National Review Writer Under Fire for Racial Column

[Going Postal]

That's one cause, but not the only. Racism is also part of a group-think mechanism whereby one may project his own failings onto a despised outgroup. Watch what racists accuse their outgroup of, and look at the particular racist making the accusations and I'll bet you'll notice that they nearly always focus primarily on their own faults, which they think they see in the outgroup.

So...Derbyshire has some illegitimate chilluns, popped a cap into several asses, substandard intelligence (even though he's a mathematician), etc?

[BooRadley]

So...Derbyshire has some illegitimate chilluns, popped a cap into several asses, substandard intelligence (even though he's a mathematician), etc?

Maybe he's fucked up so many things in life he feels stupid, and maybe he's a mean drunk who slaps his kids or wife around, so he has issues he needs to place somewhere.

In his case, though, he's probably just ignorant. He sees some black panthers or crips on TV and assumes that the majority of black people are like that, because he's never gotten to know anyone outside of a small social circle of snobby rich white people.

[Cyclone Ranger]

I spent 25 years in the GOP and I assure you that if there are at least three conservatives in one spot, there's at least one racial/religious bigot. You can't be both conservative and tolerant.

There are certainly tolerant conservatives. These days, they may be a majority.

[Chachma v'Oz]

There are certainly tolerant conservatives. These days, they may be a majority.

Perhaps we're not using the term the same way. Can you explain your statement?

[Pho King]

Maybe he's fucked up so many things in life he feels stupid, and maybe he's a mean drunk who slaps his kids or wife around, so he has issues he needs to place somewhere.

In his case, though, he's probably just ignorant. He sees some black panthers or crips on TV and assumes that the majority of black people are like that, because he's never gotten to know anyone outside of a small social circle of snobby rich white people.

Perhaps this also explains the extreme anti-conservative sentiments you and Chachma have been spewing?

[hadit]

Perhaps this also explains the extreme anti-conservative sentiments you and Chachma have been spewing?

The least tolerant are usually the most vocal about demanding tolerance.

[Going Postal]

Perhaps we're not using the term the same way. Can you explain your statement?

Having more of a police state than it already is. Gunning down of ne'er do wells (for instance, a military friend from basic was from the Phillipines; cops drove around in gun jeeps (remember rat patrol)). After dark curfews for everybody non-essential. Prison are holes with no state provided food, hospitalization, rehab, education, etc.

[Going Postal]

Maybe he's fucked up so many things in life he feels stupid, and maybe he's a mean drunk who slaps his kids or wife around, so he has issues he needs to place somewhere.

In his case, though, he's probably just ignorant. He sees some black panthers or crips on TV and assumes that the majority of black people are like that, because he's never gotten to know anyone outside of a small social circle of snobby rich white people.

He went into that. Are you grasping?

[BooRadley]

He went into that. Are you grasping?

You seemed to be assuming that since he's a mathematician, he can't be violent, stupid, or ignorant. I gave examples of how he could be.

[Malcolm Wright]

That only holds if you ignore the racism evident in American liberalism, namely the continuing contempt for minorities' ability to compete with others. It is cloaked in "nice" language, but it's still racist to assume, for example, that a black student should meet lower standards to get into college than a white student, that a black policeman should get promoted with lower scores on the aptitude test than a white policeman, etc.

IOW, racists are not confined to the conservative end of the spectrum.

I'm referring to what I consider to the most virulent form of racism. You know - they kind that inspired lynchings, forbade education to the oppressed group, denied voting rights, denied service... etc.

There is an important difference between that racism, and the racial policies that have sought to counterbalance that racism. You may dislike the racial policies... you may even dislike them more than the racism that came before them, but to try to confuse the two into one thing is not helpful.

M

[Cyclone Ranger]

Perhaps we're not using the term the same way. Can you explain your statement?

ie, not racially bigoted.

[Going Postal]

What is it Like to Teach Black Students?

(The following is a an open letter from a White School teacher who had the experience of teaching Black youth.)

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.

The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.

One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five students to be screaming at me at once.

It did no good to try to quiet them and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.

They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”

Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back. They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver
dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim—in the crudest terms imaginable—that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long
grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”

So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two
minutes but when I got back, the girls had lined up at the front of the
classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students—there are—but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.

