The above is Reddit’s new policy. It is one more example of unthinking and unethical “answers” to systemic racism.
On June 17, in this post, I concluded with a proposed answer to my Question 13, “What is the “systemic reform regarding race in America” that the George Floyd protests purport to be seeking?” That answer:
…special accommodations and benefits for African Americans in all things. Affirmative action in employment, promotions, salaries and school admissions; preference in grading, contracting and hiring; elimination of any standards that African Americans continue to lag in meeting. Reparations, of course; race-based leniency in law-enforcement and sentencing; plus culture wide discrimination in favor of blacks and against whites in all things, all instituted by the intimidation, punishment and “cancelling” of anyone who dissents.
The accuracy of my prognostication has become apparent within a little more than two weeks. As Jeff Goldlum says ruefully in “Jurassic Park” as the T-Rex escapes,
Though the text of the “What We Believe” section of the Black Lives Matter site is so expansively vague and utopian that it could, literally, mean anything, in the rush to satisfy the explicit and implicit threats levied by spokespersons for the “movement” and the reality of the mobs, the woke, the cowardly, the terrified and the foolish have laid the following at the feet of the champions of “systemic race reform”
- Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced plans to “correct inequalities in healthcare coverage in the state” by expanding health care coverage to every black Kentuckian. Of course, state benefits distributed on the basis of race are per se unconstitutional, but his announcement was widely praised.
This was among the priorities he priorities he said all Kentuckians should support on moral grounds as part of his responce to the fatal shooting of a black woman during a botched house search by Louisville police, though there was and is no evidence that the accident was triggered by race or racism.
- Students at the University of Washington and elsewhere demanded that professors to grade black students’ finals with more leniency. Students started a petition on Change.org that asks for professors to “give Black students a break!”
Over 60, 000 have signed the petition. Such a policy, which some professors have implemented, endorses openly race-based grading.
- Following through on The University of California Board of Regents vote to restore affirmative action to the admissions process, though granting preferential treatment to applicants based on their race or gender in public education or employment has been outlawed in California since 1996, the California legislature has voted to strike these words from the state constitution: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
The debate made it clear that the intent of the amendment is to permit discrimination on the basis of race and color. It is in open defiance of basic civil rights and equal protection under the law.
UPDATE: This is as good as a place to mention his as anywhere. Don Lemon, CNN’s second dimmest anchor, recommended that it would be salutary to add Barack Obama, “front and center,” to Mt. Rushmore. The justification would be that he’s black.
- Nikole Hannah-Jones, the avowed Marxist who was allowed to inflict her false history “1619” project on Times readers, schools and the nation, as given a platform again (in the Times Magazine) to call for reparations. Five days later, last Sunday, the paper itself devoted a its opinion section to “The Economy We Need” (“The America We Need” online) a series of articles by Leftist members of the Times Op-Ed staff and academics advocating reparations for African Americans, usually while not using those words. The section was headlined throughout in inch-high red block letters.
Among the most prominent articles: “Banks Should Face History and Cancel Black Debt Now.
- In one of the more mindless examples of the “reform systemic racism” logic, the mandatory face mask directive issued by Lincoln County, Oregon, exempts ““People of color who have heightened concerns about racial profiling and harassment due to wearing face coverings in public.”
This is clever (or stupid) because one of the Kentucky governor’s arguments for special health care support for black Kentuckians is that the black community has suffered proportionally more Wuhan virus deaths than other groups.
- At Princeton, a group of more than 400 Princeton faculty members signed a letter to the college’s president and other leaders on the subject of “anti-black racism”—you know, because anti-white racism is just fine, presumably. The intent of the demands is to purge all non-conforming thought regarding race from the campus:
Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.
As with most of these proposed measures, the assumption is that basic liberties, including academic freedom, must be sacrificed in the pursuit of “systemic racism reform.”
- The nationwide movement to make pot as easy to get, or easier, than liquor, our current legal destroyer of lives and families. is being promoted as a social justice measure, since marijuana use is epidemic in black communities, and so are arrests. Of course, drug abuse, including pot, harms lower income individual and communities far in excess of their impact on more affluent groups. This, however, is the strategy to address “mass incarceration”: stop arresting, convicting and imprisoning African Americans who break the law, either by ignoring, legalizing or not punishing them the non-violent crimes especially rampant in the black community.
