Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Why Race Will Always Be an Issue

For every white racist there are at least three whites who see having a (e.g.) black friend as a mark of elite status and a rite of passage to the inner circle.

Morgan Freeman gets it right; but he's fighting a losing battle. 





Sunday, February 21, 2016

Racist Structures and Systemic Racism

Notice the black and white parts conspicuous by their absence

The left talks a lot about systemic racism, racist structures, institutionalized racism, systems of white supremacy, and the like.  Why is that and what is a racist structure?

As far as why the left tends to talk about racist structures, there are many reasons, but here are a few:

1. They are wittingly or not influenced by Marx.
2. They tend to see the world in terms of victim and oppressor.  Victims are in no way responsible for their condition.  The explanation is fully in terms of the oppressor and in particular in terms of an oppressive system.
3. The left tends to be skittish about moral and spiritual conditions and solutions, favoring instead the political.  This is in part due to a tendency to deny agency, free will, and moral responsibility.
4. As such they tend to focus (again, due to downstream influence by Marx) on material wealth and well-being.  Thus systems such as capitalism tend to be seen as root causes or explanations today rather than moral ones (racist beliefs and attitudes).

What then is a racial structure or system?  This is a metaphysical question and, as in most cases metaphysical, there will not be an uncontroversial answer. 
But we'll hazard a start.

We might begin by thinking about the structure of a building.  The building itself is a structure--an artifact, a human creation.  Are buildings racist?  Perhaps one built by the Klan to hold Klan meetings, though whether it is racist or not might be contingent on its actual use.  (Is a building built by the Klan but turned into a homeless shelter in a black community still a racist structure?) But buildings don't seem to be the sort of structures that the left has in mind when talking about racist structures.

Rather the structures--the artifacts or creations--seem to be certain systems.  What is a system? Perhaps we might understand a system in terms of a set of rules (perhaps laws) and practices which humans create and engage in.  When a paint crew agrees to divide up how they paint a house, they develop a set of rules (perhaps never explicitly agreed upon) and practices for how best to paint the house ("I'll cut in the corners, you spray and move ladders, etc.") 

What systems are racist systems?  To answer that we'll need to come to grips with what racism is; I intend to do that in short order in another post, but for now we'll just have to work with our intuitions and provide examples that are at least in the neighborhood.  A governmental system can be a racist one if, for example, racists make some of the laws which are intended to treat some racial groups as having less dignity than another without just discrimination as a class and not on a case by case basis.  For instance, so-called "Jim Crow laws" which treated blacks wholesale as inferior would fit this description.  Of course the Civil Rights movement abolished such laws, so to that extent the legal and judicial system today is a less racist one towards blacks.

So if we're going to talk about racist systems we need to have before us concrete examples of different systems, that is, if we're to identify the racist from non-racist ones and provide solutions for eradicating them.  Here the left is often short on specifics.  From an epistemic point of view (beyond identifying what racism is) the matter is purely an empirical one.  The system the paint crew set up in order to paint houses more efficiently--raising their own profit levels while at the same time lowering the cost of home owners employing them is hardly a racist one.  A paint crew that set up a system wherein they charge whites more because they think whites are inferior as whites is a racist one.

Is the educational system racist?  Are public schools run by teachers' unions who pay dues to the (leftwing) NEA, racist?  It would be odd if most teachers and administrators were (let us reasonably suppose) racists and in fact intend that their policies help those of other races. It would be odd because, as I see it, one could not have a racist system if those making the policies and shaping the practices are not and never were racists. (Of course there could be practices or policies in public schools that are holdovers from previous racists in the system; this again is an empirical matter.)  The racism would have to be accidental.  Could there be an accidental racist system? 

The left seems to think so; or at least they act as if there can be racist systems even if those making the rules, policies, and performing the practices are not racists.  (See Eric Holder's infamous prosecution of the Ferguson police department based solely on "disparate impact.") This is because they tend to call a system racist only if the actual outcomes tend to be better for one racial group than another.  But as I see it this is either a conceptual confusion or a willful, semantic distortion.

The system in the NBA is such that blacks fair better within the system than Asians.  The outcome of the system is such that there are more black players playing and making more money than Asians.  But that system as such is not a racist one.  For various and sundry reasons blacks tend to fair better in the system.  Of course, that's not to say that there is no racism in the system; that will depend on how many Donald Sterlings there are and the extent to which their racism bears on the rules, policies, and practices.  The devil is in the details.

