Kwanzaa: Fake Holiday Created by a Felon

By Paul Mulshine
The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)
December 26, 2012


A Kwanzaa sign sits alongside a nativity display on Woodbridge town grounds.

(Brian Amaral/NJ.com)
 

It's that time of year again. You know what time I mean - the time when the media promote that fake holiday created by a crazed california felon who wanted to create racial discord.

That's right - Kwanzaa.

Do a news search and you'll find hundreds of articles about wonderful Kwanzaa celebrations held all over America. Good luck finding a single one that mentions the sorry fact that the holiday's creator was imprisoned for torturing a couple of African-American women.

You'll have to go here to my original article on Kwanzaa to find that. The article originally ran in FrontPage Magazine back in 1998. It's easily found on the Internet by any journalist willing to do the tiniest bit of research into Kwanzaa. I like to run it this time every year as a corrective to all of the dreadful journalism that occurs in every report of Kwanzaa.

If the media told the truth about Kwanzaa in these articles, then every right-thinking American would realize it's a fraud. Instead we get the same silly endorsement of this "African" feast that has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with California in the 1960s.

If you don't have the time to read that long expose then you can read the column I wrote on the subject back in 1998. Here it is in full:

One of my alert readers called me the other day to inform me that the public schools in New Jersey aren't allowed to celebrate Christmas but are celebrating Kwanzaa.

This is intriguing. Christmas celebrates the legacy of Christ who, by all accounts, was a nonviolent man who believed that people of all types could learn to live in peace. Kwanzaa celebrates the legacy of an extremely violent man from California who has dedicated his life to spreading dissension among the races.

More on that later. First let's deal with the question of why schools can propagate a belief in Kwanzaa but not Christmas or Chanukah. For an answer, I called Ed Martone of the American Civil Liberties Union.

''Kwanzaa isn't a religious holiday," said Martone. "It's a cultural holiday. It doesn't have the same restrictions as Chanukah or Christmas."

I'll grant that there is a certain logic to the view. After all, once the government gets involved in religion, the potential conflicts among Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and atheists are so complex that perhaps we are better off avoiding them altogether.

But by that same logic, the public schools should not be pushing certain cultural practices. And the schools especially shouldn't be endorsing cultural practices created by a character with the beliefs and the background of Ron Karenga.

It is not easy to get a hold of the facts about the background of the creator of Kwanzaa. In fact, it is nearly impossible. The history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an Orwellian time warp. If you look up the name "Ron Karenga" on any of the many newspaper data bases that are available these days, you will read a glowing account of a deep-thinking philosopher who comes across as a sort of jolly Father Christmas for African-Americans.

You won't find any reference to murder or torture. Yet murder was a specialty of US, the paramilitary organization that Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

As for torture, Karenga took that more personally. The accounts of his personal role in a particularly sadistic episode of brutality have been largely lost to history. The episode seems to exist only on a few microfilmed pages of the Los Angeles Times. It took two days of research and phone calls to track them down. Here is an excerpt from an article headlined "Woman describes two days of torture" on the May 1971 trial of Karenga for torturing two dissident members of his group:

''Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Karenga was convicted and served more than three years in a state prison.

This was not an isolated incident. In 1967, Karenga was accused of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an impertinent question at a college forum. In 1969, US got involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two Panthers in a shootout at the student center.

It would be nice to say that after Karenga got out of jail in 1975 he repented, saw the error of his ways and invented Kwanzaa as a means of atoning for his past. Nice, but untrue. Karenga has never atoned for his thuggery, probably because no one ever asked him to. And his sole concession to repentance was his 1975 conversion to Marxism. For him, this was considered to be a sign that he had moderated his views.

Karenga invented Kwanzaa at the height of his gang days, in 1966. And he made it up not to bring peace among the races but to divide them. That's why he placed this alleged "harvest festival" in competition with Christmas, which he derided because of its ties to the hated capitalist system.

It may be true that Kwanzaa has evolved into a ceremony that has importance to a great number of well-intentioned people, people who have no knowledge of its creator's questionable history. But Karenga himself continues to champion the holiday as an example of what he terms "cultural nationalism." This is the view that black people are a separate "nation" within a hostile country. During a visit to Newark in 1987, Karenga defined America as "an insane, socially decaying society." "We need a value system and a support system . . . because the world is organized against your Africanism," he told Newark residents.

Karenga remains a leading spokesman for the multicultural movement, a movement based on the idea that Americans should emphasize their differences rather than their similarities. The idea of Kwanzaa fits firmly within multiculturalism. And however you feel about multiculturalism, you must admit that it is a political movement and therefore one that should not be supported with tax dollars.

As for Karenga himself, he should be given all the respect due a convicted torturer. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I believe that once a man inserts a hot soldering iron into a woman's mouth, he should be excluded from public discourse for eternity. I may be wrong, however. Certainly, the people in California don't seem to share this view. Karenga is now a professor at California State University in Long Beach.

That's California for you. By that standard, there's a university presidency waiting somewhere for Charles Manson when he finally gets out.

Here Come the Closet Black Conservatives

By Pat Austin
http://www.americanthinker.com/
July 21, 2012

Rev. C.L. Bryant is making waves with his new documentary, Runaway Slave. I had the opportunity to preview the film in Bossier City, Louisiana, and I found the documentary thoroughly compelling.
Runaway Slave was conceived by Rev. Bryant and supported by private donations and FreedomWorks. It has been well-received in private screenings so far, often receiving standing ovations, and is poised to open in select theaters across the country next week. While at Regal Cinema 9 in Bossier City, it was the highest grossing film there.

Herman Cain caught a great deal of flak for his comment on the campaign trail that he "had left the Democratic plantation," but he's not the only one saying it. Indeed, C.L. Bryant has now joined the ranks of a number of black closet conservatives who are speaking out against big government, which is what they perceive to be the new plantation. And the list of black conservatives finding the courage to speak out is growing.

Joining Bryant in this documentary are famous faces like Herman Cain, Allen West, Thomas Sowell, AlfonZo Rachel, and Alveda King. Sirius radio host David Webb speaks out, and we meet a host of other black conservatives who share their stories such as Mason Weaver, Marvin D. Rogers, and K. Carl Smith, who is the founder of Frederick Douglass Republicans and subscribes to the "four life-affirming values of Douglass: respect for life, respect for the Constitution, belief in limited government and individual responsibility."

The film itself has a gritty, urban, edgy feel to it, at times contrasted with scenes of rolling hills and pastoral images of a beautiful America. The scene at the Jefferson Memorial will certainly bring a tear of pride to your eye.

