Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Are you kidding? From the guy who (username changes notwithstanding) began his posting history on this site with gems like this?

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

your point being? both statements are obviously true. geez, you really need to grow a pair, anyway;)

Re: swimming pools
 

Good lord, it's as if people are looking for reasons to be bigots. I don't know if you think profiling is teh awesome or what (it's not), but no, you're wrong. You have to watch everybody. Even if I knew that person X was Y% more likely to get into trouble. Anybody can drown. Anybody can have a seizure, anybody pass out, anybody dive head-first into the shallow end. The places I worked what you did is just count everybody in the pool over and over again. It only takes 5-10 seconds.

Re: Let His Dream Come To Fruition
 

Good one, I had read about it earlier today... but who was wrong, Gates being defensive or the racist police? Who knows? Doesn't seem clear to me who was more at fault in this situation.

Maybe Gates' arrest isn't a good example, particularly when black men are committing a disproportionate amount of crime in parts of America (just look at murder statistics in urban America... it is an abomination). It behooves certain police departments to pay close attention to black men or black men in certain areas. I don't know Cambridge, so I don't know.

What's pathetic is Gates' neighbor not recognizing it was Gates. Not exactly a crack dealing thug looking for some cash to keep his dealer from capping his ass.

Edit: Gates also knew segregation so I can understand his anger. He can complain and finger point all he wants, although I'm not sure the cops are necessarily racist. They should have been smarter perhaps and figured out that the guy just broke into his own home.

Re: swimming pools
 

My reaction exactly.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

And never will be, or should be, according to many people who hold such a view.

I get it, there is a double standard, and given the history that is justified, or at the very least, tolerable. Maybe. Just don't take from that free reign to say anything or believe anything without criticism.

Even within the black population, radicals that agree with your thinking will go on the attack for daring to criticize, within house.


Never let nonsense and idiocy pass out of someones mouth like poisoned spittle without challenging it. You do minorities no favors by coddling broken logic.


You see, some of us are equal opportunity criticizers. If someone says something off, you better damn well call them on it, I do not care what race they are.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Maybe its my age (I have a feeling I am on the younger side here), or that I moved around to much to see the undercurrent, but I find all these racial diavlogs...boring.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Or maybe it's your race . . .

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Im hispanic, not really sure if that makes me more or less likely to care about this.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

How to address it? It largely has been addressed, that is the point. The case for race based preferences, today, and in future times is shriveling like a raisin in the sun.


But the bar has shifted, now it is not focused on equal treatment or equal opportunity so much as equal results between all populations. When some people harp on apples to apples comparisons, they shame themselves. Talk to me when the profiles of the different populations are equal in terms of marriage levels, graduation rates and the like and then we will get a closer apples to apples comparison.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

The main reason people care about the topic is because they are invested in a certain side or view of things. Sounds like this is simply beneath your concern. You are not obsessed with race, and in fact, seem to have so little interest in it to the point of actual boredom.


Most people are not there.


I am not. I have a certain view I consider more reasonable in this entire arena and I think some of the opposing views are genuinely harmful to the very population they seek to "protect" with the blatant coddling and degenerate treatment in terms of what is expected from certain groups.

Re: Let His Dream Come To Fruition
 

Yeah. Those damn black murderers in urban America.

Cities are just so dangerous.

Black Men The Victims Of A Lot Of Murders By Other Black Men
 

They are for a lot of black men. Do you know anything about New Orleans or Chicago, or the violence in these cities?

Information for Nikkibong:

49% of murder victims are black

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...7_crime10.html

Many young black men in Oakland are killing and dying for respect

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl.../MNS1RBLQ5.DTL

New Orleans: More than 80 percent of the victims were black males

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/...n3665137.shtml

One of the most disturbing trends in the United States is the increasing rate of teenage murders among African American youth

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264417

Three-year murder study indicates that young black males living in some sections of the Near West and Near South Side are 30 times more likely to be murdered than young white males living in white areas

http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index...lack_and_White

Number of Chicago Murders in 2008 Tops U.S. Soldier Deaths in Iraq

http://bobmccarty.com/2009/01/03/num...-reporting-it/

Dolla Killer (Alleged) Black, Surprise!

http://actingwhite.blogspot.com/2009...ged-black.html

Oakland Cops Killer

http://actingwhite.blogspot.com/2009...op-killer.html

America's BIGie Problem

http://actingwhite.blogspot.com/2009...e-problem.html

Killadelphia

http://insidekilladelphia.blogspot.com/

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

This is such a Reed College answer. They've condition you well Nikkibong.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

did they say whites and not minoritys are obessed with race, and racial grievance!?