Related.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

True Story

Sent to me by a blog follower:

Tyrone was having trouble in school.

His teacher was always yelling at him, "You're driving me crazy,Tyrone, can't you learn anything!!?

One day Tyrone's mother came to school to check on how he was doing.  The teacher told her honestly, that her son was simply a disaster, getting very low marks, and that she had never seen such a stupid boy in her entire teaching career.  The mom was so shocked at the feedback that she withdrew her son from school and moved out of Detroit relocating to Cleveland.

Twenty-five years later, the teacher was diagnosed with an almost incurable  cardiac disease. All the doctors strongly advised her to have open-heart surgery, which only one surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic could perform. Left with no other options, the teacher decided to have the operation, which was remarkably successful.

When she opened her eyes after the surgery she saw a handsome young doctor smiling down at her. She wanted to thank him, but could not talk. Her face started to turn blue, she raised her hand, trying to tell him something but quickly died.

The doctor was shocked, wondering what went wrong so suddenly. Then he turned around and saw that our friend Tyrone, a janitor in the Clinic, had unplugged the life-support equipment in order to connect his vacuum cleaner.

If you thought Tyrone had become a heart-surgeon, there is a high likelihood that you will vote for Hillary Clinton!

Monday, November 23, 2015

Ahmed the "Clock Inventor" is Back!

Surprise, surprise.  The teenager (who I wrote about here)--the one whose father was a politician--is now seeking 15 MILLION dollars in damages.

Please, PLEASE, someone arrest ME!

Thursday, November 19, 2015

"Colorblindness Will Not End Racism"

From our Public Broadcasting Network (PBS).

Pay attention to 9 and 10:
TEN THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT RACE
Our eyes tell us that people look different. No one has trouble distinguishing a Czech from a Chinese. But what do those differences mean? Are they biological? Has race always been with us? How does race affect people today?
There's less - and more - to race than meets the eye:
1. Race is a modern idea. Ancient societies, like the Greeks, did not divide people according to physical distinctions, but according to religion, status, class, even language. The English language didn't even have the word 'race' until it turns up in 1508 in a poem by William Dunbar referring to a line of kings.
2. Race has no genetic basis. Not one characteristic, trait or even gene distinguishes all the members of one so-called race from all the members of another so-called race.
3. Human subspecies don't exist. Unlike many animals, modern humans simply haven't been around long enough or isolated enough to evolve into separate subspecies or races. Despite surface appearances, we are one of the most similar of all species.
4. Skin color really is only skin deep. Most traits are inherited independently from one another. The genes influencing skin color have nothing to do with the genes influencing hair form, eye shape, blood type, musical talent, athletic ability or forms of intelligence. Knowing someone's skin color doesn't necessarily tell you anything else about him or her.
5. Most variation is within, not between, "races." Of the small amount of total human variation, 85% exists within any local population, be they Italians, Kurds, Koreans or Cherokees. About 94% can be found within any continent. That means two random Koreans may be as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian.
6. Slavery predates race. Throughout much of human history, societies have enslaved others, often as a result of conquest or war, even debt, but not because of physical characteristics or a belief in natural inferiority. Due to a unique set of historical circumstances, ours was the first slave system where all the slaves shared similar physical characteristics.
7. Race and freedom evolved together. The U.S. was founded on the radical new principle that "All men are created equal." But our early economy was based largely on slavery. How could this anomaly be rationalized? The new idea of race helped explain why some people could be denied the rights and freedoms that others took for granted.
8. Race justified social inequalities as natural. As the race idea evolved, white superiority became "common sense" in America. It justified not only slavery but also the extermination of Indians, exclusion of Asian immigrants, and the taking of Mexican lands by a nation that professed a belief in democracy. Racial practices were institutionalized within American government, laws, and society.
9. Race isn't biological, but racism is still real. Race is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to opportunities and resources. Our government and social institutions have created advantages that disproportionately channel wealth, power, and resources to white people. This affects everyone, whether we are aware of it or not.
10. Colorblindness will not end racism. Pretending race doesn't exist is not the same as creating equality. Race is more than stereotypes and individual prejudice. To combat racism, we need to identify and remedy social policies and institutional practices that advantage some groups at the expense of others.
RACE - The Power of an Illusion was produced by California Newsreel in association with the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Major funding provided by the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Diversity Fund.