Bryant travels across America, marching with the NAACP, asking questions, and stands thoughtfully at Tea Party rallies. He takes it all in and asks, "Why?" Why are we so racially divided when we all want the same thing? Bryant asks black Americans, "What are you being prevented from doing because of your skin color?"

The documentary also tells C.L.'s personal story. He grew up in Grand Cane and is a licensed and ordained minister. He lost his church when he began to speak at local Tea Party rallies and about his conservatism. Bryant was also NAACP chapter president in Garland, TX, a position he lost when he declined to speak at a pro-choice rally. Staunchly pro-life, Bryant has twice sacrificed his position to his values.

The main theme of the documentary is not new: the enslavement of black society by big government. People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are described in interviews as "race-hustlers" or "poverty pimps" because while they claim to represent the best interests of black America, they are profiting from the continued degraded status of blacks.

Technically, the film is a masterpiece in editing and symbolism. The theme of the underground railroad is ever-prevalent, and at one point, AlfonZo Rachel even says, "We've got a new underground railroad 2.0; we're kind of like the Harriet Tubmans of our day!" We often see Bryant walking down railroad tracks, standing in thought, or running down the tracks. He picks up a rusty railroad spike which, at the end, he throws forcefully off a railroad trestle into the river: freedom!

On his journey across America, one of the people Bryant talks to is author and pundit Star Parker. Parker is the author of Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do About It. She shares her compelling personal story from welfare to entrepreneurship in her book. In the documentary, she explains that "what broke down in black America is just a picture of what's breaking down in the rest of society. ... Not only has big government enslaved America's poor, but now we're looking at the extension of government into all communities."

In Uncle Sam's Plantation, Parker wrote, "A burgeoning lower class of people dependent on the government will likely continue voting for the party that keeps the handouts coming[.]" Thus, we have the stunning statistic that 95% of black Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Statistically, black Americans have strongly voted for the Democratic party since 1936. That year, black voters came out 71% for FDR. Republicans have not been able to garner over 20% of the black vote since Nixon in 1960.

In one segment community leader Marvin D. Rogers gives Bryant a history lesson in which Rogers points out that Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington were all Republicans. Republicans were in control of both houses of Congress when the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, which granted freedom, citizenship, voting rights, and due process to blacks. Rogers also explains that President Eisenhower, a Republican, signed into law the 1957 civil rights act, which set in motion the civil rights commission and created the civil rights division of the Justice Department. It was a Republican senator, Everett Dirksen who blocked a Democratic filibuster against the 1964 civil rights legislation. Dirksen said, "The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing of government, in education, and in employment. It must not be stayed or denied."

Given all this, why such a monolithic turnout from the black community for the Democratic Party? This is one of the questions Runaway Slave attempts to answer. How has black America been improved by all these handouts? Part of the problem seems to be the controlled decimation of the black family perpetuated by the requirement that to receive that entitlement check, there must not be a father in the home. You get married, you lose your welfare check.

Planned Parenthood and the high rate of abortions in the black community are also cited. Most Planned Parenthood centers are in black communities; in New York in 2008, for example, more African-Americans had abortions than gave birth.

In her new book, Blacklash, Deneen Borelli asks, "Why aren't black kids improving and growing at the same rate as their peers? My opinion: It's all in the message from the career black politicians who promote big government solutions that result in stagnation and government dependence." The better way, Borelli suggests, is to quit blaming everyone else and take responsibility for your life. The Constitution does not guarantee you success, but it does guarantee you the opportunity for success.

Black conservatives are accustomed to the standard name-calling ("Sellout!" "Uncle Tom!"), and the personalities featured in this film simply brush it off. AlfonZo Rachel says, "I must be on the right track!" as he notes that Uncle Tom actually stood up to his master in the famous novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe and refused to whip another slave.

There will be many who won't have the courage to see this film, which opens in select theaters July 27. There will be many who scoff at C.L. Bryant and accuse him of being a sellout to the white man. But if we are ever to have a true discussion of race in this country, this documentary might be the place to start.

Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes

By Mark Steyn

May 19, 2012 6:23 A.M.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

My weekend column mentions en passant Teepee Party candidate Elizabeth Warren’s contributions to the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families”:

The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain . . . ” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.

Shortly after my column was filed yesterday afternoon, our Noah Glyn reported that Mrs Warren’s crab dish passed down from her Cherokee ancestors actually came from an upscale Manhattan eatery on 55th Street across from the St Regis:

Two of the possibly plagiarized recipes, said in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook to have been passed down through generations of Oklahoma Native American members of the Cherokee tribe, are described in a New York Times News Service story as originating at Le Pavilion, a fabulously expensive French restaurant in Manhattan. The dishes were said to be particular favorites of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.

The Pundette wonders: “Were they Cherokee, too?“
No. But, as Broadway’s first Native American composer, Cole Porter wrote about his Indian blood in his famous song, “I’ve Got Sioux Under My Skin”.

Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn’t a threat to one’s sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation’s most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first “woman of color” on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor’s favorite crab dish to a tribal cookbook.

Before he ascended to the throne, the Duke inspired a hit song of reflected celebrity: “I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales”. That seems to be how Harvard Law’s identity-group quota-filling works. I’m confident Elizabeth Warren will eventually be able to prove she danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with someone who once changed planes at a municipal airport accidentally built on a Cherokee burial ground.

Elizabeth Warren touted Cherokee heritage in 1984 collection of recipes

By Doug Powers • May 17, 2012 10:26 AM
http://michellemalkin.com/

The epic saga of Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (aka “Dances with Identity Theft”) continues. Personally, I don’t like finding out that politicians who are running for office in order to “serve the people” were once involved with a cookbook. It’s all too Twilight Zone-ish for my taste — but admittedly the metaphor isn’t much of a stretch.

Many moons ago, Warren submitted recipes for a Native American-themed cookbook. We’ll call Elizabeth’s latest recipe “cooked goose in hot water”:

Elizabeth Warren was touting her claim of Cherokee heritage as early as 1984, according to a cookbook titled “Pow Wow Chow” edited by her cousin that includes Warren’s recipes for a savory crab omelet and spicy barbecued beans.

The cookbook, edited by Warren’s cousin Candy Rowsey, is a compilation of “special recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families,” according to the introduction in a copy obtained by the Herald.

