We can't solve problems...

...if we can't talk about the reasons for the problems.

Neal Boortz does a good job of sourcing different issues...

...in the Trayvon Martin case.

It seems that he uses a trait that is sorely missing in the discussion - empathy, such as when he addresses the issue of Trayvon's mother getting a trade-mark for his name:

Many people seem to be upset that Treyvon Martin’s mother has filed for trademark protection for her son’s name. I can’t help but think that if people knew the real story here, they wouldn’t be outraged at all.

As soon as the Treyvon case gained national attention opportunists across the country started printing t-shirts, signs and other little goodies with Treyvon’s name on them. Some simply said “I am Treyvon.” Some t-shirts were vile – with pictures of Treyvon over printed racial insults. One “entrepreneur” announced plans for a collection of Treyvon hoodies.

Now put yourself in the place of Treyvon’s mother. She sees people across the country using her dead child’s name to make money and deliver messages, some of which she may not necessarily agree with. What does she do? She says something about it to her lawyer. Her lawyer tells her that she can protect her son’s name by filing for trademark protection. So she does. How can a rational person have a problem with this? If I had been her lawyer I would have given her the same advice.

Oh! You say that she also trademarked “I am Treyvon” and “Justice for Treyvon?” So? It was her son. Now she feels she has a cause. Perfectly understandable. Are you going to tell her that she cannot use her son’s name in promoting her cause?

Boortz says things that aren't going to make either "side" happy, but maybe the answer is that there shouldn't be sides.

Presumption of innocence...

... Screw that.

College expels alleged killer of black youth.

Seminole State College has expelled George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, setting off a debate over whether Florida has been too slow to charge Zimmerman in the shooting, WKMG News reported. College officials released a statement saying: "Due to the highly charged and high-profile controversy involving this student, Seminole State has taken the unusual but necessary step this week to withdraw Mr. Zimmerman from enrollment. This decision is based solely on our responsibility to provide for the safety of our students on campus as well as for Mr. Zimmerman." Zimmerman was enrolled in an associate in arts degree in general studies.

Unless the college knows - really knows - all of the facts and all of the outcomes of all the legal arguments, this seems like a deprivation of due process, which is a concept that applies insofar as the "State" in "Seminole State College" means that it is, in fact, a state college, i.e., a governmental entity.

Ethnic Cleansing in Los Angeles.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on an indictment against Mexican mafia gang members to "ethnically purify" Azusa by driving African-Americans from the city through threats and intimidation.

Members of a Latino gang affiliated with the Mexican Mafia conspired for nearly 20 years to drive African-Americans out of the Southern California city of Azusa through violence and intimidation, federal authorities alleged Tuesday.


Fifty-one alleged members of the Azusa 13 gang were indicted on racketeering and conspiracy charges; six were accused of conspiring to violate the civil rights of African-Americans. The case marks the second time federal civil-rights laws have been used against a gang, authorities said.


"The Azusa 13 gang waged a campaign of hate during a two-decade crime spree in which African-Americans were harassed and attacked," U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. said in a written statement Tuesday. "We hope that this federal case will signal the end of this racist behavior and will help vindicate all of the victims who have suffered over the years."

Thirty-nine of the defendants were in custody Tuesday. Authorities were still searching for 12 other suspects. Lawyers for some of the defendants couldn't immediately be reached.

While racial tensions among gangs have long been a part of turf wars in Southern California, none of the victims of the Azusa gang's alleged racial harassment were part of any rival gangs or criminal enterprise, authorities said. They were targeted simply because they were black, authorities said.

Prosecutors said the gang adopted a "racist principle" that, according to the indictment unsealed Tuesday, members would "harass and use violence to drive African-Americans out of the city of Azusa." According to the latest U.S. Census information, about 64% of the city's 47,000 residents are Hispanic and nearly 4% are black.

The gang targeted African-Americans with robberies and beatings, and defaced their homes with graffiti using racial slurs, the indictment alleges. New gang members "would use attacks on African-Americans as a way of proving themselves as members of the gang and enhancing their position in the gang," the indictment alleges.

NRO's Mark Krikorian asks incredulously, "It took 20 years to get around to this?"

A Radical Black Woman Speaks Truth to Power.




Notice how she demolishes the "it is better to kill black babies than permit them to be born in poverty" argument?  Also, her road to conservatism happened when she discovered that in 1960 - before LBJ - 80% of black children were born to two-parent households?  Or that the conservatives don't run the inner cities, liberals do.  So what's the problem?

Amazing.

From this site.

Cute skit.

Separate but equal.

John McWhorter offers a solution to the problem of African-American culture stigmatizing academic achievement as "acting white" - segregated schools:

The response to my Bloggingheads conversation with Stanford Law's Richard Thompson Ford on the ''acting white'' issue is making me feel old.


My entree into the race debate was in my 2000 book, Losing the Race, where I argued that a crucial reason for the gap in scholarly performance between even middle-class black students and white ones was that to be Young, Gifted and Black is often to also find oneself tarred as ''acting white'' by black peers.

