Africans and African Americans

Chris Matthews: Reality Check on Racial Fantasies

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If you ever had any doubts about how out of touch with reality MSNBC’s media pundits are on race then look no further than Schlock-Meister Chris Matthews and the Chutzpah-challenged crew at MSNBC during the recent coverage of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, which includes convicted slanderer and race hustler Al Sharpton. (For a good report on Sharpton, see here.)

What was once a suspected case of cerebral hypoxia seems more like cerebral anoxia — not merely a reduction but complete lack of oxygen flow to the brain of the ever-obnoxious Matthews. MSNBC producers should keep fully stocked oxygen tanks on the set of Hardball — not that, in the final analysis, it would make much of a difference to the brain-dead political hacks at the far-Left network.

For starters, Matthews claimed that any reference to Obama’s Chicago connection was racist because it’s a code word for poor Blacks. “They keep saying Chicago … have you noticed?  They keep saying Chicago.  That’s another thing that sends that message—this guy’s helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the ‘burbs.” His guest, John Hielemann of New York Magazine completed the thought by noting there are a lot of Black people in Chicago.

The mind-boggling dishonesty reached a new delusional realm on Tuesday evening when Matthews was wound tighter than a Joan Rivers’ facelift. In an unrestrained rant on welfare—viewed by liberals view as an unmentionable topic —— Matthews tied Mitt Romney to Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and David Duke because “they all talked about welfare.” (In reality, racially aware politicians simply connected with middle class Whites on an implicit level, which reflected the negative experience of many Whites. Ronald Reagan’s campaign stops in 1980, certainly his swing through Louisville, Kentucky, would have given Matthews cardiac arrest with his appeals to White voters with themes like “welfare queens, opposition to busing and big government.) Read more

Review of Beyond Human Nature, by Jesse J. Prinz

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Jesse J. Prinz is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York and an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. His academic specialism is the philosophy of psychology, and he has produced books and articles on emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics and consciousness. His latest book, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives, was published earlier this year. Like much of his previous work, this new book is an attack on “psychological nativism.” Prinz (who is Jewish) claims that his latest book “concerns the cultural impact on human variation” and is part “of a critique of approaches that oversell the role of biology.”[i] The Jewish ethno-political agenda behind this critique soon becomes clear when the author acknowledges his “intellectual heroes who hover silently in the background. I mention here Franz Boas, whose pioneering work in anthropology has been an inspiration to many who try to establish universal human dignity through the study of diversity.”[ii]

In arguing for the primacy of nurture over nature, Prinz devotes a significant part of his book to attempting to explain why measured racial differences in IQ can be ascribed to environmental rather than genetic factors. He believes that “The IQ controversy is an extreme example of a more general tendency to explain human abilities by appeal to biology,” and regards it as “a particularly egregious case because it legitimates biases against many subjugated groups and mistakes social injustice for biological necessity.”[iii] For Prinz “one of the great tragedies of IQ testing is that researchers have used their results to argue fallaciously that certain groups of people differ in intelligence.”[iv] Introducing his case for an environmental explanation for racial differences in IQ, he notes that

everyone agrees that intelligence can be affected by the genes. The fact that humans are smarter than dogs is clearly a consequence of our biology. Everyone also agrees that differences in human intelligence can be genetic. Some people can be congenitally retarded, and extreme forms of genius are likely to be genetically based as well. But what about the vast majority of us who lie somewhere between Einstein and Tweedledumb [note the standard invocation of the Jewish Einstein as the quintessence of human genius]. Genius and retardation are rare conditions, which may result from genetic mutations. Are the differences between people who fall in the normal range distinguished by the genes? Is the run-of-the-mill dullard biologically different from a garden variety whiz-kid? And if so, are those biological differences fixed, or might they be altered by experience? These questions become even more heated when we turn from individual differences to differences between groups.

Do biological differences in brain power come pre-packaged with biological differences in pigmentation? These are touchy topics, and naturists have felt considerable heat for defending positions that are politically incorrect. I don’t think we should let politics arbitrate in this case, however. I think naturists simply get the science wrong. While some differences in intelligence may be linked to biology, most people have pretty comparable biological endowments. If we want to find an explanation for group-wide social inequity, then we would be better off studying the negative effects of poverty, and the positive effects of cultural practices that encourage learning.[v] Read more

Another Hate Industry Start-Up: The Omar Thornton Memorial Fund

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You remember Omar Thornton. He was that Black guy in Manchester, CT who two years ago was caught stealing beer from his employer. Why he was stealing it is a mystery. There had been no hurricane to spark a looting spree, and beer distributorships typically give excellent employee discounts. Perhaps he was just engaging in a little self-serve reparations. Who knows? Anyhow, his employer gave him a generous option – either resign, or be fired. Omar chose to resign. He signed the paperwork, and started to leave. On his way out, he opened his lunchbox, where he had stashed a brace of handguns. Why he felt the need to go to work with a lunchbox full of 9mm Rugers is, again, a mystery. He pulled out the pistols and opened fire on a group of about 40 people. A few seconds later, eight European-Americas lay dead, and two others were wounded. Omar then made two phone calls, one to his mother, and one to the police. To the police, he proudly declared, “I just shot me some racists.” By the time the police arrived, Omar had killed himself.

