Category: Affirmative Action – Immigration – Race

About Declaring That the Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues

According to The New York Times (“The MLB-Negro Leagues Stat Change: What Happened, and Why?“, May 29, 2024):

Some will be shocked waking up to the news Wednesday that Hall of Famer and Negro League star Josh Gibson is now the major leagues’ all-time batting leader — 77 years after his death in 1947. Gibson has long been called one of the best hitters in baseball history, but he died three months before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier and his numbers never appeared in MLB’s official record.

Until now.

As more than 2,300 Negro Leaguers’ numbers are added to the league’s official ledger, Gibson is MLB’s new career leader in batting average (.372), slugging percentage (.718) and OPS (1.177), and holds the single-season record in each slash-line category (.466/.564/.974).

Single-season OPS
NAME OPS (SEASON)
Josh Gibson
1.474 (1937)
Josh Gibson
1.435 (1943)
Barry Bonds
1.421 (2004)
Chino Smith
1.421 (1929)
Barry Bonds
1.381 (2002)
Babe Ruth
1.379 (1920)
Barry Bonds
1.378 (2001)
Babe Ruth
1.358 (1921)
Mule Suttles
1.349 (1926)
Babe Ruth
1.309 (1923)

[Note: OPS is a statistic that comes close to the sum of batting average and slugging percentage. I prefer the latter two, which I use below.]

“When you hear Josh Gibson’s name now, it’s not just that he was the greatest player in the Negro Leagues,’’ Gibson’s great-grandson, Sean, told USA TODAY, “but one of the greatest of all-time. These aren’t just Negro League stats. They’re major-league baseball stats.’’

This is of a piece with, though less harmful than, the beatification of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and others of their ilk. It’s yet another example of “equity” at work — make blacks equal (or more than equal) to whites and others by fiat.

I sampled the records of 25 black baseball players who went from the Negro leagues to Major League Baseball. The sample isn’t representative because it includes such greats, near-greats, long-tenured MLB players as Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Hank Thompson, Roy Campanella, Minnie Minoso, Luke Easter, Sam Jethroe, Jim Gilliam, Elston Howard, Monte Irvin, Harry Simpson, and Willie Mays. Of those players, Robinson, Doby, Campanella, Minoso, Irvin, and Mays were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I compared the records compiled by the 25 players (as a group) in the Negro leagues with their performance in MLB. Here’s what I found:

Negro leagues
MLB
Batting average 0.317 0.266
Runs/at bat 0.196 0.138
Home runs/at bat 0.023 0.019
Runs batted in/at bat 0.185 0.107
Slugging percentage 0.487 0.386

The big leagues (the real ones) are tough, aren’t they? Let’s just say that the Negro leagues were on a par with minor-league baseball — perhaps class A in the scheme that prevailed back in the day (AAA, AA, A, B, C, and D).

Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and other real MLB record-holders can sleep soundly in their graves.

Management Consultants Deliver … What Their Clients Want

I am reminded of the scam that is management consulting by an article at Econ Journal Watch, “McKinsey’s Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited“. (McKinsey is McKinsey & Company, a prestigious consulting firm founded in 1926.) I have read the article, and it firmly support the claims made in its abstract:

In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives [emphasis added].

McKinsey’s studies about the supposed benefits of diversity were produced for corporate clients. Specifically, they would have been produced for senior executives of corporations, most likely at the direction of or with the close involvement of vice presidents for human resources (i.e., personnel). I would be willing to place a wager that McKinsey’s results were just what the clients wanted, corporate culture being what it had become by the time McKinsey was called in to ratify diversity.

In that respect, McKinsey is far from alone. I worked at a not-for-profit consulting firm in the Washington DC area for 30 years. We looked down on the for-profit firms of which McKinsey is one of dozens (if not hundreds). They were known crudely but with some justice as Beltway Bandits, and more accurately as Highway Helpers. Their job (unacknowledged but obvious to anyone who read their output) was to deliver findings that served their clients’ interests. Those interests, in most cases were the justification of systems and processes being considered for procurement by government agencies. When the clients were government agencies, the findings justified whatever systems and processes were favored by those agencies.

But, to be candid, the same kind of relationship often existed between non-for-profits (like the one I worked for) and their government clients. We knew what the clients wanted to hear, and we often found ways to deliver results that made them happy. The first major project to which I was assigned went that way, and I observed (and sometimes participated in) projects that were similarly biased. One time, when I delivered to an admiral a candid — and negative — appraisal of his pet project, I was declared persona non grata in his branch of the Navy’s DC establishment.

The main exception to this kind of behavior occurred in the field, where my former employer’s analysts worked with Navy and Marine Corps operators to evaluate the effectiveness of systems and tactics — sometimes in actual combat situations. There, where lives were at stake (or could be at stake), operators usually wanted the unvarnished facts. And that’s what they got from the analysts in the field. But those analysts comprised (and still comprise) a tiny fraction of the thousands of analysts who worked for Beltway Bandits/Highway Helpers and their not-for-profit brethren.

Consulting to U.S.-government agencies on a grand scale grew out of the perceived successes in World War II of civilian analysts who were embedded in military organizations. To the extent that the civilian analysts were actually helpful,* it was because they focused on specific operations, such as methods of searching for enemy submarines. In such cases, the government client can benefit from an outside look at the effectiveness of the operations, the identification of failure points, and suggestions for changes in weapons and tactics that are informed by first-hand observation of military operations.

Beyond that, however, outsiders are of little help, and may be a hindrance, as in the case cited in a Politico article that I address here. (Which is far from unique.) Outsiders can’t really grasp the dynamics and unwritten rules of organizational cultures that embed decades of learning and adaptation.

