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by Smitty
Victor Davis Hanson surveys not just the race card, but offers a thoughtful overview of the whole race deck:
In the last fifty years, United States has evolved into a complex multiracial state. Race no longer is necessarily an indicator of income or material success-as the record of, say, Japanese-Americans or, indeed Asians in general, attests.
The article is worth your attention in full, writing as he does from the no-problem-left-unincorporated landscape of California.
As with quite a few problems, there is a straightforward answer:
DNA-based decision-making is false.
Note that this formulation blows away both racial and sexual discrimination.
Racism has been and, it’s safe to say, will always be present. You can’t deny past evil without turning history into fiction. You can even argue that affirmative action had its place: in overcoming past ills, there was a need to jump-start various systems. To prime the pump. Fine.
At what point can the pump be considered primed? Or, if the Real Goal of the exercise is a meritocracy, what are the victory conditions?
I submit that things are about as “fair” as they will ever be, and any further consideration of gender and race in decision making is an exercise in merging the solution with the problem.
by Smitty (h/t Insty)
Yes, Advice Goddess, the “Empowerment Experiment” people are behaving in a racist fashion. However, they are certainly within their rights to express themselves in this fashion, for all it is boorish.
Affirmative Action, too, is racist. The argument on the table is that there was sufficient historical unfairness that government intervention was justified. Two wrongs don’t make a right, for all two (w)rights did make an airplane. It’s done.
That said, the time for anything besides pure meritocracy is long past.
Perpetuating racism in any form, whether it’s tossing the term around liberally at political opponents, or crassly choosing for/against vendors based upon race, has got to be booed in public.
BOOOOOOOO!
Update:
HotMES has related thoughts.
Every conservative discovers, sooner or later, that to criticize liberal ideas is to be adjudged guilty of some “-ism” or diagnosed with a “phobia.” Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of race.
Steve Benen has one of those “a-ha!” moments with a segment of a recent Rush Limbaugh monologue:
“The [economic] deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, ‘rightful owners.’ Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.”
RAAAAACISM! (Remember, bloggers, there are five A’s in “RAAAAACISM!” Some of you have been slacking off and trying to get by with four.) Benen pronounces Limbaugh’s suggestion “nauseating,” but as always, we must ask the question, “Is Rush right?”
Would any honest “progressive” deny that the aims of their redistributionist economic program — to tax the evil “rich” for the benefit of the sainted “poor,” in Robin Hood fashion — are motivated by notions of “social justice”?
Is it not a fundamental tenet of this “social justice” ideology that the wealthy gain their riches by the exploitation and oppression of the poor? And is it not furthermore true that, vis-a-vis the racial aspect of “social justice,” progressives believe that black people have been especially victimized by capitalist greed?
From such a chain of premises, it follows that a policy that purposefully hinders the private free-market economy and expands government entitlement programs — the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it has been called — is to some degree intended by the authors of the policy as “forced reparations,” just like Rush says.
In other words, is Limbaugh being denounced as a racist merely for describing this policy accurately?
In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell describes how liberals employ “mascots” and “targets” to advance their policy aims. By positioning themselves as defenders of “mascots,” liberals set a rhetorical trap whereby any attack on their policies is denounced as an attack on the (allegedly) victimized and downtrodden people whom those policies are supposed to benefit. Ergo, anyone who criticizes the cost of Medicare is accused of wishing to deprive the elderly of health care, and anyone who criticizes affirmative action is accused of hating women and minorities.
The problem, of course, is that this prevents rational discussion of policy. Limbaugh would surely argue that black people would benefit more from a flourishing private-sector economy — which offers them jobs — than they would benefit from an expanding program of entitlements, which offers them only government handouts.
Furthermore, we have seen that the “Cloward-Pivens Strategy” brings disastrous results for the poor people its architects claim to care so much about. Go read Fred Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here if you want to see how this kind of liberal policy has devastated America’s great cities and brought misery to the urban poor.
If liberal policy is demonstrably bad for black people — as Limbaugh, Sowell and Siegel would argue — then in what sense is it “racist” to oppose liberalism? In fact, given the clearly evident socio-economic disaster inflicted on the black community by decades of liberal policy, is it not liberals themselves who ought to be attempting to defend themselves against such accusations?
The real problem with modern liberalism is the concept of “social justice.” As Friedrich Hayek explained, “social justice” is a mirage, a will-o’-th’-wisp that, however enthusiastically pursued, can never be achieved. And “social justice” harms those it aims to help, in part because it destroys the only legal and economic system — free-market capitalism — wherein the downtrodden have ever been able to improve their fortunes to any great degree.
The great irony of all this is that, even if you favor government aid to the poor — or perhaps, especially if you favor such aid — the health of the free-market economy should be paramount in your considerations.