Brilliant!
- Finally, proliferating rules, policies and proposals to make race a priority in filling jobs, board positions and more. The Oscars announced that racial considerations will determine eligibility for awards, thus making the statement that color trumps artistic excellence. Publishers have declared that the color of authors will determine publishing decisions; literary organizations have been ordered to employ color as a factor in deciding what poems and works of literature are worthy of honors.
Joe Biden is limited to black candidates for his Vice President, though the pool is depressingly thin, especially since he also committed to selecting a woman.
There is much more I could mention, and more is sure to come. The tragedy is that the “answer to Question 13” being embraced is no answer at all. More inequality, bias and prejudice won’t solve the problem, it is guaranteed to make matters worse. Most of the proposals aim at eliminating any sense of accountability or personal responsibility among African Americans, while officially designating them of incapable of competing and achieving without perpetual assistance.
The “answer” will make the African American community simultaneously a supreme race and a perpetually supplicant one.
Ethics Alarms 
Y’know, I’m an optimist by nature. I have long believed that as long as I treat everyone – and I mean EVERYONE – with the respect and courtesy I want them to show me, and that if by my example and those of many, many others we could encourage still more to embrace the same philosophy… well, we’d ultimately find our way out of this.
But after reading this… we’re fucked. All of us. Black, white and polka-dotted.
I’m recommending that large areas of the East and West coasts be spun off into their own countries, perhaps as many as 100 million people. Traditionalist areas of California, Virginia, etc., could form new states and stay with the rest of the country. This would leave a large country of about 40 states and over 200 million people that will have a clear majority of people who believe in the Constitution.
I can see more White Flight from cities and even states where some of this nonsense takes hold. Cities with crumbling infrastructure and fewer taxes coming in will not be great places for urban blacks to live, especially for those too poor to relocate. There will be a few more Detroits before this is over.
Businesses in downtown Indianapolis have already suffered for months because the city’s workforce largely commutes from the suburbs. With no games, conventions or other events to draw people, those businesses were struggling to operate at even a partial capacity when we began to reopen.
Then the Floyd Freakout happened. The murder rate in the city, which hadn’t been great before the pandemic, has not diminished with it and the city is trying to attract tourism with deals for 50% off hotel rooms and encouraging walks along the canal…in the daytime, though…since the canal has seen an uptick in crime…even in the daytime. Of course, few people want to see burned out buildings or find seating in half-capacity restaurants along a canal where they might be mugged.
And since we now have to defund police, except it’s not defunding despite that being the word used, no one is going to want to go downtown when the zoo, the Children’s Museum and the sporting events do return to full capacity in our beautiful city.
At least, it has been a beautiful city. Despite being a very red state, Indiana’s capital has, like many urban centers, a Democrat in the mayor’s office. Thus far, we’ve not seen the extreme woke wackiness out of him that other cities have endured. Hopefully, he remembers where he lives and doesn’t fall off the deep end.
Indianapolis is not a bad place for blacks to live. At least, it hasn’t been. In 1968, we avoided the riots that other cities saw in the wake of the King assassination because Bobby Kennedy was in town while campaigning and calmed the crowd. There’s even a monument in the park to commemorate it.
But we had no Bobby Kennedy last month. Many of our black citizens lament the damage. Some of our woke citizens do not. If white citizens start leaving, I don’t see how that will help the black community.
I posted an excerpt from Lincoln’s first inaugural on Facebook (the We are not enemies paragraph). I felt sad and annoyed that I was compelled to warn that I would delete snarky political comments.
How quickly things have changed in 6 months. It’s one thing after another. Our hearts are hardening toward each other and that can only be bad.
There is something much bigger happening here.
There is something much bigger happening here.
The ‘war against whiteness’ empowering an intensification of your dispossession and displacement. Roots in the Sixties go back 100 years before that.
The remaking of the country to cater to the New Demographic. The New America goes after the Original America. The collusion of the Government System with the Corporate and Media Systems in these proceses as rational ‘boardroom’ decisions .
All because a reversal or negation of the War on Whiteness and all that comes from it demands a shift in perspective that American whites can’t achieve because they have accepted the general ideological structures that were imposed in the Sixties.
