Category: Social Justice

A complete anti-racism curriculum for all ages

by philg

In case your local school is mostly shut down and you want to make sure that your kids get the essentials, from the front of a house in the Boston suburbs…

(the neighborhood welcomes People of Color as long as they can afford the two-acre zoning minimum (about $750,000 for a vacant lot, and don’t forget to set aside $20-40,000 per year for no-longer-deductible-unless-Biden-gets-elected property tax))

Should children give their lunch money to the Massachusetts Bail Fund? “Mass. Bail Fund Answers Criticism After Freeing Convicted Sex Offender Accused Of New Rape” (WBUR):

A bail fund in Massachusetts is defending itself after freeing people facing serious crimes, including a convicted rapist who has since been charged with a new rape.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund said in a statement Wednesday that it bails out people based on financial need “regardless of charge or court history” because it believes pretrial detention is “harmful and racist.”

The Cambridge-based organization, whose motto is “Free Them All,” said criticism over its practices only serves to “prop up a white supremacist institution” that studies have shown imposes higher bails on people of color than whites for the same crimes.

From boston.com, “Convicted rapist let out after bail fund pays for his release allegedly rapes again”:

On July 15, the Massachusetts Bail Fund paid the $15,000 in bail to release a registered Level 3 sex offender awaiting trial on rape and kidnapping charges stemming from a 2018 case, according to authorities.

On Wednesday, he allegedly raped again. And authorities are now openly criticizing the fund for setting Shawn McClinton free, referring to him as a “sexual predator.”

McClinton, 39, was arraigned Thursday in the Dorchester division of Boston Municipal Court on new charges of aggravated rape, kidnapping for the purpose of sexual assault, strangulation, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. His bail was set at $500,000 on these charges, and Judge Lisa Grant revoked his open bail from the 2018 case, according to a news release from Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’s office.

On Tuesday night, McClinton allegedly met up with the victim, and they went from Quincy to Dorchester. When she tried to leave on Wednesday, McClinton allegedly wouldn’t let her and raped her at knifepoint. The victim reportedly suffered cuts and bruising and ultimately was able to escape. A passerby saw her afterward and called 911, authorities said.

(see also Richard Pryor regarding racial injustice in imprisonment: “I thought Black people killed people by accident”)

How about M4BL The Movement for Black Lives? Their May 2020 “vision” and “policy demands for Black power, freedom, & justice” says that the Jews in Israel are committing “genocide … against the Palestinian people.” If there is a full-scale genocide being perpetrated by Jews, why should the top priority of the righteous be the behavior of the police in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Portland, and some other U.S. cities? Nobody has accused these police departments of genocide. Why not give money to Hamas so that they can #Resist the Jewish-run genocide?

Let’s look at the reading list with some excerpts from Amazon…

I Believe I Can is an affirmation for boys and girls of every background to love and believe in themselves. … [the author] Grace was bullied throughout her childhood

Why is this limited to affirming “boys” and “girls”? What about children with other gender IDs?

Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table: Will Allen is no ordinary farmer. A former basketball star … he can see what others can’t see. When he looked at an abandoned city lot in Milwaukee he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world. No space, no problem. Poor soil, there’s a solution. Need help, found it. Farmer Will is a genius in solving problems. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation named him one for his innovative urban farming methods, including aquaponics and hydroponics.

Might this mislead youngsters regarding farming economics? How can a hydroponic farm built by Will Allen compete with a regular farm in Mexico plus a truck to bring the produce to Costco? (Wikipedia says that at least one of this guy’s urban farming projects went bust.) If the answer is “we need to eat it right after it is picked” then might it still be cheaper to airfreight the produce than to grow it in a city with exotic life support? (NPR says that I’m wrong: “How Hydroponic School Gardens Can Cultivate Food Justice, Year-Round”)

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is an adaptation for youngsters of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America: (from a reader) This is one of the greatest history books I’ve ever read. I was highlighting passages on pretty much every page, mostly because so much of what’s here was new to me. Hey, I’m an upper middle class white guy who’s trying to examine my own privileges, understand more of why there’s so much racism in this country and learn how I can do better. This book, which was undoubtedly extremely difficult to write, is an amazing resource, one I’ll be referring back to probably for the rest of my life. We all owe Ibram X. Kendi a tremendous debt.