The consulting game is now (and has been for decades) an invasive species. It is a perverse outgrowth of operations research as it was developed in World War II. Too much of a “good thing” is a bad thing — as I saw for myself many years ago.
__________
* The success of the U.S. Navy’s antisubmarine warfare (ASW) operations had been for decades ascribed to the pioneering civilian organization known as the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG), the predecessor of the organization for which I worked. However, with the publication of The Ultra Secret in 1974 (and subsequent revelations), it became known that codebreaking may have contributed greatly to the success of various operations against enemy forces, including ASW.

See also “Modeling Is Not Science“, “Analytical and Scientific Arrogance“, and “Management Science” in “The Balderdash Chronicles“.

The Black-White Achievement Gap and Its Parallel in the Middle East

THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP

My post, “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications“, long predates the summer of Black Lives Matter riots and the ensuing effort to whitewash (dare I say that?) the deep-seated and insurmountable differences between blacks and other racial-ethnic groups.

A key element of that post, but by no means the only key element, is the persistent intelligence gap, which is perhaps best measured by SAT scores on math. I introduce in evidence the misnamed and misguided “Race Gaps in SAT Scores Highlight Inequality and Hinder Upward Mobility” (Brookings, February 1, 2017).

The report is misnamed and misguided because inequality and upward mobility are the result of inherent differences in intelligence, not causes of those differences. (There is, of course, a feedback mechanism at work, but it rests on lower average intelligence among blacks.) Here is the meat of the report:

The mean score on the math section of the SAT for all test-takers is 511 out of 800, the average scores for blacks (428) and Latinos (457) are significantly below those of whites (534) and Asians (598). The scores of black and Latino students are clustered towards the bottom of the distribution, while white scores are relatively normally distributed, and Asians are clustered at the top:

Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution. In a perfectly equal distribution, the racial breakdown of scores at every point in the distribution would mirror the composition of test-takers as whole i.e. 51 percent white, 21 percent Latino, 14 percent black, and 14 percent Asian. But in fact, among top scorers—those scoring between a 750 and 800—60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300 and 350, 37 percent are Latino, 35 percent are black, 21 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian:

The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.) …

Disappointingly, the black-white achievement gap in SAT math scores has remained virtually unchanged over the last fifteen years. Between 1996 and 2015, the average gap between the mean black score and the mean white score has been .92 standard deviations. In 1996 it was .9 standard deviations and in 2015 it was .88 standard deviations. This means that over the last fifteen years, roughly 64 percent of all test-takers scored between the average black and average white score.

Note that the black-white gap shown in the third figure is inconsistent with the difference between the white and black means. The gap doesn’t shrink in the 2010s. Note also the following observations by the authors of the report:

The ceiling on the SAT score may … understate Asian achievement. If the exam was redesigned to increase score variance (add harder and easier questions than it currently has), the achievement gap across racial groups could be even more pronounced.

A standardized test with a wider range of scores, the LSAT, offers some evidence on this front. An analysis of the 2013-2014 LSAT finds an average black score of 142 compared to an average white score of 153. This amounts to a black-white achievement gap of 1.06 standard deviations, even higher than that on the SAT….

[T]here is a possibility that the SAT is racially biased, in which case the observed racial gap in test scores may overstate the underlying academic achievement gap. But most of the concerns about bias relate to the verbal section of the SAT, and our analysis focuses exclusively on the math section….

Finally, [these] data [are] limited in that [they] doesn’t allow us to disentangle race and class as drivers of achievement gaps. It is likely that at least some of these racial inequalities can be explained by different income levels across race….

However, a 2015 research paper from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley shows that between 1994 and 2011, race has grown more important than class in predicting SAT scores for UC applicants. While it is difficult to extrapolate from such findings to the broader population of SAT test-takers, it is unlikely that the racial achievement gap can be explained away by class differences across race.

In fact, my post includes hard evidence (from earlier data) that the race gaps persist across income levels. That is, blacks are less intelligent on average than whites (and others) in the same income bracket.

The evidence notwithstanding (because it is ignored and twisted), the current dogmas (critical race theory, or CRT; diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI) insist that white culture — including the tenet of racial equality under the law and the importance of dispassionate, scientific inquiry— must be rejected because it is all tainted with racism. Rejection means the suppression of whites and white culture so that blacks may reach their true potential.

The true potential of blacks is determined by their intelligence and their culture. Blacks, on average, are less intelligent than whites, and black culture (in America) fosters violence, disdain for education, and family dysfunction to a greater degree than is true for whites, on average. (But that, somehow, is whitey’s fault.)

Where will this lead? Right where Dov Fischer predicts it will lead:

[T]he same disadvantaged groups who today rely on blaming instead of self-help will then be at the same exact rung on the social order that they are today, just as 50 years of racism-free society and Great Society “entitlements” have not accomplished equality of results today, even as newcomers from Asia entered this country these past 50 and 60 years and leap-frogged those already here.

Blacks, on the whole, are not where they are because of whitey, but because of their genes and culture. But whites (and East Asians) will nevertheless be burdened and suppressed for the sake of “equity”.

THE PARALLEL IN THE MIDDLE EAST

A parallel to the racism of CRT and DEI is that Israel is the aggressor, and that Palestinians are victims. They are “obviously” (to a leftist) victims of Israel because they live (mostly) in territories that were or are controlled by Israel: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. There is also Israel’s controversial nation-state law, which according to an anti-Zionist source

declare[s] that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid.

The “nation-state” law, backed by the right-wing government, passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Some Arab lawmakers shouted and ripped up papers after the vote.

“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote.

Largely symbolic [not observed in practice], the law was enacted just after the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. It stipulates that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it.”

The usual suspects have declared that the separation of Palestinians (and other Arabs) from Israel and from its governance amount to apartheid., a crime against “international (leftist) law”. From this it follows (to a leftist) that acts of savagery — like those committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7, 2023 — are justified because Palestinians are victims It further follows (to a leftist) that Israel’s fully justified prophylactic retaliation is aggression.

Let’s examine those premises.

