Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Call Me When You’re Serious.
Even those in the racism industry are finding it difficult to point to examples of modern racism. So they have declared their battle won, and have moved on to other things. Ha! Just kidding, of course. The Black Lives Matter movement does not agitate against lack of voting rights, or educational rights, or any other civil rights, because those battles were won decades ago, before most of them were born. Lacking a clear modern villain, they have created their own, like microaggressions and white privilege. Since these concepts are more abstract & subtle, and lack the emotional impact of, say, Bull Connor’s fire hoses, they have shifted their gaze even further, away from modern, subtle, implied racists, to historical figures who may have really been actually racist. So rather than drafting legislation to give black people voting rights, now they are destroying statues. Even statues honoring the black soldiers that fought bravely in the Civil War, like the one in the picture to the right. Oops. Eh, whatever. It’s the thought that counts, right?
It may seem odd, at first glance. The guy in the statue has been dead for a long time. Even if he was racist, he is of no threat to anyone now. You would think that if they wanted to destroy historical evidence of racism, they might choose to destroy something with a history of racism that is still functioning today and remains a threat to blacks. Destroying a statue doesn’t help. The statue is just sitting there. Destroying Aunt Jemima syrup doesn’t help. It’s just syrup. But I have a suggestion for a more practical and important target for Black Lives Matter. If they want to destroy something with a horrifying record of racism, and that still poses a threat to blacks, they should consider destroying the Democrat party.
How the party of Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, Robert Byrd, etc etc etc has escaped the ire of the Black Lives Matter movement is a mystery to me.
And until they do go after Democrats with the same viciousness that they are going after statues and pancake syrup, it will be difficult to take this movement seriously.
Racism in the United States is obviously better than it was, but it remains a serious problem. It should be discussed seriously, by serious people. This is important to us all.
Those who vilify Aunt Jemima but vote for Joe Biden (even after the Clarence Thomas hearings) are not helping America address a very real problem. They’re playing a silly game. Which would just be silly, except for the deadly serious subject matter. The importance of our common battle against racism moves their tactics from silly to destructive.
If you want to talk about real problems and real solutions, call me.
If you want to talk about pancake syrup, you can leave me out of it.
Call me when you’re serious.
Published in General
They seem to be doing well now, and to some sense losing the Datsun name was shedding an early reputation for shoddiness and unreliability.
A major cause of the increase in administrators is the Special Education. US House Bill 90 which came out sometime in the late 1980s set up a series of “reforms” which has created an incredible number of administrative positions just to deal with Special Needs children. At its inception it was pretty simple, just write a one page Indivdual Educational Program (IEP) for each child in the program. When I left teaching in 2013 my average IEP was 20 pages long and required several hours to compile. Then I had to hold an IEP meeting with the parent, a school administrator, a regular ed teacher, and any other sped teacher who might have contact with the child. Any time a change was made to the program another meeting had to be held with the same cast of characters. Any disciplinary action against the child would entail another IEP meeting. This time a special education consultant needed to be present and well as the rest of the cast. When a student was made a Focus of Concern, meaning that they were being considered for a special education process, consulting teachers had to review the files of anecdotal data and a psychological assessment. School psychs had to do reassessments on every student every three years. And, finally, every year some new directive was handed down from the Department of Education which then had to be explained to the entire Special Education staff at a workshop.
When I started in Seattle Schools in 1969 there was the Director of Special Education, Roy Howard, and a department head for each of the various departments, Mental Retardation, Speech and Hearing, Orthopedic Disabilities, Emotionally/Behaviorally Disabled. That was it, the whole administrative staff for the district. By the time I left there were at least 100 people in those roles, most of them were classmates from the University of Washington School of Education Special Education department. I suspected that they all had to learn a special handshake, like Skull and Bones or the Masons. No one got a position in that department without going through the Uof W program.
Have you read Theodore Dalrymple’s account of his time in Rhodesia? It explains a lot. I use Zimbabwe because they began with a civilized country and destroyed it, unlike Liberia.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/after-empire-12420.html
It’s easy to forget that Zimbabwe was ever civilized.
I spent 15 years teaching medical students. Many of those students were black. Of the blacks, most were either African or West Indian. Some were quite poor, one girl from Eritrea could not afford a laptop which has replaced the microscope in medical schools. I loaned her the diagnostic equipment they need for physical diagnosis. All that group did fine. I had two American blacks over the years. One flunked out and the other was so weird I thought he might be schizophrenic. It turned out that kid had parents who were Black Panthers in Oakland and he had never spoken to a white adult.
The black Africans and West Indians could not understand the American blacks. I have seen this in military recruits as well. The nAmerican blacks have been poisoned by the victim psychology. My dental hygienist was Ethiopian and was one of the Ethiopian Jews rescued by Israel during the Ethiopian civil war. She grew up in Israel and had family there. Her husband is white and Jewish. She told me she would get hate stares from black women when she was out with her husband.
The Aunt Jemima image was changed about 25 years ago but I agree with you. We had a black nursemaid who came to live with us when my sister came home from the hospital as a newborn in 1941. She stayed with us and, after we left home, stayed close to my sister until she died at age 95. She saw all my children. She herself had never been married or had children but her parents owned land. She had been a nursemaid for whites since she was 16. She converted to Catholicism because we were and she died in a Catholic nursing home 50 years after she came to us.