So that's where "woman" placed the apple?
Because Obama had no interest since it conflicted with his desire to transform America in a manner that created disunity.
Also:
Democrats are among the worst kind of racists because of two main reasons:
a) The are hypocrites
And
b) engage in racial discrimination by embracing the policy of low expectations. What can be more insulting, demeaning, emotionally crippling and personally hurtful?
The problem with Republicans is, though their hearts are in the right place, they do not know how to relate to blacks. Clinton was a master at it and Republicans are just too timid and blacks are understandably, too suspicious.
One day, perhaps, blacks will wake up to this egregious fact and the Republican Party will overcome and have appeal.
Finally:
The latest black stabbing and police shooting is being turned into another police hate crime because it suits Biden's false, despicable race baiting narrative. After all, this is the president who said he would heal and unite the nation and, as we know, whatever he says he does the opposite. He has been racially prejudiced for decades based on his support of legislation that was anti-civil rights and his mean spirited comments commentary. The man is a bigot!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Will Bitcoin become the new Tulip?
Stay Tuned.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Would matters have brightened had Trump gutted the FBI?
++++++++++++++++++++++
Have riots become part of our legal system? The answer is yes because that is another strategy BLM embraces.
The American Left Now Knows That
Threatening To Riot Works Perfectly
While Americans were pleased to avoid another round of riots
over Floyd’s death, it’s obvious that riots or the threat of them, are now a
'normal' response.
On April 21, America held its collective breath. When the news broke that the jury in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin had arrived at a verdict, the fate of the nation’s cities was hanging in the balance. As the boarded-up storefronts in urban areas and suburbs from coast to coast showed, there was little doubt that if a Minneapolis jury didn’t produce the verdicts many people wanted, riots would ensue.
When Judge Peter Cahill read the verdicts, the nation heaved a sigh of
relief. The conviction on all three counts against the former Minneapolis
police officer — second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and
second-degree murder — for the death of George Floyd, means Chauvin faces up to
40 years in prison. But more was at stake in the trial than just his future.
The widespread outrage generated by the appalling nine-minute
video that depicted Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck set off a summer of “mostly peaceful” protests orchestrated by the
Black Lives Matter movement. The BLM movement and advocates of critical race
theory about “white privilege” used Floyd’s death at the hands of a white cop
to justify their assertions that not only was there an epidemic of police
shootings of black men but that America was guilty of institutional racism.
The demonstrations they orchestrated in response to the case
transformed Floyd into a martyr for civil rights. Millions attended
demonstrations in the weeks and months that followed. Hundreds of these “mostly
peaceful” protests around the country turned into riots in which neighborhoods
were burned. Stores were looted, resulting in casualties and deaths involving law
enforcement personnel and civilians.
Democrats Keep the Anger Churning
Worries about more riots should Chauvin be acquitted were not
theoretical. Threats from activists and politicians demanding a conviction had
created an atmosphere in which anything less than a guilty verdict would have
been used as an excuse for more rioting.
President Joe Biden said he was praying for “the right verdict.” Rep.
Maxine Waters, D-Calif., told demonstrators to “get more confrontational” with
police if the Chauvin jurors didn’t give them what they demanded. Not long
after, some protesters committed a drive-by shooting of National Guardsmen in
the area to protect against riots. Indeed, Waters was chided by Judge Cahill for having
given the Chauvin defense possible grounds for appeal although he denied a
motion for a mistrial.
But thanks to the Chauvin jury, that nightmare was not repeated on
the evening of April 21. There had been some justified fears that riots might
occur even if the former cop was convicted. But as it turned out, the reaction
to the verdict was one of general jubilation. Celebrations, rather than angry demonstrations, were held
around the country.
Biden weighed in with rhetoric about the trial being a “reckoning”
and a “wake-up call” for the nation. Vice President Kamala Harris also claimed
what happened to Floyd, who died after being arrested for passing a counterfeit
bill at a convenience store, epitomized the truth about widespread racial
injustice in the United States.
