[ABACA]

http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

Oh good. In the Washington Post,* the trade journal of the coming vacuum, I discover a story on "Whiteness Studies." These, at what used to be the University of Massachusetts, are yet more un-courses that grow like mold on the wreckage of American education. They endeavor to make white students ashamed of being white. How useful.

An implement wielded to this end, saith the Post, is the Privilege Walk. In this the students or, more accurately, indoctrinees, are asked to take a step forward if they can answer "yes" to such questions as "Can you get a bank loan whenever you want?"

The Post: "You looked behind you and became really uncomfortable," said Naomi Cairns, a 24-year-old junior who stood at the front of the classroom with other white students. Asian and black students she admired were near the back. "We all started together," she said, "and now were so separated."

Which discomfort was of course intended. Whiteness is bad. In fact anything associated with achievement is bad.

The questions must have been carefully crafted to separate whites from Asians, who are smarter than whites, more industrious, less criminal, generally more successful, and consequently wildly over-represented in the better schools.

But…embarrassment over qualifying for a loan?

"Can you get a bank loan?" might be phrased otherwise. For example, "Has your family, by virtue of proven honesty, sense of responsibility, and the economic fecundity that comes of study, competence, and hard work, demonstrated that it would not be foolish to lend you money?"

The Privilege Walk is transparently designed to punish whites for having historically been intelligent, studious, and productive; for having contributed most of the things enjoyed, often at the expense of white taxpayers, by the shiftless, dull-witted, improvident, and parasitic.

Now, I like the idea of a Privilege Walk, but I believe we ought to make it an Earned Privilege Walk. What do you think?

"Take a step forward if the following statements apply to you:

You got into the university without benefit of affirmative action.

No one in your family has a criminal record.

You have read three books this year you didn't have to read.

You have ever read any book you didn't have to read

You have ever read any book.

You are majoring in a hard science, mathematics, or engineering.

You had 600 math boards or better.

You had 600 verbal boards or better.

You study more than an hour a day."

Since Whiteness Studies is explicitly aimed at segregating the races, how about this:

"Your racial or ethnic group invented (take one step for each): Computational fluid dynamics. Tensor calculus. The harpsichord. The theory of finite automata. Cardiac surgery. Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism. Writing. The wheel. Counting past ten. Fingers. (OK, OK, I'll give you that one.)"

And:

"You can spell 'polymorphism,' 'automata,' and 'ten' (one step each)."

The result would be an interesting electrophoretic trace. Anyone want to try it?

Next topic: In the Washington Times,** I find this lead: "The District's schoolchildren rank as the worst readers in the country and only slightly better in some grades than non-English-speaking children in the territories of Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa…Only 10 percent of D.C. fourth-and eighth-graders last year were at or above proficient in reading ability."

Having lived for many years in and about Washington, I can decrypt the foregoing story. "Children" means "black children." The few white kids in school in the District generally go to private schools, read competently, and produce the Merit finalists. Whites are uninvolved in this scholastic catastrophe: The government of Washington is black through and through, has a high expenditure per student ($9,650 says the Times; the average salary of teachers is $48,651), and can therefore have any schools it wants. This being so, the presumption is that it is satisfied with what it has.

Newsweek:** "An astonishing 47 percent of Detroiters, nearly one out of two adults in this predominantly black city, are functionally illiterate. (By way of comparison, the figure for Vietnam is 6.7 percent and 1.7 percent for Croatia.)"*

Do you suppose they should have done their homework? Whites however should be ashamed because they can get a loan from a bank.

Black America is a vast, hidden, changeless disaster kept afloat by welfare and pretense. Nobody is even trying to do anything practical about it. While this goes on, the therapists of the University of Massachusetts beat their breasts conspicuously and waste the time of students. Do you sometimes suspect that some people are more useful than others?

