Category: Racism

A Point About Race-Conscious Admissions in Higher Education

From the What-A Day newsletter

There’s an elephant in the room that none of the conservative Justices nor anyone railing against affirmative action seems to want to discuss: legacy students. A 2019 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that 43 percent of White students admitted to Harvard from 2009-2014 were either recruited athletes, legacies, applicants on the “dean’s interest list” (aka the children of wealthy donors) and children of faculty and staff. More pointedly, a whopping 75 percent of the White students admitted under those privileged categories, particularly legacies, would have been rejected had they not been given those bonus points. The acceptance rate for legacy students at Harvard is about 33 percent, compared with the school’s overall acceptance rate of under six percent. But the Edward Blums of the world deem this kind of affirmative action acceptable.

What a Day Monday, 2022/10/31

If they where…

Recently, I waited for hours in a hospital waiting room while my appendix was rupturing.  My wife and I joke about how if I were Black, we would have assumed that I would have been treated better if I were White.  So I don’t always agree with “If they were Black” or “If they were White” hypotheticals. 

But to look at these pictures and imagine that these smirking terrorists would be treated about the same had they been Black would simply be absurd.  I challenge anyone to look at these gleeful criminals defiling our nation’s capital as police look on, some laughing with them, and tell me that they would have been treated about as well if they were Black

Removing Monuments to Oppression is the American Thing To Do

Scientific American: The History behind the King George III Statue Meme: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-history-behind-the-king-george-iii-statue-meme/

Slate: How Did We Treat Monuments to White Supremacists When They Weren’t Our White Supremacists?: https://slate.com/culture/2017/08/read-the-allied-order-to-destroy-nazi-monuments-in-germany.html

Wikipedia: Firdos Square statue destruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firdos_Square_statue_destruction

Image: Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, N.Y.C., (c. 1859): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Green_(New_York_City)#/media/File:Johannes_Adam_Simon_Oertel_Pulling_Down_the_Statue_of_King_George_III,_N.Y.C._ca._1859.jpg

Peaceful Rally at City Hall in Suffolk Virginia

I attended a Black Lives Matter rally at City Hall tonight, in light rain, although it was still going on when I left at about 7:15. As far as I could tell, it was primarily organized by Eric Knight who is active in Suffolk. It was peaceful and dignified. Mr. Knight and other speakers called for peace, unity across demographics, and in what might even please the “what about Black on Black crime?” crowd, said that he was tired not only of crimes committed by police, but by people in the neighborhoods.

There were no nasty insults against the police, although there were calls for rules to ensure police accountability. For their part, a few officers where parked across the street near the library at a respectful distance.

City officials who were in the crowd were invited to speak, and among those who spoke where Clerk of Court Randy Carter, who spoke about the importance of registering to vote and voting.

I was proud that a rally in my city could be so peaceful, but mindful of the fact if we want rallies to be peaceful, then peaceful rallies have to make a difference.

Defining Patriots and Tyrants

If it comes down to the blood of patriots and tyrants, remember that the patriots will be the ones defending the civil transfer of power to the democratically elected candidate, and the tyrant would be the one trying to gain power with the help of a foreign dictator and a rogue army of bloodthirsty nationalists.

 

 

 

A normal campaign would disavow an army of twitter nazis

Matthew Yglesias tweeted:

An example of what Mr. Yglesias is talking about:

@ThaRightStuff @Mattyglesias Hopefully we can gas him before too long
—Oliver Who? (@UltraOliver) October 29, 2016

This is how bad it is

We have to elect Clinton and down-ballot Democrats. They we’ll have to deal with violent ignoramuses who will think Trump’s loss is due to rigging and are dreaming about a civil war.

Reporter tweets from Trump rally:

Jared Yates Sexton @JYSexton

I’ve covered the Trump campaign for over a year now and have seen this worsen. The anger changes, grows. It’s going to boil over.

It started with Muslims and moved to BLM. Then it was Clinton and calling for her death. Now it’s media. It won’t stop spreading.

Trump wasn’t Trump tonight. He was a megaphone spouting off Breitbart copy. It was organized and structured. Nuanced. That’s terrible news.

He kept crowd’s attention, which he’s never been able to do. He crafted a very dangerous narrative and they swallowed it whole.

See more: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/trump-rally-tweets-jared-yates-sexton/

Black Lives and Blue Lives

There’s a meme going around complaining that while mothers of “Young Men” (sarcastically printed in quotation marks) who were killed by police spoke at the Democratic National Convention, there were no family members of fallen heroes who were killed by “Thugs” (quotes mine).

Image described in paragraph above

But there were no family members of fallen heroes at the Republican National Convention, either. Family members of fallen heroes didn’t speak at either convention because we already agree that the deaths of police officers are tragic. That’s why we have severe penalties for violence against the police and compensation packages for family members of fallen heroes.

