According to Michael Powell, Barack Obama is a cocky, smack-talking Negro. He doesn’t use the word “Negro” of course, but that’s the tone I got. At the end, it appeared that he was just pissed off because he didn’t get as much access to the candidate he thought he deserved.
Obama has received generally favorable press coverage, so I’m not going to pretend the media is out to get him. But, I’m still annoyed at the prima dona campaign press that pretends their personal feelings and relationships toward the candidates ought to be projected in larger terms as somehow being relevant to the campaign coverage. Personally, a lot of them were annoyed by Gore and were buddies with Bush, and so the campaign narratives reflected these things. Gore was an earth-tone wearing sigher and serial exaggerator. Bush was a straight-talking good ol’ boy whose inability to speak was in no way indicative of the depth of his thought.
I’d find it helpful if campaign reporters would tell us up front for a given article whether they’re reporting news or whether they’re engaging in a good old-fashioned high school snark fest or some combination thereof.
I passed the bar exam on the first–and obviously only– attempt.
Pila, good for you. 53% of African Americans pass the bar on the first try. That is a majority, just not as high as the 85% of whites who pass the first time.
Just wondering, would you say that you “act white”? Is that a problem for you?
Are you offended by “What White People Like”? I myself think that it is one of the best social satire projects I have ever seen. Offensive, yes, but so damn funny. And, of course, true for a certain kind of white person.
by his rules of logic, that is enough to condemn my entire race.
I’m am not condeming anybody’s race. I am condeming a culture that is engaged in by a certain percentage of one race, and truth be told, quite a number of our own race.
Actually, Thomas Sowell’s book is the only socio-historical book I know of that really explores where the black culture comes from. Interestingly, T is correct in one thing, this culture is actually WHITE redneck culture of the turn of the last century rural south.
Must be T’s “legacy of slavery and Jim Crow”, but that’s not what he was talking about, of course.
I have found this a very interesting discussion. In the late 50’s (when my mom was out of town visiting Grandmother in Georgia) I would attend civil rights marches. My dad thought that it would be a good learning experience for me.(I would have locked my own children in a room.) I learned alot that summer. I learned that a hot bus painted with spoiled chicken juice can make a whole group throw up on the way home. I learned that if a group of girls go into the “colored only” restroom, the restaurant won’t serve them. I learned that it is better to have water turned on you in warm weather than in cold. I learned that rotten tomatoes can leave stains–and smells that don’t come out. I learned that there were good and bad of all races. I knew that I was lucky to be an American– but there were times when pride was hard. I didn’t think that it would take this long for a black man or any woman to be in the race for President. T’s remarks are pretty much on the mark as to how things have actually transpired.
Buzzcut,
You wrote:
Right, so Pila’s “one of the good ones”?
As far as Hampton and Peltier go, I reckon it’s pretty easy to have jingoistic pride when one rewrites history to obliterate the bad things one’s country has done.
(Exception: such people usually find there’s no end of things wrong with America when the blame of all of them can be confined to the Democratic Party–by definition, this never constitutes running America down, because everybody knows that the Republicans represent all that is right, good, and Godly.)
And since you’re so fond of joke sites as oracles for discerning someone’s true personality, why not apply some rigor to your metric? You write down how you’d expect an exemplar of “white culture” and “black culture” (whatever those are) to respond to the quiz, then seal it in an envelope and give it to a neutral bystander. Your subject then takes the test and you live by the outcome.
But that’s not how this game is played is it?
If someone scores 75/75, you chuckle with self-satisfaction, thoroughly vindicated.
If someone scores 50/75, that’s a two-thirds match, so you chuckle with self-satisfaction, thoroughly vindicated.
If someone scores 38/75, that’s better than half, so you chuckle with self-satisfaction, thoroughly vindicated.
If someone scores between 1 and 37 (inclusive), you talk about how “it’s just a joke site”, but “it got [the subject] pegged pretty good for all that”, and chuckle with self-satisfaction, thoroughly vindicated.
If by some fluke the subject scores 0, you accuse them of having falsified their answers because the test was hitting too close to the mark, and chuckle with self-satisfaction, thoroughly vindicated.
So let’s get back to Logic 101. This is called an “unfalsifiable hypothesis”. That is, you cannot be incorrect no matter what the empirical outcome.
This works great for religious belief, but is a poor tool for understanding the world, or for persuading a rational audience of anything at all. If I had to guess, though, I’d reckon that neither of these is your aim–since you possess sufficient wit to string together an intelligible sentence and type it into a message board, it does not stand to reason that you’re a complete imbecile.
Instead, I reckon that if someone limits himself to the cognitive apparatus and rhetorical tools of antisocial blowhard who finds more validation in spewing his own bigotry than in working to understand people unlike himself, he’ll come up with posts much like yours.
I’ll close with the great Dennis Miller perfunctory valediction: But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Branden –
Who are you quoting? It isn’t anyone on this thread…
You would be more informative if you responded to what people say, rather than what you think they MUST mean.
The projection puts you into straw man territory, a bit.
But hey, that’s just my opinion – I could be wrong…
Parker,
The sentiment pretty much seems to ooze from posts #51 and #52, especially when read in their mutually reinforcing contexts.