It’s true enough that the denizens of Gaza are poor and feckless. But what makes them victims? They are about on a par with most non-Jewish Semites, except for the relative handful who are members of a professional caste or oil-rich. The basic problem with most such members of humanity —whether in the Middle East or elsewhere — isn’t that they have been put down by anyone (e.g., Israelis) but that they lack the intellectual and cultural resources to raise themselves up.

A “funny” thing about Israel is that it is of a piece with the surrounding lands occupied by non-Jews, but it has become a relatively prosperous place because Jews have the intellectual and cultural resources that undergird prosperity.

For their success and for the fact that they are Jews, the Jews of Israel are the targets of envious failures (Palestinian and Muslim hot-heads), Jew-haters (in addition to the hot-heads), and leftists who can’t bear to think that Palestinians (like American blacks) mainly have their genes and culture to blame for their failings.

Israel was founded (re-founded, really) in the wake of the Holocaust. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews — a safe haven for a historically oppressed and brutalized people. Israel has been under attack by Muslims since its modern founding. But Israel has a natural right to self-defense and to preserve its Jewish character, just as the American rebels of 1776 had a natural right to declare themselves independent of a despotic King and rapacious Parliament.

So, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank became de jure parts of Israel (though the Gaza Strip was foolishly handed over to anti-Israelis) as a matter of the natural right of self-defense. As for Palestinians living in Israel proper, why should they have a voice in the governance of a country that was re-founded for Jews? Well, despite the nation-state law cited above, they do have a voice in the governance of Israel.

So, all of the leftist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, Palestinians aren’t victims, except of their own genes and culture. But unlike the “liberals” of old, the left nowadays focuses on demonizing the meritorious instead of helping those who need help.

Finally, there is the accusation that Israelis are sometimes brutal in their own defense. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s impossible to defend a country against determined enemies without being brutal toward them — just as it’s impossible to protect law-abiding citizens by disarming them and depriving them of police protection. The left sees Israelis as brutal because the left despises Israeli Jews, not because Israelis are any more brutal than leftists like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their many successors unto the present day.

Coda: There was a time when most Americans recognized the need for superior force as a bulwark of the defense of America. It is a sad commentary on the state of America that a sizable and influential segment of the populace no longer believes that America is worth defending tooth and nail. (Just look at the response to the rise of China, our trading “partner”.)

Those pampered idiots believe that it is necessary for America to be taken down a peg or two, and that it is wrong for America (but not other nations) to excel. As beneficiaries of American exceptionalism, they are able to spout such nonsense and to tear down the very laws and traditions that shelter them from the wrath of the rightfully aggrieved victims of their beliefs and policies: hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding victims of unfettered illegal immigration, unnecessary Covid lockdowns, prosperity-draining regulations and regulatory agencies, unnecessarily high energy costs because of the climate-change hoax, etc., etc., etc.

Melting Pots

Melting pots are good when the ingredients are stirred in slowly and the resulting mixture isn’t force-fed.

Second Thoughts

I read here that Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, and eminent economist at Princeton University, has changed his mind about a few hot topics. One of them is globalization:

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

Another is immigration:

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

I hope that Professor Deaton’s example will be emulated by many more academics. Not just with respect to the issues that he addresses in his essay but also with respect to the many other issues where academics — and so-called intellectuals — have abetted dangerous and/or costly errors (to which I will come).

There was a time when it was considered sound thinking to gather evidence — facts, not opinions or talking points — and to base judgments and policy recommendations on the evidence. That time is past, though not irretrievably. Professor Deaton’s epiphanies are proof of the possibility that science, in all its forms, might once again become evidence-based. That’s not to say that there is never room for disagreements. There always is. But science, properly done, advances because of disagreement. It stagnates and regresses when dogma replaces debate.

But that is what has happened in so many fields of inquiry. Science, in too many fields, has become captive to “scientists” who put their preconceptions ahead of the evidence and who howl for the heads of heretics. It is dispiriting to know how many so-called scientists have become willing and eager handmaidens of wokeness. (Prostitution takes many forms.)

Thus the dangerous and/or costly errors, of which these are leading examples:

  • The “war” on “climate change” is making Americans and Europeans generally poorer and less comfortable.
  • The unnecessarily draconian response to Covid-19 made billions of people poorer, less well educated, and uncomfortable in their daily lives. It also had a lot to do with the rampant inflation of recent years, which will never be rolled back.
  • The LGBTQ/non-binary craze is causing parents and young adults to do things to their children and themselves that will cause them much misery for years to come, if not forever.
  • The anti-racism craze has been endorsed by “scientists” and “scientific organization” (as well as elites, pundits, and politicians). The main result is that “persons of color” get “bonus points” which enable them to commit crimes with impunity; acquire jobs for which they aren’t qualified, and gain entrance to colleges and graduate schools despite their lower intelligence than whites and Asians with whom they are competing. The cost in social comity and inferior products and services (e.g., surgery) may be subtle, but it is real and long-lasting. And it will get worse as long as wokeness prevails in high places.

Needless to say, the politicians and wealthy elites who favor such things are well insulated from the dire effects. Among the wealthy elites are tens of thousands of academics at top-tier and even second-rate universities who rake in money and dispense lunacy.

“Licking” in the Age of Wokeness

Eons ago, when I was a freshman in college, I learned that “licking” was the art of adapting a story or novel to a movie script. That use of “licking” seems to have vanished, which is unsurprising in an age when actual licking (and other such things) is a staple of film fare.

In any event, I use “licking” here to mean the adaptation of a piece of literature to a script. The script in this case is that of Lessons in Chemistry, a 2023 release on Apple TV+, which in eight episodes veers wildly from the novel on which it is based: Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, by Bonnie Garmus. The novel and the TV adaptation are set in the 1950s.

“Licking” sometimes involved changing the ending of the story. And the writers of the TV version certainly did that. But that was the least of their sins. The most of their sins was their feat of making Garmus’s story even more woke than the print version.