Next: The stories are dying down now about Benton Harbor, Michigan, which blacks spent two days burning. It was the usual story: a black with a suspended license ran from the police, wrecked his motorcycle, and killed himself. The population began igniting things. It happens every few years with either blacks or Latinos rioting. Cincinnati, Miami, DC at least twice, Los Angeles, Crown Heights, Newark, St. Pete, on and on, city after city torched, the stories played down, no consequences to the rioters, and the expectant wait for the next conflagration.

Racially, things aren't working. Yet we have Privilege Walks. The Eloi play while awaiting the Morlocks.

Next: I saw a political talk show in which a Mexican-American politician talked about the Latino population in Texas. He wasn't hostile to whites. He was, however, pro-Mexican. He said (I may have the number slightly off) that sixty-some percent of kids under 18 in Texas were Mexican. In ten years, he said, when they reached eighteen, and voted, "there is going to be a huge political change." Yes. Specifically, Mexicans will own the state. (This is exactly what he meant.)

How bad this will be, if at all, depends on how relations develop. An ominous trend however is that Latino kids are dismal students and drop out of school. Other tensions loom. Latinos congregate in cities and, where they outnumber blacks, will displace them in elected office. There will be consequences.

Finally: A friend in California, an economist, tells me that whites begin to flee the state to avoid the taxes needed to provide social services for immigrants. Unfortunately Mexican doctors, engineers, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers do not swim the river. America gets those who can't make it at home. The ethnic cleansing of California, should it continue, will be fascinating.

Whence the productivity, the leadership for America's declining years? Latinos won't provide it, blacks can't, whites are gnawing their own veins, and there aren't enough Asians. But we at least have Whiteness Studies.

*June 19, 2003

** http://www.shashitharoor.com/article...lliterate.html

***June 20, 2003

http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

Do blacks realize the contempt in which the government, the universities, and what is frequently called the “liberal establishment”—though it is hardly that—hold them? That the transparent premise of virtually all racial policy is that blacks are irremediably helpless?

I recently saw a news story saying that a black girl at the University of Colorado, I believe it was, felt “uncomfortable” because the social atmosphere wasn’t to her taste: there weren’t enough black faces, or black clubs, or black this and that. Her attitude was, “Do something. The universe owes me any adjustment that I demand to my tedious minor problems. How I suffer. Take care of me.”

Now, why was this a national story? I don’t care about her discomforts. Does she care about mine? Discomforts by definition are minor.

Ah, but a governing principle of American politics is that blacks cannot manage their own lives, solve their own problems, or compete with others. It is a position embodying a profound contempt, a smug disguised condescension that might seem excessive in a colonial missionary to the bushmen.

Think about it. As we all know, a wide disparity exists between the academic achievement of black students and white. If government federal or otherwise regarded blacks as being able, it would do the obvious: provide rigorous schooling in the necrotic black regions of the cities, demand from blacks everywhere the homework without which one learns little, supply highly qualified teachers, and expect reasonable decorum.

Government does none of this. It will do many other things for blacks. It will provide food, housing, medical care—charity, things that keepers of a zoo would provide. It provides jobs on easy terms. It never does anything that implies an expectation of performance.

By inescapable implication government expects nothing of blacks except failure—not in the schools, not at work, nowhere. Law after policy after regulation aims at hiding poor performance and bad behavior, or at punishing people for noticing it. If you consistently don’t expect people to perform, the implication is that you think they can’t perform. They can come to believe it themselves, no? And then where are you?

And there is the now-tiresome matter of affirmative action, which can be summed up in four short sentences. It is for losers. If you are good enough, you don’t need it. If you need it, you aren’t good enough. If you don’t need it yet take advantage of it, you are a freeloader. The offer is insulting, and acceptance evidence of a lack of self-respect.

Yes blacks have come to depend on it as Eskimos depend on fish. In examinations for promotion in police departments, admission to universities, federal employment, everywhere, the question is not which candidates are best but which candidates are black.