I don’t insist that you draw the same conclusions I do.
Buzzcut: No, I don’t act white, and I don’t think you are the least bit funny. I am who I am–an African American female with a brain. I don’t have to spend time “arguing” with a semi-literate wingnut. I admire T and Branden for reasoning withy you, buth they are wasting time.
You spout statistics of dubious origin and then use them to smear someone you’ve never met and whose experiences you cannot possibly fathom. Michelle Obama didn’t pass the bar exam on the first try, so in your fevered mind that is “proof” that she didn’t deserve to attend an Ivy League school and presumably took the place of a “deserving” white person.
I mean no offense to anyone here , but I’ve grown up with, gone to college and law school with, and worked with a large number of white people who have been the beneficiaries of “affirmative action.” I’m not writing about an official program. I’m writing about getting handed grades, jobs, and opportunities that they most certainly did NOT earn on their own merit or intelligence. I have met and worked with white people who can barely read or write and who have the audacity to presume that their highly qualified black supervisor was given some opportunity that they should have been given. Many white people assume that they are qualified for any and every opportunity–whether they are or not–and that every black person is some unqualified buffoon who benefitted from affirmative action. Most blacks who are in high positions or who get into institutions of high quality will tell people like Buzzcut and his ilk this–they had to be super-qualified just to get through the door.
Parker: I can read between the lines of what Buzzcut wrote, and yes, he as much as said that I was one of the “good ones” without actually using those words. Branden was asking a question about what Buzzcut said, with the quoted phrase used for sarcastic effect. That’s not a straw man argument. If anyone is in straw man territory, it is Buzzcut, who has a permanent residence there.
Pila and Branden –
You may both be right, but you seem to have a certainty about your inferences that I don’t share.
Blog comments, like email, often come across more harshly than the author intends – which can lead us down side trails like the one we’re on now.
So, how should we deal with race in this country?
Ignore it?
Try to define it objectively?
Use it as a basis for some decisions, but not others?
None of the above?
Pila, question is still out there: how do you interpret that 53% of African Americans pass the bar on the first try, and 85% of whites do, 84% of Asians do, and 68% of Hispanics do?
If the statistics are of dubious origin (hard to see how when they’re from the Texas bar), by all means link to your own.
And Pila, there is a big difference between a program like AA that is codefied in law and enforcable through the criminal justice system and the informal system of perks that you talk about whites benefiting from.
And really, those of us who were not part of the upper class didn’t benefit from the “good old boy” network anyway. I’m just a son of humble proles who went to community college and a second class state school like Perdue Calumet. So don’t project your irrational phobias about the upper classes on me.
And being as that my public high school was 30% African American, and my elementary school was majority African American, I can easily argue that I did not benefit from any perk that was not available to any African American.
One more thing. This guy is the smartest person that I know. Absolutely brilliant.
Blog comments, like email, often come across more harshly than the author intends
Yeah, let me appologize right now for this. I am guilty of this. Being an engineer, I’ve got a certain writing style that comes across as harsh, simply becuase I’ve been trained to be short and to the point. And the medium doesn’t help.
If a person fails we can blame the person for lack of initiative, and it’s easy to compile first hand data on one person.We all have living dossiers and personal evaluations that follow us. But can whole groups of people fail by race or ethnic origin,and we just assume that the failure is race-based? Isn’t it more logical to assume a ‘societal imbalance’,for lack of a better expression?
But solutions must involve government effort( the people) because the private sector would garner no immediate profit.That’s why we supposedly have no pollution, no global warming,no education crisis etc.Just ignore the unworthy people. My opinion ,to be sure.
But solutions must involve government effort( the people) because the private sector would garner no immediate profit.
Is it a dichotemy? Is it either the government or the private sector? Those are the only choices?
I don’t think so. Society is much more complex than that.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about: Newark and the power of a billbord.
Funny, but there hasn’t been a murder since the billboards went up. What’s up with that?
“Funny, but there hasn’t been a murder since the billboards went up. What’s up with that?”
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
I guess we know now what’s no longer part of the public school curriculum since we had to make room for abstinence-only and intelligent design.
Branden, you must really enjoy this. I have always used the phrase “correlation is not causation”, but I had to Wikipedia your latin… :)
Parker,
“So, how should we deal with race in this country?”
(Note: The “you” in the following is the generic “you”, not Parker.)
Bluntly:
* Acknowledge that historically people have been fucked over because of the color of their skin.
* Acknowledge that still today, people get fucked over because of the color of their skin.
* Acknowledge that fear of the unknown is a natural part of human psychology.
* Recognize that when a person’s “unknown” includes people of other racial groups, ethnic persuasions, religious beliefs, etc., that a degree of psychological fear is inescapable.
* Given the above:
A) Promote diversity within our society so that our fearful psychological triggers are not pulled by our fellow neighbors and citizens, simply because they’re different.
B) Teach critical thinking better so that latent irrational feelings are more easily overcome by those who wish to do so.
* Acknowledge that the liberty and property expropriated from ethnic and other minorities generally accrues to someone else’s benefit.