Those compensation packages would be more generous if Republicans didn’t fight against police unions. It’s only Republican lies that suggest Democrats are against the police. Democrats do more to support the police than Republicans do, but we all agree that the police deserve our support.

What we don’t all agree on is that something should be done about the few rogue cops who murder or brutalize the citizens they’re supposed to protect. Republicans seem to feel that the lives affected by dangerous or murderous acts committed by police don’t matter, as long as it’s not happening in their own neighborhoods. They claim that it’s best to just shut up about it, and that even mentioning the fact that sometimes people are murdered by police is the same as calling for the deaths of good cops.

Except for a few bad actors, nobody is calling for attacks on the police. That’s why Hillary Clinton praised the 500 applicants who wanted to become police officers in the aftermath of the Dallas murders, and why she said of the police, after Baton Rouge “They represent the rule of law itself. If you take aim at that and at them, you take aim at all of us. There can be no justification, no looking the other way.”

In my city, where “Police hugs make Sydnee smile”, community leaders and the police are working together. For those in Suffolk, there will be a Unity Parade, during National Night Out, and community leaders and police departments across the nation are working together in similar outreach efforts.

Dead cops isn’t the answer, but neither is ignoring the problem. It’s too bad that the phrase “All Lives Matter” was born as an attack on the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, all lives do matter, Black lives and blue lives included.

The Internet and the Civil War

Imagine if 30 years ago someone were to tell you that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and to prove it showed you a quote like this one from General Robert E. Lee, here taken from Confederate American Pride:

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery is an institution of a moral and political evil

Assuming that you believed the quote to be accurate, you might be left scratching your head and wondering why this seems so contradictory to what you’ve always heard. You’re probably not going to run to the library to research Robert E. Lee quotes to see the context from which that quote was taken. Which is, by the way, via Wikipedia and Rad Geek,

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise God.

Of course, 30 years ago, few people would have heard the misleading out-of-context quote to begin with, so the Internet helps spread lies along with the truths that debunk them. Which is why there are still so many Confederate battle flag lovers who think the flag isn’t a symbol of racism.

I know that such true believers exist, but if they honestly do their research, they should have a change of heart.

People with busy lives who don’t think much about the flag and what it has stood for may be forgiven for not knowing the truth. But for anyone willing to make a stand, the Internet leaves little excuse for such ignorance. By the time someone is yelling “baaa, baaa” into a bullhorn at counter-protesters to a Confederate rally to drown out the truth, or has compiled a website full of out-of-context quotes and misleading facts, that person is not a true believer. That person is a liar.

Roof’s Black Friends

There was a disgusting and pathetic effort to spread the word that the murders of nine Black people in Charleston, South Carolina, wasn’t motivated by racism, but rather by the war on Christians that the right wing keeps complaining about. But now, I think most of us agree that the White terrorist who yelled “I’m here to shoot Black people” was probably motivated by racism.

Part of the effort to downplay the possibility of White racism was pointing out that Dylan Storm Roof had many Black friends on Facebook. All those Black friends might be vexing to some.

So I did what I could to look up the friends pictured in Gateway Pundit’s article “Weird… Half of Dylann Storm Roof’s Facebook Friends Are African-American”, and other sources, and of the few that still have their friends list open to the public, what I found was they have lots and lots of Facebook friends. They don’t live near Roof and don’t seem to have anything in common with him. They don’t even have a lot of White friends, but they do have one or two each. They don’t seem to be the kind of people who would turn down a friend request from anyone. Many also seem to have exactly the kinds of Facebook profiles that someone who hates Black people would use to justify their hatred.

Farah Stockman has a good take on Roof’s Black friends in the Boston Globe:

I couldn’t help but notice that Roof had a penchant for befriending black people who post over-the-top photos: One of his “friends” was a self-described rapper with a mouth full of gold teeth and a stack of $100 bills. Another worked at “X-Rated Mafia Records.” A third was a young black woman who posted numerous pictures of male genitalia, accompanied by belittling comments.

Dylan Storm Roof’s Black Friends were the closest thing to a shred of evidence suggesting that the attack on the AME church in Charleston was anything but a hate crime perpetuated by a White person against Black people, and yet the attempt to play down the racist motive was widespread. “Extraordinarily, they called it a hate crime,” said Fox News Host Steve Doocy.

Facebook friends are not real friends. Maybe it’s a little “Weird”, but it’s not shocking that a racist lunatic with a burning obsession with Black people would manage to become Facebook friends with large number of African Americans.

Update: I made a couple of changes within the first hour of posting, mostly to clean up poor structure. Also I added the information from the Boston Globe article.