Warren, who has been under fire for claiming Indian lineage despite a lack of documentation, is identified as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee” under each of five recipes she contributes in the cookbook, published in 1984 by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum located in Muskogee. Warren is not listed as an official member of the Cherokee tribe and she has been unable thus far to document her claim of any Native American heritage.
[...]
News of Warren’s Cherokee recipes comes as outraged members of the tribe — including a Warren supporter — demanded she release her employment records following reports that she has no documentation to prove her Native American ancestry.

By way of Twitchy (who are collecting the mockery for full display as we speak), here’s a review of the cookbook at Amazon:


Another satisfied customer!

I’m told Warren’s recipe for Macaroni & Cochise isn’t too bad though.

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

~ For the latest breaking news, be sure to join Michelle's e-mail list ~

Craven and Pusillanimous at the Chronicle

By Roger Kimball
http://pjmedia.com/
May 9, 2012

The Chronicle of so-called higher education, that is.

On April 30, Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote a column for “Brainstorm,” the Chronicle’s blog, called “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations ^[1].” When I say that there was nothing new in Ms. Riley’s column, I do not mean to disparage it. No: it is a splendid piece, a public service, really. It performs exactly the same service as the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Everyone knows, though few have the temerity to say, that “Black Studies” is an awful confidence game: an exercise in racial grievance mongering utterly without scholarly merit. In this, I hasten to add, it resembles many other pseudo-disciplines invented since the late 1960s to provide a home for intellectually challenged but politically fermenting denizens of our universities: Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Transgender Studies, etc. etc. Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with twentieth century academia could be summed up in the word “workshop.” “Studies” is the new “workshop.” Take a look at the “dissertations” Ms. Riley describes. They are cringe-making in their awfulness. Consider:

• “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth,” by Ruth Hayes. “It began,” Riley writes, “because she ‘noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.’ How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in ‘natural birth literature,’ whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.”
• Then there is “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. . . . She explains that ‘The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.’ The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.”
• Riley’s pièce de la résistance is a work by La TaSha B. Levy. “Ms. Levy,” the Chronicle writes, “is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” Riley asks: “The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?”

And on it goes. Riley concludes with this sterling bit of advice: “If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.” But of course if you subtract the racialism from such works you would be left with… nothing. That’s what they essentially are: politicized exercises in race mongering.

As I say, Riley’s brief column only highlights what we all know to be true about the pseudo-discipline of Black Studies. And what was the upshot of her foray into the forbidden territory of truth about this embarrassing subject? A cataract of outrage from readers of the Chronicle’s blog — almost all of whom are academics — and, in an exhibition of academic editorial independence and courage, a craven apology and dismissal notice from Liz McMillen, the editor of the Chronicle.
Why is it that more and more editors these days seem to respond to any controversial piece — controversial in challenging the reigning political pieties, that is — by public rituals of ostracism?
Their first response to speech they or some of their readers don’t like is to rusticate the offender while loudly assuring the public of their own spotless virtue. Ms. McMillen’s “Note to Readers ^[2]” is an especially emetic example of the genre. Riley’s column did not, she began, “did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.” Really? In what ways was it deficient, either in substance or tone? Read what Riley says above: her chief sin seems to have been to shine a bit of daylight on the shadowy academic racket.

“We heard you,” Ms. McMillen pleadingly cries to her mob. We heard you and “We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.” “Now.” What a world of smarmy evasiveness is contained in the little adverb. Now that the mob is baying for blood, I am happy to chuck the ideal of robust journalism and throw Naomi Riley under the bus. Back when she published it, all was well. (Though I never reviewed it! It was not my fault!) It was only when there was public criticism that my politically correct antennae began to twitch and I found that craven capitulation was the best route to editorial high-mindedness.

Disgusting. Even more craven is Ms. McMillen’s concluding apology “for the distress these incidents have caused our readers.” Are the Chronicle’s readers really such delicate plants? Well, as I say, almost all of them are academics, so the answer is undoubtedly Yes.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has long been receding into semi-senescent irrelevance. This latest episode underscores its moral bankruptcy as well. What a pathetic showing.

[UPDATE: see Riley's splendid op-ed in the WSJ today: "The Academic Mob Rules ^[3]."]

See also Ron Radosh: How the Academic Establishment has Silenced a Major Critic of the Field of “Black Studies” ^[4]


Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/05/09/craven-and-pusillanimous-at-the-chronicle/

URLs in this post:

[1] The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case-for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346

[2] Note to Readers: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/a-note-to-readers/46608

[3] The Academic Mob Rules: http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304363104577391842133259230.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop&mg=reno64-sec-wsj

[4] How the Academic Establishment has Silenced a Major Critic of the Field of “Black Studies”: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball../../ronradosh/2012/05/08/how-the-academic-establishment-has-silenced-a-major-critic-of-the-field-of-black-studies/

Fauxcahontas and the melting pot

Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here!

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
May 4, 2012

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts

Have you dated a composite woman? They're America's hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In "Dreams from My Father," the world's all-time most-unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend:

"When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn't. She could only be herself, and wasn't that enough..."

But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend – "Julia." She's worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can't even be herself. In fact, she can't be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his "Head Start" program at age 3 through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you'll love it: Sweet Dreams From My Sugar Daddy. She's what the lawyers would call "non composite mentis." She's not competent to do a single thing for herself – and, from Barack's point of view, that's exactly what he's looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.

Then there's "Elizabeth," a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack's white girlfriend, she couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be a composite – a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface makeup and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the "Are you Native American?" box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she's part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F—kin' Chief Dances With Plugs.

How does she know she's a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather's "high cheekbones," and says the Indian stuff is part of her family "lore." Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama Special Advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that "I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am," and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as The Boston Herald reported, "Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the '90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty's lack of diversity."

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School's first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.
Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have – hang on, let me get out my calculator – duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother's wedding license application. And now it's here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren's memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams From My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America's melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!

Coincidentally, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission last week issued an "Enforcement Guidance" limiting the rights of employers to take into account the criminal convictions and arrest records of job applicants because of the "disparate impact" the consideration of such matters might have on minorities. That's great news, isn't it? So Harvard Law School can't ask Elizabeth Warren if she's ever held up a liquor store because, if they did, the faculty might be even less Cherokee than it is.

My colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote the other day about Chris Mooney, author of "The Republican Brain," and other scientific chaps who argue that conservatives suffer from a genetic cognitive impairment that causes us to favor small government. In other words, we're born stupid. So, thanks to gene sequencing, we now know why conservatives aren't as smart as, say, Pete Stark, the nigh-on-half-a-century Democrat congressman who believes that Solyndra, which is based in his district, is an automobile manufacturer: "I wish I had a big enough expense allowance to get one of those new 'S's' that Solyndra's going to make down there, the electric car," he told The San Francisco Chronicle this week. "My 10-year-old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants Dad to have an 'S' sedan." Pete sounds so out of it, you have to wonder if maybe he's 1/32nd Republican on his great-great-great-grandmother's side.

But, if conservatives are simply born that way, shouldn't they be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission?

Aw, don't waste your time. Elizabeth Warren will be ahead of you checking the "right-wing madman" box on the grounds that she gets her high cheekbones and minimal facial hair from Genghis Khan. And "Julia" will be saying she was born conservative but thanks to Obama's new Headcase Start program was able to get ideological reassignment surgery. And Barack's imaginary girlfriend will be telling him that she'd be left if she could, but she's right so she can't, but she'd love to be left. So he left her.

Good thing the smart guys are running the joint.

©MARK STEYN

Holder Meets Sharpton

The attorney general heaps praise on an infamous huckster.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 14, 2012

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, left, and the Rev. Al Sharpton confer before Holder’s address to the 13th annual National Action Network conference, in New York Wednesday, April 6, 2011. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Eric Holder rode in on the stench of Marc Rich and will ride out on the stench of Al Sharpton. He’s spent the three-plus years in between branding Americans as “cowards” on race matters; investigating the CIA; coddling CAIR and the New Black Panthers; green-lighting voter fraud; swaddling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Bill of Rights; and converting the Justice Department into a full-employment program for the Lawyer Left and its Gitmo boutique. But now he’s hit the big time.

This week, our esteemed attorney general canoodled with Reverend Al at the annual convention of the “National Action Network,” home base for the infamous huckster (that would be Sharpton, not Holder — sorry for any confusion). It is difficult to imagine another attorney general in American history sucking up to such a race-mongering charlatan. The Sharpton record was succinctly catalogued on the Corner by Victor Davis Hanson: inciting murderous riots; slandering Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals; libeling a state prosecutor in the course of championing Tawana Brawley’s fabrication of a racial “hate crime.” Yet there was Holder, ladling cringe-making praise on Sharpton for “your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill.”

Holder is currently in “partnership” with his fast friend on the highly charged Trayvon Martin case. In the days before the nation’s chief federal law-enforcement official lionized the CEO of the nation’s racial-grievance industry, Sharpton had been in Florida, threatening that his “action network” — as in “direct action,” the community-organizer’s stock-in-trade — would “move to the next level” if authorities in Sanford, Fla., failed to arrest George Zimmerman, the man (or, if you prefer the New York Times Agitator’s Glossary, the “white Hispanic”) who shot Mr. Martin, a black 17-year-old.

With such notches on his belt as Crown Heights and Freddie’s Fashion Mart, there’s not a lot of mystery involved when the Reverend Al starts conjuring “the next level” of “action.” Still, never what you’d call a master of subtlety, Sharpton — between inciting mobs with demands to “arrest Zimmerman now!” — expressly threatened to “occupy” the city of Sanford.

The nation’s chief federal law enforcer reacted to these threats of lawlessness with paeans to Sharpton’s besotted history. Beyond that, Holder has been doing plenty of agitating on his own. He bragged to Sharpton’s crowd that he’d ordered his Justice Department to open an investigation into the Martin shooting three weeks ago. He stood ready, he vowed, to file “civil rights” charges if warranted by “the facts and the law.”

Just one problem: Nothing about the known facts comes close to triggering federal jurisdiction. Holder’s “civil rights” hooey is based on fiction: a tale manufactured by NBC News, the flimflam artists who doctored the audiotape of Zimmerman’s call to the police, stoking public outrage with a report that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin.

The case at hand involves the excruciating loss of a 17-year-old’s life. We do not know exactly what happened. We do know, however, that there is virtually no chance Martin’s race was the cause of his killing. Quite apart from Zimmerman’s lineage — which the Times would be reporting as “Hispanic,” not the newfangled “white Hispanic,” if he had been on the receiving end of fired shots — Zimmerman is of a mixed-race family. Not only does he have black relatives, he has reportedly donated his time to tutor black children. He seems to have used tragically poor judgment in the chain of events that led to Martin’s death, but there is no indication that he is a racist or that his overeager actions were motivated by racial bias. In the context of the case, Martin’s race is sheer happenstance. Its principal relevance is the divisive opening it presents for opportunistic racialists such as Sharpton and Holder.

Race is a dubious constitutional basis for federal intrusion into state law enforcement. The framers saw policing as a state matter– that’s why there was no U.S. Justice Department for the first 83 years of constitutional governance. One needn’t be blind to slavery and structural racism to understand that 21st-century Florida has moved beyond these blights on the nation’s history. There is zero reason to believe that, without Eric Holder hovering, Florida’s police, prosecutors, and citizens could not be trusted to do justice.

There is, moreover, grave reason to believe Holder’s looming involvement will taint the case. In fact, it is already tainting the case.

Put aside the absence of a race angle in this particular case. We know that the Obama-Holder Justice Department practices racial discrimination in enforcing Congress’s race-neutral civil-rights statutes. That is clear from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s investigation of the New Black Panthers voter-intimidation case– brought by the Bush DOJ but dismissed by Holder’s minions, in consultation with far-left activists, even though the government had already prevailed. Anything Holder’s department does under the rubric of civil-rights enforcement exacerbates this profound offense against our constitutional commitment to equal protection under the law for all citizens, regardless of race.

Furthermore, controversial cases that stir passions and bring out the rabble-rousers demand that high law-enforcement officials provide adult supervision. Not every wrong is a criminal wrong. Responsible prosecutors respect this premise as the Constitution’s safe harbor for the innocent; it is not a mere inconvenience to be maneuvered around. Doing justice means justice for everyone, including the suspect. While it may be news to Mr. Holder, that proposition holds even if the suspect’s name is not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If negligence, even lethal negligence, has occurred, its victims are not without a remedy — they can sue civilly. The criminal law, however, is not the solution to every legal problem, and its invocation where it has no place is monstrous.

The Justice Department’s conduct in the Martin case has been emblematic of Holder’s tenure: an exercise in hardball politics, not faithful law enforcement. In this case, a responsible attorney general would stay his hand. There appears to be no possibility of a federal crime. If such a possibility arises, the generous statute of limitations on civil-rights violations means there is no rush, and the “dual sovereignty” doctrine assures that there will be no double-jeopardy bar against a federal prosecution once the state’s work is done. The feds should just butt out for now: Let Florida’s system work.