The book is a long, feminist rant. The TV adaptation is a feminist, racist rant, amplified through a bullhorn. Things that aren’t in the book but which are in the TV version:

  • Calvin Evans (the white, male protagonist) and Elizabeth Zott (the white, female protagonist) live in a black neighborhood.
  • There is a black neighbor woman (more about her below) who abandoned her law career to put her husband through medical school.
  • The same black woman leads a crusade to keep the corrupt, all-white, city council and greedy developers from replacing the neighborhood with a freeway.
  • Elizabeth Zott, who (for reason too convoluted to discuss here) becomes the host of a successful TV show about cooking (an early Julia Child). That much is in the books. But when Elizabeth alienates her sponsor — the maker of a hydrogenated shortening — she manages to replace that sponsor with … Tampax. Not in the book, but essential to the arch-feminist tone of the TV series.
  • Calvin Evans, as a child, is placed in an orphanage run by Catholic priests. That’s in the book. What’s not in the book is that he’s held back from adoption because the priests exploit his nascent brilliance as a chemist to distill and sell bootleg whiskey.
  • A clergyman — white in the book, black in the TV show — helps Calvin’s daughter, Mad Zott, find the orphanage. The book’s clergyman didn’t know Calvin; the TV’s show’s clergyman was a long-lost friend.

Similar things can happen relatively infrequently -in life but when they’re packed into a single TV series, you know that you’re getting a message like this one:

  • White folks and black folks can get along just fine — as long as white folks are willing.
  • White folks who live among and socialize with black folks are open-minded, loving people. (How about white folks who live among or near violent black folks? Are they open-minded and loving or just stupid or too poor to move?)
  • Bad things happen to black folks because of white folks. (Hmm … that’s the theme of CRT, which fails to acknowledge the weighty burdens of lower intelligence and a culture of irresponsibility and violence.)
  • Catholic priests are b-a-a-d people, unless they’re homosexuals. (Sodomizing young boys is really bad, but it’s usually done by homosexuals, which is why the badness shown in the TV version skirted that issue.)

About that black neighbor woman: Like the black neighborhood, she didn’t exist in the book. The middle-aged, white housewife who befriended Elizabeth in the book had to be replaced by a younger, black housewife-lawyer-crusader. In other words, more of the same: arch-feminism and racism.

The book was a feel-good story that probably appealed mainly to white women in search of escape and a bit of inner rebellion. The TV series is a feel-good story for well-off white folks of the kind who hate Donald Trump and believe that anyone who might vote for him is a misogynist, racist Neanderthal.

What Do I See in My Crystal Ball?

Nothing good:

The Biden administration overcomes the resistance of Texas and other GOP-led States and continues to allow illegal aliens (potential Democrat voters) to inundate the nation.

Perversely, in response to the resistance from Texas and other GOP-led States, the Biden administration declares a “national emergency” and effectively seizes control of GOP-controlled States. All policies that affirm life and liberty are suppressed (e.g., abortion bans and limits, school choice, effective law-enforcement, and — course — the freedoms of religion and speech).

If the immigration crisis doesn’t result in a “national emergency”, a different predicate will be found. The left’s need for control has is obsessive.

One result of the “national emergency” is the cancellation of the 2024 presidential election and the installation of a “provisional” government, led nominally by Biden (with Obama pulling the strings).

Even if there’s no national emergency or a provisional government, the left will remain in control through electoral chicanery.

Among many things, Biden administration’s egregious policies continue; for example, privileges for violent criminals, blacks, queers, and other “identity groups” (despite their known anti-social predilections and lack of accomplishments and abilities); the impoverishing war on fossil fuels and their efficient use (e.g., in gasoline-powered automobiles, gas furnaces, and gas cooktops); and the aforementioned flood of illegal aliens whose are supported the tax-paying citizens who are also the victims of the criminals among said aliens.

The regime finds a way around the GOP’s efforts to block aid to Ukraine and persists in a war that spreads to Western Europe and thus (via NATO) to the United States — perhaps involving exchanges of nuclear weapons.

The regime fails to take decisive action in the Middle East (and against Iran, specifically), with the result that critical resources and a critical trade route are throttled — re-igniting inflation and imposing real burdens (e.g., soaring energy prices) on working-class Americans.

Israel stands alone and eventually succumbs to the Muslim hordes, which leads to a second Holocaust. The provisional government tut-tuts and does nothing.

Iran, North Korea, and China — having observed the regime’s fecklessness — attack allied nations and international-trade routes, thereby exacerbating the effects of the conflagration in the Middle East. Diminished U.S. armed forces will only stand by as South Korea and Japan are assailed by missile attacks, Taiwan is subjugated to China, and the South China Sea and its bordering nations become China’s possessions.

The regime — under heavy pressure from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — enters into an alliance of “peace and prosperity” with those nations. The effect of the alliance is the subjugation of working Americans (i.e., the people who produce things, not ideas) to the regulatory state and the gradual reduction of working people’s living standards to the those of the 1940s (at best).

Further emulating Soviet-style “democracy” the labor of the masses (including the illegal hordes) enables the ruling classes and their favorite to live high on the hog.

Continuing the lawfare conducted against Donald Trump and the J6 protestors, Soviet-style “justice” is exacted upon those who openly dissent from the new dispensation. True justice dies with the effective revocation of the Constitution and the emasculation of those courts that might have resisted the new dispensation.

These are my worst fears. I hope that I’m badly wrong.

Related reading:

Brandon Smith, “Cultural Replacement: Why the Immigration Crisis Is Being Deliberately Engineered“, Alt-Market.us, January 25, 2024

Graham McAleer, “Is Conservatism’s Future Strauss or Vogelin?“, Law & Liberty, January 26, 2024

Hans von Spakovsky, “Biden Doesn’t Have Any Legal Authority to Seize Control of the Texas National Guard“, The Daily Signal, January 27, 2024

Critical Race Theory: Where It Really Leads

ORIGINAL OF MAY 29, 2021, EDITED AND RE-POSTED

Blacks, on average, lag whites in income and wealth, and are disproportionately targeted by law-enforcement. All of this is due to white racism.