9 says that race isn't biological, but racism is real.  Is race biological?  No, if we mean biological in the natural kind sense of the term.  Races are neither like species nor like different breeds of cats or dogs since the people who normally fall under our race terms (e.g. Caucasian, black, etc.) have no significant genetic dissimilarity; for instance, one is likely to find more genetic similarity between some who we call "black" and "hispanic" than between some who we call "black" and others who we call "black."  This leaves open whether races are (a) unreal (that is, there is nothing which our race terms and ideas refer to), or are (b) real but not natural kinds; instead they are social kinds (like citizens or bankers) perhaps partly grounded in phenotypical features, or (c) some other thing altogether.

According to 9, race isn't grounded in phenotypical features at all; rather race is simply an idea. And there seems to be nothing to which the idea of race refers.  Moreover it's an idea which privileges whites. How?  In what way?  No examples are given.  But these advantages are there, even if we aren't aware of it.  (Trust us.  They.  Are.  There.)  Presumably, though, these advantages do not exist in the form of affirmative action programs!

According to 10, we shouldn't presume that race doesn't exist.  What does this mean?  If 9 is correct, race is only an idea--and nothing whatsoever is mentioned about any extra-mental reality to which our idea refers.  Blacks and whites are like unicorns and centaurs.  Still, racism is real.  Even though there are no blacks to which our idea of race refers, a Klansman can still be a racist.  Racism is real, but race is an idea.  Got that?

Still, we need the idea of race.  Why?  10 tells us.  So that we can have social policies and institutional practices that advantage some groups (non-whites) over others (whites).  In other words, even though the idea of a particular race does not refer to anything in the world--it's a mental fiction--we need to pretend there are extra-mental races, so that people like Al Sharpton, race studies professors, diversity officers, etc. have employment and can privilege some over others--in the name, of course, of remedying alleged advantages given to whites by institutions and policies.  Ignoring race as the (alleged) fiction that it is would have the undesirable result that affirmative action policies and institutions go out of business.

One wonders, if colorblindness would not end racism, what would?

Friday, November 13, 2015

Blacks Kicked Out of White-Only "Healing Space"

Disgusting.  Racism won't end until people start treating color as the insignificant property that it is.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Racist Democrats and Planned Parenthood

The left likes to talk about racism.  A lot.  Rarely, though, is the notion defined.  Often the idea is that--whatever racism is--there can be racism even if there are no racists (there are racist "structures," "institutions," and the like).  I take this to be an absurd and unjustified extension of the term "racism," but perhaps the left has so distorted the meaning of the term that "racism" is now properly attributable to groups of people who individually do not harbor racist sentiments and motives.  Suppose that is true.  Then so is the following:

If we use disparate impact analysis to locate and root out structural racism--as the Obama administration used in Ferguson--then given (a) the high percentage of minorities killed by Planned Parenthood compared to whites and (b) the high percentage of abortion clinics in or near minority communities, Planned Parenthood is surely the most racist organization in America.  And given the Democrats' strong support for abortion and Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party is arguably the most racist party in the U.S.  The death statistics speak for themselves.

So the next time racism comes up, it might be worth beginning the conversation with a discussion of the most racist organizations in the country and what is to be done about them.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Obamazone., Racism, and Disparate Impact

If you don't get the joke, look up Ricci v. DeStefano
While you were sleeping last week, the Obama administration has set up a regulatory rule which essentially gives the federal government a lever to annex communities on the basis of disparate impact. (Learn what disparate impact is and how it is used.) Read more about it here and here

Malcolm Pollack offers an excellent analysis.  Here is the meat of it:

Here is an item that’s been going around over the past couple of days: an essay by Paul Sperry describing the Obama administration’s latest race-leveling operation.

The idea is to fish for “disparate impact” violations, wherever they can be found — in housing, lending, school discipline, academic performance, enrollment in gifted-student programs, etc. — and to use the coercive power of the State [i.e. the federal government] to flatten outcomes.

The Left has a secret weapon here, and in the current cultural climate, it’s a beaut. Here’s how it works:

1) If you go looking for disparate outcomes by racial groups (or by sex), you’ll certainly find them. They are real, and persistent. (See, for example, just how persistent they can be, here.)

2) When such disparate outcomes occur, there are only two possible causes: either they are due to an external obstacle, or something intrinsic to the group itself.