Corollary A) Systematized race prejudice is generally not undertaken for the fun of it. In the case of black slavery, commoditization of human chattels, the corresponding market opportunities, and the free labor that could be derived therefrom was not even the most fundamental cause of Southern intransigence; the fact that slaves were capital assets and therefore collateralizable meant that the underpinnings of the Southern credit market demanded that slavery persist. Anyone who thinks credit markets are an esoteric point should read financial news outlets for a day or two. Or try taking out a mortgage. (It’s worth remembering that most Southern whites were not slaveholders. Slave ownership was concentrated among economic elites. Poor whites fled west to homestead the territories and try to build their own plantation empires because there was practically no way to achieve upward mobility in the Old South.)
Corollary B) Our society continues to be structured such that impoverishment and wealth are generational; economic mobility is limited and easier in the downward direction than the upward one. This means that the imposed destitution of an entire class of people will have lingering effects long afterwards.
* Members of privileged groups, such as middle-class whites, who bitch about affirmative action and “reverse racism” should, but do not, take the same medicine they prescribe to blacks and others: if you want that good job, work harder, be smarter, and ensure that you’re the best candidate for the position regardless of race.
* Be the change you want. Evaluate people as individuals, not by the color of their skin, and work on enhancing your own merit instead of worrying about what unearned rewards someone else might be getting. Stop exemplifying the pathetic example you’re so quick to find in others and resolve to manifest your worth as an individual in spite of the injustices, petty or great, that you suspect infest the world–including school lunch programs, AFDC, and Medicaid.
* In short, make the world a better place by behaving as you think “one of the good ones” would, and not acting like an ignorant, whiny cracker.
Jason,
Glad you enjoyed it. :)
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is actually more specific than “correlation is not causation”, because it speaks to the temporal relationship Buzzcut offered, but both are applicable here.
Okay, so the fact that Newark has not gone for 45 days without a murder since the 1950s means nothing? It is just a coincidence.
Branden, don’t guys like you say that there are no coincidences?
There is something going on there, and it has nothing to do with the police, the mayor, law enforcement in general, etc. etc. etc.
Maybe I’ll start a grassroots campaign to get a couple of similar billboards put up in Gary. You guys can donate some money. We’ll do a little experiment.
Maybe we can replace the “US Out of Iraq” billboard that’s on the Bohrman.
Jesus, Branden, you wrote a whole lot of words and said… what?
Cumbaya?
And if everything you wish came to pass, how would anything be better?
Would Gary somehow become a paradise? Would people start buying up property there and rebuild?
Of course not. Quite frankly, we in the educated white and African American middle class have very little to do with poverty in America, one way or the other.
For all my bitching about AA, it does very little one way or the other. If it stays or if it goes makes very little differnce. The number of people who benefit from it is too small.
What would make a big difference? How about increasing those high school graduation rates? For ALL races?
Ironically, the biggest impediment to Afirmative Action is the lack of African American high school graduates! Think about THAT for a while.
And don’t take the typical liberal line that more money needs to be spent. Gary schools spend more money than almost any district in Indiana. $14k per student. They have veru small class sizes too, on the order of 17 students per teacher.
If we’re going to do a Cumbaya moment, could we place the spotlight on people like Pila and Michelle Obama who have succeeded in “White Amerikkka” by… what? Embracing education? Fidelity? Hard work? Chastity even? (I don’t know, Pila, are you chaste? Michelle Obama was.)
I’m not immune to the argument that AA promotes education. I think that the evidence says that it does not (it just changes where that education occurs). But I could be persuaded with more data.
Oh, the irony of Branden quoting me “correlation is not causation”! I’ve been linking to studies and articles and whatnot! I’ve been hyperlinking my ass off!
Who’s the data guy here?
And to quote it to me in Latin is… so… “Stuff White People Like”?
# 47 is “Lawyers”, and we all know how much lawyers love latin!
Buzzcut,
Irony is not an argument. (Particularly when, like Alanis Morissette, you betray a misunderstanding of the concept.)
Hyperlinking to joke sites also does not an argument make.
Guilt by association is yet another logical fallacy you’re practicing.
I wish I could say I look forward to your next glut of faulty reasoning, but I get the feeling Doug’s blog will be graced with it regardless of its reception.
Branden, irony is #50
I’ve got plenty of serious links.
Like,racial disparities in bar exam pass rates, for example.
The “acting white” stigma reported among groups of black students was recently tested by Harvard economist Roland Fryer. Fryer used data on high school friendship groups to determine that, while white kids were more popular the higher their GPA, blacks and Hispanics whose average exceeded a certain level were increasingly unpopular. The phenomenon identified by Fryer has been corroborated by a large number of ethnographic studies — not only of blacks and Hispanics, but also of other less-advantaged groups, such as the Buraku outcastes in Japan, the Maori in New Zealand, the British working class, and Italian immigrants in 1950s Boston. It’s a bedrock fact of social psychology: Humans have a powerful and universal tendency to form self-policing social groups. With groups that are marginal to begin with, the tendency to enforce group solidarity can express itself through stigmatizing anything that looks like mainstream success.