Despite nonstop claims that the United States is an irredeemably
racist society, the feeling that the system had worked to punish someone who
had committed an egregious act produced happiness, not more anger. While those
intent on keeping the anger churning, like former President Barack Obama and various BLM
activists, sought to dispel any idea that the verdict should inspire confidence
in American justice rather than serve as a reason for more protests, it was
hard for even the most determined race-baiter to dispel the good feelings the
verdict produced.
For those living in neighborhoods that were torched or looted last
summer — like many in Minneapolis — there were expressions of relief about the
threat of violence and unrest having been averted. But the fact that
violence wasn’t the result this time shouldn’t inspire confidence that last
summer’s riots were a one-off that won’t be repeated.
Police shootings, however justified they might have been, in Atlanta and Kenosha, Wisconsin also provoked riots last
summer. And only a week before a jury convicted Chauvin in Minneapolis, a
police shooting of Duante Wright led to the violence which Waters had helped
cheer on.
The Chauvin verdict was not the first time in the last year riots
had been forestalled, not by cooler heads prevailing, but because those who
might have rioted had gotten what they wanted. That was true last November when
the same storefronts were boarded up throughout the country in anticipation of
violence had Donald Trump won the presidential election.
Riots Are the New Norm
We now know that any time the BLM movement can highlight a case
that they think proves their point about racism, whether accurate or not, riots
will follow. As the aftermath of the presidential race proved, the same may be
true of the outcomes of elections.
In Minneapolis, the possibility of riots had hung over the trial
from the beginning. Indeed, the agitation for Chauvin’s conviction — regardless
of how heartrending the dismal spectacle that unfolded in the videotape of
Floyd’s death might have been — resembled the way Jim Crow racists
intimidated juries into acquitting those accused of killing blacks.
The events of the past year have proven that in post-George Floyd
America, political violence over anything that can be claimed to prove racism
is something to be expected, rather than a shocking occurrence. Indeed, it’s
those instances where riots don’t follow, like the Chauvin trial outcome, that
are the outliers.
Democrats are content to excuse or rationalize riots when they
occur, as happened throughout last summer when the mainstream media tried to
claim they were “mostly peaceful.” They are actively opposing efforts, like the
law passed by Florida to increase the penalties for
rioting while still preserving the right to peacefully protest.
Protests are a justified reaction to the way most of those who
engaged in the BLM violence either weren’t charged or got off lightly
after being bailed out by funds supported by Biden and
Harris. The fact that the same people rationalizing BLM riots are still
demonizing the pro-Trump mob that took part in the Capitol riot and demanding
that they be convicted on serious charges think left-wing rioters should get a
pass illustrates their hypocrisy and lack of principle.
While Americans were pleased to avoid another round of riots over
Floyd’s death, it’s obvious that riots or the threat of them, are now a
permanent feature of American life. Going forward, anytime an incident that can
be framed, either fairly or not as racist, or a trial produces an unpopular
verdict, or the left loses power, riots are likely.
Even if Chauvin deserved to be convicted, no one should be happy
about the way the trial confirmed again that we are now living in a country
where political violence is no longer considered beyond the pale.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist,
editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him
on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org, a senior
contributor for The Federalist and a columnist for the New York Post, Newsweek
and Haaretz. He can be reached via e-mail at: jtobin@jns.org. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin and
on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JonathanSTobincolumnist/.
And:
A black professor is dispirited about America's future:
Equity,
Equality, and MLK
An inFOCUS
interview with Prof. Glenn Loury
Glenn Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. For forty years, he has thought and written extensively about race, poverty, crime, the Black family, affirmative action, and relations between people in our society, during which time he has earned a reputation as a truth teller and a sharp critic of the shibboleth of the moment. When we sat down with him recently, Professor Loury seemed more frustrated than sanguine, and deeply pained about the direction in which much of American culture is heading.
inFOCUS: Let’s jump right in. How are race and cancel culture related?