They have been complicit in creating the conditions that led to this. If this is so — I think it is — our biggest obstacle is in our own minds and within our own self.
“The European grammar of self intolerance….“
Charles Blow writes today:
Now that we are deep into protests over racism, inequality and police brutality — protests that I’ve come to see as a revisiting of Freedom Summer — it is clear that Donald Trump sees the activation of white nationalism and anti-otherness as his path to re-election. We are engaged in yet another national conversation about race and racism, privilege and oppression.
This is an interesting statement because it presents this rebellion, this resistance, this movement (whatever it is which is not easy to define) as normalcy. It can do this because — truthfully — racism, inequality and certain forms of brutality have been real. But this is all a very confusing and even overwhelming question and problem because — also truthfully — the US was created out of the taking over of the new lands by the colonizing English. Everything that was done (since *1619* if you wanted to establish that as a date) was done through what I might call natural and accepted human aggression and the Nietzschen Will to Power and will to create, to build, to forge.
These are real and actual facts. It is also a fact — incontestable — that a significant aspect of the wealth and strength of America’s attainment when one thinks *structurally* about it, was based on putting the Black nation to work in the Empire of the White Man’s Will. It is very important to understand why this phrase is relevant and what, really, it means. Because the essence of the critical effort to undermine America is now focused on undermining *the White Man’s will*. Seeing it, identifying it as evil, creating narratives that operate against it, and setting up an entire opposition based in shadowy ideas infused with ressentiment and acted on through pure emotionalism. A visceral rage, a will to *get even*, a will to reverse the roles.
Once you grasp what is *really happening*, and once you have realized that referring to America’s civil promise and the imposition of Sixties valuations within your own self is the cause that has allowed this to happen, then you will (this is what I have come to and I admit I am still working it out) have to turn against all of that! *They* are fighting you witht your own tools, the tools you gave them (essentially). Once you grasp that this is a life-or-death struggle and that *they* will kill you and destroy everything that you have created (I suggest you pay attention to what is going on in South Africa today in order to *see where this goes*) then you will have no choice but to grasp the core issue of Power that is central to everything.
So as it happens — this I propose to you — that you are going to have to revisit the entire notion of supremacy. And I mean this as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant meant it. The Rising Tide of Color — you must face this and indeed so must our ‘allies’ of color — that we have to recover supremacy. It means taking back all that ground that was given up. What is happening now in America is because a bunch of real idiots — a whole sector of *yous* because you definitely participated in it and you definitely agreed to all of it, and you still do, to a man — sold their patrimony for *a mess of pottage*. What I mean is that is how it has turned out. I think I do understand how idealism and romanticism — especially in the Sixties — functioned. I cannot blame anyone really. The forces that came to bear on *you* were extremely powerful.
But do you see, perhaps a little better, where this goes? Now things have gotten very very serious. Far more serious than you realize. It is more likely that the sound advice I offer here will not *resonate* in any substantial sense. There is a *hurdle* that you cannot get over. Because you have surrendered, at a most essential point, your own Power. Until you reclaim it none of this will abate. That is my prediction for you (and it is a terrible prediction with terrifying ramifications).
Charles Blow does, in his way, see clearly. But he also tells you that you have no way and no means to stand up and answer him. But my answer is as follows: I will recover and self-empower myself within all those categories of Europeanism and ‘whiteness’. If you want to ally with *me* (here I take on a larger voice) you must ally with me, because I will not ever ally with *you* in the sense of the Rising Tide of Color whose intention is to break the power of the white man’s will. You must understand: there is no other way to put this though I recognize what I have said here is completely jolting to you.
I defy any one of you — anyone! — to successfully rebut what I have written here. I know you wont: because you can’t! At a most essential level I am telling the truth, stating it openly, and the reason I do this is because of a commitment to ethics and to morals. Therefore I contradict your-plural assertion that you are *righteous* and ethical. This is, of course, what I have always done and this is why I have gotten into so much trouble here: encountering hostility, blame & shame, and the *team efforts* to ridicule and to vilify.
Did I complain? 🙂
Do you know the percentage of the American population that is black? Hispanics/Latinos (both legal and not)? This should be part of any dialogue about minority anger, white fear and white flight. Not to say that minorities have fewer rights and opportunities by virtue of their percentage of the population, but a poll last year showed that Americans thought the black population was 30-50%. The power of anger and the power of the press… right up there with scientists who have recently been shown to have lied about their global warming data. Science became politics. The louder you shout, no matter what you have to say, if you’re shouting what the media wants, you get the coverage — truth means nothing.