After all, government can’t conjure money out of thin air. Ultimately, government can only spend on aid to the poor what it takes from the private economy in taxes. So if liberals pursue policies that harm the private economy, they’re killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. (Anybody tried applying for food stamps, health care or student loans in Zimbabwe lately?)
So the accusation of “racism” against Rush Limbaugh is transparently false, its entire rhetorical basis being the liberal conceit that only mala fides (bad faith) can motivate opposition to liberalism.
“I suppose if you haven’t been called a racist by the usual suspects on the left, you haven’t been writing for very long.”
Florida Democrats:
Gradulations! In 3 minutes and 38 seconds, Corinne Brown turns back the clock at least 40 years. (This video hate is brought to you by Iowahawk.)
In response to my much-noted American Spectator column of yesterday, some obnoxious troll commenter asserted that I had once wrote a column “praising the lynching of Emmet Till.” For the record, I never wrote any such column.
At the time that this libelous accusation first emerged on the Internet, I was employed as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times. My employers ordered me not to respond to this libel, and I was compelled to remain silent under penalty of being fired if I dared defend my good name. Duty and loyalty required me to obey, but when I resigned from The Washington Times in January 2008, no one even bothered to say “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
C’est la vie! C’est l’amour! C’est la guerre!
Having acquired a bad reputation in such a manner, I am loath to deny anything unnecessarily. Being notorious is not the same as being famous, but it’s better than being anonymous. So if it helps my career to be thought a vile “white supremacist” hatemonger (like the notorious Walter Williams), then I’ll laugh all the way to the bank.
I write for money, and if someone wants to pay me enough to explain how a fundamentally unserious person, a “tedious nothing” like myself, could ever acquire such a monstrous notoriety, please make an offer. Don’t lowball me, because it’s a very long story and the value of the continued mystery is not neglible.
Let the mystified think on this: Saturday evening, I was introduced to the old college boyfriend of a beauty whom I’d introduced to her most recent boyfriend. The college beau’s eyes were burning with rage, his upper lip glistened with perspiration, and when I shook his hand, it was cold, damp and unsteady. With jocular courtesy and good cheer I greeted as an old friend this fellow whom I’d never met before and who, for all I knew, was even then contemplating whether to pull out a .32 semi-auto and blast me into oblivion.
And he never saw me flinch, not once.
Observing Black History Month with my latest column at Pajamas Media:
With so many problems afflicting America today, especially with the economy in crisis, what purpose was served by [Attorney General Eric] Holder’s remarks? Trillions of dollars in asset value were wiped out by the collapse of the housing “bubble” and the ripple effects of that collapse have shaken financial institutions worldwide to their very foundations. It hardly seems a convenient moment for an angry racial harangue from the nation’s chief law enforcement official.
Particularly odd was that Holder chose to deliver his lecture in the middle of Black History Month, when America’s school children are annually immersed in the subject of race. Originally conceived by pioneering scholar Carter G. Woodson as a means of inspiring black youth by celebrating the accomplishments of overlooked achievers, in recent decades Black History Month has been hijacked by those who view the story of African-Americans not as one of hard-earned progress, but of perpetual victimhood and permanent grievance.
Most Americans over age 30 have little idea how the teaching of history has been perverted by the damaging attitudes Shelby Steele examined in his 2007 bestseller, White Guilt. And because history has been hijacked by grievance mongers and guilt-trippers, most Americans under age 30 have absolutely no idea of what a triumphant tale our nation has to tell . . .
You should read the whole thing. And here’s a half-hour documentary video (a rough-cut of a new production by Nina May scheduled for release next month) that defies Holder’s “nation of cowards” slur:
“[T]he need to confront our racial past and to understand our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country — that all endures. . . . Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”
— Eric Holder
Let’s start with the fact that some “talk . . . about things racial” is privileged and celebrated, whereas other “talk . . . about things racial” is streng verboten. Also, let’s talk about the fact that liberals are absolutely humorless and vindictive douchebags. Or better yet, let’s don’t talk about it at all, because I’m tired of talking about it, and would never introduce the topic except that it seems to be just about the only thing that liberals want to talk about while they hand each other million-dollar “genius” grants and congratulate themselves on how morally superior they are.
Bite me, Eric Holder, you corrupt thug.
UPDATE: “. . . aside from the occasional insinuation that McCain’s a bigot . . .” No, not me — this time.
UPDATE II: Lorie Byrd has an interesting reaction. She also has an interesting photo of Beyonce. NTTATWWT. (Wait a minute — is that Beyonce or Mariah? Eh, who cares? You’ve seen one diva, you’ve seen ’em all.)
UPDATE III: Linked by Kathy Shaidle, who informs me that her “tolerant” enemies consider her very existence a human-rights violation.
UPDATE IV: Eric Holder slanders America
UPDATE V: More courageous conversation!
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