MLK Day thoughts:
Almost every school-kid in America will get a hefty dose of Martin Luther King hagiography this week. The left pays endless lip service to King’s legacy, but consider for a moment one of his most famous quotations:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Amazingly, much of the left, in actuality, now rejects this notion, making statements and touting ideologies and pursuing policies that judge people solely on the color of their skin and that have nothing to do with the content of their character.
Watch the video at the top of this article –
You can’t? As of this writing, I can’t either, for some reason, but you can find it on YouTube if you want. It’s ugly.
There’s a phrase that appears nowhere in this article about the incident. That phrase that you won’t find used, even speculatively, is “hate crime” — even though the whole theme of the article is ‘why the hell did these guys do this?’
Now, I have no idea if these guys beat this dude specifically because he was white, and I don’t really care; for me, the *random beating in the street* is the issue, not the abstract motivations — but I know for a fact that if three white guys randomly beat a black dude in the street with no provocation and the video was released, it would be called a hate crime in a New York minute, regardless of the evidence, and it would be international news for a week. You might even have riots.
Events like this aren’t even particularly rare (here’s one from last month, also on video: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/wicker-park-woman-punched-broken-nose-convenience-store/), and they mostly will not appear in hate crime statistics if no one heard the guys saying, “I am randomly assaulting you because you are white,” which means that even though blacks commit hate crimes (and violent assaults in general) at *much higher rates than whites according to official FBI statistics*, I’d speculate that it’s reasonable to suppose the actual rate of ‘hate crimes’ is even higher than the official one. Blacks make up only ~13% of the population but are responsible for ~26% of reported hate crimes (twice as likely as you’d expect if all races were equally likely to commit hate crimes). By contrast, whites make up nearly 60-70% of the population but committed only 47% of reported hate crimes in 2016 – considerably less than you’d expect based on population proportions (especially considering the way the media deals with this issue). Black men also, of course, commit approximately half of all murders in this country, despite being barely one-fourteenth of the population!
Remember a year ago when those black teenagers kidnapped that white kid and tied him up and beat and tortured him and live-streamed it on Facebook while saying “f*ck white people?” They actually did get charged with a hate crime – though the Chicago police took their time in deciding to do so, the superintendent claiming that he “wanted to check all the facts before deciding anything based on emotion” (even though the entire thing was on tape) and sort of implying that what clinched the decision was that the victim was mentally disabled. I don’t even think it’s necessarily a good idea for “hate crimes” to be a technical legal thing — I think it’s sufficient to charge and try individuals for their particular actions — assaults and batteries and trespasses on one another — never mind their motives or excuses — but if you’re going to report, talk about, charge, and try “hate crimes,” you should do so even-handedly, honestly, and rationally.
Incidentally, hate crime hoaxes are shockingly common – many of the well-publicized “hate crimes” attributed to Trump’s noxious influence this past year were hoaxes, including many if not most of the ‘anti-Semitic’ incidents (many by a black dude trying to frame his ex-girlfriend, ~two thousand others by a Jewish Israeli-American, at least one was a situation where a cemetery had been neglected and headstones had toppled due to age and weather and this was blamed on vandalism … many supposed anti-Muslim assaults were invented, the Navy and Air Force vandalism were hoaxes, lots of incidents on college campuses were made up, etc. See:
http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/ <— As of this writing this website is down, not sure why — it’s a straight up objective list of links to dozens and dozens of mainstream accounts of individual hate crime hoaxes. Here’s an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20180108014956/http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/
See also:
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/12/08/sailor-staged-racist-vandalism-navy-says/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451299/muslim-hate-crime-hoaxes-retrospective
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/12/27/hate-crimes-and-hoaxes-10-campus-stories-debunked-in-2017.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/24/israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats
This was a fascinating incident that occurred before Trump was elected, worth reading up on if you weren’t aware of it when it happened — the girls reporting the fake “hate crime” didn’t realize that their 911 call was being recorded before the operator picked up, and their comments audible in the background proved they were lying about the incident (corroborated by surveillance video from the bus itself): http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/UAlbany-students-face-sentencing-in-bus-brawl-11224727.php
This editorial — firmly denouncing the “wolf-criers” — was a rare voice of reason … http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/reality-bad-denounce-hate-crime-hoaxes-article-1.3622613 … because the response when these hoaxes are revealed is generally just to insist that “this changes nothing!” and double down on the “racism is bad, mkay?” essentially implying that in some perverse way these fake incidents are just more proof that hatred for non-whites is rampant (See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/09/opinions/hoax-hate-crime-and-racism-opinion-ghitis/). This, instead of asking why on earth would racial minorities and Muslims feel compelled to *manufacture* these incidents!? Seriously — think about it. What are the incentives that lead to this sort of thing? I mean, what could be more calculated to inflame racial/religious disharmony than INVENTING incidents of bias and vandalism? And yet no one seems to dare (or care) to talk about it honestly and incisively.