Glenn Loury: They’re
joined at the hip, in my opinion, but it’s not only race. Cancel culture is
also the MeToo movement. Cancel culture is if you like the Founding Fathers or
Mount Rushmore, you’re in trouble. If you thought Columbus Day should have been
Columbus Day instead of Indigenous People’s Day, you’re in trouble. Cancel
culture is about a lot of things, but it is substantially about race.
We have events [Ed. the death of George Floyd] that
become the focus of movements. And now they’ve become the stage on which people
perform rituals of expiation. The president of Princeton University talked
about how racist his institution is. Now, in 2021. It’s madness. All the
affirmative action, all of the Black studies, all of the recognition of the
legitimacy of the claim of African Americans against slavery and Jim Crow.
We’ve been doing this for a half century and still presidents of Ivy League
institutions have to “fess up” to systemic racism. And everybody knows it’s a
fraud.
iF: Everybody knows that?
Prof. Loury: The professor of
physics, the professor of organic chemistry, the person who actually knows
something about the French Revolution, because he or she reads French and
studied the texts from the 18th and early 19th century. The computer
scientist…. No, of course, everybody doesn’t know it’s a fraud. But I’m saying
it is a fraud and it doesn’t go down very deeply in the real root of the
academy. It would be the tail wagging the dog to have these institutions
defined and organized around the petulance and sophomoric tantrum-throwing of
all of these kids. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
I think there’s substance in the university. I think that the
great traditions of learning that we’ve inherited, they’re Western traditions,
not exclusively, but substantially so, are real things. They’re the
achievements of human civilization. I think they will weather the storm,
although I don’t exactly see the end of the storm.
iF: What about all those departments of race, or sexual studies, or
identity?
Prof. Loury: These departments
are here to stay. I’m sorry to report that. I think it was a mistake, but
they’re here to stay. Let me try to defend the position that it was a mistake.
The year is 1969, ‘70, ‘71, Black power, and the kids are taking over the
administration building, and they demand Black studies.
So, you create Black studies departments. Now, it’s not like
there’s nothing to study, there’s a legitimate set of questions. But we all
knew, and we always have known that the history department was where history
was done, the political science department was where the study of government
took place, the economics department stood on the shoulders of generations of
reflection about economics. The university has traditions and the canon. The
study of Afro-related affairs should have been vetted through the normal
channels. Identity in politics should not drive that process. Sadly, what we
did in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to lock in an institutional framework
in the universities, such that identity in politics ended up driving that
process. That was a mistake.
The Discipline of the
Disciplines
iF: And Critical Race Theory?
Prof. Loury: That’s a slightly
different subject. I’m not sure I understand it, but I will speculate. It’s not
inconsistent with what I was saying because the discipline of the academic
disciplines is what I was trying to drive toward when discussing Black studies.
You have to submit yourself to the discipline of the disciplines, and you also
have to submit yourself to the discipline of your peers in terms of evaluation.
The gates get narrower as you ascend the pyramid of human excellence. And when
we start talking about MIT and Caltech, we’re talking about the top tier. The
narrower the gate, the more each one of us who seeks to pass through knows and
is aware of the fact that we’re being judged.
And not everybody is going to be found fit. That’s the nature of
the thing – it’s elite. Why is the “identitarian” attraction so powerful? For
many, it’s a way of evading the existential angst of confronting one’s own
failure in the face of severe competition as you enter into elite venues when
nobody knows if they are really on sure footing.
The point of a university education is to expose students to the
whole vista of what is available to know about life. Students don’t know what
they’re going to be after they’ve encountered that vista. So rather than
doubling down on what they bring to us at 18 years old, to form their
identities, we should be encouraging them to shed that and to open themselves
to all these possibilities. And we’re not doing that. Affirmative action
exacerbates this.
Summer 2020
iF: Last summer the Black Lives Matter explosion along with the
claims of structural racism and White privilege, went from zero to Kamala
Harris for president. What happened?
Prof. Loury: God, I’m befuddled
by what happened in the summer of 2020, but I’m also chastened by it because this
is a deep thing about our country. I mean, there are small points. Where’s Tom
Wolf when we need him? George Floyd was buried in a gold casket. There was a
caisson. It was a state funeral. George Floyd – I don’t mean to disparage him,
but this wasn’t Emmett Till, lynched.