Wikipedia says Ibram Kendi is director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. So people who don’t want to spend $20 on these books can pay $77,662 per year to watch a video by Dr. Kendi. (If “privilege” is all about being white, how is it that “in 2016, Ibram X. Kendi became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction” (“How to Be an Anti-Intellectual” from City Journal)? Shouldn’t Americans who identify as Black need to work harder and for more years in order to get to the same places as Americans who identify as white?)

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Blacks and Jews band together to fight the Blondes

by philg

“United Sued for Packing NFL Charters With Young, Blond Crews” (Bloomberg) warms my heart on so many levels, and not simply as a proud former Delta employee.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. packs its charter flights for sports teams with young, blond crews and bars older flight attendants from working the plum routes, according to a new lawsuit.

The attendants — a Black woman who has worked for the airline for 28 years and a Jewish woman with 34 years of tenure — say that they both tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get assigned to work the charter flights.

Sharon Tesler and Kim Guillory said they were told by supervisors that they were unable to get work on the charters because they weren’t on “preferred” lists that were based on team preferences, according to the complaint.

They said they later discovered that young, white blond attendants — with less seniority — were given the assignments.

United Airlines “has adopted and continues to implement procedures that are designed to ensure that young, white, blond/blue-eyed, female employees receive positions with the charter program, while more senior, and Black and Jewish employees such as plaintiffs, do not,” they said in the complaint.

Is it fair to say that this repairs all of the damage from the Jesse Jackson Hymietown incident?

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Invest in BLM sign-making company?

by philg

“Some Protests Against Police Brutality Take a More Confrontational Approach” (NYT):

The protests are moving into white residential neighborhoods, where activists demand that people choose a side.

Terrance Moses was watching protesters against police brutality march down his quiet residential street one recent evening when some in the group of a few hundred suddenly stopped and started yelling.

Mr. Moses was initially not sure what the protesters were upset about, but as he got closer, he saw it: His neighbors had an American flag on display.

“It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, ‘How dare you fly the American flag?’” said Mr. Moses, who is Black and runs a nonprofit group in the Portland, Ore., area. “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”

Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational — and personal — approach. The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come “out of your house and into the street” and demonstrate their support.

Can investors make money by investing in companies that produce BLM and other social justice signs? And then, once every house in the U.S. has a BLM sign, how will the protesters sort out the true believers from the sham sympathizers who merely place signs as protection?

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New email signatures for white teachers in all-white suburb

by philg

The overwhelmingly white unionized public school teachers in our nearly all-white, all-Asian suburb have begun appending, in a red font, the following signature text to every email message…

Lincoln Public Schools are united in standing with those who are calling out ingrained racism and violence toward people of color in our country and calling for acknowledgement of humanity in one another. This is not just an issue for black and brown people, but an issue that impacts all of our futures. We must:

  • Listen to each other, showing compassion and empathy
  • Never turn our backs on senseless brutality [ordinary brutality is okay?]
  • Continue to denounce injustices
  • Unify our voices to create systemic change

During this painful time, let us work together to be a light to break the darkness that silence can bring. Let us facilitate education, healing, connection, and let us support each other and our communities. Every one of us needs to be part of the solution and we must work together to ensure that there is justice for all.

[Note that relaxing the two-acre zoning minimum so that black and brown people could afford to move into our suburb is not mentioned. And we’re supposed to listen (free), not pay reparations (costly).]

