Tag: Race

Joe Selvaggi discusses the implications of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case for race and ethnicity-based programs with David Bernstein, a Distinguished Law Professor at George Mason University and an Adjunct Fellow at the CATO Institute.

Guest:

[Member Post]

 

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been asked this question, “How do you teach in the public university as a Christian?” At the Comenius Institute we have created various essays, videos, and video series that address the general idea of “How do I treat my neighbor?” whether in university or on your street. Find […]

⚠️ This is a members-only post on Ricochet's Member Feed. Want to read it? Join Ricochet's community of conservatives and be part of the conversation.

Join Ricochet for free.

South Africa After-Action Report

 

This year Mr. Charlotte and I have had the great good fortune to do some serious ’round-the-world traveling. We have been on the road since the first week of January and will be back stateside just in time for Independence Day. Our destinations so far: Ecuador, Egypt, Fiji, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa, Lesotho, and eSwatini (Swaziland). We just wrapped up the South Africa leg of the trip and I thought the Rico-verse might be interested in some impressions. If you just want to see some fun photos of animals, dramatic landscapes, etc., please feel free to skip to the end!

We spent nearly five weeks in South Africa, starting with a week in Cape Town, then driving east along the Garden Route (basically following along the southern coast of Africa) for several days, a few days in Addo Elephant Park, a few days in Lesotho and the Drakensberg Mountains, a couple of days in the Blyde River Canyon area (about two hours west of the central part of Kruger National Park), a week in and near Kruger, and then ended with three days in Cullinan/Pretoria/Johannesburg.

Joe Selvaggi talks with York College of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Eric Smith about the disempowering effects of modern anti-racism movement and the challenges for thought leaders who espouse more constructive narratives.

Guest:

Joe Selvaggi talks with George Mason Law Professor David E. Bernstein about his book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, discussing the ways in which racial definitions once used for past abuse and exclusion have evolved to become a central feature used to describe modern society.

Guest:

Join Jim and Greg offer a quick update on yesterday’s Don Lemon saga before serving up their three martinis for the day. First, they welcome new studies from the Lancet and beyond showing people who developed natural immunity from a bout with COVID did just as well as the vaccinated against future cases and that natural immunity was stronger against reinfection than the jab. Those who demanded getting shots to keep your job or just be part of society will sure to file this news in the memory hole as quickly as possible. They also unload at the California school district that decided to end high school honors classes in English because they were not diverse enough. Jim explains why those school officials took exactly the wrong course of action. Finally, react to several flawed and failed GOP House and Senate candidates from last year gearing up to run again.

A Liberal Democrat Says DeSantis Was Right

 

John McWhorter appears regularly on the podcast “The Glenn Show” with economics professor Glenn Loury. When McWhorter is the guest, McWhorter and Loury usually talk about the racial issues in the United States of America and to what extent those on the Left have distorted the truth about the lives of African-Americans.

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and likely a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, has taken issue with some of the Woke education in Florida schools. While Glenn Loury is a self-described conservative, at least currently, John McWhorter is a self-described liberal Democrat and an atheist.  McWhorter is also African-American and a non-tenured professor who teaches linguistics at Columbia University.

Manhattan Institute policy analyst Zach Goldberg joins Brian Anderson to discuss the growing prominence of college-educated whites in the Democratic Party, how this group increasingly sets the party’s agenda, and the implications of the changing Democratic coalition for the GOP.

Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

Americans are understandably squeamish about official racial and ethnic classifications. Nevertheless, these classifications are ubiquitous in American life—and their boundaries are policed by the government.

On this week’s special episode, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and director of constitutional studies Ilya Shapiro moderates a panel featuring David Bernstein, professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; Glenn Loury, Manhattan Institute Paulson fellow; and Adrienne Davis, professor at Washington University Law School. Bernstein’s new book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, is out now.

