"The racism I experience is on the left!"

There’s no possible way I could sum this up any better. pic.twitter.com/rVnJIC0GtN

— The Dirty Truth (Josh) (@AKA_RealDirty) June 16, 2020

Merriam-Webster To Determine All Definitions Using Twitter Polls

From the satirical Babylon Bee:

"the bludgeon of “racism” is a popular and effective instrument of moral one-upmanship and social control, not to mention intellectual conformity and economic blackmail."

Roger Kimball writes in part in American Greatness,

...The deployment of power always attracts acolytes and entrepreneurs. So it is no surprise that a thriving cottage industry has grown up around accusations of racism. We might call the resulting enterprise “Racism, Inc.” There is no shortage of workers on that assembly line. On college campuses (but not only on college campuses, as a look at our city streets these last weeks remind us), the bludgeon of “racism” is a popular and effective instrument of moral one-upmanship and social control, not to mention intellectual conformity and economic blackmail.

Read more here.

"Minority students will suffer worst" if teachers fail to keep order in classrooms for fear of being accused of racism

Gail Heriot dissents from a US Civil Rights Commission report. Paul Mirengoff writes in PowerLine,

Pretending, as the Civil Rights Commission does, that Black students do not commit disproportionately more offenses than non-Blacks does a disservice to everyone except, perhaps, identity politics activists. To quote Gail one more time:

[The pretense] "certainly does not benefit minority children. To the contrary, they are its greatest victims. African American students disproportionately go to school with other African American students. . .If teachers fail to keep order in those classrooms out of fear that they will be accused of racism, it is these minority students who will suffer most.

Children can’t learn in disorderly classrooms."

For the left, identity politics trumps nearly everything. We shouldn’t be surprised that it now trumps the urgent need for quality education.

Read more here.

Americans have become less inclined to express racist opinions since Trump was elected

Ross Clark reports in Spectator,

Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington set out to measure the effect of Trump’s election on anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice, using a randomly-selected panel of 2,500 Americans whose changing opinions have been under study since 2008. The academics report that they had been expecting to measure a rise in racist opinions, writing: ‘The normalization of prejudice or opinion leadership both lead us to expect that expressed prejudice may have increased in this period, especially among Republicans or Trump supporters’. They had been led to expect this, they say, through an extensive reading of recent literature in social sciences which, they say, supports the notion that racist attitudes lie dormant inside many people, waiting to be triggered by certain events – of which the election of Donald Trump might be one. There could, after all, hardly be anything more calculated to awaken an incipient racist than the president calling Mexicans a bunch of rapists.

Yet the study found exactly the opposite. Americans, claim Hopkins and Washington, have actually become less inclined to express racist opinions since Donald Trump was elected. Anti-black prejudice, they found, declined by a statistically-insignificant degree between 2012 and 2016, when Trump was elected. But then after 2016 it took a sharp dive that was statistically significant. Moreover, contrary to their expectations, the fall was as evident among Republican voters as it was among Democrats. There was also a general fall in anti-Hispanic prejudice, too, although this was more evident among Democrat voters.

Read more here.

Is there a racist virus, or are there serious defects in liberalism?

Richard Fernandez writes in PJ Media,

The year 2016 was a traumatic experience, shattering the left-wing sense of safety and dominance. Hillary's defeat -- and to a lesser extent Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe -- demonstrated the astonishing fragility of the mainstream liberal project and provided shocking proof that "the plague never dies." The boogeymen the progressives seek to exterminate can apparently resist any fumigation, indoctrination or persuasion, leaving liberal activists like those characters in horror movies who shoot at Dracula without effect. This in turn led to renewed interest in outright socialism among Democrats. If Hillary and her billions proved useless against the MAGA werewolf, perhaps Bernie Sanders and AOC have the silver bullet.

...Only experience can falsify -- and only temporarily -- cultic belief. In this respect, Venezuela is also instructive. It changed. For decades Venezuela's poor held loyal to the belief that the socialists were on "their side." Now they are fighting Maduro. How did this turnabout happen?

...The most telling indicator of socialism's fall in Venezuela is that forces have flipped. Now it is the poor who challenge Maduro and the Russian- and Cuban-supported military that props up the regime. One way to understand this is that the burn through moment in Venezuela occurred.