Maybe they will show up to work in these T-shirts?

and for the feet…

Related:

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Princeton case highlights the need for immunity after public confession of racism?

by philg

American Great Awakenings have tended to require public confessions of sin. Stand up in front of the congregation, admit that you’re a sinner, and let the healing and forgiveness begin. This was extended to Alcoholics Anonymous. Stand up and admit that you’re an alcoholic. More recently, this has been adapted for the Great Awokening: stand up and admit that you’re a racist.

Princeton tried this collectively, via a letter from its president, and was not rewarded with the conventional “Hello, Princeton,” but instead with a letter from the Feds demanding to know if Princeton was lying in past years about not being racist (or maybe Princeton is lying now about being racist?).

From a 2008 coast-to-coast helicopter trip (ferrying a Robinson R44 from the factory):

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Fewer retail stores in cities due to higher insurance rates going forward?

by philg

“$1 billion-plus riot damage is most expensive in insurance history” (Axios):

The vandalism and looting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police will cost the insurance industry more than any other violent demonstrations in recent history, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring were mostly peaceful, but the arson, vandalism and looting that did occur will result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims — eclipsing the record set in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers who brutalized Rodney King.

Shops in the suburbs weren’t torched or looted, right? Rational insurance companies will therefore charge higher rates going forward for retail stores in urban areas. Combined with the extra risk of being shut down due to coronapanic, the risk of losing customers as richer city-dwellers flee during coronapanic, and the higher minimum wages that some cities mandate relative to surrounding suburbs, why would rational business owners decide to continue operating a lot of these shops? So the white suburbanites who came into the cities to join the protests, ostensibly to help their Black brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, will have ended up permanently degrading city life for Blacks of all gender IDs.

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Will Black Americans have more spending power after receiving reparations?

by philg

Suppose that President Kamala Harris writes every American who identifies as “Black” (including Rachel Dolezal and, everyone’s new favorite Black American, Jessica Krug) a fat reparations check. Will Black Americans have greater spending power as a result?

Some Blacks are on means-tested welfare programs, such as public housing, Medicaid, or SNAP. If they receive a reparations check, maybe their “means” will now be greater and they’ll have to pay more for housing, health insurance, and food. A 2015 Census report:

At 41.6 percent, blacks were more likely to participate in government assistance programs in an average month. The black participation rate was followed by Hispanics at 36.4 percent, Asians or Pacific Islanders at 17.8 percent, and non-Hispanic whites at 13.2 percent.

The Son also Rises (Clark 2014; Princeton University Press) contains a survey of the academic literature regarding the effect of family wealth and unearned cash transfers on children. In 1832 there was a land lottery in Georgia where winners received a parcel of land roughly equal in value to the median family wealth at the time (i.e., the typical winners ended up with twice as much wealth, about $150,000 extra in today’s money). How did the children of the winners do?

They were no more literate than the children of losers. Their occupational status was no higher. Their own children in 1880 (the grandchildren of the 1832 winners) were again no more literate. Worse, they were significantly less likely to be enrolled in school than the grandchildren of the losers. … Wealth is not statistically higher for lottery winners’ children…

(Clark also reviews a study of Cherokee Indians who, starting in 1998, received substantial boosts to their income from casino profits. For children who had not been living in poverty, “there was no measurable change in any educational outcomes, including high school graduation rates…” This was despite the fact that a child who graduated high school would immediately become eligible for his or her own $4,000-per-year payment.)

“Divorce laws and the economic behavior of married couples,” by Alessandra Voena, a University of Chicago economist, concluded that an increased opportunity to obtain cash via a divorce lawsuit reduced reduced married women’s labor force participation rate. Similarly, successful child support plaintiffs generally reduce their working hours so that cash from the defendant is not turned into a higher standard of living for the child, but rather increased leisure time for the adult plaintiff.

See Long-term effects of short-term free cash (guaranteed minimum income experiments) for a reference to a paper regarding how just a few years of free government cash resulted in a lifetime of reduced labor force efforts. Those who got the cash were more likely to end up on disability and, if not Hispanic, to divorce their husbands and wives (additional gender IDs were unavailable in the 1970s).

