Race and racial bias
February 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
February is Black History Month, as everyone with school-age children must know. Charles Cooke at NRO makes a strong case against having such a month. I concur. In my view, Black History Month operates to warp students’ understanding of American History and to assist those who wish to demonize America. I also believe these effects are intended by many of those who have foisted the present incarnation of this event
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February 1, 2013 — Steven Hayward
A few days ago we pondered the predictable ruckus over whether Volkswagen’s Super Bowl ad was raaacciiist. Well, if the Volkswagen ad fails the test of the Sensitivity Police, why not this recent Discovery Card ad, which plays to the stereotype of female black dialect: Here’s the Volkswagen ad again, for reference and comparison: There’s a reason most people play little attention to what’s left of the Civil Rights movement,
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January 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’m confused. I hear there is some kind of celebration of a black leader going on in Washington today, Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, except that it’s somebody else. I think I’ll skip whoever this poser may be, and celebrate Dr. King instead for his conservative principles. Scott writes movingly below about King’s prophetic gifts and courage, and rightly so. I appended a brief note about how King’s “Letter from
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December 16, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
A while ago, The Daily Caller reported that, as a student at Columbia University, Eric Holder participated in an armed takeover of the University’s former ROTC office. John wrote about this at the time, but I want to expand. According to the Daily Caller, Holder was among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge.” The change,
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December 14, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
I wasn’t going to comment about the remarks of the racist ESPN talking head who suggested that football star Robert Griffin III might be a “cornball brother” (i.e., an inauthentic black) because Griffin’s fiance is white and he might even be a Republican. Random stupidity doesn’t interest me. But then I heard that the taking head in question, Rob Parker, attended graduate school in journalism at Columbia University. Thus, his
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December 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We continue our Christmas extravaganza previewing the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here and get immediate access to the issue online). To assess an extraordinary new book on affirmative action in higher education, the editors have called on the great Thomas Sowell. Sowell introduces the subject with a paragraph that could be chiseled in stone: Anyone who follows public policy issues can easily think of policies
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December 1, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Contrary to what I wrote earlier today, Mona Charen did not err when she referred to Andrew Breitbart’s offer of a $10,000 reward to anyone producing video of racial epithets being shouted at Reps. Emanuel Cleaver et al. as they made their way to the Capitol on March 20,2010. As I am reminded through Jack Cashill’s video Capitol Hill Conspiracy (below), Andrew’s initial offer was indeed in the amount of
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December 1, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The late Andrew Breitbart founded Big Government, Big Hollywood, and Big Journalism. Andrew doggedly pursued the story behind the allegations of Reps. Andre Carson, John Lewis, Emanuel Cleaver and James Clyburn that Tea Party protesters abused black congressmen with racial epithets while demonstrating against Obamacare on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2010. The story was reported as fact by news organizations including Fox News and McClatchy News, but Breitbart called
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November 27, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The scramble is on to fill the congressional seat that Jesse Jackson, Jr. had to abandon due to mental illness. And, according to Politico, the black establishment is fearful that the seat might fall into the hands — not of a Republican; there’s no way — but a white. The concern is that former Rep. Debbie Halvorson, a white Democrat and veteran of suburban Chicago politics, will win the Democratic
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October 25, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Citing its latest survey, in which Mitt Romney leads President Obama 50-47, the Washington Post reports that “Poll shows widening racial gap in presidential contest.” But I like my headline better, because the widening of the racial gap is solely the result of white voters abandoning Obama. Obama’s support among black voters is constant; he captured 95 percent of that vote in 2008 and, according to the Post’s survey, will
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October 9, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
You might think that an African-American actress could tweet her support for Mitt Romney without becoming the subject of vicious verbal abuse in response. But to think this, you would have to be oblivious to the character of the American left. The actress in question is Stacey Dash. She tweeted an image of herself in a red swimsuit in front of the American Flag with the message, “Vote for Romney.
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October 3, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Crediting Morgen Richmond, Patterico has posted a video clip of Barack Obama speaking at a 2002 University of Chicago Martin Luther King Day Memorial. The video of the full speech is posted here. Patterico characterizes it as “by and large…a nice speech by a rising politician. Obama speaks about the need for empathy in society, about taking responsibility for our actions, and the audacity of hope….But,” Patterico holds, “there are
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October 3, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Obama famously pronounced that the radical Rev. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright that emerged in the 2008 campaign “is not the Rev. Wright that I know,” but the new videos suggest that Obama knows exactly who Rev. Wright is, and has no problem with it. Charles Kesler points out in I Am the Change that a close reading of Obama’s much-praised Philadelphia speech that supposedly threw Wright under the bus
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October 2, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
In the post immediately below, I described candidate Barack Obama’s 2007 speech in Hampton, Virginia in which he told a group of black ministers that because of racism, America doesn’t care very much about black people. As I noted, Obama based this claim on dishonest statements about the response to Hurricane Katrina. Jeremiah Wright also figured in Obama’s Hampton speech. In fact, Obama paid this tribute to Wright: I’ve got
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October 2, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The Daily Caller has obtained and posted video (video below) of a 2007 speech by Barack Obama in Hampton, Virginia. Speaking to an audience of black ministers, and using a black dialect only marginally more authentic than Joe Biden’s, Obama claims that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism. As the Daily Caller says, “the effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign
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September 26, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The news is out the afternoon of the passing of another giant of the intellectual world: Eugene Genovese, at the age of 82. In one of those coincidences that may not be entirely coincidental in this mystical world of ours, on Sunday and Monday my mind turned to thoughts of Genovese, the great scholar of the South and slavery in America (especially his classic Roll, Jordan, Roll). I was doing
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September 20, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
On September 16, 1962, Bobby Mitchell became the first black player to take the field for the Washington Redskins. The NFL had long been integrated, but the Redskins hadn’t followed suit. Owner George Preston Marshall was a racist who, in addition, cultivated a southern fan base (there was no NFL team located in Dixie during the 1950s). The Redskins integrated only after Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall made doing
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