Africans and African Americans

Martha Stewart and the Ferguson Lynch Mob

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

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

“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

The “Black Code”: Blacks discriminate against other Blacks who socialize with Whites

You know all those ads where Blacks (usually cool and competent) and  Whites (often dorky and behaving weirdly) are hanging out together, often drinking beer while watching football. Best friends forever. The Hollywood/Madison Ave. image of America’s harmonious multicultural future.

Now we all know that this is a fantasy of the people who run the media. But its implausibility derives from not only because White people prefer being with other Whites—the phenomenon of implicit Whiteness. The  same goes for Blacks, and a recent academic paper goes further, showing that Blacks disapprove of Blacks who socialize with Whites (which makes me think that  such commercials are not going to be effective with either race) (“Testing the ”Black Code”: Does Having White Close Friends Elicit Identity Denial and Decreased Empathy from Black In-Group Members?“).

The “Black Code” referred to in the title refers to the attitude among Blacks that ‘‘relationships with whites must be kept at arm’s length maintaining a silent us against them mindset. Blacks who appear too friendly and comfortable around whites are viewed with suspicion; their blackness in question.”

Prior to presenting their own data, the authors review findings that “Blacks, more than any other racial group, show empathy toward members of their in-group.” In the  experiment Black college students (mostly female from an all-Black college) observed a  Facebook page of a White person alone, a Black person alone, and a Black person and a White person in two conditions, with same-race friends or opposite-race friends. Read more

Prof. Ralph Scott on the costs of not mentioning race differences

I recently had a conversation with an academic woman who was strongly against any discussion of racial differences in academic ability even though she seemed to believe they exist. I countered that in the absence of such a discussion, the conversation usually reverts to charges that the reason for the racial achievement gap (RAG) is because of White racism, either directly or indirectly (e.g., by causing Black poverty).

Now Prof. Ralph Scott of the University of Northern Iowa has written an article in Mankind Quarterly describing the victims of this rigorously enforced silence (“The Late Arthur Jensen: A latter-Day ‘Enemy of the People’?“). Dr. Scott was prominently involved in the public discussion of the effects of desegregation, including a stint as the Iowa chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights. His article presents Arthur Jensen as the consummate scientist. For example, Jensen only included heritability in his groundbreaking 1969  Harvard Educational Review article on boosting IQ because the editor requested him to do so. His finding that there was no evidence for lasting gains in IQ and that IQ differences are substantially heritable resulted in a firestorm, not only for Jensen but for others, such as Prof. Scott, who accepted these findings.

Scott emphasizes findings by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman (The IQ Controversy [1988]) that there is a gap between (covertly held) professional opinion on IQ and the views disseminated by the elite media. “They found that, despite the common understanding to the contrary, most experts continue to believe that intelligence can be measured, and that genetic endowment plays an important role in IQ.” The following is from an abstract for the book:

The central question addressed in this book is why expert opinion and public views toward intelligence and its measurement are so widely divergent. The authors conclude that the public’s view of the IQ controversy has been shaped by inaccurate media coverage; and more importantly, by changes in the nature of American liberalism as well as the key role of civil rights issues in American life. The increasing influence of new strategic elites in the United States, and the changing role of the mass media, have profoundly affected the character of scientific information communicated to the general public and how it is communicated. (See here)

(Parenthetically, The Culture of Critique references 8 works co-authored by Stanley Rothman, including the groundbreaking Roots of Radicalism: Christians, Jews and the Left [which documents the predominant Jewish role in the 1960s countercultural revolution]. Rothman’s writings on the attitudes of the new elite and on the Jewish representation in the new elite are of seminal importance.)

Scott emphasizes Jensen’s finding that the one standard deviation difference between Black and White students persisted through the school years, implying that the problem was not the schools. As a result, Jensen emphasized that remediation should be aimed at the preschool years:

Colorblind emphasis therefore should be placed on prenatal and perinatal events taking place within families in the course of daily living, such as poor nutrition and intrafamily stress, as well as biophysical considerations, including maternal ingestion of illegal drugs during pregnancy, single parenting, crimes, and sickle cell anemia.

