Category Archives: Affirmative Action

House Husbands

Affirmative Action, Economy, Feminism, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Labor, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them:

“Seven of the 18 women who are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—including Xerox’s (XRX) Ursula Burns, PepsiCo’s (PEP) Indra Nooyi, and WellPoint’s (WLP) Angela Braly—have, or at some point have had, a stay-at-home husband. So do scores of female CEOs of smaller companies and women in other senior executive jobs. Others, like IBM’s (IBM) new CEO, Ginni Rometty, have spouses who dialed back their careers to become their powerful wives’ chief domestic officers.

This role reversal is occurring more and more as women edge past men at work. Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S.”

Buried within the Bloomberg Business Week edifying report above is that the “recession” is, more than anything, a man recession:

“During the recent recession, three men lost their jobs for every woman. Many unemployed fathers, casualties of layoffs in manufacturing and finance, have ended up caring for their children full-time while their wives are the primary wage earners. The number of men in the U.S. who regularly care for children under age five increased to 32 percent in 2010 from 19 percent in 1988, according to Census figures. Among those fathers with preschool-age children, one in five served as the main caregiver.”

[SNIP]
Alas, women still complain when a poor bloke—who has put in more years and hours and happens to be more talented—earns a bit more. I dispelled distaff America’s claims of disadvantage long ago: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.”

UPDATED: Snarling Sister Is Back, In Time for Halloween (Winnie Mandela/Madam Obama)

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Conflict, Critique, Politics, Racism

Michelle Obama has managed to lie low since the times I described her as “Militant Mama Obama” (February 22, 2008). In that column, I ventured that, “If anything, her charmed life has made Michelle Obama more racially militant.” As the woman complained in a blatantly banal university thesis, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.”

But she’s back!

The Washington Times has details of the strategy undergirding M’s latest moaning:

… She will go to the opulent homes of rich people across the country to tell them how rich people are to blame for America’s woes and guilt them into giving millions for her husband’s campaign. … [How] rich people (white, of course) certainly don’t want black people to succeed. They want to squelch success based on what people look like, how much money they have. … And the Princeton graduate will tell supporters they simply can’t comprehend the significance of what’s occurring today in America. ‘It can be hard to see clearly what’s at stake – because these issues are so complicated …’

MORE.

Michelle Obama’s sentiments seep out from that festering reservoir of racial animosity—the same cesspool wherefrom the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their perennial strikes.

UPDATE (Oct. 1): WINNIE MANDELA/MADAM OBAMA. Robert, there is a similarity in anger levels between the two women, although Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had considerable cause for anger. The woman had it tough. I mention Winnie in the book you just reviewed on Amazon. Winnie, moreover, was a looker, unlike MO. I saw Winnie in person when I attended Tutu’s inaugural with my dad. She was then drop-dead (if deadly) gorgeous. But I mean Beyonce beautiful.

Those Darn Differences

Affirmative Action, Debt, Economy, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Regulation

“Parity in prosperity and performance can be achieved only playing socialist leveler” (Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. page 127). And even then, leveling legislation, such as compulsory preferential hiring or money lending, will eventually fail. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation’s two largest minorities—Hispanics and blacks—has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession, according to new research.
The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Hispanic households, according to an analysis of newly available 2009 government data by the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank.
The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago, with the gulf separating whites from other groups twice as wide as it was in the two decades prior to the recession and 2008 financial crisis, according to the study.

Darker Clouds On the Horizon

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Economy, Race, Taxation, Welfare

The dynamics Pat Buchanan describes in his latest column, “Black America vs. Obama?,” might very well be borne out: African-Americans will likely turn on the black president who was forced to slash the oink sector in which they are overrepresented.

Though 10 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, African-Americans are 18 percent of U.S. government workers. They are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of the State Department, 37 percent of Department of Education employees and 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the employees at the Government Printing Office and 82 percent at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.
When the Obama administration suggested shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants whose losses of $150 billion have had to be made up by taxpayers, The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.
In Washington, D.C., we have also seen the result of government cuts on African-American leaders who had to approve those cuts.
When Mayor Adrian Fenty stood behind schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who fired hundreds of teachers, most of them African-American, the wards east of the Anacostia cut him dead. In 2010, Fenty was thrown out by many of the black voters who elected him

Is this is a welcome development? Hardly. (And I fully understand that Mr. Buchanan is hardly making such a claim.)

While coalitions of the aggrieved are good, where here is there a coalition for freedom-loving Americans to pursue? Fifty percent or so of Americans—those who pay the taxes—want the excesses of the oink sector curtailed. The African-American cohort Buchanan cites wants these programs to carry on in perpetuity.

It’s possible that Mr. Buchanan is simply warning that African-Americans are just going to get angrier and angrier.