This might also throw light on why Hillary failed precisely at the very moment the dream seemed close enough to touch. At that instant it was clear enough to see.

Is the return of racists and Nazis the explanation for the current headlines? Or are people genuinely rising up against bloated incompetence? Time will tell. Reality always tells us which model is correct.

On that will turn the Democratic Party's future. Will it be someone like Bernie Sanders or someone like Howard Schultz?

Read more here.

Can you believe this?

Don Lemon says, "We have to stop demonizing people." Then, in his very next sentence he says, "The biggest terror threat in this country is white men!" ..."We have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them."

Southern strategy? Not so much!

Dinesh D'Souz writes in American Greatness some excerpts from his new book.

Democrats have never publicly admitted their role over nearly two centuries of being the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan, and also fascism and Nazism. Yet when pushed up against the wall with the mountain of evidence I provide in my book, how can they deny it?

...Now we turn to a second question: why did blacks become Democrats? They were once at home in the Republican Party. As Frederick Douglass put it, “The Republican Party is the deck; all else is the sea.” How different things are now. After the Civil War nine out of 10 blacks voted Republican; now nine out of 10 blacks votes Democratic. So something happened to cause blacks to switch their allegiance. But what?

...Why would blacks leave the party of emancipation and resistance to segregation and lynching and join the party of bigotry and white supremacy? The depressing answer is that blacks did it in exchange for the crumbs that they got from FDR’s New Deal. We have seen earlier how FDR designed the New Deal to exclude African-Americans and preserve Jim Crow. How delighted and amused FDR must have been to see blacks coming over to his camp even as his administration worked closely with racist Democrats to screw them over.

It should be noted, in mitigation of this horrible decision on the part of African Americans—and it was a horrible decision—that conditions for blacks during the Great Depression were almost inconceivably bad. Historian Ira Katznelson points out that median black family income was around $500 a month, which means most blacks lived at subsistence level without electricity, hot water, refrigeration, adequate plumbing or gas for cooking. “Under these circumstances,” Katznelson writes, New Deal benefits “limited though they were” and “however discriminatory” still offered some relief and solace to a “desperate population.”

So FDR bought off the African American vote at a bargain-basement price in the 1930s. Yet this secured the Democrats a decisive, but not unanimous, black vote. Democrats had around 75 percent, and they remained in that range from the 1930s through the 1960s. Then LBJ consciously directed a large portion of his Great Society benefits to blacks, and bought off another big chunk of the black vote for the Democratic Party.

Since LBJ, blacks have voted for Democrats in the 90 percent range. This second generation of blacks in overwhelming numbers gave their electoral consent to becoming part of LBJ’s Democratic plantation. Note that this generation of African-Americans did this by abandoning the party that had stood up for them for more than a century and joining the one that had enslaved them, lynched them, installed systems of discrimination against them, and was even then the main source of resistance to the enactment of their civil rights.

...The first problem with this Southern Strategy tale is that progressives have never been able to provide a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Richard Nixon at any time in his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to Deep South racists would actually have to be made and to be understood as such. Yet quite evidently none was.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. Unlike Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nixon supported it. He also supported the Voting Rights Act the following year. When Nixon was elected in 1968, nearly 70 percent of African-American children attended all-black schools. When he left, in 1974, that figure was down to 8 percent.

Tom Wicker, the progressive columnist for the New York Times, gave his appraisal of Nixon’s desegregation efforts. “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort . . . .That effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”

The Nixon Administration went even further, putting into effect the nation’s first affirmative action program. Dubbed the Philadelphia Plan, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions first in Philadelphia and then throughout the country. Basically, Nixon moved to kick in the closed union door and to force racist Democratic unions to admit blacks. The progressive legal scholar Neal Devins admits that Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan is “the genesis of affirmative action in government contracting and arguably all federal affirmative action programs.”

Moreover, Nixon lost the Deep South. Goldwater won five Deep South states in 1964, the only states he carried other than his native Arizona. Not that Goldwater was a racist—he was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and had pushed to integrate the Arizona National Guard and the Phoenix public schools. He had supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which established a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, as well as another civil rights bill in 1960.

Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater’s principled stand was misunderstood by many African-Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.

These sensitivities on the part of blacks were, of course, understandable. Unfortunately for the GOP they cost the party dearly. Previously, Martin Luther King, Jr., had maintained his independence from both parties; now he joined the Democratic camp. And Goldwater paid not only with a disastrous election loss but also with the loss of his reputation: the characterization of Goldwater as a racist, although false, has endured as a staple among today’s progressives.

These sensitivities on the part of blacks were, of course, understandable. Unfortunately for the GOP they cost the party dearly. Previously, Martin Luther King, Jr., had maintained his independence from both parties; now he joined the Democratic camp. And Goldwater paid not only with a disastrous election loss but also with the loss of his reputation: the characterization of Goldwater as a racist, although false, has endured as a staple among today’s progressives.

Nixon appealed to these Peripheral South voters not on the basis of race but rather on the basis of Republican policies of entrepreneurial capitalism and economic success. In other words, he went after the Peripheral South’s nonracist, upwardly mobile voters, leaving the Deep South racists to the Democratic Party. And sure enough, in 1968 Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida in the Peripheral South and the entire Deep South went to the racist Dixiecrat George Wallace.

...Reagan’s success, however, was made possible by the sharp leftward move by the Democratic Party starting with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and continuing through the 1970s. This swing to the left, especially on social and cultural issues like school prayer, pornography, recreational drugs and abortion, receives virtually no mention by progressive scholars because it disrupts their thesis that the trend in the South to the GOP was motivated primarily by race.

Read more here.

Here is the trailer for the movie based on D'Souza's new book.

Which is it? “heroic neighbors fight against gentrification,” or “racist neighbors fight for segregation?”

David Cole writes at Taki's Magazine,

...In 2016, I wrote about the Boyle Heights neighborhood in East L.A. Boyle Heights is about 95% Latino, and its residents aim to keep it that way. Last year, the Obama administration handed down a federal civil rights indictment against Boyle Heights’ oldest and largest street gangs. The gangs had been using violence and intimidation to keep black people from moving into the neighborhood. Blacks who braved the threats and tried to make a life for themselves in Boyle Heights’ low-cost housing units soon found themselves firebombed into homelessness. The gangs had strong support from the community, and even after the federal indictment, the area is still almost entirely devoid of blacks.

Boyle Heights activists have been in the news once again, and this time, their targets are white. They’ve been waging a relentless campaign to force the closure of any stores that might attract white people to the neighborhood. First to go were the art galleries, which were targeted because art appreciation is apparently a whites-only endeavor (unless you’re Frida Kahlo or a graffiti tagger). “Fuck white art” was painted on gallery doors. Windows were broken, employees harassed. Most of the targeted gallery owners surrendered to the segregationists and fled. After defeating a bunch of pretentious art sissies, the activists decided that the coffee shops were next. Yes, drinking coffee is now apparently emblematic of white supremacy. Protesters picketed a local coffee shop, holding signs that read “Caffè AmeriKKKano” (because if the Klan was known for anything, it was its love of espresso) and “fuck white coffee” (okay, seriously, that doesn’t even make a lick of sense). Customers trying to enter the store were harassed. Signs were posted around the city depicting a white hipster’s head in the crosshairs of a rifle. And through it all, at no point did the activists make any attempt to hide the racial nature of their cleansing campaign: “No white people. No white stores.” It’s almost funny reading the reactions of some of the gallery and coffee-shop owners. “But we’re progressive whites! We’re the good guys! We resist Trump!”

They don’t get, or refuse to get, that it’s about race, not politics.

Needless to say, the anti-gentrification campaigners were hailed as heroes by the local press (and by national outlets like Newsweek). Curiously, in all of the coverage devoted to the 2017 war against the Boyle Heights “white wave” (as the activists referred to it), not a mention was made of last year’s civil rights indictment. Reporters and editors steadfastly avoided bringing up the antiblack pogroms of years past.

Why do you think the anti-white campaign was presented in isolation from the previous year’s antiblack campaign?

