African Americans

Excerpt from “My journey to race realism”: Reformers’ search to close “the gap”

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The following is the second of two excerpts from an article, “My journey to race realism,” to appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Prof. Ray Wolters is Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware.

First Excerpt: The Burden of Brown

Before 2010, I was aware of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.  As mentioned, during the 1990s I began to read American Renaissance, and about the same time one of my chums from grade school and high school, a bank examiner named Gene Stelzer, bent my ear with comments about Darwinism.  Gene was also the first person to call my attention to The Occidental Quarterly, a journal I later came to regard as an indispensable guide to understanding White racial consciousness.  At the University of Delaware, education professor Bob Hampel kept me informed about some of the best recent books in his field, and social scientist Linda Gottfredson told me about gene-culture co-evolution.  But from mainstream historians I heard and read nothing about Darwinism or the interaction of culture and genes, and my own written work was still based primarily on archival research.  It was not until 2010, when I was laid low by lung failure and could no longer rummage through archives that I began to read deeply and to think seriously about evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.  As it happened, at this time I was also thinking about the modern school reform movement, which since about 1990 had become, above all else, an effort to close the achievement gaps that show American Blacks and Latinos lagging behind Whites and Asians on standardized achievement tests.

In some ways, the reformers’ concern with test scores is surprising.  In recent international comparisons, African Americans have done better on standardized tests than Blacks in Africa or the Caribbean.  Hispanic Americans have done better than Hispanics in Latin America.  White Americans are doing better than students in other predominantly-White nations (except Finland).  And Asian-American students have done as well as most students in Asia — and better than those in Korea or Japan.  These results were achieved, moreover, at a time when an increasing proportion of American students were being reared in single-parent families and a growing proportion of parents did not speak English. Read more

Excerpt from “My Journey to Race Realism”: The Burden of Brown

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The following is the first of two excerpts from an article, “My journey to race realism,” to appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Prof. Ray Wolters is Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware.

In the 1960s and 1970s I forged through the academic ranks.  My dissertation received favorable notice when it was published in 1970, and another book of 1975 received even better reviews.  At the age of 36, I was promoted to the rank of full professor at the University of Delaware, and I began to think about research for yet another book.  At that time, civil rights lawyers had brought a lawsuit seeking metropolitan busing for racial balance throughout the northern portion of New Castle County, Delaware.  From reading the local newspaper, I learned that the largest city in this region, Wilmington, had been one of the first five jurisdictions that the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), had ordered to desegregate its public schools.  Wilmington complied immediately, but desegregation led to inter-racial scuffles and a decline in cultural and academic standards.  This touched off White flight, and enrollment in Wilmington’s public schools tipped from 73% White to 90% Black.  I then learned that much the same had happened in three of the four other “Brown districts” — in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in Summerton, South Carolina, and in Washington D.C.  Only in Topeka, Kansas, where Blacks made up only 8% of the students, had the majority of Whites continued to patronize the public schools.  And desegregation had been problematic even in Topeka.[1]

In my best-known book, The Burden of Brown (1984), I told the story of how public education had fared in these five districts where desegregation began.  In the introduction and conclusion, and in a few statements that were interspersed in the text, I maintained that the misbehavior of Black students had created serious problems and that federal judges had made matters worse by redefining desegregation to mean something quite different from the original understanding.  When the implementation order for Brown was handed down in 1955, the Supreme Court defined “desegregation” as assigning students to public schools on “a racially non-discriminatory basis.”  Similarly,  in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress defined what “desegregation” meant and what it did not mean: “‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.”[2] Read more

The Nation of Islam as an African-American Group Evolutionary Strategy

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For many years I’ve had a tempered respect for Black Nationalists. If our struggle is a difficult one, hampered at every turn by the hostile controllers of culture, theirs is perhaps an even greater labor. To start with, leading Black Nationalists have had to contend with the biological handicaps of their race — the most potent being a lower IQ and attending dispositions towards impulsive behaviors and criminality. On top of this, modern Black mainstream culture is even more spiritually and morally bankrupt than our own. Social problems accompanying this culture are acute. Blacks account for 30% of all abortions, but comprise just 14% of the population. The traditional family unit is next to non-existent in modern Black America. Just under half of Black men will never marry and those that do will marry White women at twice the rate of Black women marrying Black men — bringing destruction to the genetic distinction of both our races.

Black Nationalists have also had to contend with the fact that most of their co-ethnics enjoy living among Whites and receiving all the benefits that that entails. Black separatism is simply too unappealing to enter the Black mainstream. On top of this, Black Nationalists have also been subject to hysterical treatment from the ADL and SPLC — organizations that work over-time to prevent the emergence of non-Jewish nationalisms that dare to acknowledge racial realities or point out the Jewish role in the Great Game of modern ethnic warfare. Although Jewish hatred reserves a special place for European man, Black Nationalists have not been spared.

I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb when I state that, as far as fashioning a rebirth of one’s people goes, our counterparts of a darker hue do not have much to work with. Read more

The Justice Department’s Bogus Report

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Apropos Sam Dickson’s article on the Ferguson lynch mob, an article by John R. Lott, Jr. in the New York Daily News rounds out the story (“Ferguson Fakeout: The Justice Department’s Bogus Report“). After failing to nail Darren Wilson despite what were doubtless gargantuan efforts, Eric Holder’s department sought their pound of flesh anyway by writing a report condemning  the entire police department, with the predictable result that the police chief, Thomas Jackson, has resigned. Lott’s point is that the findings of the Justice Department report do not indicate discrimination, but may in fact result from differences in behavior. Analogously, everyone knows that Blacks are overrepresented in the NBA and the NFL, but no one complains that it’s because of anti-White racism.