California’s Reparations Overreach

 

With Assembly Bill 3121, passed in 2020, the California state legislature created a task force whose purpose is to “study and develop reparation programs for African-Americans.” On June 1, 2022, that task force issued its lengthy interim report, with an executive summary, which together will divide rather than inform the highly fraught public at large. What is desperately needed today are programs of market liberalization that will raise the welfare of all groups, without seeking to play one off against the other.

But the task force has no such general recommendations. Instead, it chooses to examine complex historical events that took place from the onset of slavery in the United States until the present day. That untidy inquiry should mix together developments of both cruelty and heroism. Had the task force proceeded in a more responsible manner, it would have started with the proposition that many groups—racial and otherwise—have been mistreated and can make, and have made, claims for reparations. And it also should have explicitly acknowledged that at no point in our nation’s history have any such expansive reparations programs been enacted.

Misunderstanding Korematsu

Quote of the Day: Thomas Sowell on Ending Slavery

 

“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.”
― Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals

The Iron Law of “Quote of the Day” Posts: when in doubt, go with Sowell. A few months back I read his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, and it was even more brilliant than the high level we’ve all come to expect. With seeming ease, Sowell dismantles the divisive racial narrative our media and political culture have peddled for decades. “Seeming ease,” because everything he writes is backed by years of research.

In 1833, the British Empire radically reconsidered the morality of slavery, an institution present throughout every previous era of human history. Once the Crown and Parliament deemed it an intolerable evil, they converted most of the world to their newly held view — often at the point of a bayonet. Only three decades later, the United States fully adopted this new morality, fighting its bloodiest war to remove slavery’s Southern holdouts.

The Sham of ‘White Supremacy’

 

According to President Biden, “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” as he put it in an address to congress. Attorney General Merrick Garland agreed, noting that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” are the most dangerous element of domestic violence. Garland declared that we must “bring federal resources to bear” and “adopt a broader societal response” to the threat of white supremacy.

But it’s a slur to claim that Americans live in fear of white supremacists like the brownshirts of yore. In reality, white supremacists are a small fringe group of pathetic losers who are despised by all.

Their gatherings often attract more attackers than members. No one raises money for their bail when they get in trouble like Kamala Harris did for BLM when their “mostly peaceful” protests produced burning buildings and mass looting.

The Scam That Was BLM

 

I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard the slogan “Black Lives Matter” I thought it was, well … curious. Whoever said otherwise these days? Wasn’t that obvious?

I soon discovered the depths of my naïveté. The tip-off was realizing that “All Lives Matter” was not a more inclusive iteration of the same concept, but its opposite – racist fighting words. People were vilified and fired for saying them.

It turned out that BLM was a “social justice” organization focused primarily on “intervening in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes,” i.e., police.

The Problem of ‘Tokenism’

 

“Tokenism” is the practice of choosing people for roles based on superficial qualities rather than intrinsic worthiness for the positions. Because it prioritizes identity over merit, it risks placing less qualified, underperforming individuals in positions of responsibility.

We have a particularly glaring example of tokenism in our current Vice President, Kamala Harris.

This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-host Gerard Robinson and guest co-host Kerry McDonald talk with Howard Bryant, a senior writer for ESPN and the author of nine books, including Full Dissidence: Notes From an Uneven Playing Field and The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. Bryant shares how his experiences as a student, baseball fan, and sportswriter growing up in 1970s-era Boston have shaped his understanding of race relations and sports. He discusses celebrated American athletes who have broken barriers, from Jackie Robinson and Celtics legend Bill Russell to the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods. Bryant describes how these pioneering athletes were treated, and how they handled their celebrity status. He also offers thoughts on how the multi-billion-dollar professional sports industry is addressing larger racial disparities.

Stories of the Week: In San Francisco, a recall election ousted three members of the Board of Education, after a period of remote learning challenges, controversial school renaming process, admissions policy changes, and other issues. Democratic strategists are raising concerns about their party’s weak positioning on education issues, which will likely continue to play a major role in this election cycle.