And:

That's when the whole ''acting white'' phenomenon started -- since then passed on and morphing into an attitude. That's how things can go with human beings: The logical drifts into the visceral, the objective drifts into the subjective. Now it's no longer about white kids tripping you in the hall. It has been recruited as one of the many ways that any teenager can fashion a sense of group membership.


But yes, it's more of a problem to think of school as "white" than to just think of it as uncool. "I was a nerd, and those kids responded accordingly," Bouie recounts. But this neglects the added sting of also being accused of hating your own people. My mother, good nerd that she was in Atlanta in the '40s, was teased as a "walking encyclopedia" by her black peers. But no one accused her of thinking she was white. None of those '40s Atlanta kids would have imagined saying that. The reason is what Buck devoted his book to: "Think you're white?" for liking school is something new in the black community.

And:

Call them ''segregated'' and enable the mission creep that terms like pathology end up being misused under. ''Segregation,'' OK, but why does your breast probably swell at the thought of a graduation ceremony at Spelman or Howard? In all-black schools, nobody gets called ''acting white'' for liking school. This is important.


As such, we must beware the tack that Matthew Yglesias takes, showing that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in math have narrowed between black and white students since 1978. Yglesias calls this evidence that desegregation, which has increased during that period, must be OK. And sure, it can be. But it's well-known that the coalescence of black and white students' performance scores largely got stuck as of the early '80s. Note how the gap in 1999 was 32 percent, when it was 33 percent back in 1982. Or, why was there more of a gap in 2004 than way back in 1986?

This is a case for desegregation? I suggest not

I shouldn't have to point out that McWhorter is the "young, gifted and black" linguist, and author of the fantastically insightful "Doing Our Own Thing." 

What will happen is that the data will be ignored.  Our political and specialist classes are committed to an ideological position that prohibits them from looking at the data and seeing anything other than that which their ideology projects onto it.

The quickest way to get rid of bad laws is to enforce them...

...and the quickest way to get rid of the way that liberals use race as blanket smear is to turn it around on them.

I don't think that Shirley Sherrod should necessarily have been fired for her story about being a racist twenty years ago, but I don't think that Trent Lott deserved to be pilloried for his smarmy tribute to the elderly Strom Thurmond either.  But, then, I'm with Anne Althouse in thinking that the full video doesn't change the picture that much.

The video is disturbing on so many levels.  First, this government official feels that it alright to confess to being racist because she then says that she had an epiphany and decided that the real answer was to engage in class war?  This is good because one set of irrational hatred is better than another?  Color me unimpressed.

Second, the audience's reaction was disturbing.  They approved her story even before she talked about her conversion.  The audience - NAACP members - would have been entirely satisfied if the story had ended with her sticking it to the white farmer.  That's not good.

Third, check out the NAACP's reaction - they acted as if they knew the story was about a speaker confessing to be a racist, which is strange if that kind of thing doesn't happen frequently enough for the organization to have a reasonable belief that they'd been caught. 

The dirty linen here is that the Left has been using the charge of racism against conservatives for years while knowinglly practicing their own brand of racism.  The way to end that kind of hypocrisy is to hold the Left to the same standard that they hold everyone else to.

Racism in High School.

Live Oaks High School - where students were told not to wear the American flag on Cinco de Mayo - has a bona fide racist group - MECHA.:

Mr. Boden and Mr. Rodriguez preside over a high school with various clubs and organizations. As administrators, they must sanction these activities. There is the Anime Club, the Asian Student Union, the Black Student Union, the Drama Guild, the Chess Club, MEChA, the Patriot Club, and a raft of other extracurricular activities from which student can chose to participate. Shockingly, one of these groups is a borderline hate group that proclaims racial supremacy. While it may come as a shock to some of our more “progressive” readers, the oppressors are not the Patriot Club, but the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA. Live Oak High’s Web site claims that the group has certain goals:

MECHA stands for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán). Aztlán was the homeland of the Mexicas (Mexicas is the root word of Chicano), also known as the people of the earth, who wandered from Aztlán to Tenochtitlan. Aztlán is believed to be located in the southern US and northern Mexico.

The group was [originally] formed to address issues in the Chicano movement of 1969 such as the need for better school conditions (resources, facilities), to learn Mexican studies, have more Mexican teachers, and higher expectations for Mexican students versus encouraging them to go to trade schools or for young Chicanas to stay at home.

And all of this is true — but it is not all of the truth, and there are clear warning signs for anyone paying the least bit of attention. MEChA’s militaristic logo is an eagle with a brutal obsidian-bladed Aztec war club called a Huitzauhqui in one claw and a lit stick of dynamite in the other. Is such violent symbolism an indicator that the group might need to be vetted a bit further? Reasonable people would think so.

Critics of MEChA claim that the organization is little more than a racial supremacist group seeking to carve out a country of their own, to be inhabited by their own race.

Wait a minute — that wasn’t from critics; it was a direct quote from the official MEChA website:

As Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán, we are a nationalist movement of Indigenous Gente that lay claim to the land that is ours by birthright. As a nationalist movement we seek to free our people from the exploitation of an oppressive society that occupies our land. Thus, the principle of nationalism serves to preserve the cultural traditions of La Familia de La Raza and promotes our identity as a Chicana/Chicano Gente.