“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.

“Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask.
Two obese girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.” “Juicy” is a colorful black expression
for the buttocks.

Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to
the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately
other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”

For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom
be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.

It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.

Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black.
My white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We
need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government
services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”

“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.

She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.

[Going Postal]

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. "Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you
know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.

My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one
student explained, “Get dat green.”

There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.

Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all—well—black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.

One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.



A rewarding relationship can grow
up between an exceptional, interested
student and his teacher. I have stayed in
my classroom with a group of students
discussing ideas and playing chess until
the janitor kicked us out. I was the
old gentleman, imparting my history,
culture, personal loves and triumphs,
defeats and failures to young kinsman.
Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus,
the Spartan poet, who counseled the
youth to honor and loyalty. I never had
this kind intimacy with a black student,
and I know of no other white teacher
who did.

Teaching can be fun. For a certain
kind of person it is exhilarating to map
out battles on chalkboards, and teach
heroism. It is rewarding to challenge
liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on
these children, but what I aimed for with
my white students I could never achieve
with the blacks.

There is a kind of child whose look
can melt your heart: some working-class
castaway, in and out of foster homes,
often abused, who is nevertheless almost
an angel. Your heart melts for these children,
this refuse of the modern world.

Many white students possess a certain
innocence; their cheeks still blush.
Try as I might, I could not get the
blacks to care one bit about Beethoven
or Sherman’s march to the sea, or
Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even
liberals like John Rawls, or their own
history. They cared about nothing I
tried to teach them. When this goes on
year after year it chokes the soul out
of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and
sends him guiltily searching for The Bell
Curve on the Internet.

Blacks break down the intimacy that
can be achieved in the classroom, and
leave you convinced that that intimacy
is really a form of kinship. Without
intending to, they destroy what is most
beautiful—whether it be your belief in
human equality, your daughter’s innocence,
or even the state of the hallway.

Just last year I read on the
bathroom stall the words “F**k
Whitey.” Not two feet away, on the
same stall, was a small swastika.

The National Council for the Social
Studies, the leading authority on social
science education in the United States,
urges teachers to inculcate such values
as equality of opportunity, individual
property rights, and a democratic form
of government. Even if teachers could
inculcate this milquetoast ideology into
whites, liberalism is doomed because so
many non-whites are not receptive to
education of any kind beyond the merest
basics.

It is impossible to
get them to care about such abstractions
as property rights or democratic citizenship.
They do not see much further than
the fact that you live in a big house and
“we in da pro-jek.” Of course, there are a
few loutish whites who will never think
past their next meal and a few sensitive
blacks for whom anything is possible,
but no society takes on the characteristics
of its exceptions.

Once I asked my students, “What do
you think of the Constitution?”
“It white,” one slouching black rang
out. The class began to laugh. And I
caught myself laughing along with them,
laughing while Pompeii’s volcano simmers,
while the barbarians swell around
the Palatine, while the country I love,
and the job I love, and the community I
love become dimmer by the day.

I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian
who visited Zimbabwe not
too many years ago. Traveling with a
companion, she stopped at a store along
the highway. A black man materialized
next to her car window. “Job, boss, (I)
work good, boss,” he pleaded. “You
give job.”

“What happened to your old job?”
the expatriate white asked. The man replied in the straightforward
manner of his race: “We drove
out the whites. No more jobs. You give
job.”

At some level, my students understand
the same thing. One day I asked
the bored, black faces staring back
at me. “What would happen if all the
white people in America disappeared
tomorrow?”

“We screwed,” a young, pitch-black
boy screamed back. The rest of the
blacks laughed.

I have had children tell me to my face
as they struggled with an assignment. “I
cain’t do dis,” Mr. Jackson. “I black.”

The point is that human beings are not
always rational. It is in the black man’s
interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but
he drives them out and starves. Most
whites do not think black Americans
could ever do anything so irrational.
They see blacks on television smiling,
fighting evil whites, embodying
white values. But the real black is not
on television, and you pull your purse
closer when you see him, and you lock
the car doors when he swaggers by
with his pants hanging down almost to
his knees.

I have been in parent-teacher conferences
that broke my heart: the child
pleading with his parents to take him
out of school; the parents convinced
their child’s fears are groundless. If you
love your child, show her you care—
not by giving her fancy vacations or a
car, but making her innocent years safe
and happy. Give her the gift of a not-heavily black
school.