Readers: What do you think? Will the free government cash result in higher spending power and standard of living or reduced working hours and additional leisure time for Americans who identify as “Black”?

Related:

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Can University of Chicago expel students who lose interest in Black Studies?

by philg

The home page of the University of Chicago’s Department of English currently contains the following statement:

The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.

For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black Studies page.

I’m wondering how this can be enforced. Suppose that an accepted student, a few months after enrolling (which means turning on Zoom from his/her/zir/their mom’s house?), decides “In demography and in the workforce, Blacks in the U.S. are being replaced by Hispanic and Asian immigrants, so in looking toward the future I would rather do a thesis in Hispanic Studies.” Can the university then expel the student? The department says:

all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African American, African diasporic, and colonized peoples, regardless of area of specialization, as a core competence of the profession.

What if, after a year of reading these literatures, a student says “these authors are terrible compared to what Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans have written in English; I want to do my thesis on the lyrics of K-pop”? Does that student similarly get expelled?

From a cross-country trip in the Robinson R44:

Update, September 22: the home page has been edited to remove the Black Studies-only limitation. But the brave language lives on at archive.org:

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Hollywood says it is okay to be racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ half the time

by philg

“Oscars Announce New Inclusion Requirements for Best Picture Eligibility” (Variety):

For the 94th and 95th Oscars ceremonies, scheduled for 2022 and 2023, a film will submit a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form to be considered for best picture. Beginning in 2024, for the 96th Oscars, a film submitting for best picture will need to meet the inclusion thresholds by meeting two of the four standards.

If these standards are important, why does a film need to meet only half of them? Would we say that a person was a virtuous anti-racist if he/she/ze/they went to only half of the local KKK gatherings?

What are America’s victim groups, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?

•Women
•Racial or ethnic group:
•Asian
•Hispanic/Latinx
•Black/African American
•Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native
•Middle Eastern/North African
•Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
•Other underrepresented race or ethnicity
•LGBTQ+
•People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

(Only “LGBTQ+” and not “LGBQTIA+”?)

Also… when is victimhood measured? At the time that the victim is hired? At the time that the victim first works on the film? At the time that the victim completes work on the film? At the time of the Academy Awards? We wouldn’t deny, I hope, that gender ID is fluid and changeable. Hollywood itself loves to give us examples of people who change their LGBTQIA+ status from negative (cisgender heterosexual) to positive (e.g., homosexual). Racial identification is fluid. Most recently in the news, Jessica Krug, whose brilliant Ph.D. colleagues accepted her as a Black woman (NY Post):

Finally, what actually qualifies under the LGBTQIA+ banner? The actor tells the producer that he/she/ze/they had sex in an LGBTQIA+ manner? How does that move the needle with the general public unless the actor has sex in an LGBTQIA+ manner on screen? Rock Hudson, for example, allegedly identified as LGBTQIA+, but his on-screen characters were cisgender heterosexuals. Why did that advance the LGBTQIA+ movement compared to simply hiring a cisgender heterosexual actor?

(Even a movie with an all-Asian (a victim category for Hollywood) cast and a female lead is objectionable currently: “Disney Wanted to Make a Splash in China With ‘Mulan.’ It Stumbled Instead.” (NYT, complaining that Disney did some filming in a Muslim area of China (wouldn’t the revenue actually be good for Chinese Muslims?)))

Related (going through old posts to see if any of them involve movies that would qualify):

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BLM theme meals at fast food restaurants?

by philg

Stopping alongside one of the elegant restaurants that the Maskachusetts License Raj hasn’t managed to shut down, I was offered a gourmet meal:

If there can be a “Travis Scott Meal”, why not a “Jacob Blake Meal” for those who want to demonstrate their commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement? For those who never think about anything other than COVID-19, a “Dr. Fauci Meal” whose contents may change from day to day? For the politically oriented, a “President Harris Meal”?

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