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

It is so obvious that LIBERALS DO NOT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE CONSTUITION.

they just go on and on about how important it is to have tan skin and be from the bronx's instead of talking about what legal precedent Sotomayor was upholding in her Ricci descion. Cause like she admitted there is none!

They think that it should be illegal (as it is) for black people to not do well on tests for jobs like in the Ricci case! who can respect anyone with such a position?

They want rase based justice, to deny that is ridiclious when you watch liberals like Dayo just go on and on about how great it is that shes not a white male.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Not only did we elect a black president and legalized anti-white laws. Polls show there is more racism among non whites than whites. Americans in 1965 delibratly decided to become a non white majority nation with the 65' immgration reform act. We have racial quotas. It is illegal for black people to do too poorly on tests. There are 2 wasps on the court. A white male wasn't even in the mix for being nominated and probably won't be for a long time. In a few decades whites will be a minority. The big "racism" the NAACP "exsposes" today are non-racist monkey NY post cartoons. People need to shut up about white racism, and white privledge.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

With all of the fuss being made over the “wise Latina” comment made by Sonia Sotomeyer, people fail to remember that the worse Supreme Court decision in all of the American history – the Dred Scott decision – was a product of the imagination of 19th century white males. Chief Justice Roger Taney went much farther than was necessary in that case back in 1847 & 1850, and it begs the question: would a “wise Latina” have agreed with Taney’s decision in Dred Scott? Would a “wise Latina” have dissented? Would a wise Latina, if she were the Chief Justice, go as far as Taney did? I think the answer is obvious. Our world would be quite different if a “wise Latina” were chief justice back in 1847. I think we need more “wise Latinas”

Re: swimming pools
 

Maybe not:

Results. During the study period, 678 US residents aged 5 to 24 years drowned in pools. Seventy-five percent were male, 47% were Black, 33% were White, and 12% were Hispanic. Drowning rates were highest among Black males, and this increased risk persisted after we controlled for income. The majority of Black victims (51%) drowned in public pools, the majority of White victims (55%) drowned in residential pools, and the majority of Hispanic victims (35%) drowned in neighborhood pools (e.g., an apartment complex pool). Foreign-born males also had an increased risk for drowning compared with American-born males.
Conclusions. Targeted interventions are needed to reduce the incidence of swimming pool drownings across racial/ethnic groups, particularly adult supervision at public pools.

You must think the nerds at the NIH are bigots for advocating "targeted interventions" (which sounds like code for "profiling") at public pools, where "targeted interventions" would help the most black males. Do public pools even have lifeguard-less swimming times? It would certainly put a kink in your "no real difference" idea if all these deaths happened when there were lifeguards around.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Absolutely. For centuries the best legal minds came up with crap like Dred Scott and Plessey, bullshit that any black person would have seen through at the time. That any black person could have avoided colossal blunders like that scores a point for diversity. Julian Sanchez has the goods here.

Not that the rah/boo ranters care, but her actual record is pretty boring:

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/judge-s...full-data-set/

Re: swimming pools
 

But maybe you can write to the statisticians at the NIH who advocate "targeted interventions" across racial/ethnic groups at public pools and explain to them the idea of the "ecological fallacy."

Everyone has to play the odds. Duh.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

That was then, this is now. The judicial philosophy that is today popular among ethnic minorities offends public’s sense of justice. Therefore, evaluating a minority lawyer warrants more, not less, scrutiny when it comes to their positions on the principle of equality before the law. Odds are minorities are not all that wise on this particular issue.