These kinds of double-standards are endemic in our media and institutional cultures and are one of the reasons for piss-poor race-relations. ‘Affirmative action’ may be a well-intentioned policy on its surface, but the reality is that it is, fundamentally, legalized discrimination against whites (well-meaning and designed to salve white guilt and pacify racial minorities, but every instance of it results in specific injustices against specific individuals — justice being, in fact, a concept that is coherent only when applied to individuals), and its cosmetic effects are not worth its corrosive results. It’s actually quite striking how ineffective half a century of affirmative action policies have been at narrowing statistical gaps in any meaningful way.
Every schoolkid realizes that it makes no sense to tell him over and over again that it’s unjust to discriminate, and you should treat everyone equally based on race – and then welcome him into a world of of legal, institutionalized racial categorization and explicitly biased decision-making (which has been in place for over 40 years in this country – my entire childhood and adult life), justified by the fact that it is whites and sometimes Asians and Jews who are being systematically disfavored (even though none of these whites/Asians/Jews or their parents, or their grandparents, had anything to do with slavery, and the vast majority of them have probably never “discriminated against black people” — and even though ‘affirmative action’ includes among its protected and favored classes essentially any nonwhite person, therefore mostly people who are not descendents of slaves. All based on the destructive, unjust, and fictional premise that every living individual white person in the world has been systematically advantaged at the expense of every living individual non-white person in the world — thus justifying individual white people’s being denounced and intentionally handicapped indefinitely in the name of “social justice.” It’s a spectacular and cynical example of the bigotry of low expectations.
And ‘affirmative action’ almost without exception has no ‘means test’ — so its biggest beneficiaries are commonly already relatively privileged people — those who are seeking higher and professional education, those competing for government contracts, government jobs, corporate jobs, etc. (This inconvenient fact is usually justified by explaining that ‘people of color’ need “role models,” though after decades of black role models and a twice-elected black President, it’s apparent that most urban blacks are still more likely to take gangsta rappers and professional athletes as role models than black bankers or professors.)
Major institutions practice affirmative action, and obsess about “diversity and inclusion,” not because they actually care so very much about the welfare of minorities, but because having a lot of nonwhite faces — preferably a disproportionately large number, if this is possible without utterly doing away with standards — is good PR and safe HR. It means you’re “diverse” and therefore virtuous (and no one can accuse you of being “racist,” because we’re now in a clown world where demographic statistical disparities in employment levels of racial minorities (and women) may be taken as de facto evidence of discrimination, and ‘critical race theorists’ and their enablers insist that only whites, and pretty much all whites, can be accused of racism. But if a Pakistani or a Hawaiian or an African-American hates white people, that’s not racism because …. reasons).
https://www.vice.com/sv/article/kwzjvz/dear-white-people-please-stop-pretending-reverse-racism-is-real <— The subhead to this article is “It’s literally impossible to be racist to a white person. ”
Much of whatever racial tension exists on university campuses is a direct result of 1) ‘affirmative action’ — which naturally creates a weird dynamic between the white students and the non-white students — whites (and often Asians) knowing that many minorities are admitted under a lower standard, which contributes to their higher dropout rates (often somewhat mitigated by continuing double-standards), notwithstanding the attempt to blame it on racism or whatever — and minorities feeling resentful when they sense their relative academic merit might be doubted — even though it is inevitable under the circumstances) and 2) treating non-whites (and now also the various sexual minorities) as tragically and universally disadvantaged super-special snowflakes, who can do no wrong and must be deferred to at every turn, regardless of the merit of their complaints or the absurdity of their demands or behavior. Of course these dynamics may help explain why hate crime hoaxes often occur on college campuses.
There are decent arguments in favor of affirmative action for descendents of slaves, and — believe me — since I started studying this issue 25 years ago, I have heard all of them, but after careful consideration I have concluded that a healthy society that is actually devoted to ‘social justice’ and racial harmony simply must not practice it. It’s not worth the moral compromise, or the distortions it creates along with its socio-psychological effects. The longer you delay actually instituting color-blindness in your institutions, the more likely you are to end up having race relations regress (as is happening in America).
We’ve now gone through the looking-glass in most of our academic instutions (and in Canada this phenomenon has infected the government as well) where any talk of working toward color-blindness is itself derided as impossible and racist. Perversely, the only way to avoid being called a racist is to be race-conscious to the point of paranoia (while not forgetting everyone’s invented pronouns so as to avoid being accused of committing hate against transgender people). We are very lucky to have free speech in America. It does not exist in most of the rest of the world, including Canada and and Western Europe. In England, you can literally be arrested for saying mean things on Twitter (that is if Twitter hasn’t already banned you because don’t like your politics — even if you’re practicing your politics off their site).