[Going Postal]

Speaking of LOUD and fighting.

[Cyclone Ranger]

Of course, I didn't say there are no bigoted conservatives.

[hadit]

I'm referring to what I consider to the most virulent form of racism. You know - they kind that inspired lynchings, forbade education to the oppressed group, denied voting rights, denied service... etc.

There is an important difference between that racism, and the racial policies that have sought to counterbalance that racism. You may dislike the racial policies... you may even dislike them more than the racism that came before them, but to try to confuse the two into one thing is not helpful.

M

True enough, at one point in time. Today, however, we have had several generations grow up under a different set of rules. Believing that black people simply can't compete with white people is a disservice to them, and ultimately causes great harm. At this point, we need to move beyond even the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations" and expect everyone to do their best, not shave points because they have a certain skin color. Maybe that means that Asian people get the best intellectual jobs for a while until everyone else figures out they had better step up their performance, but that's the way it works.

I would not, for example, expect the NBA to adapt a quota system that would require racial representation on the teams. That would be simply ludicrous. Neither should colleges or police departments.

[Going Postal]

As an extension of the whitel teacher in high school, a black professor (journalism) at Stillman College:

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/05/20/Op...ay_dying.shtml

At the link at the bottom is his first year.

[Malcolm Wright]

True enough, at one point in time. Today, however, we have had several generations grow up under a different set of rules. Believing that black people simply can't compete with white people is a disservice to them, and ultimately causes great harm. At this point, we need to move beyond even the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations" and expect everyone to do their best, not shave points because they have a certain skin color. Maybe that means that Asian people get the best intellectual jobs for a while until everyone else figures out they had better step up their performance, but that's the way it works.

I would not, for example, expect the NBA to adapt a quota system that would require racial representation on the teams. That would be simply ludicrous. Neither should colleges or police departments.

Times certainly have changed.
As for quotas and affirmative action - it takes more than the opinions of two individuals on the net to determine the timeliness of phasing it out.

Unlike you, I believe it has been slowly but surely fulfilling its role of providing opportunity to a group that was robbed of all opportunity for centuries. There will be a time to phase it out, but that time is not something any one person should feel at liberty to determine without the backup of in depth studies.

There is little indication that affirmative action does harm to African Americans. And very few choose to perceive it as an expression of lowered expectations. In the long term, that could change.

As for the comparison between sports teams, and colleges and police departments - its comparing apples and oranges. Discrimination has not prevented anyone from shooting hoops, to point out the obvious. It has, for centuries, prevented us from gaining quality education. And we have a sad history of racially abusive police that has been mitigated by African American officers.

Look, in an ideal world, no racially-oriented policies would be necessary. What you, and to a worse degree others, tend to forget is that America is far from ideal when it comes to race relations. Wishing the problem didn't exist doesn't make it vanish. Getting fed up with the problem, frustrated with it... doesn't make it go away either. What you are doing when you make these inappropriate comparisons, is proving again that you're trying to wish away the facts on the ground. It doesn't do us any good.

I wish the USA were closer to an ideal society too, where cultures exist side by side without deep seated complexes, animosity and fear. We're heading that way slowly but surely.

M.

[Going Postal]

I wish the USA were closer to an ideal society too, where cultures exist side by side without deep seated complexes, animosity and fear. We're heading that way slowly but surely.

M.

Only with some genetic engineering. Ever heard of the so-called warrior gene?

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/warr...ry?id=12422661

[Malcolm Wright]

Only with some genetic engineering. Ever heard of the so-called warrior gene?

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/warr...ry?id=12422661

Weird - that article says page 1 of 3 at the bottom, but I see now links to get to the next pages... Pity because it was very interesting. I'll do a search to see if I can find something else relating to it.

Anyway, violence and risk-taking are not absolutely negative traits. They need to remain within the gene pool. We need to remain capable of them. It is within culture and education that we must successfully learn to express these traits in constructive ways.

And I disagree that what I described as an ideal can 'only' happen with genetic engineering. It is happening slowly but surely via the current mode of interaction. I believe it could be accelerated if we put national cultural emphasis on the value of its acceleration... but of course, we don't.

M.