Lott:

Addressing the nation from Selma, Ala., on Saturday, President Obama said that while racism may be “no longer endemic,” as it was 50 years ago, his Justice Department’s report on Ferguson shows that the “nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.”

Sorry: The Justice report doesn’t prove disparate treatment, let alone discrimination.

Read more

Martha Stewart and the Ferguson Lynch Mob

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The New York Times states:

They were four words that became the national rallying cry of a new civil rights movement: “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

The slogan was embraced by members of Congress, recording artists and football players with the St. Louis Rams.

It inspired posters and songs, T-shirts and new advocacy groups, a powerful distillation of simmering anger over police violence and racial injustice in Ferguson and beyond.

But in its final report this week clearing the police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights violations in Mr. Brown’s death, the Justice Department said it may not have happened that way. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. cast doubt on the “hands up” account even as he described Ferguson as having a racially biased police department and justice system. (March 4, 2015: Ferguson Report Puts ‘Hands Up’ To Reality Test)

It is worth correcting from the get-go the statement that “it may not have happened that way.”

The spin doctors of the New York Times are clever but cleverness doesn’t make it so.  It did not happen that way. It isn’t a case that it may not have happened that way.

As journalists, Mr. & Ms. New York Times reporters, let’s try to speak plainly and in accordance with the facts.  It may be painful for the Times and its journalists with their agendas so firmly in place.  But it is the right thing to do.

The Times goes on to blandly quote the co-chair of and outfit calling itself “The Don’t Shoot Coalition” a Black person named Michael T. McPhearson:

“To me, he had his hands up,” said Michael T. McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition in St. Louis. “It doesn’t change it for me.”

Isn’t that nice?  The facts don’t matter to Mr. McPhearson.  He has the right to choose his own facts:  “to me” he had his hands up…” Read more

“Birth of a Nation” at 100 Years Old

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dwgriffith

Liberals and multiculturalists hate it when confronted with works of obvious genius which don’t fall into the pattern of their worldview. Along with angst-fuelled hand-wringing over certain works by Shakespeare and Wagner, a more modern manifestation of the problem is the cinematic landmark, The Birth of a Nation (available in part here), which will quietly celebrate its centenary this week. Compelling, innovative, trend-setting, and epic in scale, D.W. Griffith’s astonishing and unflinching vision of the Civil War and Reconstruction-era South remains powerful viewing even on its hundredth birthday.

I was an impressionable eighteen-year-old college student when I first viewed it. Despite the admonitions and careful commentaries of my film and media professor, I remember seeing past the fact that it was silent and interspersed with grainy captions and being impressed by its ‘modern’ style and appearance, and the smoothness of the editorial process. But it was some years later before I came to truly appreciate the scale and meaning of what Griffith had committed to film. On this occasion I watched it in North Carolina, at the home of my wife’s very elderly grandfather. This remarkable old man was every inch a Southerner, and a true gentleman at that. There one humid May evening, with the AC broken down and the windows wide open, the old man pulled out some Civil War relics that he had collected over the years. Presenting a series of antique rifles, medals, and pictures of Lee and Jackson, his eyes regained a youthful spark as he spoke of his own family memories and connections (real or imagined) to a host of Confederate heroes. Later in the evening, after we set down the relics of war in favor of cigars and Scotch, he pulled out a dusty VHS from an old bookcase. It was Birth of a Nation. It’s a long movie, clocking in at over three hours, and the old man drifted off to sleep within the first half hour. But I kept watching. And it was that night, with the firebugs glowing and buzzing by the open windows, and with the fragrant Southern air drifting slowly inside, that I felt what Griffith had aimed to portray — pride of land, pride of culture, and pride of blood. Read more

Ferguson: Media Images in the Service of White Dispossession

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“Look, folks, policing is done this way. You may like to live in Santa Monica and have your little wine party in the backyard and drive your Jaguar and do your little barbecue…. Know that the reason you are allowed to do that in the safety of your community is because police Officers go out and they clean up the streets and deal with all the scum that you don’t want to know about….”
—Stacey Koon [former LAPD Sergeant in charge of the Rodney King incident]
Quoted in Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, 430

The two-week spectacle in Ferguson, Missouri, which culminated in the packed funeral of 18-year-old Michael Brown, produced a cascade of predictable volatility. Brown, an unarmed Black male, died August 9, 2014, after Darren Wilson, a White police officer, fired multiple rounds at the 6’4”, 292-pound amateur rapper known as “Big Mike.” (According to the New York Times, “[Brown] collaborated on songs that included lyrics such as ‘My favorite part is when the bodies hit the ground.’”)

As more details emerge, the sequence of events that prompted the shooting offers a plausible explanation for the skewed original narrative of an unarmed Black male targeted by a White police officer. Several eyewitnesses alleged that Brown was cooperative, had his hands up, and was shot from behind.

However, others tell a quite different story. According to forensic reports, Brown was shot from the front, not from behind. The pattern and number of rounds fired suggests that the officer attempted to stop Brown by wounding him. The two shots to Brown’s head may have been the rounds of last resort in the reasonable use of deadly force against a menacing assailant who was rushing at him, particularly given the possibility that the assailant was a large, physically powerful, marijuana-buzzed, man who showed no signs of being subdued by a volley of shots. Newly released audiotape from an amateur video chat of an apartment dweller near the shooting records ten or eleven shots over a 12-second span. This suggests that Wilson may have tried to thwart Brown by intimidating him at first, then wounding him with a volley of shots before unloading two rounds to the head (a series of six shots can be heard with a one- or two-second break followed by a burst of 4 or 5 additional shots). Read more