Re: swimming pools
 

Oh hey, I was talking about lifeguarding. I think EVERYONE should learn how to swim plus learn water safety. In the schools I went to and later taught swimming/water safety in it was part of the curriculum. Everybody learned to swim. Two weeks of lessons every year grades 2-6. Even the disabled kids. Even the kids in wheelchairs. (When I was working at the pool the staff was even a little zealous about saving kids, "drowning is a leading cause of death in children", etc). It wouldn't surprise me if city kids aren't always so lucky to get that education.

But I think maybe you were bullshitting me a little bit with that report (thanks for the link btw). Further down:

So what's the lesson here? That lifeguards should know that black swimmers are more likely to drown in unsupervised hotel pools so therefore they should pay extra attention to them in supervised municipal pools? That lifeguards should be experts in compound probability and hypothesis testing? That profiling is hard, and if you do it you'll probably get it wrong anyway?

Look, it's simple, if you're a lifeguard, and you watch everybody, nobody drowns.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Well, judging on Sotomayor's answers and on the behavior of Republican senators, both affirmative action and the liberal judicial philosophy poll pretty badly.
As Dayo remarked, them Republicans must think they are appealing to somebody. lol

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

I think the idea that we should all be finding professional clubs to be in (whether they be sorted by religion, ethnicity, or even partisanship) to help our careers is saddening.

I have no desire to network with people from my demographic, and no desire to hear that people 'like me' ought to be 'better represented' in a field.

I also don't see Latinas dominating the legal field, so it's easy to give Sotomayor a pass here. But there's something to the conservative critique of her speech -- unfortunately, they passed on making the fair argument and opted for what I viewed as race baiting.

A missed opportunity to recruit someone like me to their party, I guess.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

As I read her speech, she's talking about about the innumerable decisions finding against the interests of women and minorities, all by white men, whom she declines to imply have acted in their particular interest, but instead have based their interpretations on a lack of understanding of what those decisions imply, because of the relatively privileged (an sheltered) perch from which they view the world. If anything, that's the opposite of a racist gloss. Her point was that in those cases, somebody with her perspective, and who had the requisite "wisdom" would likely have come to different, and by her lights (I'd add by the standards of this society as it now parses these things) better, decisions in those paeticular cases.

Calling her a racist based on those words was a smear, and it comes damned close to being a racist statement, itself.

I find the idea that minorities adhere in professional groups for mutual support not to be particularly shocking or dangerous. If you own the society, and your clubs hold the keys to admission to the higher levels of that society, then exclusivity has completely different smell.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Jeff, I don't disagree with you. I just think that tribalism and meritocracy are at odds with each other, and that her statement could too easily be construed as tribalism.

If she'd said 'people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds make better judges than rich folks', it would be far more palatable to someone like me. The only way Latina women are wiser than anyone else is their collective experience with poverty. So why not cut out the racial middle man and head straight for class?

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Mainly, I think, because that's not how people seem to behave.

My mom just started presiding over a group at her church. One of the first things that's occurred as a result is she's found a group of Hungarian women (her background is half Austro-Hungarian) with whom she's certain to bond pretty closely. (Never underestimate the power of the memory of food from your childhood.) People tend sort themselves through things that they share, and ethnicity can provide a thousand such bonds. John Derbyshire ha a good line a while back, even though he wasn't really arguing my side of this:

There are two circumstances when I find the sort of cleaving we're discussing to be pathological. One, when people only sort themselves by a single criterion, and two (as I said above) when the sorted group holds all the societal goodies.

I think expecting people to idealize their modes of association, as a general rule (as opposed to under specific circumstances when generalized harm can be shown), is expecting more than we should be asking.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

No, you can't really just fold everything into class or poverty. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, wealth, gender, age, rural/urban, etc -- the experience of them is all different, and no one person can have all the information from all those experiences. Two heads (or nine) are better than one only when there's different stuff in 'em. This is pretty straightforward stuff and hardly warrants the race war freakout coming from some quarters.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

its not more experience, unless all minorities come equipped with some sort of time/space-continuum-twister device. It is different experience. not more. not better.

the quote was racist. people on the left should just admit it and say - hey we don't care that she made one racist statement, her RELEVANT experiences, as a judge, makes her well qualified -which they do.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Jeff,

our laws are not about your ancestors - they are about people living now - we all have responsibility for our actions regardless of of what happened to our ancestors - or even what happened to us as children.

