Africans

Black Racial Privilege and White Displacement in Education in the New South Africa

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The old South African educational system was racist. The new system is now also racist just that now Whites are the group that are subject to racial discrimination. The new South Africa does not judge on merit, but on your race…. so the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If you wish to read a good overall view of education and race in South Africa, see the South African Institute of Race Relations.

There are multiple levels of racial bias in the educational system. Let’s begin with the one that is a hangover from the old apartheid system. Education in SA starts in the mother tongue and then before high school it switches over to English or Afrikaans. Thus native English or Afrikaans speakers have an advantage over non-English speakers. Thus to compensate , on a racial basis, even if all your education has been in English you are given a number of extra marks when you take exams.

This means that a bright Indian student can achieve or exceed 100% after the racial adjustments have been made. The adjustments can be substantial and are made on a proportional basis to your marks received.  According to the newspaper reports, the adjustment is limited to about 10%, but this is substantial when competing for places. Read more

Negroid immigration in Holland: Antilleans and Somalis compared

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Until the 1970s there was no significant Negro presence in Holland. In the 1970s the first wave came from Surinam, in the 1980s the second wave from the Antilles and in the 1990s the third wave from Somalia. Since elites in the media and academic world never tire of saying that mass immigration is beneficial to the receiving country, it is good to put this thesis to the test using publicly available government sources and applying it to Negro migration. As the government uses regions of origin instead of ethnicity, we leave Surinamese out, because this group is composed of Whites, Blacks and Hindus. It is more interesting to use Antilleans and Somalis, because they are ethnically pure groups and they are both Negroid. These groups are particularly interesting because the Antilleans are descendants of African slaves under the White colonial regime. It will come as no surprise that it is common in the media and among intellectuals to claim that the reason for the backwardness of the Antilleans is that they were enslaved by Whites.  On the other hand, this argument fails to apply to the Somalis because they were not brought as slaves from Africa. Read more

David Starkey: No Refuge in Cultural Arguments

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British historian David Starkey’s indiscretion continues to rankle among the morally uplifted (“David Starkey’s views on race disgrace the academic world, say historians.”) 102 academics are horrified by his behavior, complaining that

his crass generalisations about black culture and white culturrrre as oppositional, monolithic entities demonstrate a failure to grasp the subtleties of race and class that would disgrace a first-year history undergraduate. In fact, it appears to us that the BBC was more interested in employing him for his on-screen persona and tendency to make comments that viewers find offensive than for his skills as a historian. (See the letter here.)

This episode is a good example of policing elite levels of discourse. People like Starkey represent a potentially grave threat to the system because they not only have excellent academic credentials, they also have access to the elite media. Deviations from the path of moral and political righteousness by people with Starkey’s stature must be severely punished. If at all possible, he must be removed from access to the elite media. The letter clearly aims at getting Starkey removed from his position at the BBC:

We the undersigned would therefore ask that the BBC and other broadcasters think carefully before they next invite Starkey to comment as a historian on matters for which his historical training and record of teaching, research and publication have ill-fitted him to speak.

I suppose it’s fair enough to bring up Starkey’s lack of academic publications on current race relations, although I rather doubt that they would have been disturbed if he had blamed it all on an evil monolithic White culture.  In the original interview he mentioned a study he did of rap lyrics illustrating a Black subculture of hyper-masculinity, dominance, and violence. This is the culture he was portraying as at the root of the rioting, both because it is common among Blacks (Starkey explicitly stated it didn’t characterize all Blacks, so his comments are quite compatible with different Black sub-cultures) and because the (relatively few) Whites involved seem to have similar tendencies.

The historians’ letter simply asserts that things are more subtle and differentiated than Starkey represented them without saying exactly how they are more subtle and differentiated in a way that would make a difference to what Starkey is saying. One would think that  when attacking  a colleague, they might feel a little guilty for not being more specific–that they would feel a need to say what added subtlety would have cleared away all the clouds. I guess the idea is that if moral righteousness is on your side, you don’t have the usual scholarly obligations. Read more

David Starkey on Black Culture and Non-Racial English Nationalism

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Telegraph caption: 'My friends believe my greatest error was to mention Enoch Powell’: historian David Starkey

Historian David Starkey is in damage control mode for his remarks on the UK riots. In The Telegraph (“UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture… and this is only the beginning“) he defends his main point that Black culture is the root of the problem, partly with this telling comment:

Even stranger is [Labour Party leader Ed] Miliband’s apparent notion that, far from militating against educational achievement as I suggested, “the gang culture of black London” must therefore be a seedbed for scholarship and sound learning. Odd, isn’t it, that Waterstone’s bookshop was the only business unlooted in the Ealing riots?

Starkey makes the critical point that UK elites have abandoned the White working class following Enoch Powell’s famous “rivers of blood” speech: Read more