And keep quiet in the meantime. We expect grand juries and petit juries to deliberate over cases in secret. The law requires that, because juries are supposed to decide without fear or favor, based on unvarnished evidence not outside agitators. In stark contrast, Holder has thrown the enormous weight of the Justice Department behind the mob. He is not seeking justice; he is pressing his thumb on the scale.

And it’s working. When Trayvon Martin was first shot to death nearly two months ago, state authorities sensibly opted not to charge George Zimmerman with murder. It wasn’t that they were looking to excuse wrongdoing. It was that the evidence was insufficient to prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt.

Plainly, there was a lack of criminal intent: There was obviously no premeditation; and, alternatively, the facts do not remotely suggest that Zimmerman acted with a “depraved mind regardless of human life”(e.g., the savage indifference of a man who fires into a crowd, heedless of the consequences). To the contrary, the known facts indicate (a) Zimmerman’s concern that Martin was acting suspiciously (the depraved do not call the police, as Zimmerman did, before shooting), and (b) a struggle in which Zimmerman may well have been severely beaten and, in any event, would have a strong basis to persuade a jury that he shot in self-defense.

In advancing that argument, Zimmerman would be aided by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which gives the law-abiding latitude to use guns for protection. The wisdom vel non of “Stand Your Ground” is beside the point. I happen to agree with National Review’s editors that the anti-gun lobby’s attack on Florida’s statute is unpersuasive. But regardless of who is right, ex post facto principles dictate that criminal cases be resolved based on the law in existence at the time of the conduct at issue. A criminal case may be the reason for subsequently changing laws like “Stand Your Ground,” but the Constitution does not permit a criminal case to be shored up by a midstream change in the law.

A prosecutor cannot prove murder without being able to prove mens rea (the state-of-mind element of the offense). To file a murder charge without first establishing mens rea would be unethical and violate due process. So, initially, the Florida authorities did not. But there followed over six weeks of race-baiters fanning the flames of rage. If a U.S. attorney general has any role in such circumstances, it is to call for calm, assure people that the professionals are doing their duty diligently, and urge that the process be allowed to play out. Holder, instead, decided to go Sharpton — except he’s a Sharpton with subpoena power, as well as the raw power to threaten Florida with a civil-rights investigation that would portray its police and prosecutors as racially insensitive obstacles to social justice.

Florida got the message. After the original prosecutor and police chief stepped aside under blistering political heat for declining to indict Zimmerman, the governor appointed Angela Corey, an elected state attorney of apparent ambition, as a special prosecutor. She decided not to continue with the grand jury — which would have required submitting the weak case to members of the community. She has now unilaterally filed a second-degree-murder charge against Zimmerman, based on an affidavit that is so laughably devoid of probable cause that commentators across the ideological divide — from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz– have panned it as incredibly weak and grossly irresponsible. It is agitprop, not law — it makes murky mention of a “struggle” but meticulously avoids mention of the injuries sustained by Zimmerman; and it invokes the ambiguous but explosive word “profiled” while failing to explain what it means, or to clarify that, absent any racial component (and none is alleged), profiling is perfectly legitimate. Police do it all the time to avoid harassing innocent people.

You can thank Eric Holder. He has a gun to Florida’s head, and he is standing his ground.

It is quite amazing that Holder is in a position to do so. His prior tenure as Clinton deputy attorney general — a record of corrupting the pardon process, politicizing the Justice Department (even to the point of arranging commutations for convicted FALN terrorists), and misleading Congress — made it embarrassingly obvious that he was not fit to be attorney general. Yet, Senate Republicans ignored warnings to this effect and marched in merry lockstep with Democrats to confirm him overwhelmingly.

Now, so predictably, Al Sharpton is smiling. We have no justice and no peace.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.


By SHELBY STEELE
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
April 5, 2012

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a "hoodie," a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: "I will take you out!" There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon," said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family's side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, "There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement." And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon's parents featured as celebrities.

In fact Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

It was a time when standing on the side of the good required true selflessness and so it ennobled people. And this chance to ennoble oneself through a courageous moral stand is what so many blacks and white liberals miss today—now that white racism is such a defeated idea. There is a nostalgia for that time when posture alone ennobled. So today even the hint of old-fashioned raw racism excites with its potential for ennoblement.

For the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, for the increasingly redundant civil rights establishment, for liberal blacks and the broader American left, the poetic truth that white racism is somehow the real culprit in this tragedy is redemption itself. The reason Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become such disreputable figures on our cultural landscape is that they are such quick purveyors of poetic truth rather than literal truth.

The great trick of poetic truth is to pass itself off as the deep and essential truth so that hard facts that refute it must be dismissed in the name of truth. O.J. Simpson was innocent by the poetic truth that the justice system is stacked against blacks. Trayvon was a victim of racist stereotyping—though the shooter never mentioned his race until asked to do so.

There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism.

When the Cambridge cop or the Duke lacrosse players or the men accused of raping Tawana Brawley tried to defend themselves, they were already so stained by poetic truth as to never be entirely redeemed. No matter the facts—whether Trayvon Martin was his victim or his assailant—George Zimmerman will also never be entirely redeemed.

And this points to the second tragedy that Trayvon's sad demise highlights. Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the '60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake.

It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon's death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin.

Anderson Cooper 360: Bounty put on Trayvon Martin shooter

It’s Not About "Stand Your Ground"

We should reserve judgment, but it seems that Zimmerman acted lawfully.

By John R. Lott Jr.
http://www.nationalreview.com
March 28, 2012

President Obama, Jesse Jackson, and others have chosen to personalize the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., highlighting the racial issues by expressing concern for people who look like they do or live where “blacks are under attack.” Many conservatives and liberals have also already concluded that the shooter committed a crime. All of these reactions are premature.

In response to the shooting, Florida governor Rick Scott has set up a commission to review the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Gun-control organizations, including the Brady Campaign, have gone beyond this and even more drastically called for the end of right-to-carry laws.

But such outrage should be restrained until we have all of the facts. Zimmerman’s call to the police, which has been heard over and over again, does not appear to tell the whole story. There is other information that appears to back up the shooter’s account. That evidence, rather than racism, might well be the reason that police chose not to arrest the shooter. Fox 35 in Orlando spoke to one eyewitness, identified as “John,” the day after the shooting. He explained: “The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: ‘Help, help’ . . . and I told him to stop and I was calling 9-1-1.”