White culture — including the tenet of racial equality under the law and the importance of dispassionate, scientific inquire — must be rejected because it is all tainted with racism. Rejection means the suppression of whites and white culture so that blacks may reach their true potential.

In fact, the true potential of blacks is determined by their intelligence and their culture.

Blacks, on average, are less intelligent than whites, and black culture (in America) fosters violence, disdain for education, and family dysfunction to a greater degree than is true for whites, on average. (But that, somehow, is whitey’s fault.)

Where will this lead? Right where Dov Fischer predicts it will lead:

[T]he same disadvantaged groups who today rely on blaming instead of self-help will then be at the same exact rung on the social order that they are today, just as 50 years of racism-free society and Great Society “entitlements” have not accomplished equality of results today, even as newcomers from Asia entered this country these past 50 and 60 years and leap-frogged those already here.

Blacks, on the whole, are not where they are because of whitey, but because of their genes and culture.

How Two Wrongs (Do Not) Make a Right

The essential aim of Black Lives Matter and its many allies in the woke-o-sphere is to serve a hot, heaping dish of revenge to whites who meet certain specifications (non-woke, straight, white, male, conservatives of European descent) and to anyone else who doesn’t grovel at the altar of wokeism.

Why revenge? Because, in the world of wokeism, two wrongs do make a right. The wrongs of slavery and Jim Crow weren’t wrongs because they denied fundamental rights to persons of a certain class (i.e., most blacks in the South). If that were the case, wokesters would believe that it’s wrong to deny fundamental rights (e.g., freedom of speech) to certain whites just because of their whiteness or the views that they hold about wokeism.

But wokesters evidently don’t believe that its wrong to deny fundamental rights to persons. Their actions demonstrate this belief: It’s wrong to deny fundamental rights to blacks, but the rest of the world can go to hell.

That this belief exemplifies racism, tribalism, and other isms decried by wokesters is evident to non-wokesters. Thus the backlash against wokeism and its various manifestations — critical race theory being the most obvious and pernicious of the lot.

What Do Wokesters Want?

I am using “wokesters” as a convenient handle for persons who subscribe to a range of closely related movements, which include but are not limited to wokeness, racial justice, equity, gender equality, transgenderism, social justice, cancel culture, environmental justice, and climate-change activism. It is fair to say that the following views, which might be associated with one or another of the movements, are held widely by members of all the movements (despite the truths noted parenthetically):

Race is a social construct. (Despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary.)

Racism is a foundational and systemic aspect of American history. (Which is a convenient excuse for much of what follows.)

Racism explains every bad thing that has befallen people of color in America. (Ditto.)

America’s history must be repudiated by eradicating all vestiges of it that glorify straight white males of European descent. (Because wokesters are intolerant of brilliance and success of it comes from straight white males of European descent.)

The central government (when it is run by wokesters and their political pawns) should be the sole arbiter of human relations. (Replacing smaller units of government, voluntary contractual arrangements, families, churches, clubs, and other elements of civil society through which essential services are provided, economic wants are satisfied efficiently, and civilizing norms are inculcated and enforced), except for those institutions that are dominated by wokesters or their proteges, of course.)

[You name it] is a human right. (Which — unlike true rights, which all can enjoy without cost to others — must be provided at cost to others.)

Economics is a zero-sum game; the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. (Though the economic history of the United States — and the Western world — says otherwise. The rich get rich — often rising from poverty and middling circumstances — by dint of effort risk-taking, and in the process produce things of value for others while also enabling them to advance economically.)

Profit is a dirty word. (But I — the elite lefty who makes seven figures a year, thank you, deserve every penny of my hard-earned income.)

Sex gender is assigned arbitrarily at birth. (Ludicrous).

Men can bear children. (Ditto.)

Women can have penises. (Ditto.)

Gender dysphoria in some children proves the preceding poiXXXX

Children can have two mommies, two daddies, or any combination of parents in any number and any gender. And, no, they won’t grow up anti-social for lack of traditional father (male) and mother (female) parents. (Just ask blacks who are unemployed for lack of education and serving prison time after having been raised without bread-winning fathers.)

Blacks, on average, are at the bottom of income and wealth distributions and at the top of the incarceration distribution — despite affirmative action, subsidized housing, welfare payments, etc. — because of racism. (Not because blacks, on average, are at the bottom of the intelligence distribution and have in many black communities adopted and enforced a culture the promotes violence and denigrates education?)

Black lives matter. (More than other lives? Despite the facts adduced above?)

Police are racist Nazis and ought to be de-funded. (So that law abiding blacks and other Americans can become easier targets for rape, murder, and theft.)

Grades, advanced placement courses, aptitude tests, and intelligence tests are racist devices. (Which happen to enable the best and brightest — regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic class — to lead the country forward scientifically and economically, to the benefit of all.)

The warming of the planet by a couple of degrees in the past half-century (for reasons that aren’t well understood but which are attributed by latter-day Puritans to human activity) is a sign of things to come: Earth will warm to the point that it becomes almost uninhabitable. (Which is a case of undue extrapolation from demonstrably erroneous models and a failure to credit the ability of capitalism — gasp! — to adapt successfully to truly significant climatic changes.)

Science is real. (Though we don’t know what science is, and believe things that are labeled scientific if we agree with them. We don’t understand, or care, that science is a process that sometimes yields useful knowledge, or that the “knowledge” is always provisional, always in doubt, and sometimes wrong. We support the movement of recent decades to label some things as scientific that are really driven by a puritanical, anti-humanistic agenda, and which don’t hold up against rigorous, scientific examination, such as the debunked “science” of “climate change”; the essential equality of the races and sexes, despite their scientifically demonstrable differences; and the belief that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.)