During the investigation and the news coverage, Omar’s family claimed that he frequently complained of workplace racial discrimination against him, and his White girlfriend said that he had taken cell phone pictures of a restroom wall upon which someone had drawn a noose and written a racial epithet. Well, as far as the MSM is concerned, if you can’t believe the word of a Black guy who had stolen a bunch of beer and murdered eight White people, then you can’t believe anyone. So, despite the absence of even the minutest particle of evidence to support the racism claims of Omar and his family, and despite the inexistence of the noose and n-word pictures, the MSM waved its collective hand like a Jedi and said, “Omar killed Racist White people. They deserved it.” To which millions of Blacks and a sickening number of White people responded by repeating, “Omar killed Racist White people. They deserved it.” Read more

Things sure have changed at National Review

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Does anyone remember James J. Kilpatrick? At one time, in the late 1970s to the mid 1980s he was apparently one of the most widely read columnists in the country. Do you know how he became famous? In the early 1950s he was an unknown editor/editorial writer for a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia. Then he began denouncing Brown vs. Board of Education, and championing states’ rights and segregation. He died in 2010. The following was printed in his obituary.

James J. Kilpatrick, a nationally syndicated columnist whose strongly conservative viewpoints on politics, law and language appeared in hundreds of newspapers over the last five decades and made him a popular, even parodied, television pundit, died Sunday at a Washington, D.C., hospital. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Kevin.

Kilpatrick, who once described himself as “10 miles to the right of Ivan the Terrible,” was the editor of a Richmond, Va., newspaper in the 1950s. His anti-desegregation crusades gave him national prominence, eventually leading to a thrice-weekly syndicated political column called “A Conservative View. Read more

Race realism: Breaking into the mainstream

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A friend  and I were talking about Arthur Jensen–the psychologist who reignited the race and IQ debate with his 1969 paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” published in the Harvard Educational Review. My friend said that starting with that paper there had been a huge amount of supportive research published in reputable academic journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. There have also been major works like The Bell Curve that provoked a national discussion in newspapers and intellectual media. And there have been major works by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn published by academic presses.

The thrust of my friend’s comments was that it was just a matter of time before it becomes standard wisdom, informing all respectable discussions of the issue, even among politicians and the mainstream media. Read more

Ethnic Pressure on Hollywood for Diversity

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There is no question that Hollywood is internally driven to promote diversity, as shown, for example, in two recent TOO movie reviews: James Edwards’ Driving Miss Ditzy: Review of The Help and Edmund Connelly’s “Unstoppable: Why I write.” Typical movies and TV fare not only turn on diversity themes, like The Help, but so much of it has relatively subtle pro-diversity messages, like bit parts for counter-stereotypical Blacks in otherwise all-White programming. The 24/7/365 propaganda machine.

But the other side of  the coin is that the media industry is under a great deal of pressure to promote diversity from outside activist groups, as illustrated by a recent LATimes article “Concerns about lack of minorities in NBC’s family; Latino groups raise an issue with KNBC, and NBC’s fall schedule shows a reversal from characters’ ethnic diversity last season.” Latino groups are upset that a Latino anchor on the local NBC affiliate was removed, so they don’t  have any Latino anchors. The altruistic and high-minded activist groups (who want these companies to hire more people like themselves) were able to get a memorandum of understanding with NBC to “recruit and retain more Latinos so that their workforces more accurately reflect the communities they serve.” So much for the idea that  immigrants only do jobs Americans won’t do. Executives are “are scrambling to address the concerns”–doubtless backed up with an implicit threat of a lawsuit or problems in renewing licenses if nothing is done.

Incidentally, one strategy that TV stations use to have their cake and eat it too is to hire White people with Spanish-sounding names. Here’s Carlos Granda, the reporter from KABC who interviewed me on the Breivik thing:

If people like Granda were the whole story about incorporating Latino diversity, it really wouldn’t be a problem for Whites. Read more

Driving Miss Ditzy: Review of “The Help”

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Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), Minnie Jackson (Octavia Spencer) and Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) in "The Help"

As we’ve noted many times before, the cultural Marxists never tire of fanning the dying embers of the “Civil Rights” movement (CRM) because it can always be relied upon to burst into flame, warming the hearts of a credulous American public. Whenever the Left encounters massive public skepticism regarding the benefits of homosexual marriage, open borders, global warming, Obama’s presidency, or whatever the liberal cause du jour may be, they can always depend on striking a sympathetic chord with mainstream conservatives and liberals alike by dusting off yet another reminiscence about the bad old days of segregation to remind us of how righteous liberals are.

Unpleasant memories like the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Vendee, and the gulags fade into nothingness when those evergreen images of police dogs and fire hoses flicker on the screen. If Tombstone, Arizona was the town too tough to die, the CRM is the radical egalitarian movement too good to be forsaken. Its memory must be kept front and center, and on life support forever, preserved in an environmentally controlled glass covered casket like Lenin’s corpse.

The Help is the movie industry’s latest contribution to this endless enterprise. Billed as this summer’s premier chick flick, The Help gives moviegoers a heaping helping of all of the bromides and stereotypes we’ve come to expect from a Hollywood production depicting the benighted South before the triumph of liberalism – stoic, long-suffering Blacks imbued with both homespun wisdom and impeccable moral rectitude. They never lose their tempers or lapse into profanity. They are the match to any and all circumstances they encounter, especially all impediments clumsily or maliciously thrown in their path by racist whites. Read more