The witness further indicated that it was the guy on top who was doing the hitting, and that the shot occurred while that attack was taking place. The man who shot Martin, George Zimmerman, was the man in the red jacket. The police report corroborates the witness’s account: “While I was in such close contact with Zimmerman, I could observe that his back appeared to be wet and was covered in grass, as if he had been laying on his back on the ground. Zimmerman was also bleeding from the nose and back of his head.” Zimmerman told the police, “I was yelling for someone to help me, but no one would help me.”

Zimmerman and his neighbors seem to have had reason for forming a neighborhood-watch group: During the past year, the Miami Herald reports, eight burglaries, nine thefts, and one shooting occurred in their gated community. And Zimmerman had even caught at least one thief himself.

Prior to the spread of “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle Doctrine” laws, citizens who wanted to defend themselves from a criminal had to retreat as far as possible and then announce to the criminal that they were going to shoot. But obvious problems arise: Forcing a victim to take time to retreat can put their life in jeopardy, and a prosecutor might argue that a victim didn’t retreat sufficiently. There have been many cases where victims have been chased and knocked down a couple of times before firing in self-defense, and yet prosecutors claimed that the victim still could have done more to retreat before firing their gun.

The Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws replaced the original requirement to retreat to a “reasonable person’s” standard, instead stating that lethal force is justified when a reasonable person would believe that a criminal intends to inflict serious bodily harm or death. These laws do not protect those who shoot fleeing criminals in the back, provoke attacks, or use lethal force in the absence of a threat to life or limb.

The difference between the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground laws is where they apply: The Castle Doctrine applies in a person’s home, and Stand Your Ground extends the right to any place the defender has a right to have a gun. Forty-one states now have these laws in some form, though most have adopted them in the last decade, and the statutes haven’t caused any problems at all. By case law, six other states protect victims from having to retreat before using deadly force.

Allowing victims to defend themselves not only protects the lives of victims who come under attack, but deters criminals from attacking to begin with. I have myself conducted the only published refereed academic study on these laws, and I found that states adopting Castle Doctrine laws reduced murder rates by 9 percent and overall violent crime by 8 percent.

But Martin’s shooting has raised a lot of confusion over what the Florida law would allow. Irrespective of the Stand Your Ground law, Zimmerman did indeed have the right to investigate a strange person in his neighborhood. And when, before any confrontation, Zimmerman informed the police operator that he was following Martin, the operator’s advice that “we don’t need you to do that” was suggestive, not compulsory. By itself, investigating someone who is a stranger in the neighborhood does not imply a provocation. In addition, Zimmerman claims that Martin attacked him from behind.

If it turns out that the police report and witness are wrong, and Zimmerman was the aggressor, he certainly deserves to be punished. But if Zimmerman was attacked, pummeled, and bloodied by Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman had justification to shoot in self-defense. So far it looks as if the police made the right decision.

— John R. Lott Jr. is the author of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010). He previously served as the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. He is also a co-author of the newly released book Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future (John Wiley & Sons, 2012).

Why Manipulate the Tragedy of Trayvon Martin?

By Heather Mac Donald

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

March 25, 2012  12:05 pm

Comments

 

The fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last month by a neighborhood-watch volunteer was a sickening and — unless new facts come to light — unjustified loss of an innocent life. Unless Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, had reason to believe that Martin was armed, shooting him was a grossly disproportionate response to a fistfight, even leaving aside the fact that Zimmerman had initiated the encounter. If such a shooting is justified under Florida’s broad self-defense law, that law has licensed violence that goes far beyond legitimate self-defense. Every American shares the despair of Martin’s family over this heartbreaking tragedy and supports a fuller investigation (though the entrance of the Feds at this point is premature, absent evidence of Florida’s incapacity to conduct a fair inquiry).

But is the Martin shooting emblematic of a larger problem? Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the mainstream media here and abroad certainly are portraying it as such. That larger problem, of course, is lethal white racism and a criminal-justice system allegedly indifferent to the killing of blacks. At a rally Thursday night in Sanford, Sharpton said that “Trayvon represents a reckless disregard for our lives that we’ve seen for too long,” and warned that “they,” presumably whites, would try to trick black protesters into violence by “send[ing] in provocateurs.” “Blacks are under attack,” said Jesse Jackson on Friday from Chicago. “Targeting, arresting, convicting blacks, and ultimately killing us is big business.” MSNBC analyst Karen Finney claimed that “racist rhetoric” used by Rush Limbaugh and several Republican presidential candidates was responsible for Martin’s death.

So determined has the New York Times been to fit the shooting into its favored racial story line that it has been referring to the Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” contrary to its usual practice of referring to Hispanics without any additional racial characterization. The fact that Zimmerman’s father is white does not explain this departure from the Times’s racial protocols; the Times’s one-drop rule still applies to Barack Obama, who is, according to the Times and every other media outlet, America’s “first black president.” (The Grey Lady referred to Zimmerman for the first time on Friday simply as “Hispanic.”)

Times columnist Charles Blow dealt with the complicating factor of Zimmerman’s ethnicity with a simple duality: “Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not,” he wrote last Saturday, presumably conferring on Zimmerman putative white status. The Rainbow Coalition has apparently broken down.

Blow went on to claim that it is the “the burden of black boys in America” to be at high risk of being shot by non-blacks: “This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious.’”

Blow is right about one thing: Black boys do face a much higher chance than non-blacks that they will be shot when they are “out in the world.” Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 were seven times more likely to die of homicide in 2007 than white and Hispanic males of the same age group combined. But the danger they face comes overwhelmingly from other black males, whose homicide offending rate in the 14 to 24 age category was nearly ten times higher than that of young white and Hispanic males combined. (The federal government’s crime data puts Hispanics and whites in a single category of “white,” thus overstating the non-Hispanic white offending and victimization rates). Most homicides are intraracial, but the chance of a black being killed by a white or Hispanic is much lower than the chance that a white or Hispanic will be killed by a black. Seventeen percent of what the FBI calls “white” homicide victims in 2009 were killed by blacks, compared to 8 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by “whites.” There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. If Hispanics were removed from the category of “white” killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls “white”-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs. (Needless to say, there is no reason to think that racism plays a more frequent role in white-on-black killings than in black-on-white killings.)

Blow’s fear that his children will be blown away by a white is particularly ludicrous in New York City. Blacks commit 80 percent of all shootings in the city — as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings — though they are but 23 percent of the population; whites commit 1.4 percent of all shootings, though they are 35 percent of the population. Add Hispanic shootings to the black tally, and you account for 98 percent of all of the city’s gun violence. In New York, as in big cities across the country, the face of violence is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.