Illegal immigrants migrants are just seeking a better life and should be allowed free entry into the United States. (Because borders are arbitrary — except when it comes to my property — and it doesn’t matter if the unfettered enty ro illegal immigrants burdens tax-paying Americans and takes jobs from working-class Americans.)

The United States spends too much on national defense because (a) borders are arbitrary (except when they delineate my property), (b) there’s no real threat to this country (except for cyberattacks and terrorism sponsored by other states, and growing Chinese and Russian aggression that imperils the economic interests of Americans), (c) America is the aggressor (except in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Gulf War I, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and in the future if America significantly reduces its defense forces), and (d) peace is preferable to war (except that it is preparedness for war that ensures peace, either through deterrence or victory).

What wokesters want is to see that these views, and many others of their ilk, are enforced by the central government. To that end, steps will be taken to ensure that the Democrat Party is permanently in control of the central government and is able to control most State governments. Accordingly, voting laws will be “reformed” to enable everyone, regardless of citizenship status or other qualification (perhaps excepting age, or perhaps not) to receive a mail-in ballot that will be harvested and cast for Democrat candidates; the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (with their iron-clad Democrat super-majorities) will be added to the Union; the filibuster will be abolished; the Supreme Court and lower courts will be expanded and new seats will be filled by Democrat nominees; and on, and on.

Why do wokesters want what they want? Here’s my take:

  • They reject personal responsibility.
  • They don’t like the sense of real community that is represented in the traditional institutions of civil society.
  • They don’t like the truth if it contradicts their view of what the world should be like.
  • They are devoid of true compassion.
  • They are — in sum — alienated, hate-filled nihilists, the produce of decades of left-wing indoctrination by public schools, universities, and the media.

What will wokesters (and all of us) get?

At best, what they will get is a European Union on steroids, a Kafka-esque existence in a world run by bureaucratic whims from which entrepreneurial initiative and deeply rooted, socially binding cultures have been erased.

Somewhere between best and worst, they will get an impoverished, violent, drug-addled dystopia which is effectively a police state run for the benefit of cosseted political-media-corprate-academic elites.

At worst (as if it could get worse), what they will get is life under the hob-nailed boots of Russia and China:; for example:

Russians are building a military focused on killing people and breaking things. We’re apparently building a military focused on being capable of explaining microaggressions and critical race theory to Afghan Tribesmen.

A country whose political leaders oppose the execution of murderers, support riots and looting by BLM, will not back Israel in it’s life-or-death struggle with Islamic terrorists, and use the military to advance “wokeism” isn’t a country that you can count on to face down Russia and China.

Wokesters are nothing but useful idiots to the Russians and Chinese. And if wokesterst succeed in weakening the U.S. to the point that it becomes a Sino-Soviet vassal, they will be among the first to learn what life under an all-powerful central government is really like. Though, useful idiots that they are, they won’t survive long enough to savor the biter fruits of their labors.

Reparations? Really?

A purportedly conservative columnist named Gary Abernathy, who seems to opine bi-weekly in The Washington Post, takes on reparations (for blacks, of course):

Like most conservatives, I’ve scoffed at the idea of reparations or a formal apology for slavery. I did not own slaves, so why would I support my government using my tax dollars for reparations … ?…

[I]t could be argued that the idea fits within the conservative philosophy. We’ll come back to that. But it is undeniable that White people have disproportionately benefitted from both the labor and the legacy of slavery, and — crucially — will continue to do so for generations to come.

When slavery was abolished after a bloody civil war, African Americans were dispersed into a world that was overtly hostile to them. Reconstruction efforts were bitterly resisted by most Southern Whites, and attempts to educate and employ former slaves happened only in fits and starts. The government even reneged on its “40 acres and a mule” pledge. After slavery, prejudice and indifference continued to fuel social and economic disparity.

The result is unsurprising. As noted by scholars A. Kirsten Mullen and William A. Darity Jr., co-authors of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” data from the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances showed that median Black household net worth averaged $17,600 — a little more than one-tenth of median White net worth. As Mullen and Darity write, “white parents, on average, can provide their children with wealth-related intergenerational advantages to a far greater degree than black parents. When parents offer gifts to help children buy a home, avoid student debt, or start a business, those children are more able to retain and build on their wealth over their own lifetimes.”

Black author and activist Randall Robinson has argued that even laws such as those on affirmative action “will never close the economic gap. This gap is structural. … blacks, even middle-class blacks, have no paper assets to speak of. They may be salaried, but they’re only a few months away from poverty if they should lose those jobs, because … they’ve had nothing to hand down from generation to generation because of the ravages of discrimination and segregation, which were based in law until recently.”

In addition to the discrepancy in inherited wealth, even conservatives should be able to acknowledge that Whites enjoy generational associations in the business world, where who you know often counts more than what you know — a reality based not so much on overt racism as on employment and promotion patterns within old-school networks that Blacks lack the traditional contacts to consistently intersect….

The cost [of reparations] can be debated, along with the mechanics of a compensation package. But in the current drunken haze of government spending, appropriating trillions for the noble purpose of bringing Black Americans who remain economically penalized by the enslavement of their ancestors closer to the fiscal universe of White citizens surely seems less objectionable than some recent spending proposals.

It is a tenet of conservatism that a level playing field is all we should guarantee. But that’s meaningless if one team starts with an unsurmountable lead before play even begins.

It’s not necessary to experience “White guilt” or buy into the notion of “White privilege,” a pejorative that to me suggests Whites possess something they should lose, when in fact such benefits should extend to all. Supporting reparations simply requires a universal agreement to work toward, as Jayapal said, “righting that wrong.”

That’s not what you were expecting, is it? Where to begin?

