BrianGarst.com

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

race issues Archive

Saturday

21

June 2008

1

COMMENTS

Obama Continues Victim Campaign; Plays Race Card

Written by , Posted in Election Time, Identity Politics

In case you needed more proof that Obama is auditioning for the job of Victim-In-Chief, the oppressed Senator said this at a Florida fundraiser:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run,” said the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’”

This is change? Looks like the same worn-out, democrat playbook to me.

Wednesday

28

May 2008

0

COMMENTS

Racists Threaten Obamatopia

Written by , Posted in Election Time, Identity Politics, Media Bias

The narrative for the general election is being cast and anyone who doesn’t immediately jump on the Obama bandwagon will be accused of racism. CQ Politics frets that Obama will face a “racial challenge” in the general election. To substantiate the proposition that people who don’t support Obama are all just evil racists, the article rests heavily on Newsweek poll, an organization with a history of using shoddy polling methodology.

While Illinois Sen. Barack Obama runs dead even with Arizona Sen. John McCain in a new Newsweek poll at 46 percent each with 8 percent undecided, the survey took a hard look at the race factor by employing what it called a “Racial Resentment Index” to further analyze voting blocs and it concluded that, “Obama’s race may well explain his difficulty in winning over white voters.”

Questions in the poll that tested voters on issues that involved race included views on affirmative action, whether blacks or whites lost out more because of racial preferences in things like hiring or school admissions, whether racial discrimination or personal responsibility accounted for problems facing black Americans, opinions on interracial marriage and dating and reaction that white voters would have if a black American with equal education and income moved into their neighborhood.

Measuring people’s motivations is admittedly a difficult task, but this is a horrible conceptualization of racism. Newsweek’s “Racial Resentment Index” doesn’t measure racism, it measures liberalism! The only questions that possibly have anything to do with racism are the last two; the rest are just direct measures of an individual’s proclivity toward liberal policy. Support affirmative action? If so, you’re a good non-racist (liberal)! See everyone as victims rather than in control of their own destiny? If not, you must be a racist (and an evil conservative)!

Be prepared: the media will, at the behest of the Obama campaign, continue to assault non-Obama voters and insist on labeling them all racists, with ever greater frequency, the closer we get to the election.

Thursday

28

June 2007

0

COMMENTS

Supreme Court Strikes Down Government Racism

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

The Supreme Court has been on a roll lately. This time they’ve correctly ruled that west coast liberals assigning students to schools according to race do so unconstitutionally.

The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen?discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.

. . .Although remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test, see Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467 , that interest is not involved here because the Seattle schools were never segregated by law nor subject to court-ordered desegregation, and the desegregation decree to which the Jefferson County schools were previously subject has been dissolved.

The left often justifies their institutionally condoned racism with the claim that they are just correcting for past racism. They now make this argument so reflexively, that they don’t even bother to determine if there is any history of past racism to which they can possibly be referring. Indeed, they instinctively refer to any racial imbalance as “segregation”, but in so doing they lose the meaning of the word. Even the supposedly intelligent liberals on the Supreme Court can’t understand this basic distinction. Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, sets them straight.

Disfavoring a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, the dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of race—, an approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S 483 (1954). This approach is just as wrong today as it was a half-century ago. The Constitution and our cases require us to be much more demanding before permitting local school boards to make decisions based on race.

. . .The dissent repeatedly claims that the school districts are threatened with resegregation and that they will succumb to that threat if these plans are declared unconstitutional. It also argues that these plans can be justified as part of the school boards’ attempts to “eradicate earlier school segregation.” . . Contrary to the dissent’s rhetoric, neither of these school districts is threatened with resegregation, and neither is constitutionally compelled or permitted to undertake race-based remediation. Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.

Because this Court has authorized and required race-based remedial measures to address de jure segregation, it is important to define segregation clearly and to distinguish it from racial imbalance. In the context of public schooling, segregation is the deliberate operation of a school system to “carry out a governmental policy to  separate pupils in schools solely on the basis of race.” . . In Brown, this Court declared that segregation was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Racial imbalance is the failure of a school district’s individual schools to match or approximate the demographic makeup of the student population at large. . . Racial imbalance is not segregation. Although presently observed racial imbalance might result from past de jure segregation, racial imbalance can also result from any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices. Because racial imbalance is not inevitably linked to unconstitutional segregation, it is not unconstitutional in and of itself.

The use of racial imbalance by liberals to justify their social engineering programs is no longer acceptable. It is time they accept that observing such an imbalance does not constitute evidence of racism.

Thursday

12

April 2007

2

COMMENTS

A Year Late, Duke Case Finally Dismissed

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Identity Politics, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

Long overdue, the persecution of three Duke lacrosse players based on blatantly false allegations has finally ended. Head over to Hot Air for coverage and video.

