If I had to pick the most prominent political blogs unaffiliated with news media, I would say the Huffington Post, Vox.com, and PowerLine. To the best of my knowledge PowerLine is the only one of those three blogs to make the cover of Time magazine. It is also the only conservative, Republican blog among those three.
I read PowerLine only very occasionally—perhaps three times in the last year. Two of those three times was during the rioting in Minneapolis. Since the blog’s authors reside in Minneapolis I thought they might have some particular insights into what was happening there. I didn’t find much that I didn’t already know.
The guys at PowerLine do a pretty fair job of expressing the conservative Republican point of view and Paul Mirengoff’s recent post on the director of the Centers for Disease Control’s proclamation that racism is a public health threat is no exception. I wanted to pass along one passage from the post:
For example, in reporting Walensky’s statement the Washington Post cites findings that “because of segregated housing, Black people are nearly four times more likely to die of pollution exposure that White people.†But to assume that housing patterns are the result of racism is to apply the dogma that all outcomes unfavorable to Blacks are due to racism.
Where Blacks live is the result of (1) where they want to live and (2) where they can afford to live. If Blacks want to live in upscale neighborhoods populated by Whites, but can’t afford to, we shouldn’t assume that racism is responsible. More likely, the Blacks in question haven’t done the things they needed to do — e.g., stay in school, avoid having kids too young, get and stay married — to afford the housing they want.
mostly to disagree with it. That is certainly the conservative, Republican point of view but I think it’s a grave over-simplification. It’s more complicated than that. While I believe that black people who “stay in school, avoid having kids too young, get and stay married” on average do better than those who do not, I think it’s a superficial analysis.
For example, in all of the ten states in which the most black people live (Florida, Texas, New York, Georgia, California, North Carolina, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio) the state contribution to the funding of public K-12 education is below the U. S. median. In practice that means that school funding is more dependent on local property taxes than would otherwise be the case. That is true both in Red States (Texas, Georgia, North Carolina) and Blue States (New York, California, and Illinois). In my view racism is among the reasons for that. That in turn is a contributing factor to poor schools where blackk people live. That’s what I mean by “more complicated”.
Illinois ranks dead last among the states in the state’s contribution to K-12 public education and I believe that racism is, at the very least, a contributing factor to that.
First, differences in public spending on education have no effect on differences in outcomes. We, in fact, spend too much on public education in nearly every state. Class size is another thing that does not affect outcomes. Outcomes are determined largely by IQ and behavior.
What differences there are are not due to racism. Aside from California, which has few blacks nowadays, each of the states with large black populations also has powerful black lobbying groups that have major influences on public education and other public issues. Racism is an excuse, not a cause. There is very little anti-black racism in white America nowadays. Hispanic America is another story. There is also very little anti-semitism in white America, although anti-semitism in black America is rampant and virulent. Virtually all barriers to blacks and Jews have disappeared since 1950, and privileges like affirmative action have become standard.
The only group in America subject to routine, systemic racism (and sexism) is white men.
If you do not account for genetic differences among the races, you are not serious about differences in outcomes: you are virtue signaling.
The variances within populations so overwhelm the differences between populations that it really makes no difference. Genetic background tells you exactly nothing about the potential for academic achievement in any individual student.
Furthermore, nearly all American blacks are mulattos with European ancestry from 1% to more than 50%. A whopping 10% of American blacks have more than 50% European ancestry and the genetic testing organizations have found that a third of American whites have some sub-Saharan black ancestry.
Among American blacks the Gullah-Geechee population is believed to have the smallest percentage of European ancestry with an estimated 3-4%. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hails from that population and only the most racist and/or partisan would doubt that his intelligence is at last a standard deviation above average for the entire population. One standard deviation above normal is pretty typical for the “professional class”.
Shorter: it’s a lot more complicated—multi-factorial like just about everything else. That’s true of the relation between genetics and academic achievement, the relation of spending to academic achievement, and the relation of class size to academic achievement.
indeed, school achievement has multiple variables, e.g. nutrition, general health, crime (hard to study whilst checking the triple locks hourly), hard to learn when the school heater is leaking CO2 into the classroom, then there’s the expectations of the ruling class for a docile, vote a straight party ticket, incurious work force, the occasional midnight visit when folks forget their place and issues of class, race, etc too.
Those are among the factors, walt moffett, but there are many, many more. For example, there is some evidence that suggests that teacher expectations of students are positively correlated with student academic achievement—the higher the expectations, the better the performance. And guess what? Black teachers typically expect more from black students than white teachers do. Cutting students slack even when well-intentioned may do them no favors.
That’s among the reasons I think that the present direction is so desperately wrong.
Mulattos. You wouldn’t want them to hear you call them that.
“black people who “stay in school, avoid having kids too young, get and stay married†on average do better than those who do not”
Sure, but the behavior described is low status in urban Black culture.
black is a color, Black is a culture. Most young Black identifying people don’t even aspire to the suburban White career climbing, homeowning, family oriented goals that we wish they would.
Get rich or die tryin.
Which brings to mind, is it even possible to have racial bias against a culture?
No that isn’t racial bias. It may be jingoism but not racism.
IMO black urban culture is retarding the progress of black people. At the moment there are some people selling a fantasy and benefiting from the sale. It won’t work for most of the people.
There are things that will work. Reduce political corruption. Reduce monopoly control. Reduce financialization. Conform to traditional habits and mores of successful people. What makes things so hard is that there is resistance to all of those.
“IMO black urban culture is retarding the progress of black people.â€
Urban Gangsta culture may or may not be a minority, but they are, by virtue of youth, energy, and firepower the minority that matters.
The military arm of the BLM movement.
They represent African American culture through domination.
Guess I have to go and fire all of my black doctors, PAs and APNs. They must be fake since black people dont really aspire to anything.
Steve
Please note that I’m defending black people, steve, but keep in mind that 5% of physicians are African Americans. That’s about 25,000 of a population of 42 million.
From that you can conclude like bob sykes that blacks are genetically inferior or you can conclude it’s because all whites are racists or you can speculate as I do that there’s something seriously wrong with urban black culture that encourages counterproductive behaviors and discourages productive ones.
I don’t deny as some do that white racism exists but I also don’t believe it’s the main impediment to black people any more than I believe that white racists are killing all of those young black men being killed on a daily basis on the South Side.
I think it just takes a lot more effort for many black people, not unlike what it takes for poor white people. Black people can become doctors, lawyers, CEOs, just like poor white people, but the odds are against them.
What I find really weird is the complaint that all of the racism is really aimed at white people. No shortage of white people, mostly men, in management positions and better paying jobs. A few areas have more minorities that expected but the real bulk of jobs dont go to minorities.
Steve
You had mentioned Clarence Thomas, no doubt much more intelligent than I but a quick glance at his career ladder suggests a more than a little lift from Federal Civil Rights efforts.
Wikipedia:
Thomas grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and was educated at the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. He was appointed an assistant attorney general in Missouri in 1974, ( at 26 years) and later entered private practice there. In 1979, he became a legislative assistant to United States Senator John Danforth, and in 1981 he was appointed Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
He is also an oreo, not to me, but to the culture you’d like to see emulate him.
To that culture, Tupac is the Christ.
@Steve:
If you are going to have diversity quotas in a tight job market, you must discriminate and Whites, Asians feel the brunt of that legal discrimination
as individuals.