Needless to say, this remains an unpopular message in an age where it seems the blame is now directed mainly at teachers.  Jensen advocated placing children into ability groups based on their scores on standardized tests—a proposal that clearly conflicts with egalitarian dogma. Instead, the education establishment pinned their hopes of reducing the racial achievement gap (RAG) on desegregation—not merely de jure desegregation (in which Blacks had the right to attend neighborhood schools), but de facto segregation (which actively changed the racial balance of schools by forced busing). Read more

A Tale of Two Trials: What the George Zimmerman and O.J. Simpson Verdicts Reveal About Racial Denial

One transparent outcome of the “not guilty” verdict in the George Zimmerman trial is the racial disconnect between the average American and the nation’s powerful elites (the mass media, politicians, and “civil rights” leaders). The ever-widening gulf between racial reality and racial fantasy—the daily repetition of Black violence in contrast with the media-driven narrative of nonstop injustices of an oppressed minority—seems more pronounced in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict.

We live in an era of extreme racial denial. The nation’s media and political elites—what Joseph Sobran termed the “hive”—live in a fantasy realm that dismisses latent racial differences, an existence defined by unrealistic egalitarianism and hyper-liberalism; racial disparities are merely symptomatic of the lingering impact of slavery, racism, and discrimination. The emphasis is always on some inanimate object—“mean” streets, “gun” violence, “epidemic of violence,” “crack” cocaine, “heat waves,” “underfunding” of Head Start, the lack of upward “middle class mobility”; or the fault of law enforcement—“police brutality,” “deficient” law enforcement strategies, “racial profiling,” or “Stand Your Ground” laws.

The crux of the Zimmerman case is fundamentally about holding Blacks accountable for their own actions. The jury of six females—five Whites and one Hispanic—reached a reasonable conclusion that the defendant acted in self-defense in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The evidence presented at trial countered the prosecution’s claims that Zimmerman was the aggressor, stalked Martin, initiated the altercation, and as a “wannabe” cop shot Martin—an innocent “unarmed” 17-year-old bystander. Most of the media coverage in the wake of the verdict reinforces the unfounded assumption that Trayvon Martin was innocently preyed upon—nothing more than a victim of “profiling,” who was just an “unarmed” teenager, a kid, trying to get home. This is the fantasy that our elites are hyping and one the jury simply rejected outright.

The Zimmerman jury, after a careful assessment of the evidence, concluded that Martin was the aggressor. After an initial encounter, Martin forced Zimmerman to the ground after sucker-punching him, pounded Zimmerman’s head against the concrete sidewalk, and after 45-seconds of screaming and fearing for his life, Zimmerman shot Martin to save his own life.

The verdict has produced a predictable tsunami of racial demagoguery from beltway pundits. Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Tavis Smiley, and Jesse Jackson have exploited the jury decision to project their own warped views about the endless suffering of Blacks from White oppression. Read more

Race Relations 101 with Ann Coulter

Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama
Ann Coulter
Sentinel (a division of Penguin), 2012
$26.95, 326pp.

In more ways than one, Ann Coulter stands out among “conservative” commentators. Her feisty, tart, hard-edged prose and photogenic allure — coupled with her gusto to address issues most “conservatives” deliberately avoid — have generated a loyal following among grassroots activists on the Right.

As a bestselling conservative author, Coulter’s high-profile status makes her a walking target for liberal critics. Pushing the envelope is her trademark practice, especially on cultural and social issues, which infuriates the Left. Consider: her defense of Joseph McCarthy; her admiration for the writings of the late Joseph Sobran; her claim that The Bell Curve is one of her favorite books; and her quip that her “only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times Building.” Not to mention her defense of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which earned her the tag “Rabid far-right commentator” from the SPLC. All of this positions Coulter in the company of Pat Buchanan well to the right of the conservative establishment. Read more