Simple. Because the residents of Boyle Heights are not fighting gentrification; they’re fighting diversity. If they were only concerned with gentrification—i.e., ensuring that home prices and rents don’t rise—they’d welcome black residents, as, generally speaking, an influx of blacks tends to depress property values. But no, gentrification isn’t the foe here. The Latinos of Boyle Heights want a neighborhood that looks like them, talks like them, and reflects their culture and heritage. They want a neighborhood where churches praise Jesucristo, with no mosques or temples in sight. They want horchata carts instead of coffee shops, taquerias instead of soul food restaurants. They want a neighborhood where if someone stubs a toe, they scream ¡ay! instead of ouch! Simply put, they want a brown town, and they’ll fight against any other color that tries to muscle in.

The media won’t present the Boyle Heights story honestly, because to do so would expose the ugly and inevitable result of leftist identity politics. It’s a road that doesn’t lead to diversity; it leads to Boyle Heights. It also leads to Leimert Park, one of the few remaining black neighborhoods in L.A., where the locals resist the “threat” of nonblack neighbors, be they white or Latino. And just as in the case of Boyle Heights, when the press covers anti-diversity protests in Leimert Park, it’s always from the perspective of “heroic neighbors fight against gentrification,” not “racist neighbors fight for segregation.”

...There’s your identity politics, leftists. This is the logical conclusion of the race-centered worldview that the left encourages nonwhites to embrace. These “progressive” geniuses thought they could unleash that beast on whites alone. They thought they could feed it, nurture it, grow it big and fat, and still control it.

How’s that workin’ out?

And now that the beast has turned on its creators, the left is preventing any kind of “honest dialogue” (the thing that leftists always say they want but actually never do) about the “anti-gentrification” protests. It would be nice if the media would report these matters accurately, even if it means portraying people with black or brown skin in a negative light.

Read more here.

"Acosta's gaffe was epically ignorant and racist in the extreme."

David Goldman writes at PJ Media,

White House adviser Stephen Miller made short work of CNN's Jim Acosta at yesterday's White House press briefing on immigration. Acosta enjoined, "It sounds like you're trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country through this policy," by giving preference to English speakers. In fact, the vast majority of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are African or Asian.

Acosta claimed that preferential treatment for English-speaking applicants would benefit people from Great Britain and Australia. Scathingly, Miller replied:

I am shocked at your statement, that you think only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree. This is an amazing moment. That you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hard-working immigrants who do speak English from all over the world. Jim, have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English, outside of Great Britain and Australia? Is that your personal experience?

There are about 1.2 billion English speakers in the world, including 125 million Indians, 90 million Filipinos, 79 million Nigerians, 30 million Bengalis, 28 million Egyptians and 15 million Pakistanis, according to Wikipedia. More than half of all English-speakers are non-European. Barely a tenth of English speakers outside the United States live in Britain, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Acosta's gaffe was epically ignorant and racist in the extreme.

Read more here.

"Unfortunately, he can't be charged with trying to incite minorities against whites."

At PJ Media, Rick Moran reports,

From our "Another Fake Hate Crime" file comes the story of a horrible incident in North Carolina where an Indian-owned grocery store was vandalized and set ablaze by someone who left a note signed "White America."

Washington Times:

“A note was also left at the scene near the door that stated the suspect did not want any refugee business owners and that they would torture the owner if they did not leave and go back to where they came from,” the police department said, a local CBS News affiliate reported. “The suspect signed the letter ‘White America.’”
The note also called President Trump “our nation builder for white America.”

“We need to get rid of Muslims, Indians and all immigrants,” it read. “This is our warning. Leave the business and go back where you came from. If you don’t follow this warning then we are not responsible for the torture starting now. God Bless America … White America.”

Police examined security video from a camera at the front of the store and determined who was responsible and arrested him.

The man responsible was a 32 year-old black man, Curtis Flournoy.

Flournoy is facing numerous charges:

Mr. Flournoy was reportedly charged with burning a building of trade, malicious damage by use of an incendiary material, felony breaking and entering, ethnic intimidation and anonymous or threatening letters.
Unfortunately, he can't be charged with trying to incite minorities against whites.

Sanctuary cities are racist!

The racists have won.