Glaringly absent from Abernathy’s “analysis” are the main determinants of the vast black-white gaps in income and wealth: Blacks are (on average) less intelligent than whites; two-thirds of all whites in the U.S. are more intelligent than the average black. The lower intelligence of blacks, combined with certain cultural traits, means that (as a group) they can never attain the income and wealth of whites. The insurmountable gap is there because of inborn and inbred differences that have nothing to do with slavery or “Jim Crow” and everything to do with genetic inheritance and deeply rooted cultural traditions.

The wrong of “Jim Crow” is several decades in the past, and the wrong of slavery is in the distant past. Both have as much to do with the present condition of blacks as CO2 has to do with “climate change” — which is to say, almost nothing.

Racism? It cuts both ways, and you ignore that fact at your peril. It takes but a few seconds with a search engine to turn up statistics which show that blacks are much more prone to the commission of violent crimes than are whites (or Hispanics, for that matter). Don’t you suppose that the greater propensity for violence among blacks (which is a reflection of intelligence and culture) has a lot to do with the income and wealth gap? (It also has very much to do with the seemingly greater tendency of blacks to be shot by cops while they, blacks, are committing crimes and resisting arrest.)

A level playing field? Where did Abernathy get that one? A level playing field is where the participants are given the same opportunities to make what they can of their natural endowments. No amount of leveling the playing field will give blacks the same natural endowments as whites when it comes to earning a living. (Athletes and entertainers are among the relatively rare exceptions that don’t change the rule.)

Taking money from whites and giving it to blacks doesn’t level the playing field. It merely penalizes (most) whites for something that isn’t their fault and that can’t be fixed by throwing money at it. (Ditto, “climate change”.)

My own view is that American blacks, on the whole, owe me a large reparation for my “contributions” to various government programs. I am thinking not just of the usual handouts to “welfare queens”, the futile Head Start program, preferential treatment for mortgage loans, subsidies for black-owned businesses, etc., etc. Those are just icing on the cake of Social Security and Medicaid, which are designed to transfer income from those with high earnings to those with low earnings (or none). Then there are the taxes that I pay for “public safety”, which are undoubtedly higher than they would be if blacks comprised a smaller proportion of the populace.

Related page and posts:

Intelligence

Affirmative Action: A Modest Proposal
After the Bell Curve
A Footnote . . .<
Affirmative Action: Two Views from the Academy, Revisited
Crime, Explained Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Poverty, Crime, and Big Government
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Crime Revisited Nature, Nurture, and Inequality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
The IQ of Nations
Race and Social Engineering
More about Intelligence
Nature, Nurture, and Leniency
Racism on Parade
How’s Your (Implicit) Attitude?
Why Race Matters
Is Race a Social Construct?
The Complexity of Race
White Privilege
Less Discrimination Means More Discrimination

Regarding the Verdict in the Chauvin Trial

What I said here still applies.

And … regardless of the justice or injustice of the verdict, cops will be further demoralized and thugs will be further emboldened by it. Look for less law and order in the months and years to come, unless a “man on horseback” arrives.

The Second Coming of Who?

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is quoted often these days, especially the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. And with good reason, given the maelstrom of strife and lunacy in which the nation and the world seem to be swirling.

Science and mathematics are in the grip of irrational forces; that is to say, sadly, the academic-media-information technology-corporate élites who have swallowed “wokeness” hook, line, and sinker. The same élites are responsible for the wholesale violation of immigration laws; the advancement of shiftless, violent, and less-intelligent citizens (and non-citizens) at the expense of blameless others; the risible belief that one’s sex is “assigned at birth”, to justify self-destructive and child-destructive gender-shifting; the repudiation of America’s past (the good with the bad); the destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well; the blatant theft of a presidential election; and much more that is equally distressing to contemplate.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of what was then the world’s most destructive war and in the midst of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal than the one from which the world is now emerging. It was a time of moral and physical exhaustion.

What is most remarkable about Yeats’s poem is its prescient second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And thus did those “rough beasts” Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords — all “men on horseback” — emerge to take advantage of the moral and physical exhaustion of the time.

No such person is now on the horizon in America (though the élites feared that Trump might be that man). But if the maelstrom continues to swirl, a man on horseback will emerge, either from within or from without. In the latter case, given the feckless leadership in America, the man on horseback is likely to ride out of China, perhaps accompanied by a Russian.

And given a choice between a man or horseback and the élites who have corrupted America and who pamper the rabble, the man on horseback will be welcomed with open arms by those who are suffering at the hands of the élites.

Racism in Action

Here. It’s not what you expected, is it?

The perp — a young-ish black man — had previously been arrested more than 100 times

Why was he walking around free?

Why aren’t white’s rioting and burning down buildings?

(See also “Crime Revisited“.)

Less Discrimination Means More Discrimination

From a piece by Jordan Davidson in The Federalist:

The United States Supreme Court on Monday ruled [in Bostock v. Clayton] that the definition of sex in a federal civil rights law expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity, ensuring the protection of gay, lesbian, and transgender people from being reprimanded or fired at work. This controversial decision comes after multiple failed legislation attempts in Congress over the last 15 years to rewrite the definition of the word “sex” into law.

The ruling was 6-3 with Justice Gorsuch and Justice Roberts, both appointed by Republican presidents, voting with the majority while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissented on the grounds that the definition of sex is not the Court’s decision.

Kavanaugh’s dissent includes this conciliatory aside:

Notwithstanding my concern about the Court’s transgression of the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is appropriate to acknowledge the important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans. Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law. They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit—battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention in their daily lives. They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today’s result.

Granting more “equality” to yet another identity group means that employers are less likely to hire and promote — and more likely to fire — white, heterosexual males under the age of 40 who are undeniably of European descent. It’s the only group that can’t claim employment discrimination. Well, maybe it’s not the only group, but it’s certainly the only group that comprises more than a fraction of a percent of the populace. And you can bet that the minuscule minorities will eventually acquire more “rights” than the aforementioned white, heterosexual males.