No evidence has yet surfaced to support the charge that the failure of the Sanford police to arrest Zimmerman results from racial bias, as opposed to ambiguities in the application of Florida’s self-defense law and the absence of eye-witnesses to the killing. But if such evidence of racial indifference does emerge, it would be not only shameful but also a great exception to the practice of police departments across the country. Far from showing a “reckless disregard for [black] lives,” in Sharpton’s words, it is the police and prosecutors who are the most reliable responders to black victimization, trying relentlessly to put together a case even when the witnesses to crime refuse to cooperate. Most police chiefs will say that they could solve every inner-city killing if the people who saw the crime or know the perpetrators came forward, instead of obeying the “no snitching” code.

And it is the concerted efforts of police departments across the country to bring safety to urban neighborhoods that have played a central role in the 50 percent drop in the black homicide victimization rate from 1991 to 2008. In New York City, over 10,000 minority males are alive today who would have been killed had homicide rates remained at their early 1990s highs; the largest cause of that crime drop is the New York Police Department’s policing revolution, which has created an unprecedented sense of urgency about protecting lives. The NYPD’s weekly meetings at police headquarters, known as Compstat, focus relentlessly on one overriding question: How can we save more people — overwhelmingly minorities — from being victimized by crime? Many an NYPD commander has lost his post because he has not had an adequate answer to that question.

The protesters in Florida and across the country are right to demand an explanation for the decision not to charge Zimmerman. A critical examination of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law is absolutely warranted. But the racial storyline that has been imposed on the shooting does not fairly represent contemporary America. That storyline is not just wrong, it is dangerous, because it only feeds black alienation and anger. Family breakdown, not white racism, is the biggest impediment facing blacks today, producing such casualties as the 18-year-old gangbanger who fatally shot a 34-year-old mother picking up her child from school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, last October. Sharpton and the national media didn’t show up for that killing, just as they don’t for the thousands of other black-on-black killings each year. By all means, demand justice for Trayvon Martin. But when that justice comes, as it most surely will, perhaps some small part of the energy devoted to securing it could be redirected towards stigmatizing black criminals and revalorizing the role of fathers in families.

Editor’s Note: This post has been amended since it was originally published.

The Racist Ravings of Derrick Bell

By John Perazzo
http://frontpagemag.com/
March 9, 2012

Derrick Bell (Photo: Steve Liss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

By now, you may already have seen the 1991 video footage of Barack Obama, who was then a 30-year-old student at Harvard Law School, speaking in glowing terms about Harvard professor Derrick Bell, whom Obama described as a man known for “speaking the truth” and for an “excellence of … scholarship” that had not only “opened up new vistas and new horizons,” but had “changed the standards [of what] legal writing is about.” “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama urged the sizable crowd which had gathered to show their support for Professor Bell that day.

Since the release of the video, Obama’s backers have been quick to dismiss it as nothing more than a young scholar’s affectionate tribute to a liberal academic icon who not only made major intellectual contributions to his profession, but who also was a leading champion of racial “diversity” in higher education. For instance, CNN host Soledad O’Brien, when interviewing Breitbart.com’s editor-in-chief Joel Pollak yesterday about the significance of the video, described Bell benignly as “the first tenured African American professor of law at Harvard University,” and characterized the gathering merely as “a rally in support of racial equality among the faculty at Harvard Law School.” O’Brien then asked her guest, with apparent bewilderment, “What part of that was the bombshell? Because I missed it. I don’t get it. What was a bombshell?”

In a similar spirit of willful blindness, Media Matters describes Derrick Bell as “a respected academic” and “an influential figure in the Civil Rights movement.” This portrayal is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s pathetic characterization, a few years back, of Bill Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” But just as the reality of Bill Ayers was far more interesting than Obama indicated at that time, the truth about Derrick Bell is likewise far more compelling than the pablum the left has provided in the wake of this latest video. For you see, by the time Barack Obama was delivering his glowing remarks about Derrick Bell in 1991, the professor had already established—and would continue to cultivate for another two decades—a reputation as someone who thoroughly, resolutely detested the United States and who viewed the nation’s institutions and its people as irremediably racist. In short, until his death last October at the age of 80, Bell was secular academia’s version of Jeremiah Wright—a raging, fulminating racist without the clergyman’s robe. And something about his philosophy resonated strongly with Barack Obama.

Derrick Bell is best known as the founding father of Critical Race Theory, an academic discipline which maintains that society is divided along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines. Critical Race Theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently its legal structures are, by definition, racist and invalid. A logical derivative of this premise, according to Critical Race Theory, is that the members of “oppressed” racial groups are entitled—in fact obligated—to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and are worth observing. Such a perspective’s implications for the ability of civil society to function at all, are nothing short of monumental.

Further, Critical Race Theory holds that because racism is so deeply ingrained in America’s national character, racial preferences (favoring blacks) in employment and higher education are not only permissible but necessary as a means of countering the permanent character flaws of white people who, as Bell put it, seek to “achieve a measure of social stability through their unspoken pact to keep blacks on the bottom.”[1] Asserting that “few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks,” Bell—right around the time Obama was praising him at the Harvard rally—believed that “racial discrimination in the workplace is as vicious (if less obvious) than it was when employers posted signs ‘no negras need apply.’” Bell complained, in fact, that most white employers were loath to hire African Americans for “any position above the most menial.”[2] Nor did the professor look kindly upon his black colleagues who failed to share his enthusiasm for affirmative action. Indeed, Bell was among the first critics to condemn the June 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating: “To place a person who looks black and who, in conservative terms, thinks white, is an insult.”

Ideological conformity among blacks was of the utmost importance to Bell, since wherever he looked, he saw white racism. Lamenting that “no African Americans are insulated from incidents of racial discrimination,” Bell excoriated “a white society that condemns all blacks to quasi citizenship as surely as it segregated our parents.”[3] Claiming that racism was “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” Bell went so far as to state: “The fact that, as victims, we suffer racism’s harm but, as a people, [we] cannot share the responsibility for that harm, may be the crucial component in a definition of what it is to be black in America.”[4] On the premise that “black people will never gain full equality in this country” due to the unending evils of the white “oppressor class,” Bell advised African Americans to squarely confront “the otherwise deadening reality of our permanent subordinate status.”[5] This gloomy view of black destiny was reflected most vividly in the title of Bell’s 1992 book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.

