sentenced to a life of slavery as criminal punishment for running away from his indentured servitude, his fellow escapees — whites — merely got longer terms of forced labor.

Racism, Thomas Sowell explains, became increasingly important to “the peculiar institution” as time went on. If you exalt the notion that “all men are created equal,” how do you square that with your slave-holding?

By denigrating the humanity of blacks.

This vile ugliness of racism is still with us, to some degree . . . and slavery, too — at least, in small pockets around the globe and in a much bigger way in the Muslim world. An estimated eleven million slaves are held in Africa and the Middle East. And black Africans are still the main victims.

Sunday was also the 240th anniversary of Tom Paine’s first American call for slavery’s abolition.

Ending slavery: it’s way past time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

African Slavery In America…

On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine is believed to be the author. The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.

Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Ironically, Johnson was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro” and the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally-recognized as a lifelong slave in England’s North American colonies.

 

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crime and punishment general freedom

Police Officer Un-indicted

We’re naturally worried about the potential for police abuse of power — cops who roust people for no good reason, then claim that the other party was “resisting arrest” or some such thing.

But sometimes it’s the person on the other side of the badge who reconstructs history.

Several days ago, a story broke about Django Unchained actress Danièle Watts, who is African-American, being accosted along with her white boyfriend by a police officer who wanted to see their IDs. Both later suggested that they were targeted by police for racial reasons. On her Facebook page, Watts reported that she “was handcuffed and detained by two police officers . . . after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place.”

But audio of the encounter that has come to light shows an officer politely asking for ID, and explaining that he was responding to a call. (The caller had claimed the couple were having sex in public.) The officer is calm; Watts is persistently histrionic. She brings up race; he says race wasn’t the issue, sexual activity in public was.

We can argue about whether the officer should have handcuffed the actress in response to her recalcitrance. (Apparently, an accusation is all that is required to trigger police power, a demand to “see our papers.” It’s hard not to be on Ms. Watts’s pro-freedom side on that.) But now that this recording is out there, her original version of the encounter just won’t stand.

Enough reason to put video-recording devices onto every police lapel . . . in L.A., in Ferguson, everywhere.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

The Race Card, Again

Are persons necessarily racist if (a) white and (b) opposed to expansion of the welfare state — that is, merely for opposing such expansion?

In the New York Times, journalism professor Thomas Edsall, echoing a now-familiar charge, implies as though it were self-evident that many who oppose Obamacare-ized medicine do so because of the race(s) of the recipients:

“Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look at the election of 2010. . . . [Obamacare] forced such issues to the fore, and Republicans swept the House and state houses across the country.”

Poor(er) people can come in all shapes, sizes and colors. But for the sake of Edsall’s freighted non-argument, let’s stipulate that the poorest Obama-subsidy recipients are slightly or much more likely to be minorities than not. Why must this fact motivate an individual’s opposition to seeing more and more of his hard-earned income coercively transferred to  anybody?

Change the context to a street mugging. If a mugger is non-white, does the victim’s dislike of being mugged necessarily hinge on the race of the mugger?

Of course, any victim of crime may be a racist. But you wouldn’t simply assume it.

Gratuitous charges of racism are one sign of desperation by friends of Obamacare — a program the color-blind horrors of which will only grow more evident over time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Give PSA’s a Chance?

After the George Zimmerman verdict, a slice of the country protested, insisting on the guilt of the exonerated Zimmerman. The president went on air and pled “for understanding.” And Fox’s Bill O’Reilly took the occasion to chide the country’s black leadership for not doing the right kind of Public Service Announcements.

Much of what O’Reilly said was on target. The high rates of unwed parenthood in the African-American community — 73 percent — and the consequent predominance of single-parent households lies at the heart of many problems.

Yet, neither O’Reilly’s idea of PSAs “telling young black girls to avoid becoming pregnant,” nor President Obama’s efforts to give young black men “the sense that their country cares about them,” would likely change behavior.

Black unemployment and rates of illegitimate births were lower half a century ago than white rates. What happened?

Black Americans were hardest hit by the rise of the welfare state.

First, raising minimum wages placed low-skilled workers at a disadvantage, with each wage floor hike doing more damage.

Second, the general switch in state aid from assistance to intact families to aid to mothers with dependent children took away a major disincentive for irresponsible sexual practices. Throw in the sexual revolution, and you have a powder keg.

Third, the War on Drugs established the market conditions for illegal activity, and encouraged the formation of gangs. Drugs made users unfit for most work, while providing a lucrative draw for those wanting to advance economically.

None of this is a mystery. But sadly, I fear America’s black leadership would rather do Bill O’Reilly’s PSA’s than really address these problems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Owning Up to Racism

Last week, actress Stacey Dash tweeted her support for Republican candidate Mitt Romney. And unleashed a firestorm, including AP coverage — “Do Black People Support Obama Because He’s Black?”

On Twitter, she was called “jigaboo,” “traitor,” “house nigger” and worse. . . .

The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.

It might behoove Twits (those who use Twitter?) to take a breath every now and then and not immediately type out the first thing that comes to their heads. Especially if they’re racists, like those who tapped out these vile attacks on Ms. Dash.

What should the president’s skin color or her skin color have to do with whether she chooses to support Obama or Romney or whomever?

Funny, while attacking her for being stupid and subservient, this “progressive” beat-down crowd is upset precisely because Dash is smart enough — independent enough — to think for herself, refusing to be subservient to them.

It’s scary that this sort of racism is so blatant, even after the long and difficult progress made on civil rights; scary, too, that today a black person can be “high-tech lynched” online for thinking and acting and speaking in ways not somehow assigned to his or her race.

Slavery is long over. The laws that made blacks second-class citizens have been repealed. So, why do some progressives think they own blacks?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.