MEChA is a paranoid, racist, nationalist group that seeks to claim northern Mexico and the southwestern United States as a nation called Aztlán. Principal Borden and Assistant Principal Rodriguez have allowed their school to be infiltrated by a seditious supremacist group.

Why are they still employed?

Good question.

My sense is that young people - those who came of age in the multi-culti era - are far more racist than they were in my day, when tolerance and equality under the law was the ideological norm.  Given the fact that the law has tolerated these kind of racist groups, it is hardly surprising that "white" kids are kicking back by paying kind with kind. That, unfortunately, undermines the dream of a race-blind society that was supposed to be the goal of the Civil Rights movement.

I'm overtaxed already, so why do I have to pay this guys salary?

A UCLA Professor calls for a Mexican revolution against the United States at UCLA.

“We are revolutionary Mexican organization here. We understand that this is not just about Mexico. It’s about a global struggle against imperialism and capitalism… At the forefront of this revolutionary movement is La Raza. We will no longer fall for these lies called borders. We see America as a northern front of a revolutionary movement… Our enemy is capitalism and imperialism.”

I like the fact that he's a racist and doesn't hide the fact, but it's ok because he's part of an officially sanctioned Democrat victim bloc.

Funny!

Re Harry Reid's "well-spoken and light colored Negro" comment


Reid is a classic Democrat racist who thinks that no "person of color" can make it without the loving intervention of a State controlled by the Democrat Party. It was Reid - an intellectual lightweight of Joe Biden proportions based on his many idiotic public comments - who singled out the second African-American Justice of the Supreme Court for "poorly written opinions," a statement which is simply untrue.

Victicrat

An Honest Conversation about Race.

Rush Limbaugh is getting beat up by conservatives and libertarians like Rod Dreher and Megan McCardle for a Swiftian satirical bit linking the story of the white kid who was bit up on a bus by two black kids to Kanye West's bullying behavior to Newsweek's lead story on how white's are racist to the Democrat's who have decided that any opposition to Obama is racist. McCardle and Dreher think that Limbaugh is currying favor with the vast legion of KKK members in America because he describes the school bus beating as something typical of "Obama's America," despite the fact that Limbaugh clearly doesn't think it is typical but is lampooning the "only white's can be racist" attitude, e.g., he accuses the white victim of provoking the fight because of his inherent racism.

The real clue to the sarcasm should have been when Limbaugh tells a caller that the local police chief was wrong in ruling out a racial motive because the white victim was undoubtedly taunting the blacks.

Limbaugh spreads it on a bit thick, but, hey, it's a sort of open discussion about race. As "open" anyhow, in a society where the discussion proceeds from the premise that whites have to shut up, listen and not say anything disturbing the consensus that white's are never the victim.

What caused me to post this was Vox Day's interesting post on the subject." Day writes:

The reality is that as much as the various twits at the Atlantic would like to sweep it under the table, (to Dreher's credit, he does not), violent black-on-white crime is far more common than the reverse and one of the many reasons for this is that the same guilty white liberals who were piddling themselves with joy over Obama have been making excuses for violent black criminals for nearly fifty years.

As long as we're on the subject, it's worth noting that statistics readily demonstrate that the racist lynchings of the past were far less of a problem than violent black crime is today. The Tuskegee Institute reports 3,437 lynchings of black Americans between 1882 and 1968. If one takes into account the 1,293 lynchings of white Americans as well as the relative population difference, this means there were roughly 38 race-motivated lynchings per year. In 2005, the FBI reported 37,460 white women were raped or sexually assaulted by black men. By contrast, zero black women were raped or sexually assaulted by white men. In other words, over the course of a year, 990 white women are now attacked by black men for every racist lynching of the past. Naturally, guilty white liberals are much more deeply concerned about the latter than the former. Nor is it only a problem for white women, as an additional 964 black women were raped or sexually assaulted by black men for each of those lynchings as well.

To be fair, Day notes that there are false accusation of rape against black men, just as we know that there have been false accusations of rape by black women against white men. (See Duke LaCross team.)

Nonetheless, the disparity between black on white rape and white on black rape seems weird enough to require some explanation. I might be willing to accept some difference in rape statistics, but "zero" seems inexplicable. Are black women less likely to report rape generally? Was 2005 an anomalous year?

On the other hand, if this statistic is true, that can't be good for civil discourse. It certainly would reinforce buried prejudices, which may be why I instinctively don't want to accept Day's "factoid." I guess the point here is to ask whether we really want an "honest discussion about race" if this is the kind of thing that we are going to learn.

Also, the lynching statistic is interesting. If Day is right, then there were as many lynchings in America in less than 100 years as there were people executed by the Spanish Inquisition over 300. I don't know what that means - that the Spanish Inquisition could have worked harder? It is an odd factoid.

"Occam's Butterknife"

This is an interesting but dangerous deconstruction of a popular liberal racialist urban myth about stereotyping and attitudes. As Steven Sailer points out, this might be useful to keep in mind as we hear more "magic thinking" about Obama's miraculous essence.