Bookworm writes,

Yes, abortion in American is racist. Here’s the summary of an article in the Open Journal of Preventative Medicine (emphasis mine):There is no credible scientific opposition to the fact that a genetically distinct human life begins at conception and that an induced abortion is a death. Yet, abortion is not reported as a cause of death in the U.S. vital statistics system. Mortality patterns have profound implications for public policy. As a cause of death, we found abortion to be highly consequential, with large racial and ethnic disparities. Abortion represented 16.4% of non-Hispanic White deaths, but 61.1% and 64.0% of non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic deaths respectively. For Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL), the ubiquitous measure of premature death, abortion accumulated 63.1% of non-Hispanic White YPLL and 86.5% and 87.4% of non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic YPLL respectively. Further, as measured by the availability of valid data and resources allocated for research, there is evidence that the science community is not appropriately engaged on this crucial public health problem.

You know the racists have really won when, instead of doing the dirty work themselves when it comes to killing the disfavored race, the racists convince the disfavored race to commit auto-genocide.

Putting racism under new management

At Town Hall, Thomas Sowell writes about the war on cops.

There was never a more appropriately named book than "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald, published a few weeks ago, on the eve of the greatest escalation of that war by the ambush murders of five policemen in Dallas.
Nor is this war against the police confined to Dallas. It is occurring across the country. Who is to blame?

There is a ton of blame, more than enough to go around to the wide range of people and institutions that have contributed to these disasters. In addition to the murderers who have killed people they don't even know, there are those who created the atmosphere of blind hatred in which such killers flourish.

Chief among those who generate this poisonous atmosphere are career race hustlers like Al Sharpton and racist institutions like the "Black Lives Matter" movement. All such demagogues need is a situation where there has been a confrontation where someone was white and someone else was black. The facts don't matter to them.

The same is true of the more upscale, genteel and sophisticated race panderers, including the President of the United States. During his first year in the White House, Barack Obama chastised a white policeman over his handling of an incident with a black professor at Harvard -- after admitting that he didn't know the specific facts.

Nor did he know the specifics when he publicly announced that, if he had a son, that son would look like Trayvon Martin. Are we to decide who is right and who is wrong on the basis of skin color? There was a long history of that in the days of the old Jim Crow South. Are we fighting against racism today or do we just want to put it under new management?

No one should imagine that any of this is helping the black community. The surge in murder rates across the country, in the wake of the anarchy unleashed after the Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore riots, has taken a wholly disproportionate number of black lives.

But, to the race hustlers, black lives don't really matter nearly as much as their chance to get publicity, power, money, votes or whatever else serves their own interests.

The mainstream media play a large, and largely irresponsible, role in the creation and maintenance of a poisonous racial atmosphere that has claimed the lives of policemen around the country.

That same poisoned atmosphere has claimed the lives of even more blacks, who have been victims of violence by thugs and criminals who have had fewer restrictions as the police have pulled back, or have been pulled back, under political pressure.

The media provide the publicity on which career race hustlers thrive. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which turmoil in the streets gives the media something exciting to attract viewers. In return, the media give those behind this turmoil millions of dollars' worth of free publicity to spread their poison.

...The media have also actively promoted the anti-police propaganda by the way they present the news. This goes all the way back to the Rodney King riots of 1992. Television stations all across the country repeatedly played a selectively edited fraction of a videotape covering the encounter between the police and Rodney King, who had been stopped after a wild, high-speed chase.

The great majority of that video never saw the light of day on the TV networks that incessantly played the selectively edited fraction.

When the police were charged with excessive violence in overcoming Rodney King's resistance to arrest, the jury saw the whole video -- and refused to convict the policemen. That is when people who had seen only what the media showed them rioted after the jury verdict.

Today, the media keep repeating the mantra that there was a "peaceful demonstration," even when it ends in violence. How many people have to die in "peaceful demonstrations" before the media admit that those who promote mob disruptions have to know what is likely to happen when you put mobs in the streets at night?

Mob rule is not democracy. It threatens democracy, as it threatens lives -- black or white -- and all lives should matter.

Read more here.

Facebook protection

This morning I listened to Victor Davis Hanson on the Laura Ingraham show. VDH was talking about Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's opposition to tough border enforcement, despite the glaring fact of Zuckerberg owning three palatial residences, each protected by a wall.