This entire episode shows that there are some fundamental dysfunctions in our society. A significant portion of the population has shown that confirming their cynical views is more important than facts or justice. Whether it be Duke Professors, liberal commentators or race-baiting shakedown artists, a lot of people owe these boys an apology. More importantly, they need to step back and examine their own prejudices and hatreds that literally forced them to believe the worst about young white men even in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.

This is what the constant obsession with identity politics has wrought. Rather than see a woman with ever evolving stories and little credibility, or college athletes behaving crudely – but not criminally – as most such young men do, all these people could see was black and white. Their ideology requires that they see black as victim and white as oppressor. They could not see the facts of this specific case because maintaining the legitimacy of their generally cynical and destructive world view took precedence. But their destructive influence has been exposed. We can only hope average Americans were paying attention and will learn the right lesson. Criminal cases should rest on their specific merit and nothing more, not serve to promote a political agenda.

Wednesday

25

October 2006

0

COMMENTS

Thoughts On A Colorblind Society

Written by , Posted in Identity Politics

La Shawn Barber has a great post on her views of a colorblind society and just what that means.

When I was young and na?ve, I used to believe in a ?colorblind society.? I envisioned a utopia-like world where everyone got along, despite differences in skin color, religion, height, weight, or other ?irrelevant? factors.

Having lived in the real world for a few decades now, I realize how silly I was. Human beings can?t ignore differences if we tried. The best we can do is condition ourselves to not allow those differences to divide us too sharply. If we can do that, we?re doing quite well.

Some people misunderstand the conservative position on ?colorblindness.? I should say my position on colorblindness, since I can?t speak for conservatives or black people. While humans will always make decisions based on what we perceive, the government should not. What conservatives and other anti-race preference opponents like myself believe is that government policy should be colorblind; that is, the government should not make policy, write laws, or base decisions on a citizen?s race, color, creed, or religion. We are to be judged and treated as individuals, not as members or representatives of a racial or ethnic group.

The very first reply to her post, from a self described liberal, serves as an excellent example of just how it is a government comes to be obssessed with color.

To the extent that ?affirmative action? programs require quotas and the compelled hiring of certain groups of people, those are clearly wrong.

But I see nothing wrong with laws ? as well as business policies or education policies ? which seek to achieve diversity. Diversity does not mean preference of one group over another; in fact, it literally means the opposite.

Trying to achieve diversity, which in common usage actually means proportionality, is itself a form of quota regardless of whether the means to achieve that end utilizes quotas. Diversity, as typically used, is actually a misnomer. What is actually desired is uniformity. All jobs/institutions must have a uniform representation of all groups, making all such institutions virtual copies of each other. They would, amongst themselves, lack diversity.

On a recent episode of Numbers, the mathematician and star of the show was lecturing his students on random occurrences. He showed them two pictures of dark dots on a white background, in this case representing rain drops. One picture had dots fairly evenly spaced throughout the picture; the other had some close together and some far apart. When asked which better represented random rainfall, many incorrectly thought it was the picture of equally spaced dots, because people tend to erroneously associate even distributions with random behaviors.

Applying this to our current discussion, we see that many falsely associate workplaces or other institutions with exactly proportional group representations as nondiscriminatory, when the opposite is actually true. The only way for such proportionality to ever occur across the board is by interference. Instead, anything not exhibiting proportional representation is seen as evidence of discrimination. Based on this dubious conclusion, they force proportionality through legislation.

Fighting against discrimination is admirable, but the means we use to determine where discrimination is occurring are faulty. Even when disproportionate representation is indicative of a problem, it is often a much different one than race-based agitators assume. The dismal high school graduation rate of urban schools is a prime example of the types of factors that can contribute to those situations.

This well intentioned “diversity” for the sake of “diversity” has the end result of making everyone hyper aware of race. The cumulative effect of having these policies implemented in all levels of government and the work force, rather than the alleviation of discrimination and race conflict as proponents intend, is the exacerbation of social cleavages. A large part of the reason we still have so much racial tension in America today is due to constant appeals to group identity politics. And as long as politicians can find personal profit in pitting groups against one another it’s not going to change.

Update: This timely article from OpinionJournal highlights the dangers of unintended consequences from well meaning meddling.

Monday

5

June 2006

0

COMMENTS

Supreme Court To Hear K-12 Affirmative Action Case

Written by , Posted in The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

From SCOTUSBlog:

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider the use of race in student assignments in two urban school districts — the first time it will take up the affirmative action issue since its rulings in 2003 on college admissions. The cases are from Seattle and Louisville, Ky. The Court had examined the two cases six times before deciding to hear them. Argument will be held in the new Term opening in October. The cases are Parents Involved v . Seattle School District (05-908) and Meredith v. Jefferson City Board of Education (05-915).