‘Affirmative action’ is additionally an extremely blunt instrument. If you want to try to compensate for slavery, do reparations for actual descendents of slaves. Don’t create a forever-discrimination-against-whites program, ignoring who the non-white beneficiaries actually are, while at the same time promoting and facilitating mass non-white immigration from 2nd and 3rd world countries. Of course, the reason Republicans like lots of immigration from “shithole” countries is that their donors love the endless supply of cheap labor, and the Democrats love it because the fresh imports and their children are guaranteed Democrat voters, and also because Social Security — the ‘third rail of American politics’ — is structured as a Ponzi scheme that, without reform, will go bankrupt pretty soon — unless we import tons of young, fertile people (though even importing tons of young people might not work if, as is currently the case, they are generally low-skilled and heavily reliant on public services).
As each new generation of native white Americans gets born and genuine institutionalized discrimination against non-whites becomes something that never existed in most people’s entire lives, the constant insistence what white people need to feel guilty and ashamed for being white and should “shut up and listen” and “check their privilege” becomes more and more absurd and indefensible, beginning to fall on deaf ears. I attribute the rise of the Alt-Right to this: at a certain point, rationalizations of systematic reflexive fetishization of non-white people, combined with a celebration of anti-whiteness, become ridiculous, and we have reached that point. The reaction to the “It’s okay to be white” posters proved it with laser precision, proving to be a big propaganda victory for the Alt-Right.
You can’t promote and celebrate identity politics for every racial and ethnic and sexual minority group for decades, and continually talk trash about white guys and speak with unconcealed relish about how whites will soon be a minority in America, and not expect cis-het white millennial dudes to start, at some point, to wonder whether maybe they should also be allowed to practice some form of identity politics and look out for their own interests, in the free-fire zone that is today’s American politics.
Crudeness aside — and the only real issue here is decorum, which is kind of an obsolete issue in the Age of Trump — I wonder whether the opportunistic pearl-clutching over Trump’s alleged ‘shithole’ comments could end up backfiring on the left. Haiti and El Salvador and many African countries (and much of Mexico – if you’ve lived there, you know that many Mexicans dispose of their trash by throwing garbage bags out their car windows) are obviously shitholes. If they weren’t, why would so many people be trying to leave them and come to America? Doesn’t mean these countries and their cultures don’t have their beautiful and amazing aspects — but if the average person had the choice of sending their kids to elementary school/high school/college in Norway/Switzerland/Germany or Haiti/Mexico/The Congo, which are they going to choose? Parts of America, including many places that are 95 percent white, are shitholes. Parts of Russia and Eastern Europe are obviously shitholes. So what?
All the screaming in unison about how Trump’s supposedly calling Haiti a shithole (he denies it – the only people insisting it happened and that it “proves Trump is racist” are Congressional Democrats and their fellow travelers) could very well serve to solidify his support among his base and possibly get some fence-sitters with common sense to take his side, due to the shrill cynicism and mediocrity of his opponents. Senator Dick Durbin, f*ckhead that he is, in wagging his finger at Trump about his alleged remarks, actually suggested that the term “chain migration” was an offense against black people because of slavery (chains – get it?). I mean …. just f*ck right off. Go do something about Chicago, Dick. When’s the last time you hung out on the trash-covered and bullet-riddled south side of Chicago after midnight, Dick? F*ck off and clean up your own backyard — you and Obama and Obama’s former chief of staff Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The whole bankrupt state of Illinois is a slow-motion fiscal train wreck, due to public-sector unions, and significant parts of the great city of Chicago are garbage-strewn gang warzones. When it comes to the welfare of black people, you and your Democrat friends have absolutely no credibility.
People need to step up and speak candidly about this stuff, or we’re just going to become more sclerotically polarized, and we’re never going to make any actual progress. And unless the left is willing to stop obsessing over skin color and blaming all of the world’s non-white people’s problems on white people — and actually work towards realizing the color-blind ideals and the emphasis on character that MLK espoused — they should immediately, starting this week, cease and desist trading on King’s reputation and claiming to be the standard-bearers of his legacy. /end of rant
Here are the FBI statistics on hate crimes: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/topic-pages/offenders
If you want to learn about the nitty-gritty history of and results of ‘affirmative action’ (not just in America, but also in New Zealand, India, etc.), I suggest reading the prolific and brilliant Thomas Sowell: https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-world
For a right-of-center perspective on university campuses, you could check out https://www.thecollegefix.com/ or https://www.campusreform.org/
Right Thinking 