Don't you think its patronizing to say that we have one set of standards for this race, and another for that race? nevermind that race itself is a fuzzy concept.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

AA is one thing - i think it should be class based not raced based, but your arguments support the idea of AA and, if i don't entirely agree, they seem quite reasonable.

however, your arguments don't really make it clear to me why you find racist statements from any non-white acceptable, while clearly rejecting racism in general.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

how can you say that and not feel hypocritical?

I know if a white guy said the opposite, it would be considered racist - but wait!!! before you put your brain on autopilot and you start talking about 400 years of slavery... consider this: Sotomayor is not a "race" (and if she was - its not black so your slavery thing is bunk anyway). she is a person. she is not a symbol. shouldn't individuals be judged as individuals? if an individual makes a statement and the only way you can judge whether its racist or not is by knowing whether or not they are a minority - then what is racism?

seriously, in a non-point-scoring way, can you answer my question with the idea that i have decent intentions and I am not a racist?

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

I can't tell who you addressing.

Putting Every Child on a Path to College
 

I want to disagree, first, with Obama's statement that as a society we want to put every child on a path to a college education; and, second, with McWhorter's suggestion that the problem with the schools in black communities cannot be fixed from without but only from within.

What we really want is a society that educates every child in a way that will enable him to become a productive and happy member of society whether or not this involves a college education. It might mean a very good vocational education in some of the manual trades. Nothing wrong with that. The notion that life is a "race" to distinction -- something else Obama mentioned -- and that every kid is just as talented as the President is meretricious nonsense and a disservice to most ordinary citizens, white and black alike. Realism is the first desideratum for moral responsibility in this world.

As for McWhorter's suggestion -- unless I misinterpret him -- that the educational problems in the black community must be solved from within, again I disagree. The problems of incompetent teachers, for example, cannot be solved without addressing the power of the teachers unions and the whole concept of tenure. Likewise the problem of discipline cannot be addressed without empowering teachers and principals to easily document and punish disruptive behavior whenever it occurs.

I have proposed web cams in all public school classrooms where parents and school administrators and indeed anyone on the web who is curious will have direct access to what is going on, especially as it relates to student misbehavior or teacher incompetence, but also to pedagogy in general. These are public places, paid for by public money, and the public has a right to know what it is paying for, especially if it would be in the interests of the children.

But a change like this is beyond the power of the people in the local community to bring about. We need to get real. Feel goody platitudes about "no excuses" won't fill the bill. They are just another way of blaming the victims. Sorry John.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

Seriously, read the whole speech. It's incredibly mild. This is nothing to freak out over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us...pagewanted=all

Re: Putting Every Child on a Path to College
 

Did Obama say that, or is that a straw man?

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

i replied to jeff.

but i'd welcome your response as well.

most of the people I respect intellectually here are on the opposite side of this (not entirely - i think Sotomayor should be confirmed, but i also think her statement is just baldly racist, as well), but most of the reasons expressed seem to just gloss over the issue of whether the statement is racist and skip to 1) history of slavery (completely irrelevant as she is hispanic) or 2) white guys are whiners (again - irrelevant about whether or not this particular statement is racist or not).

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

I think that when you build a society based on a grossly immoral act aimed at a particular group of people, then you have have created a debt. It's awfully convenient if all you have to say is "So sorry for all that slavery, and those lynchings, we'll be colorblind after this!" after having institutionalized those obscenities over a period of centuries. I think it's particularly ugly that the people most likely to have benefited from the way things had been done are the ones now crying foul. Like I said above, what was done to people of African ancestry in this country bears no comparison to to the impediments for whites created by A-A.

Re: The Barbaric Yawp (Dayo Olopade & John McWhorter)
 

I would add that when someone hollers that it's the "culture" that causes black America to lag behind in so many areas (education, crime, broken homes etc.), and insinuates that therefore it's just time for them to fix their culture, be better, pull themselves up by their bootstraps etc., it's an overly simplistic and not-very-useful approach to the problems. Like it or not, our government, our laws, our prejudices did (and continues to) bear a large influence on the creation of this struggling "culture" and some of us feel like we should play a role in trying to fix it.