Category: Social Justice

Was John Lewis an advocate for Black Americans?

by philg

John Lewis, a Civil Rights leader of the 1960s who became a Member of Congress, died two weeks ago. I hope it is not too soon to wonder whether he was actually working against the interests of the people whom he claimed to be helping.

From his 2011 press release:

“I am a very proud member of the Congressional Black Caucus,” said Rep. John Lewis. “Throughout my quarter century in Congress, the CBC has been a tireless, consistently progressive voice, always advocating for and insisting upon inclusion as a mandate of our democracy. The CBC is a powerful and seasoned advocate for African-Americans and all people who have been left out and left behind in this country.”

Was Mr. Lewis actually an advocate for the interests of African-Americans?

In his role as a member of Congress, Lewis was a reliable advocate for increased low-skill immigration. Example: 2018 press release. He voted “no” on Donald Trump’s border wall and was rated 0% by two organizations that seek to restrict immigration (ontheissues.org).

“Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER, 2007):

One reason, the authors argue, is that black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx than white employment. For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points.

That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.

In other words, Mr. Lewis was a thoroughly modern U.S. politician. Thanks to BLM, Black Americans (and their white “allies”?) can choose their statues, but immigrants will take their jobs, compete with them for rental apartments and public housing, space and resources in the public schools, space on the jammed roads and packed (now with Covid-19!) subway cars and buses, etc.

Readers: Can a politician actually advance both the interests of low-income African Americans and would-be low-skill immigrants at the same time? The U.S. does not have infinite financial resources nor infrastructure capacity. When an immigrant moves into public housing in San Francisco, for example, that unit becomes unavailable to a Black American, no?

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (by George Borjas, Harvard Kennedy School labor economist, in 2016): Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.
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NASA’s new mission: Inclusion

by philg

A friend’s Facebook post from July 23:

NASA today added Inclusion to its set of core values, reminding me, again, why this is the best place to work in government.

Inclusion – NASA is committed to a culture of diversity, inclusion, and equity, where all employees feel welcome, respected, and engaged. To achieve the greatest mission success, NASA embraces hiring, developing, and growing a diverse and inclusive workforce in a positive and safe work environment where individuals can be authentic. This value will enable NASA to attract the best talent, grow the capabilities of the entire workforce, and empower everyone to fully contribute.

Incorporating Inclusion as a NASA core value is an important step to ensuring this principle remains a long-term focus for our agency and becomes ingrained in the NASA family DNA. Together, we can continue to accomplish great things for all of humanity.

There is a new logo/graphic to go with this:

So… making employees feel welcome (why did they run a hostile work environment from 1915 through 2020, more than 100 years?) is now at the same level as “safety” (not killing pilots and passengers on the various rockets, airplanes, and helicopters operated by the agency).

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Boston Bruins hockey team and Black Lives Matter

by philg

“How Bruins Plan to Support Black Lives Matter During National Anthems” (NBC Boston):

The Bruins plan to lock arms during the playing of the Canadian and U.S. national anthems prior to games in the restarted 2020 NHL season, the team announced Tuesday.

The gesture will be “a sign of solidarity with the Black community,” per the team, and is “solely intended to be a positive sign of support for the Black community, and a way for us to use our platform to help end racism.”

Is this the ultimate proof that BLM is actually a movement by and for white people? (click on the photo below, the result of typing “Boston Bruins fans” into Google image search, and let me know if you see any people of color!)

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Focus on Black Lives Matter degrades business performance?

by philg

I am hopeful that readers will notice a more responsive server as of last night. The virtual server behind this site had hit a load average of 21 while simultaneously using only 1-3 percent CPU for user processes. How is that possible? The Unix top command was showing up to 98 percent CPU used for “st”. If you’re a dinosaur like me and most of what you learned about top was learned in the 1980s, this is confusing indeed. “st” is “steal time”, i.e., time that was “stolen” by other virtual machines on the same host and/or the hypervisor. If st is more than 10 percent, that’s a sign that the underlying physical machine is overloaded.

Why hadn’t the hosting service noticed this issue and migrated some of the demanding virtual machines off the physical machine to prevent this kind of overload? What could they be doing if not writing a Perl script to catch problems like this? “We stand with the Black community”:

(The page notes that the company will offer “Paid time off for voting”. Perhaps there will be a few decades of unpaid time off for any employee who shows up with an “All Lives Matter” T-shirt or a MAGA/KAG hat!)

The company is sufficiently committed that a banner reading “Black Lives Matter. Linode is committed to social justice and equality.” appears at the top of every page for a customer’s tech nerds. Want to know the operating system running underneath your server? IPv4 versus IPv6 traffic? See if your server was backed up? The hundreds of pages that show information like this are all headed by a “Black Lives Matter” message.

Readers: On the theory that humans aren’t great at focusing on multiple goals at the same time (witness nearly the U.S., now entirely devoted to the single goal of avoiding coronadeath and the folks who switched attention to BLM immediately abandoned all thoughts of social distancing), is it fair to say that any company that truly commits to Black Lives Matter will also deliver an inferior product and service compared to if they hadn’t made this commitment?

Related:

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Musicians of color in classical music

by philg

In May I wondered “What happens to classical musicians in the Age of Corona?”:

The audience for live classical music and opera is perilously close to the 82-year-old average age of a Covid-19 victim in Massachusetts (source). Concert venues are shut down by orders of the governor, First Amendment right to assemble notwithstanding. Even if it were legal to host a concert, would the core of elderly patrons show up?