What must it be like? I’d love to get a degree from CalTech in applied mathematics, but I’m not smart enough. I can’t imagine being accepted on affirmative action and pretending—sitting in class knowing that I was being given grades I didn’t earn, knowing that everyone else knew. I’m close to shameless, but not that close.

One might say, arguably but not unreasonably, that blacks come from an intellectually deprived background and need extra help to catch up. The idea might be plausible if there were the slightest evidence of an expectation that they ever would catch up. There is not. Have you heard a politician suggest a cut-off date for affirmative action, such as January 1, 2005? Special privilege is now demanded by blacks as an entitlement and accepted by the government as perpetual.

Again, there is the implication of contempt. Those you believe permanently to need help are those you believe to be permanently helpless.

The universities treat blacks as prizes, not as students. A school with average boards of 1200 will accept a black applicant with boards of 1000. Now, if the school actually cared about the student, it would recommend that he go to a school with average boards of 1000. He then really would be an equal, the other students would recognize it, and he would have every opportunity to graduate.

Instead the universities admit badly unqualified blacks as diversity trophies—ambulatory bumper stickers exalting the virtuousness of the faculty. This implies contempt, does it not? One thing it does not imply is intellectual respect. The black kid is outgunned, he knows it, and he knows the other students know it. A little less charity and a little more respect might help. Respect and affirmative action are mutually exclusive.

What effect does the unmentionable pervasive scorn have on society? One result is the widespread assumption among whites that blacks are incompetent. For example, I won’t let my children (or me) within shouting distance of a black doctor. I don’t care about his color. I know how great the affirmative action is, how great the pressure not to fail blacks. Sorry. I’m not going to take the chance. Nor are a great many people. Black doctors know it.

Is this fair to the black doctor who advanced on his merits? No. But it is responsible parental behavior.

What does affirmative action do to people who live by it? I can only imagine. What is it like to work in an office of whites and perhaps Asians who quietly look down on you? (Asians assuredly do.) The human response is either to work like a dog to show the white thus-and-suches (which is the Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese, and Japanese reaction), or to fall back into sulky, marginally cooperative, you-can’t-make-me-ism. And this too many blacks have done.

The effect on whites? A very quiet, angry hostility that would not exist if blacks were held to normal standards. Yes, there are exceptions. I don’t think there are many.

Another effect in a country built on calculated division, and on control of public discourse, is a certain schadenfreude in watching politicians who have overstepped the unspoken bounds. From time to time a white pol slips and says something that upsets blacks, as almost anything does. People wait. The next day he will be on television whimpering and apologizing and saying he didn’t mean what he obviously meant and writhing like a puppy that has wet the rug. It is amusing.

Blacks of course can safely say far worse of whites without consequence. But does this not demonstrate the belief that they can’t be expected to meet usual standards of comportment? If I were black I might wonder whether I weren’t being taken for a ride by people who really didn’t have much use for me.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

I believe that if I hear one more black politician hollering about how the United States is no damn good, and nobody in it is any damn good, and everyone discriminates against blacks, and denies them opportunity, and represses them, and doesn't do everything they want, and expects them to behave, I'm going to start bellowing.

It won't do any good. But I'll feel better.

Now, I don't want to associate promiscuously with facts, or state what we all know to be true. I'm a journalist, and I respect the traditions of my trade. But if I didn't, I think I might wonder why, if there is no opportunity in this country, everyone else has managed to flourish like kudzu on a Georgia road cut. No opportunity? A rock could succeed in America. Half the earth wants to come here because there's opportunity. Why do you think Mexicans swim the Rio Grande every night with their lives contained in plastic bags? ("Eet ees because we want to be repressed and have no opportunity.")

Gimme a break.

Remember the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the Twenties? I guess they came because they were tired of all that opportunity in Poland. Anyway, they had it rough. The times were ugly and so was the place. There were fewer violins and more crime than is generally recognized now. They, and for that matter the Italians and Irish, didn't have the advantages blacks now have: the welfare, or subsidized housing, or free breakfasts for the kids, or Medicaid. Nor did they have a vast array of laws aimed at letting them advance regardless of merit. Most places wanted to keep Jews (and the Irish and Italians) out.

