Category Archives: Race

A South African Tells it Like It Is

Africa, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, South-Africa

[Angelina Jolie, Stan actually endures the daily realities of Africa. He has a few poignant words for Jolie and her ilk. Thanks for writing, Stan; we appreciate your perspective.—ILANA]

In The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly quotes a figure of aid given to Africa of half a trillion dollars. So, give or take a couple of hundred million either way, at which point exactly will governments, aid Agencies , politicians and the liberal left wake up to the fact that they might as well have flushed most of this money down the good old toilet for the amount of real aid this money purchased. Zimbabwe is now flat broke. People are starving and a once-thriving agricultural economy is all but non existent. As one travels north from SA the picture just repeats itself. The only real improvements seem to be to the residences, holiday homes , motor vehicle fleets, and weapon stashes of Africa’s numerous dictators and their goons. Starving people be damned.

South African society is becoming more corrupt by the hour, and our national past time is now violent crime (including rape and child rape) and corruption. Apartheid’s fault , right Angelina?
Your article “Angelina’s color coded kids is, unfortunately, spot on the button. Until the Jolies , Bonos and their ilk wake up to the real causes of Africa’s problems, you might as well get ready to watch another couple of trillion dollars being flushed down the same hole ,while poverty, death and disease continue to escalate. Reminds me of the words from Pete Seegers song ” Where have all the flowers gone.

When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
—Stan
Johannesburg
South Africa

Rational Profiling: Cabbies Do It Too

America, Individual Rights, Race

“To decrease the risks of an extremely dangerous job, [taxi drivers] profile potential passengers, taking into account a composite of characteristics, of which race is one. I venture that if human beings were not in the habit of constructing such cognitive categories and using these to predict and protect against risk and danger, our prehistoric ancestor Homo erectus might not have stuck around long enough to evolve into Homo sapiens.”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “Rational Profiling: Cabbies Do It Too.”

Racism Or Realism?

Race, Racism

In the words of the inimitable Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “If you are not called a racist, then, it seems to me, you are in intellectual trouble and it is high time to reconsider your own thinking. Professor Hoppe was attempting to console me, after someone marked us both with that Mark of Cain.
Now, based on my last column, Rah-Rah for Rioters, Connie Deady of The Reform Club implies the same:

“It is offensive to me to suggest that something is lacking in a race of people. Just because Jews at a different time and place were able to rise above doesn’t mean another race in another time should be able.
Or maybe I misunderstand [Ilana’s] point. I suspect that being hated might make one work harder. I don’t know that everyone hates Jewish people. Maybe they are jealous? I tend to think that Jewish people as a race are smarter than the rest of us.

I stated that Chinese and Jews have 1) overall endured far greater depredations in modern times than Muslims and African-Americans (notwithstanding category overlap). 2) Have coped with such contingencies admirably while Arabs and blacks… not so much.
Is this not an observation of reality? Am I not stating an objective fact? So why is realism framed as racism? Dare discomfit people with unsettling facts, and they threaten to tarnish your reputation with damaging labels; tell the truth, and, it would seem, you risk your reputation.
That pretty much sums the direction in which discourse has been steered.
Note that Ms. Deady gets herself into a bit of a bind with a performative contradiction—she herself observes aggregate trends among groups.

Bennett, Dowd, And The Dames From Yale

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender, Media, Race, The Zeitgeist

The good news first. Following “careful” capitalistic considerations, The New York Times has curtailed accessibility to its mundane columnists. If you want to read Maureen Dowd, you must sign up and pay. Yippee. About this woman’s simpering, cutesy prose the potent (Camille) Paglia said this: “Maureen Dowd—that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She’s such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading The New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.” Now even if Paglia happens to click on the Dowd hypertext, it goes nowhere, unless one is willing to pay for the flaccid fluff.
Speaking of the best of distaff America, the newspaper of record reported that

“Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others… say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.”

Girls at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton interviewed for the piece said they expected to enjoy perhaps a 10-year career, and then quit to tend their tots. Some would go back to work part time only; others not at all. The data.s reliability has been questioned, although the emerging trend is supported by “several surveys of Yale alumni and Harvard Business School graduates,” which show “the majority of women were not employed full-time 10 to 20 years after graduation.”
Parroting the individualist-feminist bromidic line, Cathy Young begs us not to ask women “to sacrifice their personal aspirations to a feminist vision of parity.” That would be “a peculiar kind of liberation.” Young pumps out banalities, but fails to get to the crux: As talented as these women are, for every one accepted into the Ivy League, an equally—or better—qualified man is rejected. That’s the way equal-opportunity admissions operate. The rejected men need the education because they’ll be working a lifetime to support women who can choose not to. Ever wonder why doctors are in short supply? Half the students admitted to medical schools are women. When kids come along, women give up the practice. Thereafter, they resume work on a part-time—or on some other highly personalized—basis. This and not discrimination is why men are frequently paid more: they’re more likely to have maintained an uninterrupted continuum of employment. Naturally, the experts at Gender Studies blame society for this “aberrant” traditionalism. They say there haven’t been efficient social changes to support the endless opportunities given to women.

“Society” is code for the pale patriarchy. That’s you, Bill Bennett. Poor Bill, he entered the lion’s den of demographics! Race baiters duly alighted on him for condemning utilitarian arguments for abortion. On his “Morning in America” radio program Bennett offered this reductio ad absurdum:

“If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

In response, the cultural cognoscenti hastened to label him a racist. Nobody was prepared to say why Bennett is a racist, though. Was it because he denounced as deplorable the idea of aborting black babies, or because his argument was premised on an unspoken truth about “the color of crime”? Instead, those who monopolize discourse in this country quickly stipulated the terms of debate. “It’s about time we discuss race honestly,” intoned the consensus keepers. But stick to the Three P’s—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness. Crime can be discussed as long as it is framed in bogus root-causes terms. Thus even the intrepid Bay Buchanan backed down when Donna Brazile, her CNN boxing buddy, insisted that if blacks were not so horribly and eternally disenfranchised, they would not dominate the violent-crime franchise. (What will it take, pray tell, to get whites to excel in basketball and in the 100-meter dash?)
So far the battered Bennett is holding up (Bush jumped into the ring too). One doesn’t, however, need to be a prophet to foresee a retraction in the offing. Spare yourself the burlesque and beef up your knowledge of the facts.