By Bell’s reckoning, “the racism that made slavery feasible” was “far from dead.” He added: “Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”[6] Bell also railed against the racism that motivated acts of white-on-black crime, lamenting that “even our lives … are threatened because of our color.”[7] That claim did not square with the fact that more than 90 percent of African American murder victims nationwide are actually killed by fellow blacks, but it made for a nice sound bite. And in fact, Bell did not entirely turn a blind eye to the epidemic of black-on-black crime. That phenomenon, he explained, was itself a reaction to white oppression: “Victimized themselves by an uncaring society, some blacks vent their rage on victims like themselves.”[8] In other words, whenever something bad happens, it is always the fault of whites.

As Bell saw things, white malevolence knew no bounds. In one of his writings, he mused that if scientists were to someday develop a magical pill that could transform any black person who consumed it into a perfectly law-abiding individual, whites would undoubtedly conspire to destroy it so as to prevent such an effect. Why? Because black crime, he explained, benefits many whites such as those who profit from the manufacture of prison uniforms.[9] Wholly disgusted by the white race, Bell predicted that eventually America would witness the rise of charismatic new black leaders who, in the interests of retribution, would “urge that instead of [African Americans] killing each other, they should go out in gangs and kill a whole lot of white people.”[10] Presumably this was some of the lofty “scholarship” that so impressed Barack Obama.

Bell endorsed a journal called Race Traitor, whose stated aim is “to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin.” Moreover, the publication’s guiding principle is: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” In 1999 Bell signed on to a Race Traitor article that stated: “If the task of the nineteenth century was to overthrow slavery, and the task of the twentieth century was to end legal segregation, the key to solving this country’s problems in the twenty-first century is to abolish the white race as a social category—in other words, eradicate white supremacy entirely.” Among Bell’s fellow signatories were Pete Seeger, Cornel West, and Howard Zinn.

So this was Derrick Bell, the man whom Barack Obama feted on that 1991 day at Harvard, just four years before Obama was to launch his own political career in the home of two America-hating Marxists in Chicago—Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. As Obama lauded Bell, a banner was displayed in the background which read, “Harvard Law School on Strike for Diversity.” To be sure, Bell had already staged numerous sit-ins on behalf of “diversity” during his time at Harvard. Particularly high on his priority list was his wish to pressure the Law School into hiring a black female for a tenured professorship. Even though 45 percent of Harvard Law’s faculty appointments during the preceding decade had gone to minorities and women, none was both black and female—hence Professor Bell’s objection.[11] Bell’s students dutifully echoed the professor’s mantra, bleating that they desperately needed “black women role models” to help them combat “the status quo” that was dominated by “white men.” When Harvard’s dean stated that no attempt to increase “diversity” should override the University’s commitment to academic excellence, the protesters called his position “highly insulting to blacks” and symbolic of “the elitism of Harvard.”[12] It is reasonable to assume that Barack Obama, who helped galvanize campus support for Derrick Bell’s crusade on behalf of black women, more or less shared these views.

At that time, there was one black woman in particular whom Professor Bell wanted Harvard Law to hire—Regina Austin, a fellow adherent of Critical Race Theory who had been serving as a visiting professor at Harvard Law. Though Harvard had a longstanding policy that forbade the hiring of visiting professors during the year of their residence on campus, Bell issued a “non-negotiable demand” that Austin be given a faculty position.[13]

When the Law School refused to make an exception to its policy, Bell took a leave of absence from his teaching post and even staged a hunger strike in protest. Austin, you see, was a kindred spirit to Bell from an ideological perspective. An outspoken advocate of racial separatism and identity politics, she has long held that minority communities are not obliged to accept “traditional values” or “conformity to the law” as defined by the dominant power structure of a racist society.[14] Rather, such communities require an “alternative source of [legal] authority.”

In acknowledgment of the professional sacrifices Professor Bell made on behalf of this same Regina Austin, Barack Obama reverently referred to Bell as “the Rosa Parks of legal education.”

What does Barack Obama’s high regard for Derrick Bell tell us about the President? Certainly the praise he heaped upon Bell in 1991 reveals something profoundly significant about Obama’s mindset at the age of 30. Some, though, would dismiss it as ancient history. Slightly less ancient, however, is the fact that a 33-year-old Obama routinely assigned works authored by Bell—including the latter’s racialist interpretations of seminal civil-rights cases—as required readings in the courses he taught at the University of Chicago Law School in 1994. To be sure, Bell’s work appeared on Obama’s syllabus more frequently than that of any other author—a clear indication of Obama’s high regard for Bell’s scholarship.

Still more recent was Obama’s alliance with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—an alliance that shifted into high gear when Obama was 34 and remained in high gear (via his collaboration with Ayers on the radical Chicago Annenberg Challenge) until Obama was at least 38. And of course Obama’s attendance at (and his monetary contributions to) Jeremiah Wright‘s famously racist church from approximately age 27 until he was 47, says something noteworthy about his mindset during those years as well.

Pro-Obama automatons will dismiss these and all other references to Obama’s alliances as nothing more than mean-spirited attempts to smear a great man by way of innuendo and “guilt-by-association.” By contrast, people with a capacity to reason can surely understand that there is something far more profound at play here. In the final analysis, people should be free to throw their support behind a socialist who has spent his entire adult life allying himself with America-hating radicals and Marxists, if that is whom they choose to embrace. But when doing so, it is vital that they at least be cognizant of the fact that they are indeed backing such an individual.

Notes:

[1] Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 152.
[2] Ibid., pp. 5, 15.
[3] Ibid., pp. 3, 10.
[4] Cited in Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 17. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, p. 155.
[5] Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, pp. 12, 113.
[6] Ibid., pp. 3, 4.
[7] Ibid., p. 3.
[8] Ibid., p. 196.
[9] Lino Graglia, “Affirmative Discrimination,” National Review (July 5, 1993), p. 30.
[10] Robert Boynton, “Professor Bell, Sage of Black Rage,” New York Observer (October 10, 1994), p. 1.
[11] Fox Butterfield, “Harvard Law School Torn by Race Issue,” The New York Times (April 26, 1990).
[12] Ibid. Fox Butterfield, “Harvard Law Professor Quits Unitl Black Woman Is Named,” The New York Times (April 24, 1990), p. A1.
[13] David Horowitz, The Professors, p. 58.
[14] Ibid., p. 26. Heather MacDonald, “Law School Humbug,” City Journal (Autumn 1995).

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