3) If all racial groups are assumed, as by current social convention they must be, to have exactly identical distributions of every cognitive and behavioral trait, then any variation in outcome that disparately affects a particular racial group must be evidence of some external obstacle. This can only be due to racism and injustice, and therefore it is just and proper for the State to detect and remove it, by whatever means necessary.

4) If however, you suggest that disparities under neutral policies may be due, even in part, to innate differences in the distribution of cognitive and behavioral characteristics in different racial groups, then you are a racist. (If you present actual evidence of such differences, you’re a “scientific” racist.)
Moreover, the fact that you are even thinking such things is evidence of the persistence and prevalence of racism in general, which in turns confirms the assumption that disparate outcomes are the result of pervasive and intractable racism, and not innate differences. This is what justifies redoubled efforts on the part of the State to bring every aspect of our lives under racial scrutiny, and impose corrective measures wherever disparate outcomes are found.

So: notwithstanding that race, as we are told, is a “social construct” with no basis in reality, the government will spare no effort to group people by race, and to scour vast collections of intrusively gathered data to find inequalities in social and economic outcomes — not on any individual basis, but by race. But despite race being real enough, apparently, to justify making such racial categorizations, race can have no deeper reality as regards any shared characteristics that might contribute to such inequalities. Race is, in other words, real, but only real enough to serve, somehow, as a marker for defining groups, and thereby to serve as the basis of racism, without having any other actual properties. Moreover (and this is what makes the whole thing work so beautifully): if you disagree with any of this, you are yourself a racist — and you have thereby just demonstrated that persistent racism is indeed the problem.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

The Confederate Flag




 I'm from the North but now live in the South. As such I have no strong ties to the Confederate Flag (in fact, I have no emotional ties at all.) But I have a friend Jay who is Southern. Let it be noted that Jay is the furthest thing from a racist as anyone who knows him will tell you; he also loves the South and thinks the following about "the flag": It is sometimes thought of as a symbol of racism. But for him, he does not think of it as a symbol of racism. He realizes that some think of it as (at least in part) a symbol of racism, but as he views the matter it is one of the primary symbols of the South (the land of BBQ, blues, the SEC, etc.) with which he identifies. In fact, he wants to take the flag back and reclaim it, not as a symbol of racism but as a symbol of all (and only) the good things he thinks it once stood for and can stand for. Moreover, he argues that the flag is a symbol of a region (or states or nation) which has a complicated past and that all flags are symbols of a similar mixed bag. (A number of progressives I know shutter in horror more at the U.S. flag than the "Hammer and Sickle."  I know numerous Christians who loathe their own Christian flag.)

When I was growing up in the Midwest, the Confederate Flag was rarely thought of as a symbol of racism. Everyone I knew identified it with the Dukes of Hazard and country music. For various reasons, race relations have gotten worse in the last couple decades and the Confederate Flag is thought of by many now as (only) a symbol of racism.   As few as four years ago, most blacks did not have a negative view of the flag

Some questions: Why is that?  How was it that people in favor of Clinton were able to use the flag seen above just a few years ago without weeping and gnashing of teeth?  Why is it that some say today that the flag is "too toxic for public use."  (Do they think it caused nine murders?) How did that happen and who turned it toxic?

The who is fairly easy: the left (and people who jump on the bandwagon--the mindless "memers" who want to be on the "right side of history" and form beliefs on the basis of volume and not arguments.)  But why?  Well here is a theory subject to empirical disconfirmation.  The South, post-Clinton has turned strongly Republican.  Moreover, the South is one of the final strongholds in support of traditional marriage, gun-rights, anti-abortion, Federalism, and all the things progressives hate.  Slavery and racism are only a small part of what accounts for today's reaction to the flag I reckon, except insofar as progressives would be out of a job if not for their Marxist bent to turn every issue into an issue of class, race, and gender warfare and then exploit said warfare.  If there is one group that has universal scorn heaped upon it in my own corner of the cultural elite--academia--it is the South.  Your chance of landing a job drops if you are a white man with a southern accent.  (If you ask your favorite professor if this is true and he denies it, he is either lying or a dolt.)  And how many people in the media have a southern accent?  Hardly any because they don't want to sound southern.

So the hatred of the Confederate Flag, I suggest, is not due entirely to its history with slavery or racism.  And it is not because the South has become more racist in the last couple decades that the ire is hire.  (Ask yourself this: how many white Southerners do you actually know who are racists?  How many do you know who are not?  Are there more or fewer racists today than 20, 50, 100 years ago?  What are the percentages?)