So, what’s going on? This is theater. “America needs to get its
knee off the neck of Black people.” Come on, this is preposterous. It’s an
absurdity. The Black Lives Matter movement, those riots. American will be a
long time recovering from the summer of 2020 in terms of race relations.
I was deeply disquieted by what happened in summer. This will
bear bitter fruit, in my opinion.
Mainstream institutions let us down. This is why I objected when
the president of my university wrote one of these silly letters mouthing the
Black Lives Matter platitudes. I thought, “My God, we’re a university, and
we’ve surrendered our reason and our capacity to reflect about subtle moral
issues to this… We’ve now joined that movement?” It’s insulting to the
intelligence and since these are precious institutions… I speak about
universities, but I could be speaking about newsrooms mouthing that riots were
“mostly peaceful protests.”
iF: Where did the mobs come from?
Prof. Loury: Opportunity
presented itself. I remember the book by Edward C. Banfield, The
Unheavenly City. He had a chapter called, “Rioting for Fun and
Profit.” He pointed out it’s an opportunity if you’re 18 years old, sitting
around talking to your friends and have nothing else to do. I don’t know
whether there was something more systematic, I certainly can’t rule it out. It
gets into conspiracy theory territory, but I don’t think you could rule it out.
But I think real damage was done on the race question.
There will be a backlash. They think they’re winning, the racial
radicals, the “critical race theory” people. They’re not winning. It’s a big
country. There are 330 million people. There is a lot that’s going on. It’s
fast moving. We’re a nation of immigrants. The Asians and Latinos, everything
is changing.
Civil Rights and
School Failure
Technology will be completely different in 25 years. There are
real impediments to success in the modern world and those problems got set back
in the Black community.
We’re decades past the start of the Civil Rights movement. We
should be all over school failure, advocating choice and charters and every
other kind education. It should be a main pillar of the Civil Rights movement.
And I’m not saying that as a partisan, neo-liberal, I’m just saying, if kids
can’t learn to read and count in large numbers, it’s a time bomb. We need the
country to embrace this project – not just in a racial way because kids are
like this in Appalachia and Southwestern Ohio, and so on. We should get beyond
this identity thing, but that’s a separate conversation. We were talking about
the race question. And I’m saying, the issue here is the incomplete development
and the ineffective functioning of these people in terms of their ability to
cope in life.
We need the country to tackle that problem. And what happened in
the summer of 2020, I think, alienates the country from a sense of
responsibility for – and engagement with – these questions. Now it’s about a
kind of bargaining, where belligerents sit on one side of the table threatening
to burn the thing down and the powers-that-be placate and pay them off.
Corporate America pays them off, the foundations pay them off, the Democratic
Party pays them off and they lie about the real problem.
Violence and lethality are a fundamental impediment to Black
life. The homicide numbers are unbelievable. They’re stratospheric.
The Black Middle Class
iF: There’s a very large Black middle class, and we don’t hear about
them. How are they doing? They seemed to be doing better under Trump,
economically. The Black middle-class cannot possibly support looting and
rioting?
Prof. Loury: Oh, don’t be so
sure. That would be a little bit like saying an American Jew couldn’t possibly
support the Iran nuclear deal.
iF: Oy…
Prof. Loury: It seems like it
shouldn’t be so, but believe me, it can happen. African Americans are the
richest and most powerful people of African descent on the planet. Thirty or 40
million people – billionaires, industry-defining moguls, entertainers, and
athletes who set global styles. There are artists and writers. Doctors and lawyers
and Indian chiefs. A lot of people who are setting up businesses and so on. The
United States has an extremely prosperous, extremely accomplished, large
population of people of African descent.
There are problems and there are issues, and some of what affects
the lower classes of the Black community creeps across the line. But on the
whole, I think, there’s much to celebrate. When Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish
economist came to the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century to write about the
American Negro, the typical occupation for a Black man was a laborer in
manufacturing or on the farm. Most Black women who were working were domestic
servants of one sort or another. It was a completely different world.