The Second Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

 

The first assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was a national tragedy, but his assassin succeeded only in killing the man. The idea King lived and ultimately died for, most beautifully captured in his famous wish, his dream that his “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,” survived him. Ideas are not killed by bullets.

Ideas are killed by other ideas.

Quote of the Day: Teach Us To Question

 

Well, I would say the governor’s race in Virginia was decided based on the success of a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated as race — as being called racists. But that was a propaganda campaign. And there are a lot of Black parents in Virginia. There are a lot of Latino parents in Virginia. And they were not being featured in that coverage. And what they wanted for their kids’ education, which is more teaching about race, more teaching about the history of racism, seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. So I think we should frame that question properly. And I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught. I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job. When the, when the governor or the candidate said that he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that. But that’s just the fact. This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool, because these are the professional educators who have the expertise to teach social studies, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature. And I think we should leave that to the educators. Yes, we should have some say. But school is not about simply confirming our world view. Schools should teach us to question. They should teach us how to think, not what to think.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, journalist and founder of The 1619 Project, on “Meet the Press,” Dec. 26, 2021

Racist Underpass

 

When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was explaining how infrastructure is a form of systemic racism, he used an example of underpasses in New York that were constructed in a way to prevent buses “carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids” from getting to the beach. He was talking about the Southern State Parkway and Jones Beach.

Yesterday’s New York Post had an interesting article about that. Yes, the underpass is too low for a bus to get through. That much is true. At the time they said the bridges were smaller to keep costs down. Of course, that could just be an excuse to cover up their racist plot.

California: Fear of a Black Governor

 

I regret to inform you the white progressives are at it again. The California recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom will be held Tuesday and polls show him with a weak lead. Golden State Democrats are terrified, not only that their Bay Area Gordon Gekko clone will be tossed out on his oily ear but — quelle horreur — a Black man from South Central might take his place. Not being creative campaigners, progressives are playing one of the few cards they have left.

The LA Times called gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder “the Black face of white supremacy.” A columnist from the same paper said on MSNBC that replacing their peckerwood governor with a brother would discredit “the idea that multiracial democracy can work.” Nancy Pelosi’s daughter waved her white sheets claiming that “diversity is on the ballot” so her fellow crackers need to support Sacramento’s white power player.

Fear of a black governor isn’t new to California leftists. The state has had 40 chief execs, every single one a white man. Can you imagine? Apparently, Democrats don’t think there’s a single woman or ethnic minority qualified to run their state.

This is Not Normal, Not Even a New Normal

 

If you are feeling bat-[bleep] crazy, or just plain bats (I hate to use that term bats, due to the Wuhan crap and is now associated with COVID), I just want to say (shout)  – you are not alone! Not by a longshot. You, my friend, are not crazy, but normal in every sense of the word, so rest assured. The circumstances around you are not right. Your sense that this is the case, is normal, so check that box. What is not normal is what we are witnessing around us. Let’s examine:

Gender – I read on my Apple News, that comes through on my phone whether I want it or not, that the head of the American “Medical” Association wants to reject putting any sex or gender on a new birth certificate. It is now about feelings that are subject to change. Are you kidding? Please resign. Even Mother Nature knows this is ridiculous and not normal, not in the bird world, or the dog world, or even the bat world, will any of God’s creatures ever give birth to a fluid-gender, confused new life. This is orchestrated.

Sovereignty and Patriotism – Being proud to be an American has always been part of our heritage. Italians are proud of Italy, their heritage, and many pasta recipes; Greeks are proud of their very long lineage, olives and feta, and so forth. We all share a common love of country, family, and a delicious, multicultural soup, that I cannot imagine a homogenized sameness, where border safety and our history are looked at as bad. Yet we are being intimidated to do just that. America was and is a refuge – a place where you can speak freely, be safe, where law and order are part of the fabric of a society without a fear or intimidation of imprisonment, censorship, or job loss because of one’s beliefs. That only happens in communist and totalitarian regimes, right? Not anymore. This is not normal.