The flag is a symbol.  And like any other symbol its meaning can be complicated and its meaning can change.  


So we are faced with either of two options:

(1) Get rid of the flag.
(2) Change its meaning for good.


The KKK burns crosses in yards.  For some, the sign of the cross is associated with hatred and racism.  One could thereby not use the cross as a symbol.  Or one could redeem the symbol.
Is the Confederate Flag as a symbol irredeemable? I fail to see that it is.  (And please, no swastika comparisons unless you care to fully tease out the analogy.)  If Obama, Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and so forth all stood together and said,

"We know the flag has such and such a history.  We know that in the eyes of many it is a symbol of slavery and racism....But we also know the good of the South and how far it has come.   The Confederate Flag was once a symbol of division and racism but we will not let racists own the meaning of the flag just like we will not let the KKK own the meaning of the Cross...."
you cannot tell me that if there were this concerted effort by the right and left to pour new meaning into the Confederate Flag that eventually more people would think of it positively than negatively.

So those are the options and I have no dog in this fight.  I can predict that (1) will prevail and not (2).  That is because progressivism is on the upswing and there is no great love of the South therein.  Slacktivism is too tempting especially when accompanied with a feeling of moral superiority.   

Friday, March 6, 2015

Selma is Now. No, not Really.


Some perspective from James B. LaGrand:

[I]n his acceptance remarks after winning the Oscar for Best Original Song, co-writer John Legend again connected past and present. He tried to set straight any viewers who might be thinking that 1965 was a long time ago. “Selma is now because the struggle for justice is right now.”
Statements similar to Legend’s “Selma is now” have been made many times in the months since Michael Brown’s tragic death at the hands of policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. In fact, Ferguson has become a Rorschach test – not just on the state of race relations today, but on the past as well through the power of historical analogy. Like John Legend, congressman and civil rights veteran John Lewis has compared Ferguson to Selma in 1965. On college campuses, analogies comparing Ferguson to 1950s Little Rock and Michael Brown to Emmett Till have been heard.
...
These statements and actions are all rooted in the belief that little to nothing has changed in race relations from the Jim Crow era of the 1890s-1950s to the present day. If one of the tasks of History is to assess the complex relationship between change and continuity over time, these voices suggest that on the issue of race and race relations, the answer is pretty simple. 2014 = 1965 or 1955 or the 1890s.
But in looking at the past, it’s hard to make these claims hold up. The Jim Crow era stands as a distinctly grim, brutal period in America’s history for its Black citizens. After the end of Reconstruction, Black men who had recently won the franchise had it effectively taken away. The promise that Black Americans would own the product of their labor too became a bitter lie. All public spaces in the Jim Crow South became divided by the color line.
This racial code was enforced through lynchings and other forms of brutal violence. The Equal Justice Initiative has recently documented 3,959 African-Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. Lynch mobs cast a wide net. They targeted Black men accused of crimes, those accused or suspected of sexual relations with white women, and those seen as being “impudent to white man,” in the words of one lynching record. Lynchings were barbaric, often involving the ritualistic burning and dismemberment of dead bodies. Not for nothing do many historians refer to 1890-1920 as the nadir of African-American history
...
They see their motives are earnest. By their way of thinking, a continued insistence that little to nothing has changed in race relations will hold white Americans’ feet to the fire. This approach will confront and challenge them, and prevent them from becoming prideful or complacent. Some teachers and administrators on college campuses say that a focus on continuity in race relations will allow for “teaching opportunities.”
But what if such a determined focus on racial continuity from the 1890s to today doesn’t bring about these results? The discipline of History is based on a reasonable confidence about concrete, particular things, not just a fuzzy mood or spirit. Activists who tout continuity believe that their cause will result in “consciousness-raising” about a range of racial issues. But it’s just as likely to lead to cynicism and disengagement if it’s thought that events have been manipulated and comparisons over-drawn.

Read the rest here.

It's also worth noting that, as the NY Times mentions, in the decade between 2000-2010 more black Africans have voluntarily come to the U.S. "than were imported directly to North America during the more than three centuries of the slave trade."

"We've come long way, baby."  Are there still racists in the U.S.?  Of course, as there are in every country.  But how racist is the U.S.?  Adam Carolla thinks, not that racist:


"We shall be rid of the last vestiges of Goldsteinism when the language has been cleaned."