Now there is a tremendous demand for the services of the
educated African American middle class. This is the social revolution that gave
us Barack and Michelle Obama. And it’s a part of the remarkable story. When you
think about it in broader terms, African Americans emerged from slavery just
150 years ago. And this population has become integrated fully, not socially
integrated in terms of intermarriage, but still… And of course, there are the
issues that everyone talks about in terms of disparities, but come on, we’re
citizens of this Republic, we are a part of the warp and woof of America at its
center. And in fact, perhaps overrepresented to some degree at its center
because gatekeepers and cultural barons want to compensate for the history of
exclusion.
So, the African American middle-class is profoundly significant
in indicating what’s possible to accomplish here in America, notwithstanding
the disparities and the gaps. But the politics of it – as far as I can tell,
they’re 80% behind the woke narratives.
They are committed to liberalism without a doubt, and the
Democratic party. I want to make this point about the African American middle
class and their political instincts: They’re going to circle the wagons around
the Democratic party and around the liberal agenda, and many around the woke
agenda. But there are issues that are ambiguous and complex. The implications
of relatively uncontrolled entry into the country of low-skilled labor from
south of the border is one of those issues
What unchecked immigration implies for African Americans is not
a simple question. It seems to me that it should be an agonizing question
causing deep deliberation. Same with the appropriation of the phrase “people of
color.” This is a cultural move that’s been made with Critical Race Theory. The
moral capital of Black people within this country, because of our history, has
been commodified, generalized, and appropriated by other causes. Other groups
basically draw an analogy to the rights claims of African Americans, including
transgendered people, or immigrants who are coming from south of the border,
who speak Spanish as a native language. How did they get to be people of color?
How did they get our moral authority?
The black middle class doesn’t take up these questions because
of the monolithic character of the narrative in intellectual life.
Who is Black?
iF: Barak Obama was the first black President, but not from the
traditional African American, former slave community. Now we’ve got Kamala
Harris and it’s the same thing.
Prof. Loury: Obama’s father was
born in Kenya and his mother was born in Kansas. Neither one of those is the
Southside of Chicago. And Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican and her mother is
Indian. And yet they’re Black.
What other group is so porous that people whose neither mother
nor father belonged to the group get to be iconic tribunes embodying the
aspirations of the group?
Equity, Equality and MLK
iF: When we were younger, it looked like our society was heading
toward that Martin Luther King ideal of colorblindness: individual character
and action, not race. And then that all seemed to go south.
Prof. Loury: The
weight, the center of gravity, has shifted away from the colorblind ideal –
which is a great mistake, it is a historic wrong turn. But the turn has been
made. I don’t know how we go back.
What happened was that “equal opportunity” was not enough. The
challenge of getting people equipped to actually compete and perform wasn’t
met. Equal opportunity was not enough to bring a parity of performance about,
quickly enough. And so, the latest version of this is, they play with language.
We need George Orwell to protect us from these people. They don’t want to talk
about equality anymore, they want to talk about equity. And you know what
they’re talking about? They’re talking about covering up the fact that outcomes
will not be proportionate because performance it’s not equal. But we’re not
going to judge based on performance, we’re going to judge based on outcomes,
and we’re going to jigger such that we get a parity of outcome notwithstanding
the fact that we don’t have parity of performance.
The reality of the development question was too daunting. If you
go color blind, you have to live with the consequences, like a law firm with a
class of new partners that didn’t have any Blacks in it. You’d have to live
with schools like Stuyvesant [Ed. competitive high school in Manhattan]
which, when they admitted a thousand kids, had 15 Black kids in it. People
don’t want to live with that. They prefer a security blanket of mandated
“equity.” And again, I say they’re wrong.