The New York Times has an answer: the musicians become more diverse, at least in terms of skin color (but if, for coronasafety, there is a limit of one audience member at a time, there can’t be too much skin color diversity in the audience!). “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions”:

American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino. At the time of the Philharmonic’s 1969 discrimination case, it had one Black player, the first it ever hired: Sanford Allen, a violinist. Today, in a city that is a quarter Black, just one out of 106 full-time players is Black: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet.

The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

Related:

  • “A Famous Study Found That Blind Auditions Reduced Sexism in the Orchestra. Or Did It?” (Reason) : In May, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman took a deep dive into the study. He described them as “not very impressive at all,” and had great difficulty trying to locate the 50 percent statistic within the modest findings. “You shouldn’t be running around making a big deal about point estimates when the standard errors are so large,” he wrote. “I don’t hold it against the authors—this was 2000, after all, the stone age in our understanding of statistical errors. But from a modern perspective we can see the problem.”
  • Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (starring Will Ferrell, on Netflix, in case you are tired of old recordings of older music)
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New name ideas for the Redskins? How about Washington Vampires?

by philg

The Washington Redskins will soon be renamed. As with the Land O’Lakes redesign, white people are getting rid of the Indian and keeping the land (stadium/revenue).

Old:

New:

What is a good name for a football team in a city whose main industry is tax-and-spend? How about “Washington Vampires”? “Washington Parasites”? “Washington Mosquitoes” (since there are now hundreds of different taxes, many of them individually small)?

Native Americans continue to be replaced in North America with immigrants, but lately most of the immigrants have been Hispanic. If we want to celebrate a group of people, but update that for who is actually living in North America, how about the “Washington Latinx”?

And, before it disappears into a memory hole, the old team logo:

Image

Readers: What are your best ideas?

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Priority for Students of Color in returning to public K-12 school

by philg

From the Educrats in Washington State: Reopening Washington
Schools 2020 District Planning Guide. The phrase “students of color” occurs six times.

Good news for Rachel Dolezal: white students will be home driving parents crazy while “students of color” will enjoy in-person instruction and socializing with other students.

If that isn’t specific enough, “Prioritize face-to-face service for students that are most impacted by the loss of in-person services, including: … Students of color”

(“intersectionality” is involved, which presumably is a positive for the job market for PhDs in comparative victimhood)

I wonder if this is another good example of what Sweden has gained by just giving the finger to the coronavirus. Sweden isn’t pitting families of different skin colors against each other in competing for scarce slots in public schools.

Also, is this another example of a Constitutional right that Americans have lost due to the governor-declared emergencies? The Fourteenth Amendment was used to require school integration because of the Equal Protection Clause. How can states re-segregate their schools in light of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of this clause?

Related:

  • “N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall” (NYT): Classroom attendance in September will be limited to only one to three days a week in an effort to continue to curb the outbreak, the mayor said. … The decision to opt for only a partial reopening, which is most likely the only way to accommodate students in school buildings while maintaining social distancing, may hinder hundreds of thousands of parents from returning to their pre-pandemic work lives, undermining the recovery of the sputtering local economy. [Wouldn’t the parents be better off moving to a state with (a) fully open schools, and (b) good Internet connectivity?]
  • “Research Shows Students Falling Months Behind During Virus Disruptions” (NYT): “When all of the impacts are taken into account, the average student could fall seven months behind academically, while black and Hispanic students could experience even greater learning losses, equivalent to 10 months for black children and nine months for Latinos, according to an analysis from McKinsey & Company, the consulting group.”
  • https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/06/18/coronashutdown-versus-un-universal-declaration-of-human-rights/ (the UN says that children have the right to go to school, with no exceptions for a powerful teachers union or a state full of Shutdown Karens)
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Why won’t the NFL play the Black national anthem before every game?

by philg

“NFL to play Black national anthem ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing’ before ‘Star Spangled Banner’ at Week 1 games” (CBS):

“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a song also known as the Black national anthem, will be performed live or played prior to “The Star Spangled Banner” at each of the NFL’s Week 1 games in 2020, according to the Associated Press, which adds that the league is also considering memorializing victims of police brutality with helmet decals or jersey patches. These moves are seen as part of the league’s collaborative work with its players to raise awareness of systemic racism and police brutality.

Why is it only for Week 1? If this is the right thing to do, shouldn’t it be also for Week 2 and every subsequent week?

Who will be the first to be deplatformed by suggesting that the NFL start every game with a quote from the second greatest president (after FDR)?

…there is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in the military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.” –President John F. Kennedy’s News Conference of March 21, 1962

How could we update the lyrics of “The Star Spangled-Banner” for coronapanic?

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?		O say can you see, by the screen’s early light,
What so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose HD and 4K through the capacious pipe,
O’er the FiOS we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the phone screen’s red glare, Facebook alerts in the air,
Gave proof through the night that Don Trump was still there;
O say do essential marijuana stores,
O’er all of Maskachusetts stay open today?
On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.		*** could use some help here ***
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.		*** could use some help here ***
O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave		O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Inside their loved homes until the end of time.
Blest with op’oids and booze, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise Instacart that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then cower we must, until our minivan does rust,
And this be our motto: ‘In Fauci’s our trust.’
And our school teacher’s union by Zoom shall wave,
O’er part of Monday morning and also on Thursday

Related:

  • Francis Scott Key: [he] purchased his first slave in 1800 or 1801 and owned six slaves in 1820. … Key is known to have publicly criticized slavery’s cruelties. (i.e., he is like our neighbors who drive pavement-melting SUVs from their 6,000 square-foot fully climate-controlled houses while publicly criticizing climate change!)
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