Fortunately (or unfortunately), activists will never be out of a job.




Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Robert E. Lee Redux

Oh, all right.  I'll take the bait.  (I presume this is what the people want and I want to give the people what they want).  I officially dedicate this post to Jordan French (though I'm not taking aim at him or anything he's said in particular since I only read the very end of his Facebook thread--I'm just honoring him because it was indeed his thread that motivated this post).

What is so bad about honoring, not Jordan French, but Robert E. Lee?  "NoMoreDonations" in the comment section on Facebook rhetorically ejaculates, "Robert E. Lee?  Are you freakin' kidding me?" but that's hardly an objection or an explanation let alone an argument.  For the sake of this post, I am going to set aside several issues which are worthy of discussion in their own right.  Among them I will set aside the history and motivation behind having a Robert E. Lee Day.  I will set aside that it is on the same day as MLK Jr. Day and whatever causes brought this about.  I set aside most of the entire biography of Robert E. Lee.  I will have nothing to say about these matters largely because I am ignorant about the historical facts of the matter--being a Northern victor by heritage, I've never cared (and, after all, we know to whom the spoils of history writing goes).  In fact, I shall largely abstract from Lee the man to consider someone in general (though on occasion I shall return to Lee).

The question that I will raise seems to me preliminary to those other questions: whether it is illicit to honor someone who has owned slaves, was a racist, and who believed that slave owning was not immoral. 

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Racism and Sexism are Insidious

Syme from the film, "1984"
Liberals are racism and sexism bloodhounds.  They are constantly on the move, nose to the ground, catching whiffs and barking up a tree.  Racism and sexism are everywhere.  A few examples and then two 1984 quotations below:

"Hooligan" "Bugger" "Eskimo" "Peanut Gallery" all racist.

Saying "you guys" to a group that includes both men and women is sexist.  One poor student confesses,
“I don’t consciously do it, but I’ll say ‘You guys!’ or ‘We should do something together, guys!’ and I don’t even consciously...like, usually I'm addressing a group of all girls,” a Macalester College student said in a video in August.
As a professor explains:

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Ferguson's Unasked Questions

Is there a record of white power structures suppressing the black vote in Ferguson?  What evidence is there that blacks are disproportionately, unjustly discriminated against in traffic stops in Ferguson?  Other questions here.

Generalizing from Ferguson, here is a fact that is not in dispute: far more blacks are killed by police officers than whites in the U.S.  According to ProPublica 21 black males are killed by police to every 1 white male killed.  It cannot be doubted that there are a troubling number of young blacks killed by police officers.  Of course, we also know that blacks commit crimes at a disproportionately greater percentage than other racial groups, so some or all of the data could be explained by that troubling fact.

Is police officer racism the main explanation as the mass media has determined well in advance of the evidence?  Probably not if that same ProPublica article is correct and able to be generalized.  Black police officers kill a higher percentage of blacks than they kill whites.  And white officers kill a greater percentage of whites than they kill blacks.
Who is killing all those black men and boys?Mostly white officers. [Of course, since 63% of the U.S. is white compared to 14% black.  There are more white officers.]  But in hundreds of instances, black officers, too. Black officers account for a little more than 10 percent of all fatal police shootings. Of those they kill, though, 78 percent were black.
White officers, given their great numbers in so many of the country’s police departments, are well represented in all categories of police killings. White officers killed 91 percent of the whites who died at the hands of police. And they were responsible for 68 percent of the people of color killed. Those people of color represented 46 percent of all those killed by white officers.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Revolutionary Justice: Levelheaded Remarks on the Ferguson Shooting

Victor Davis Hanson:

Certainly any time in America that an unarmed suspect is fatally shot by a policeman of the opposite race, there is a need for concern and a quick and full inquiry of the circumstances leading to such a deadly use of force. That said, there is something disturbing about the demagogic efforts to rush to judgment in Ferguson, Mo. While it is understandable to deplore the militarization of the police that might accentuate rising tensions on the street, and to note that a mostly white police force might be less sensitive to a majority African-American populace, there is as yet not much evidence that the antithesis — a more relaxed approach to crowd control under the direction of a sensitive African-American law-enforcement official — has so far resulted in an end of the street violence or of the looting of stores. Too little police deterrence can be just as dangerous as too much.