They think they’ve got a trump card in identity, but it is as if
they say, “I can’t compete. I’m not going to be able to cut it on the basis of
performance. I demand because of slavery. I demand because of Jim Crow,
redlining, micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation. I demand.” This is what
goes on in a big newspaper, talking about what’s going to be on the editorial
page. People are throwing tantrums and they’re throwing fits. This is a
department in a university insisting that they don’t have enough people on the
faculty who are this, or that – not based on the books that they’ve written or work
they’ve done. They think they’ve got a trump card, but at the end of the day
everybody knows it’s a shell game and people are being tolerated, patronized,
placated, condescended to.
The Family and a New Black Movement
iF: When you talk about the development that didn’t occur, I presume
you’re talking about the family.
Prof. Loury: I am talking in
part about the family because that’s where human development is anchored, and
about out of wedlock births and single parent families and multiple paternity.
I’m not a sociologist, but there’s just a lot of child abuse, there’s a lot of
domestic violence, there’s woundedness and brokenness and it affects kids.
Schools can’t do everything. This is a part of it. It’s not the only thing, but
it’s a part of it. And transfers of money will not solve all of these problems.
Not that I’m necessarily against trying to help people who are poor, but it’s
not a panacea. And policy is limited to the extent that you respect privacy and
autonomy, and there are places you don’t want the state to enter, to try and
govern people’s lives.
We could talk about what you can do about helping people be
better parents – about supplementing the experience of early childhood with one
kind of intervention or another, about various environmental, nutritional
stopgaps. I don’t have a policy agenda, but yes, I would put my finger on
child-rearing, on parenting, on the family, on the stability of the environment
in early life. And I think the issues for the African American family are
significant.
iF: Is it fixable?
Prof. Loury: It may not be.
These are very large forces at work. It’s s not necessarily something that can
be fixed by us, meaning the entire national community. It may require a
movement of us, within the black community, a mobilization that would have to
be cultural and would have to be driven by an inspirational articulation of a
sense of Black identity. This cuts against colorblindness, so it starts to get
complicated. Call it “cultural reform,” which entails changing bedrock
patterns, expectations, habits, and customs within a community, such as “How do
you behave inside the context of marriage?” or “Do you enter into it?” Changing
that single childbearing practice and interactions between men and women.
These are very intimate things. And to mobilize on that perhaps
might draw on positive black identity. I’d say, “Our ancestors didn’t bring us
this far in order for us to let them down by…” This kind of talk. And that’s
very sectarian. It’s very thick with groupness. And so, on the one hand, from
the civic point of view, I want the nation to be a nation of laws in which
people are getting the equal protection irrespective of their identity. But if
I have a cultural impediment and I want to do something about it, I need to
mobilize people and to draw them into the church basement. I want to write the
sermon.
I want a movement for this, so that I think about my identity
differently. I want a movement where people start saying how they want to live,
and then start imposing those expectations on their peers. “You are not in good
standing within our community if…” And this would have to have its effects in
Hollywood on the popular culture, it would have to have its effect in the
Academy.
Myron Magnet first made this argument in The Dream and
the Nightmare. He wrote something like, “America caught a cold in the
‘60s with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, throwing over everything. And the
poor, the Blacks at the bottom, they got pneumonia.” Because once you threw away
all these guardrails and people didn’t have any resources, it was going to be a
nightmare – and it has been a nightmare. That’s certainly a part of the
problem, I think, that the larger culture has become so libertine. Black
identity, all you have to do is look at hip hop, which is often musical genius,
but it’s also not a part of the restoring the Black family program that I was
giving voice to a moment ago.
iF: What comes next? Give me something optimistic, or is there
nothing?
Prof. Loury: The last thing I
put up in my newsletter was that I’m in complete despair. And I feel like I’m
just tilting at windmills and it makes me think, “This is not what you want to
do if you’ve only got a limited amount of time. Try to find some pragmatic
way.”
So, I am thinking concretely about prison reform. And I am
teaching a class, with 20 very eager Brown undergraduates, who are furious at
how stifling things are. We are reading Plato, and John Stuart Mill, and we are
all trying to think about the big questions.
iF: Prof. Loury on behalf of the Jewish Policy Center, and the
readers of inFOCUS, Thank you.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment