Race

Apparently White Springfield, Ohio, Elementary School Students Were Ordered By Black Students To Say”Black Lives Matter”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The story is officially in the ‘allegedly” category until all of the facts can be confirmed.

The principal at Kenwood Elementary School in Springfield told police that a group of black students gathered several white students in the school playground and forced them to say, “Black Lives Matter.” The suspects also recorded the students who were threatened into making the statement, police said. Students who tried to resist were dragged or carried to a section of the playground and beaten, with one white student getting punched in the head.

I don’t particularly blame the black students at all. They have been told for all of their lives by adults, politicians and the news media that whites hate them, that police are trying to kill them, that the nation is overwhelmingly racist and that systemic racism and rampant white supremacy is the norm and will be, unless they do something about it.

Yesterday, in his remarks after a screening of the new Emmet Till movie, the President of the United States said (according to the official transcript posted by the White House)…

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RETRACTED!: “5 Ethics Observations On The Woke Student’s Stanford Admission Essay”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m retracting this post, for several reasons. First, it is old, really old, and the source that led me to it for some reason posted it as recent. It does appear to be true, despite the April 1 date on the tweet. Second, some of my points are not valid if the episode was not recent.

This has happened to me a few times before, usually when I’m in a rush, like today. For the second time this week, I had to get my wife to the emergency room, this time at 4:00 am. That’s no excuse: it’s my problem, not yours, and my obligations to my readers don’t change regardless of extenuating circumstances.

My thanks go to sharp-eyed Curmie, who pointed out the error.

Oh—I checked: Ziad Ahmad is real, he’s still an extreme progressive, and he didn’t go to Stanford after all. He graduated from Yale.

The post is below for posterity’s sake.

***

“When it comes to college essays, one teen is showing that a short but powerful message may be the path to success,” gushes NBC News. “Short but powerful”? I ‘d call the stunt by Ziad Ahmed, a teenager from Princeton, New Jersey, something a bit different from that.

In response to a question on his Stanford college application asking “What matters to you, and why?” the teen wrote “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times. Ahmed then received an acceptance letter from the prestigious California school and is bragging about his successful gambit on social media.

Observations:

1. Assuming that Ahmed would not have been admitted (even if he had solved the mysteries of cold fusion in his spare time) had he written “Make America Great Again” a hundred times in answer to the same question, this incident proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Stanford is using political preferences to cull its applications. That’s not a stunning revelation, but we now know that the school isn’t even trying for “diversity” of thought, opinion or world view. And, of course, Stanford’s bias is almost certainly the rule, not the exception.

2. “It was important to me that the admissions officers literally hear my impatience for justice and the significance of this issue,” Ahmed told NBC News. “The hashtag conveys my frustration with the failure of judicial system to protect the black community from violence, systemic inequity, and political disenfranchisement.” Oh. But the question didn’t ask him to express his impatience, however, or how “significant” he thinks the phony revelation expressed by the BLM mantra is.  The logic expressed by Ahmed’s statement to NBC shows a serious lack of critical thought, remarkable arrogance even for a teen, and his acceptance of propaganda as fact. So does his “answer” to the Stanford application query.

Yeah, I guess Stanford is right: he’s perfect for its student body. Continue reading →

The NFL’s Offensive And Divisive “Black National Anthem” Pander [Revised and Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Just because I wasn’t watching the showcase for the nation’s most unethical professional sports league doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. The NFL truly is a blot on American culture, and its nauseating use of the so-called “black national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” is one more piece of evidence.

The NFL started its practice of using the song as a counterpoint to THE National Anthem, the Star Spangled Banner in 2021, in craven grovelling to the George Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter, as well as sop to the NFL’s National Anthem protesters like Colin Kaepernick. It was a disgraceful suck-up to the large majority of black players in the league, and if 2021  were the only instance of it, the stunt could be forgiven. But now the song has been presented before three straight Super Bowls, and that means we are stuck with it forever, just like baseball is stuck with “God Bless America,” the redundant Irving Berlin song that stadiums started sticking into the Seventh Inning Stretch as a show of unity after the attacks of 9/11. But “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is even more beyond ending, and you know why as well as I do. Continue reading →

‘OK, But What Has He Done Lately?’

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Conservative black scholar Thomas Sowell, now 92 but still as courageous and perceptive as ever, has, to engage in understatement, been critical of the fake history “1619 Project,” now being inflicted on school children across the country. That centerpiece of current CRT indoctrination is the brain-child of Nicole Hannah-Jones, an African-American reporter with an agenda, and for her divisive misinformation, declared hooey by a large number of historians who can smell rot when they encounter it, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and later a tenured chair in “Race and Journalism,” as if that was a legitimate study rather than propaganda, at Howard.

Flushed with the perceived authority such a contrived position confers, and lacking the sense God gave a lemming, Professor Hannah-Jones took to Twitter yesterday to sneer, “Other than being Black, what exactly is Sowell’s expertise in slavery or history?” Proving that she asked this employing the same diligence and research skills that marked her “1619 Project” (which claimed that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, and is low-grade baloney), one of the many Twitterphiles who weighed in to mock her listed Sowell’s relevant publications by year: Continue reading →

Somebody Explain To Roseanne Barr What A Double Standard Is

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I guess I should start off by admitting that I have never found Roseanne Barr sufficiently witty, original or entertaining to make up for the ugliness of her world view, her horrible nasal screech, and her unjustified belief in her own brilliance.

I never could stand her hit sitcom or sit through an entire episode, so the reboot was about as welcome to me as most reboots (like the sad zombie version of “Murphy Brown”), but even a little less. When she managed to get herself fired and transformed into a pariah for making a racist slur against Barack Obama’s top advisor (and Michelle’s pal) Valerie Jarrett, tweeting in 2018 that Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes movies, I didn’t feel sorry for her. The tweet was racist, and it was a mark of Barr’s arrogance, built up over years of being excessively praised and rewarded for being “outrageous”—I file her in the same general category as similarly unfunny shock-jocks like Howard Stern—that no ethics alarms went off when she thought it would be hilarious to compare an Obama staffer to a monkey. It was also stunningly stupid. From my ethicist perspective, Barr made the offense worse by claiming that she had no idea that Jarrett was black. Sure, Roseanne. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “‘What’s Going On Here?’ Why Does Disney Think It Is Appropriate To Produce And Circulate Abrasive, Divisive, Confrontational Interest Group Propaganda And Indoctrination Like This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have a confession to make. I know that the ethical and moral deterioration of the Disney corporation is a major ethics catastrophe with dire consequences for our society and culture, and Ethics Alarms should have been covering it more thoroughly. It hasn’t, and that’s because this topic is particularly painful for me.

I owe so much to Disney’s creations and philosophy. I learned a lot of ethics from the shows and movies growing up, and many of my most enduring and important interests and hobbies were inspired by Walt’s vision. My fascination with dinosaurs began with the terrifying T-Rex sequence in “The Rite of Spring” segment of “Fantasia,” for example. My reverence for the Alamo was inspired by Disney’s “Davy Crockett” series. The first dramatic production of any kind that genuinely move me was “Bambi.” I never got to visit a Disney theme park until college, but finally going to Disneyland after dreaming about it as a kid was one of the epiphanal experiences of my entire life: it was perhaps the only time something I had looked forward to was even better than I expected it to be. Disney’s perfectionism—at the parks, which were immaculate and overlooked no detail to immerse visitors in the fantasy, and in the TV shows and movies—influenced my own view of professionalism and my approach to directing for the stage. His courage and certitude in pursuing risky creative projects that everyone was telling him were doomed to fail—a full length animated film?—bolstered my own resolve when I have had project ideas that seemed nuts to everyone but me.

(And some were nuts, as it turned out. But the times I was right more than made up for those.)

I could go on, but I won’t. The point is that attacking Disney for me is like savaging a childhood hero, or even a parent. But the country, its culture and mental health is being harmed by the current distortion of Walt’s creation’s destructive alliance with the radical Left. It deserves to be attacked, and it’s time I got down to it.

This Comment of the Day (actually two comments, in sequence) by jmv0405 on the depressing post yesterday on a Disney Critical Race Theory video, makes up for some of that lost time by getting the discussion jump-started. It is also a perceptive and illuminating perspective that I wouldn’t have seen without the comment’s guidance. Continue reading →

“What’s Going On Here?” Why Does Disney Think It Is Appropriate To Produce And Circulate Abrasive, Divisive, Confrontational Interest Group Propaganda And Indoctrination Like This?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Anyone?

I don’t like being shouted at by cartoon characters. Even if they had a valid point, my response to this kind of assaultive advocacy is, has ever been, and always will be…

Bite me.

Plumbing The Depths Of The Great Stupid: I Usually Don’t Continue Reading Articles That Start With First Sentences Like This One, Missing Out On Hilarious Race-Obsessed Delusions…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Before we delve into the substance of the article at issue, let me express my gratitude to author David Kaufman for giving me another opportunity to post a brilliant cartoon by one of my heroes, New Yorker satirist/philosopher/humorist Charles Addams. If you read here often, you have seen his work highlighted periodically because it is so often appropriate. In this case, that cartoon above, which made me laugh out loud when I first saw it as a high school student, immediately leapt to mind when I read that Kaufman believes the little white figures in the “walk/don’t walk” traffic lights represent white people.

Did anyone, at the New Yorker, among its readers, among the millions of people who have seen that creepy but very funny drawing in the best-selling collections of Addams’ mordant humor think for a second that it had anything to do with race? No, because it didn’t, doesn’t, and until quite recently, before The Great Stupid spread hate, fear, darkness and toxic cretinism over the land, nobody would be so woke-mad and brainwashed to see racism in everything that they would come to such a bonkers conclusion. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Victor Davis Hanson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“[W]hen everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.”

—Revered conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson in his column prompted by the absurd progressive calms that the beating death of young Tyre Nichols by five black police officers was caused by “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”

Hanson’s piece “Race Everywhere” neatly supports my observation in the previous post that it is time to retire February ‘s designation as “Black History Month” (though “Hot Breakfast Month” can stay). His thesis:

In sum, class, not race, remains the best litmus test of being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race.  No wonder the identity politics industry now strains to attach prefixes such as “systemic” or “implicit” to “racism,” or “micro” to “aggression,” purportedly to ferret out bias that otherwise is not apparent. Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiracial constitutional republic in history.To survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad, the unique idea of the United States requires concord.  But national cohesion is only possible through citizens subordinating their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then do they cease being automatons of warring tribes and collectives. 

Hanson includes many examples of the fact-immune push to elevate the black race above all others in the U.S. while deliberately reversing our national and societal progress away from segregation and racial hostility, as well as why the movement is neither rational nor responsible. Three that I was aware of include,

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Yet Another Explanation For The Tyre Nichols Police Attack That Doesn’t Involve “White Supremacy”…And It Is Very Much Based On Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Radlye Balko made a cogent and well-supported case that the horrible beating death of young hands Tyre Nichols at the hands of five ‘elite” black Memphis cops was the result of cities creating unaccountable special urban law enforcement teams that are negligently supervised, trained and selected. Now comes iconoclast sportswriter, podcaster and pundit Jason Whitlock, a co-founder of “Outkick,” to offer a more explosive, and unwelcome explanation (in the woke community at least):

[T]he five police officers mimicked gang behavior and that the whole sad event is a byproduct of communities overrun with matriarchal values and controlled by single black mothers….the conversation we should be having in reaction to Tyre Nichols centers on the cost of destroying the black family.

…

Black urban areas are dominated by matriarchal rulership. It’s an utter failure and disaster. These areas all operate similar to Memphis. Crime is astronomical. Young men settle their differences with deadly violence. Academic performance hovers at record lows. Illegitimacy rates skyrocket.

Tyre Nichols was 29. The five police officers who participated in beating him to death range in age from 24 to 32. The behavior we witnessed from the officers resembles what happens when a group of Vice Lords catch a Gangster Disciple on their turf. The Disciple will flee. The Vice Lords will chase. Violence ensues.

My point is what we saw Friday night does not appear to be an outgrowth of bad policing. I’ve yet to see video evidence that depicts what caused the traffic stop and why Nichols had to be snatched from his car. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been shown the complete story. Something about the encounter feels far more personal than anything born of the frustration created by a resistant suspect. The use of pepper spray makes zero sense.

It feels like the outgrowth of a rotten culture, a culture where black men are canonized and celebrated for handling petty beefs and disrespect with lethal violence. That type of emotional violence is commonplace within zip codes dominated by the matriarchy.

Tyre Nichols cried out for his mama for a reason. I’m not saying that to belittle Nichols. I’m saying it’s a reflection of modern black culture, a culture that inappropriately places women at the top of the food chain. Mama is the ultimate authority and savior.

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