It is also an American tradition that those under suspicion are considered innocent until the evidence is gathered, sifted, and adjudicated. Instead, the officer in question has more or less been tried and found guilty by those on the street (some of whom are calling for his death) and the media who reports on them. The governor has been particularly demagogic in blasting as character disparagement the logical release of a video showing the deceased minutes before the shooting robbing a store and brutally intimidating a clerk half his size — a fact naturally of some relevance in the ensuing disputed events.

If in fact the video has been doctored in the prior fashion of NBC’s selective editing of the Zimmerman tape or CNN’s distortion of the Zimmerman vocabulary, or ABC’s massaging of the video of Zimmerman’s wounds, then certainly disparagement is the correct noun; if not, the governor should be ashamed of himself.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Is the Possible Presidential Candidate, Ben Carson, Dangerous?

Somehow I'd not heard about Ben Carson till very recently (my wife was shocked when I told her this), either that or I'd forgotten.  But just the other day I heard an advertisement backing him for President and since then have read or listened to several attacks by liberals against him.  "So who is this guy?" I wondered.  He must be dangerous for liberals to be attacking him this early, since he's practically a political nobody.

Ah, now I get it.  He's BLACK and CONSERVATIVE.  He IS dangerous.  For there's little liberals fear more politically than if blacks start voting Republican.  And from what little I've read or heard so far, the guy is sharp and would make quite a candidate.

According to one of MSNBC's liberal fools, Libiot Toure, the fact that Republicans are backing him is just evidence of their racism.  Rush Limbaugh has a nice reply, but the best response I'd offer is Adam Carolla on reparations (prompted by the infamous article in The Atlantic) and America electing a black president.  Watch the whole video (it's worth it) but only if you're prepared for a few choice words.

If Carson can handle himself in a Presidential debate like he does here, then the liberal establishment should definitely be afraid:



Friday, May 23, 2014

Should Mark Cuban Get the Donald Sterling Treatment? Notes on Prejudice

Rarely do I disagree with Bill V.  Here is no exception to that rule.  Money quotes:

"The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness."
 
"It is the willful self-enstupidation of liberals that unfits them for the appreciation of such commonsensical points  as I have just reiterated."
 

Bill Plaschke of the L. A. Times lays into Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, for statements like these:
“I mean, we’re all prejudiced in one way or another,” he said. “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face – white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere – I’m walking back to the other side of the street.  And the list goes on of stereotypes we all live up to and are fearful of.”
The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  At a bare minimum, two senses of the term ought to be distinguished.
 
'Prejudice' could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice, or at least blind prejudice of the aversive sort.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.
 
'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind aversive prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.
 
My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean.  Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.
 
So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.
 
But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.
 
Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory?  Of course!  But not all discrimination is bad.  Indeed, some is morally obligatory.  We discriminate against  felons when we disallow their possession of firearms.  Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory.  You need a better argument.  And what would that be?
'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.
 
It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.
 
Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a three-minute romp.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.
 
Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the
street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?
 
Do you struggle over this question?
 
The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.
 
Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.
 
Getting back to Mark Cuban, what he is quoted as saying above makes perfect sense.  His prejudices are reasonable prejudgments.
If you walk like a thug, and talk like a thug, and dress like a thug, and are plastered with tattoos and facial hardware like a thug, then don't be surprised if people give you a wide berth.
 
It is the willful self-enstupidation of liberals that unfits them for the appreciation of such commonsensical points  as I have just reiterated.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

On the Racist Donald Sterling and the "Courage" of Adam Silver

Let's get this out of the way.  Donald Sterling is a racist.  Racism is morally bad.  I'll have more to say about Sterling's racism in a bit. Now on to what got this blog post started...

I was listening to NPR today and heard the following:
In the same breath, NBA commissioner Adam Silver was mentioned with JFK, and Silver's action of banning Don Sterling for life was compared favorably with the actions of LBJ.  Silver's courage is breathtaking. And so on.

Are we living on the same planet? JFK and LBJ comparisons?  Courageous?  Acting courageously is doing what you know is right or good in the face of great fear or peril.  Last I checked at ESPN, 80% of the voters said that they approved of the decision of Silver to ban Sterling for life.  EIGHTY PERCENT (the other 20% either thought it was too harsh or not harsh enough).  Last I checked, 95% of media pundits were calling for Sterling's head.  Call it what you want, but there is absolutely no evidence that Silver had to summon up an ounce of courage to ban Sterling for life.  We have little evidence that his action was anything more than a shrewd business decision, people.  He gave everybody what they wanted.  Not giving everyone what they want is more risky than facing a lawsuit from an old racist, pariah. But to compare Silver's action with some of the truly courageous actions of  the civil rights era is to make a mockery of courage as well as some of the courageous actions in the civil rights era.

I've also heard Don Sterling mentioned in the same breath with slave owners (and bizarrely on NPR with truck drivers (!?) until the person "of tolerance" realized she was stereotyping truck drivers and sports owners.  Ah, liberals and stereotyping, but I digress...).  There is some validity to the comparison with slave owners (which I'll get to in a moment), but let's catch our collective breaths for a second and think (THINK) about the extent to which the comparison holds.  Under what conditions are we imagining slaves in the U.S. to have suffered? If employing people to play a GAME voluntarily for millions of dollars is akin to being a slave owner, well then SIGN ME UP TO BE A SLAVE!!  

And am I the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD who finds this statement ironic (from ESPN):
Sterling's $2.5 million fine will be donated to organizations dedicated to anti-discrimination and tolerance efforts that will be jointly selected by the NBA and the players' association, Silver said.
So, ummm, banning someone FOR LIFE isn't, say, a bit intolerant?  Would a church that banned a sinner from coming to church FOR LIFE because of a sin be, say, a bit intolerant?  

Look, I have little sympathy for Don Sterling.  The only sympathy I have is because Sterling is a human being like Magic Johnson and the rest of us and needs redemption.  And I have no problem with the NBA taking whatever business actions it likes towards the guy and condemning racist remarks.  But please don't promote this vague "virtue" of tolerance while at the same time expressing intolerance.  Don't be a sanctimonious hypocrite!  Tolerance is NOT intrinsically good.  Some things shouldn't be tolerated.  Whether expressing racist beliefs in one's house should be tolerated and in what circumstances is an open question.  

Finally, let's get to the heart of the issue with Don Sterling.  I listened to the entire 9 minutes of audio tape that TMZ released as well as the additional 5 minutes or so from Deadspin, and Sterling is definitely not someone I would want for an uncle!  There are the offensive racist remarks which everyone has talked about. And let's not forget that he is dating someone about 1/3 his age and we all know why (of course nobody is talking about that.  Our society condemns racist remarks in the bedroom but you can have whatever sex you want as long as it's consensual).  But from what I've seen no one mentions what he says to his girlfriend here (after some racist remarks in reply to his girlfriend asking him to change): "I don't want to change.  If my girl can't do what I want, I don't want the girl.  I'll find a girl that will do what I want. Believe me."

This is a miserable man who is (a) not averse to USING people as mere means and (b) racist "in his heart" (as his girlfriend correctly says at one point).  That is how he is most like a slave owner. Apparently, if we can take the news stories as true that the NAACP was about to honor this man, then plenty of his overt actions have not been racist actions.  But his willingness to treat people as mere means combined with his deep dislike of associating with black people is evidence of a corrupt soul

(Note to people who love throwing around terms like "hatred" and "racist" at the drop of a hat without defining them even if such labels might destroy another's life:  Racism comes in degrees. How racist is Sterling?  Well, he's racist enough, but how racist?  He said in the tape to his girlfriend that he is not racist.  He says at one point that he doesn't hate minorities.  Apparently he  has hired plenty of black coaches and staff members in comparison with other owners.  He seems really worried about what racist friends/family will think of him.  He thinks black Jews are less valuable than white Jews.  His girlfriend didn't indicate that she thought he hated blacks or minorities.  At one point his girlfriend said that she wasn't saying he is racist.  At other points she indicates she does think he is racist or has a racist heart and that he comes from a racist background.  So it's hard to know the extent of his racism.  It's hard to know the extent to which his racist heart leads him to racist actions.  There's little to no evidence on the tapes that he hates blacks or wants them destroyed.  There is plenty of evidence that he doesn't like to be associated with blacks or other minorities and thinks of them as in some way inferior).

Whether (and the extent to which) we should be tolerant of or punish people for their morally corrupt beliefsdesires, willingnesses, and statements apart from their other actions is something worth thinking about.  My inclination is that we should be much less inclined to punish the former than the latter since the former are less under our voluntary control.  To misquote a saying or two, "Stupid does as stupid is, and it's hard to fix stupid."