But they worked like sled dogs, went to school at night, saved pennies to put the oldest boy through school. Then he sent money back from the law practice and put the other kids through. It worked. People moved up. They did it the hard way, because that was the only way available, but they did it.

The opportunity was there, and they took it.

Opportunity has grown since then, grown mightily. Success has gotten steadily easier in America. In 1975 the Vietnamese appeared. The predictions were that they would go to the slums to be pickpockets and prostitutes. I guess their English wasn't too good at first, so they didn't get the word. They went to the suburbs instead and started restaurants. The closest they got to sweatshops was McDonald's which, by world standards in sweatshops, is pretty lame. Soon they were spitting out valedictorians and showing up in droves in the better universities. (You've heard the joke about Asian SATs? Yeah, 800 math and 200 verbal.)

One year, so help me, a Viet kid was valedictorian at the Naval Academy. That's discrimination, no doubt about it. What better way to oppress a kid than to give him a free education and command of an aircraft carrier? I do it all the time.

We're a racist country? U. Cal Berkely is heavily Asian. The United States is 1% Asian. Man, ain't that some ineffectual, didn't-work, pathetic, just plain sorry-ass discrimination? I could discriminate better than that, any morning before breakfast, and I'm from West Virginia.

Why do the Viets succeed? Because they are smart, courteous, ambitious, studious, and have a work ethic that would frighten Calvin. Their parents tell them to come home with As or don't come home. They never miss supper.

Last year I went to a favorite restaurant in Little Saigon, here in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. When it opened in the mid-Seventies, the kids in the family waited tables, keeping labor costs down, and the parents cooked. Some of the same kids, now women, still wait tables. I asked one of them what she did in the daytime.

"I'm an electrical engineer," she said. "I do wide-area networks."

Oh.

I reckon if we racist Americans tried to oppress her, it didn't work.

How about the Hispanic hordes? They aren't doing as well as did the Vietnamese. Nonetheless, I notice Hispanic restaurants popping up everywhere, like ticks on a hound dog. Hereabouts, Hispanics have taken over the market for unskilled labor. Why? Because if you work hard, show up, and do a good job, people hire you. (The foregoing is a blinding insight. Copyright me. Patent applied for.) The young ones speak Standard English after a few years in the US, not Hisbonics after two centuries. They're rising.

I have to wonder where the dearth of opportunity hides. I can't find it.

Blacks today have advantages that would have turned the Irish and Italian immigrants bright purple with envy. Education is compulsory. Libraries abound. Welfare provides a breathing space for study. Blacks get affirmative action in just about everything. If American universities bent farther over backwards to accommodate blacks who didn't measure up, much less any who might, they'd be limbo dancers.

Are we Americans the cause of the ills of blacks? Think about this: In Washington we have a black mayor, a predominantly black city council, school board, teachers, parents, and students, and a very high per-pupil budget. (Now, when I want to discriminate against people, my first step is to give them political control of the national capital. Isn't that how you do it?) Oh, the heart-rending unfairness of it all. My soul curdles.

The schools are among the worst in the nation.

Oppression? Check to see what blacks need to get into universities, and what whites need. Oh yeah, we're discriminating out the gills. The United States regularly lowers its standards for blacks, offers special programs, recruits blacks who don't come close to qualifications required of whites, does everything but kidnap blacks and stuff them bodily into classrooms and jobs. Ask what proportion of black officers in the military would get in without special waivers.

If that's discrimination, I could use some of it.

Blacks, sez me, don't suffer from a lack of opportunity, but from an unwillingness, or inability, to take advantage of it. If the Vietnamese can rise from rice farmer to electrical engineer in a generation, then so can anyone who has the brains and chooses to work. This country is awash in opportunity. Fish or cut bait.