This made me think of my 14-year-old son who has been banned from Facebook for one week. One of the things he likes to do with his 16-year-old brother is go to a nearby park to play basketball. People of all ethnic backgrounds challenge each other to pickup games. The other night the boys came home telling me what a great time they had. There was one black kid, three white kids, two Arabs, and two Asians. It was the first time most of them had ever seen each other. Right away they began teasing each other by making fun of stereotypes.

They called the Asian kids chow mein and Yao Ming, the black kid accused the Asians of being dog-eaters. Everybody accused the black kid of being the worst player there, unlike what might have been expected on a basketball court. The Arab kids were called Mohammed, Osama, and ISIS. The white kids were called names that indicated they were overprotected and overprivileged.

When my boys are back in New Mexico they engage in similar banter with Hispanic or Mexican peers. One of those peers jokingly messaged my son recently on Facebook to "go back to your house; maybe your mom will make you some Tostitos." My son responded, "If my mom ever made that beaner food for me, I'd throw it out and move out on the streets."

Facebook then suspended my son for one week for using racist language.

Hollywood: one of the last bastions of condoned, flat-out, in-your-face sexism

Ed Driscoll asks at Instapundit,

...why are leftwing enclaves such hotbeds of racism and sexism?

Ed links to a column by Maureen Dowd noting that less than 2% of Hollywood movies have a female director. Scott Ott adds at PJ Media,

Since a hacker sprung an email leak at Sony Pictures in 2014 — revealing, for example, that Jeremy Renner made more than Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams for American Hustle— it's become clear that one of the last bastions of condoned, flat-out, in-your-face sexism, is the place where Progressives, Liberals and Democrats have worked diligently to craft a culture that will finally elect America's first woman president.

...Meanwhile, we all look forward to Hillary Clinton's news conference when she decries the discrimination and income inequality in Hollywood, sends back all of their political contributions, and calls for federal oversight, and steep financial penalties on this cesspool of sexism.

Read more here

Meanwhile, commenter jag20 notes at Instapundit,

Newsrooms are hardly diverse, colleges are rape and racist pits and now Hollywood is sexist, not only underpaying females but also baring them from significant positions. Why even liberal Democrats underpay women as well as (like Bubba) often abuse women (and their relationships with their wives) sexually.

Its almost as if liberals cannot convince even the MOST liberal institutions to behave "liberally". How is that possible from THE most intelligent people in society? The most "compassionate" people in society?

Read more here.

Talking about race

I have a black friend with whom I have almost daily arguments. He is sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter argument about police treatment of blacks. I point out to him that blacks are mostly being killed by other blacks. John McWhorter writes at Daily Beast,

Yes, black lives taken by cops matter. But so do black lives taken by other blacks. BLM won’t win over America until it acknowledges this.

...It is considered the height of sophistication to declare that “America doesn’t want to talk about race.”

I say it’s time to retire this phrase. Imagine being from a foreign country and hearing that phrase, watching a room full of earnest people nodding warmly, after just the first eight months of this year. Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sam Dubose, Sandra Bland, the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, the Charleston shootings, Rachel Dolezal, Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, James Blake, and of course the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a country that “doesn’t talk about race”? Let’s face it—the assertion in itself is splendidly absurd.

...When someone says America doesn’t talk about race, they mean something much more specific: that America doesn’t think racism determines black lives to such an extent that the nation needs a vast upending of procedure.

...the black left and its fellow travelers have moved leftward of what unbiased observers, urgently seeking justice and dignity for black people, regard as politically and even morally convincing.

...racism alone is no longer the only, or often even the main, problem black people have.

...A movement cannot make a real difference in 2015 by pretending that it’s still 1965.

...black people in poor neighborhoods are in vastly more danger of being killed by young black men than by the occasional bad cop.

...This year alone, in Chicago almost 80 percent of the people killed have been black. In Baltimore the figure is 216 black people versus 11 white, in Philadelphia 200 black people versus 44 white. Most by other black people.