Just a word on reddit ‘policy’. Each board has it’s own set of rules and moderators that create the culture and can enforce the rules, they are generally not employees. The statement you posted is not the official policy of reddit, it may have been the policy of one moderator on one board, but the comment has since been deleted. The nice thing about reddit, anyone can create their own board if they dislike the rules and moderation, it’s truly little d democratic.
None of which is to counter your main point, that many people believe, incorrectly, that the way to fight systemic injustice is to provide special privileges, which of course is antithetical to any understanding of what justice actually means.
From what I can tell, it was a mod trolling the users with an out-of-date April Fools’ joke, since that specific subreddit seems to be now ok with posting stuff pertaining to non-white criminals again.
It’s a BAD April Fool’s Joke when 1) it’s not April and 2) there’s nothing about the post to suggest it isn’t true.
I confess, I don’t get reddit, which appears to be run by assholes, and I’m not willing to devote the time necessary to figure it out.
“…which appears to be run by assholes…”
It sounds like you don’t need to devote any more time to figuring Reddit out. You’ve got it nailed right there.
Never posted on it, never will. It’s a place where unemployed and underemployed Zers and millennials go to run their mouths.
in regards to Don Lemon, just gonna leave this here…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCASEL9mUxM
This leftist newthink sure is convoluted. How does “institutional favoritism” (also called, correctly, nascent systemic favoritism) differ in any way from institutional racism?
It’s as if the kooky leftist wannabe monopolists of power have crowned themselves as “gods,” and further, by “virtue” of their “godly” powers, named themselves “the chosen race” or chosen people of themselves, “the gods.”
Well, they are so damned self-blinded, they have “god-ed” themselves smack into the bullseye of what certainly will be a kill zone – where a future movement, a ruthless conspiracy to impose a final solution regarding them (which a historical and similar movement imposed upon a historical group of “God’s chosen people”) will utterly and literally annihilate them.
I mostly agree with Arthur in Maine. But the truth is, today’s leftist Nazis are too stupid to foresee their inevitable doom at the hands of “superior Nazis.” It’s coming. Like Ronald Reagan said once, in a (only slightly) different context: “If it’s a bloodbath they want, let’s get it over with.”
Isn’t the censorship of content that depicts people of color in the position of aggressor itself an aggression on behalf of people of color? Wouldn’t such censorship make them look more antagonistic than what they’d be censoring?
Yes and yes.
Does an octopus have eight legs? 🙂
The whitelash that Van Jones warned about looks m,ore and more inevitable.
“The nationwide movement to make pot as easy to get, or easier, than liquor, our current legal destroyer of lives and families. is being promoted as a social justice measure, since marijuana use is epidemic in black communities, and so are arrests. Of course, drug abuse, including pot, harms lower income individual and communities far in excess of their impact on more affluent groups. This, however, is the strategy to address “mass incarceration”: stop arresting, convicting and imprisoning African Americans who break the law, either by ignoring, legalizing or not punishing them the non-violent crimes especially rampant in the black community.”
Ok, Bloomberg. And then after swinging your sword at those windmills, are you going back to sugary drinks next? Obesity kills people, don’t you know? Fight the good fight! Teaching those addicts that the substances that they put in their own bodies that may have negative physical or social outcomes for them deserves the full weight of the law! Throwing them in jail will teach them! It’s effective, right?
Terrible analogy, and I’m sure you know it, beginning with the material difference betweem making something illegal that has always been legal, which implies nothing more than government knowing its place, and making something legal that was illegal, implying government endorsement. People get obese from all forms or irresponsible eating, and focusing on any single edible is idiotic as well as an abuse of power. Banning a recreational drug with only harmful effects may offend libertarians, but it’s still responsible, just as legalizing that substance is irresponsible and (since it is financially motivated) venal. The proper analogy is government sanctioned lotteries and gambling—fun and ruinous.
The battle is lost, the poor, dumb and desperate will be the biggest victims. Good plan.
Don’t get me started.
But “OK Bloomberg” is pretty clever.