...One strategy could be that if the police were finally restrained from needless killing of black men, BLM could help forge new relationships between the cops and black communities, such that those communities would feel comfortable assisting cops in finding murderers. That is understandably often not the case under current conditions, and is surely as much a problem for a black person living in such a city than what white cops might pull. A Civil Rights movement for today rather than yesterday can’t focus only on racism. The issues have become too complex.

...Imagine if in 1965 when the Selma marchers walked across the Pettus bridge, black boys had been killing each other by the dozens over on the other side all summer, with that considered regrettable but ultimately “beside the point.” Black Lives Matter, I’m afraid, is on the path to making that scenario a reality. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Read more here.

This summer's endless search for outrage

Suzanne Fields writes in the Washington Post,

The strange summer of ‘15 fades with murder accelerating in the big cities. Most of the dead are black, slain by blacks. Many white liberals are in a fashionable rage of blaming themselves for it. What could we expect from this summer’s endless search for outrage? The literati and the left is buzzing with praise, appreciation and approval for a new book, “Between the World and Me,” by one Ta-Nehisi Coates, written as a letter warning his son that American white people — past, present and future — are out to get him.

David Brooks of The New York Times was inspired to write a public letter to the author telling him how his book “is a great and searing contribution to … public education” about the manifold sins of white folks. “It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience,” he writes. “Every conscientious American should read it.”

As blogs and social media explode with fury and rage at the thesis, much of the new radical white chic elite has taken the book as talisman, eager to cultivate perceptions of an angry African American man as personal expiation. His book, which grew from an essay in Atlantic magazine, is the perfect vehicle to soothe the troubled white liberal elite conscience without entertaining other voices, other views. “If racism is America’s oldest sin,” writes Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. “reading Coates has become its newest absolution.”

...This black man is not beautiful, but choking on bitterness and resentment. The liberal elite is eating it up. But it’s ineffably sad.

Read more here.

The Democratic Party's uniquely appalling record on racism

Mark Steyn asks,

When is the Democratic Party going to apologize for being the biggest slave-holding supporting institution on the planet and sticking with racism for the century after the abolition of slavery?

Social justice bullies

Aristotelis Orginos writes in Medium that

...if history is read as a book, the supporters of social justice are typically deemed the heroes, the opponents of it the villains.

However, Orginos notes that today's social justice warriors

have warped an admirable cause for social, economic, and political equality into a socially authoritarian movement that has divided and dehumanized individuals on the basis of an insular ideology guised as academic theory. The modern social justice movement launched on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Jezebel, Slate, Huffington Post, et al. is far more reminiscent of a Red Scare (pick one) than the Civil Rights Movement.

... In order to uphold the sanctity of this viewpoint, adherents ostracize dissension. It’s nothing new — it’s a tactic as old as religion itself. Instead of holy texts, though, the millennial social justice advocate bows at the altar of the currently-in-vogue ideological Trinity: Marxism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism.

...Let’s talk about racism. The mantra of the movement is thus: It is impossible to be racist against white people because racism is the equivalent of prejudice and power. Since white people have social and economic institutional power and privilege (in America), those who are racially oppressed cannot be racist toward whites since those who are racially oppressed do not have power.

...A millennial social justice advocate can discount an opinion simply because it is said or written by a group they feel oppresses them. It is a logical fallacy known as ad hominem whereby one attacks the person saying an argument rather than the argument itself. But this logical fallacy has become the primary weapon of the millennial social justice advocate. It is miasma to academia, to critical thinking, and to intellectual honesty. Yet it is the primary mode of operating on college campuses nationwide.

...The version of millennial social justice advocacy that I have spoken about — one that uses Identity Politics to balkanize groups of people, engenders hatred between groups, willingly lies to push agendas, manipulates language to provide immunity from criticism, and that publicly shames anyone who remotely speaks some sort of dissent from the overarching narrative of the orthodoxy — is not admirable. It is deplorable. It appeals to the basest of human instincts: fear and hatred. It is not an enlightened or educated position to take. History will not look kindly on this Orwellian, authoritarian pervision of social justice that has taken social media and millennials by storm over the past few years.

But the fact of the matter is — anyone unwilling to engage in productive, open, mutually critical conversations with people they disagree with under the moral protection of liberalism and social justice are not liberals, are not social justice advocates, and are not social justice warriors; they are social justice bullies.

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