I was pretty proud of it.
I want to say this clearly, and I’d like to say up front that I really do believe this: Not only do I think that analogy is good, I think it’s almost perfect. I don’t know what logic you could possibly use that would apply to the criminalization of marijuana that Wouldn’t also apply to things like sugary drinks, and do so pretty cleanly. I mean…. Look at your comments:
“People get obese from all forms or irresponsible eating, and focusing on any single edible is idiotic as well as an abuse of power.”
Right, and people get high on everything from paint fumes to alcohol, you are *literally* doing what you’re labeling as idiotic by focusing on marijuana.
I’m not saying that marijuana useage is good, I’m saying it is batshit insane to throw people in jail for decades for doing something that destroys their life a slightly different way.
I mean, you can try to figure out some kind of differentiator that is actually meaningful, but I don’t think you’ll be able to, and frankly, I think you know that.
Regardless, I also want to respond to this;
“beginning with the material difference betweem making something illegal that has always been legal, which implies nothing more than government knowing its place, and making something legal that was illegal, implying government endorsement”
I mean, there was a time marijuana laws did not exist and I have the feeling that you would probably support the laws as they came in. I also reject utterly the idea that repealing laws is an endorsement, the government wasn’t promoting buggery as the sodomy laws were repealed, and it wasn’t promoting alcoholism when the 21st amendment was passed…. The government was just accepting the reality that the laws were wrong and unenforceable. This reeks of fear and a lack of understanding, and it becomes a more shrill fear and a more unreasonable lack of understanding as more and more places in America and around the world legalize marijuana with little or no measurable effects on society. I don’t need to convince you, I can just look around and wallow in being right.
Jack wrote, “The “answer” will make the African American community simultaneously a supreme race and a perpetually supplicant one.”
I wrote the following in my June 23rd blog post June 23rd blog post which was specifically about the Black Lives Matter’s “What We Believe” page….
There are better, ethical and moral ways of accomplishing reasonable change in society without using blatant racism as a battering ram to force change down the throats of those they oppose. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this to be true, modern day race activists have forgotten this.
Black Lives Matter IS a racist anti-American Marxist organization hell bent on toppling the United States system and they are open about their goals. Never forget the words of the chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, Hawk Newsome, said If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it”; this is NOT justice, this is subversion and sedition.
These social justice warriors have shown us beyond a shadow of doubt that they’re totalitarian minded, they’re adapting the tactics of fascist in the early 20th century, they rationalize their every word and every action, their anarchists, they are engaging in sedition and subversion and they’re completely, utterly, and totally morally bankrupt. I think these fools actually want blood in the streets and eventually every dog, regardless of how well it’s trained, will lash out with unfettered violence when it’s backed into a corner and forced to fight. Social justice warriors are betting their lives upon the rational non-violent thinking of their opposition so they can dominate the population with their bigoted totalitarianism but that calm won’t last forever.
These social justice warriors keep pushing and pushing and eventually that thin wall of civil opposition to their insane movement will crumble and these “warriors” will not like the result. When those they oppose choose to “cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war” the wailing cries of the fallen social justice warriors in the streets calling for their mommies will fill the air and their blood will fill the gutters on the sides of the same streets they try to dominate with their tactics, when it gets to that point it’s quite probable that there will be no quarter. If that sounds like a bold projection of possible future events, you’re right but let me ask you this; what do these social justice warrior imbeciles think will happen when they push a very high percentage of the roughly 393 million firearm owners in the USA into a corner and force them to either fight or give up the United States and cower in fear to their totalitarian rule. I think our history has shown us just how violent people can get when they are backed into a corner and have to lash out with unfettered violence to maintain the integrity of these United States of America.
• I know which side of this I stand.
• The totalitarians know which side of this they stand.
• Anyone that doesn’t agree with the totalitarians or doesn’t actively promote their views is considered an enemy of their cause.
• Does everyone else know where they stand; if not, choose now and prepare for the worst. If the worst doesn’t happen and these lunatics back down, that’s great!
Funny. As a high school kid in the ’60s, I thought “integration” was supposed to bring the bereft black people up to where they could fully participate in the majority culture to their and the country’s benefit. Sixty years later, the plan seems to be to bring the majority culture down to the level of the struggling minority. Brilliant.