So much for equal treatment under the law. To paraphrase George Orwell’s observation in Animal Farm: All persons are equal, but some persons are more equal than others.

White Privilege

I won’t repeat very much of what is found in these two articles about so-called white privilege. They almost adequately address the phenomenon of superior life outcomes, on average, among whites relative to blacks. What are the causes, according to the writers? This is from the second article:

Geographic determinism, personal responsibility, family structure, and culture work [together] to explain differences in outcomes. Recall Raj Chetty, whose research found a correlation between neighbourhoods and economic mobility. His study turned up only one other local characteristic that rivalled social capital in boosting social mobility: two-parent households. However, it isn’t enough just to live in a two-parent household. If you grow up amid intact families, the American Dream is alive and well. Indeed, the proliferation of intact families in a neighbourhood serves to increase social capital.

Furthermore, the social capital which underpins geographic determinism is ultimately a consequence of the culture of a neighbourhood. These values influence the decisions made by those living in the neighbourhood. These decisions then feed into family structure, ultimately reinforcing the neighbourhood’s culture while preserving social capital.

All of this is to say, each of these factors are connected. On their own, they can only explain part of why group outcomes differ. But together, they paint a clearer picture than the one drawn by the adherents of white privilege.

These factors are less thrilling than blaming a specific racial group. If we want to feel the satisfaction of directing blame while enhancing in-group solidarity, then invoking white privilege is not a bad strategy. “White privilege” gives you a simple answer and a clear enemy. But if we truly want to understand and mitigate group differences, then taking a closer look at the data is a far better approach.

Here and throughout the two articles, however, the writers fail to name and discuss the basic determinant of differential outcomes between blacks and whites, on average. It is the crucial determinant which underlies those that they list. That determinant, of course, is the wide and persistent white-black intelligence gap.

Greater intelligence means, among many things, higher income (and thus a greater propensity to accumulate wealth), a willingness to defer gratification and to strive toward long-term objectives (by saving and acquiring education, for example), and a less-violent disposition (and thus a lower propensity to commit crimes that result in long-term incarceration, sustained loss of income, and family dissolution).

The intelligence gap can be called a privilege only if the superior ability of blacks, on average, to jump higher and sprint faster than whites can be called a privilege. I am waiting in vain to hear about black-athletic privilege, which has produced a multitude of black multi-millionaires. (I am also waiting in vain to hear about Askhkenazi Jew privilege and East Asian privilege, inasmuch as members of both groups, on average, are more intelligent and thus, on average, more highly compensated than non-Ashkenazi Americans.)

An essential fact of life is that every human being possesses a different set of physical and mental endowments than every other human being. And it is a matter of personal responsibility to make the most of one’s endowments. Blaming one’s failures on others may, somehow, be satisfying (though it has never been my style). And it may even result in the tearing down of others (e.g., affirmative action, which has penalized millions of better-qualified whites; a massive tax burden, borne disproportionately by whites, to support mostly futile attempts to lift up blacks).

But the effect of such schemes has been to harm blacks in many ways; for example, by depriving them of jobs that might have been created for them with wasted tax dollars, by putting them in jobs and college majors that they couldn’t handle, and by teaching them personal irresponsibility.

What? Where?

The small city of Marysville, Michigan (population ca. 10,000), is in the news because Jean Cramer, a candidate for a seat on the city council, is reported by The New York Times (and other of our “moral guardians”) to have said “Keep Marysville a white community as much as possible” during a forum at which she and the other candidates spoke.

The Times adds that

Kathy Hayman, the city’s mayor pro tempore, said during the forum that she took Ms. Cramer’s comments personally….

“My son-in-law is a black man and I have biracial grandchildren,” Ms. Hayman said.

After the forum, Ms. Cramer submitted to an  interview with the local newspaper:

… Ms. Cramer expanded on her views to The Times Herald and said that Ms. Hayman’s family was “in the wrong” because it was multiracial.

“Husband and wife need to be the same race,” Ms. Cramer told the paper. “Same thing with the kids. That’s how it’s been from the beginning of, how can I say, when God created the heaven and the earth. He created Adam and Eve at the same time. But as far as me being against blacks, no I’m not.”

Ms. Cramer told The Times Herald on Friday that she would not have an issue if a black couple moved next door to her. “What is the issue is the biracial marriages, that’s the big problem,” Ms. Cramer said. “And there are a lot of people who don’t know it’s in the Bible and so they’re going outside of that.”

I find this brouhaha rather amusing because I’m familiar with Marysville, the population of which in 2010 was

97.5% White, 0.3% African American, 0.2% Native American, 0.6% Asian, 0.4% from other races, and 0.9% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.8% of the population.

Marysville is a “suburb” of Port Huron, a shrinking city of 30,000 souls. Among the reasons for the shrinkage of Port Huron’s population is its growing “blackness”. When I toured Port Huron on my last trip to Michigan (four years ago), I saw that neighborhoods which used to be all-white have changed complexion. Marysville was the original white-flight destination for Port Huronites. Other “suburbs” of Port Huron have grown, even as the city’s population shrinks, for much the same reason.

So Ms. Cramer is guilty of saying what residents of places around the nation — upscale and downscale — believe about keeping a “white community”. Her stated reason — a Biblical injunction against miscegenation — probably isn’t widely shared. But her objective — economic-social-cultural segregation — is widely shared, nonetheless.

The only newsworthy thing about Ms. Cramer’s statement is the hypocrisy of the cosseted editors and reporters of The New York Times and other big-media outlets for making a big deal of it.

The Complexity of Race

Bill Vallicella takes issue with Pat Buchanan’s recent discussion of Trump’s supposed racism. Buchanan says:

[W]hat is racism?

Is it not a manifest dislike or hatred of people of color because of their color? Trump was not denouncing the ethnicity or race of Ilhan Omar in his rally speech. He was reciting and denouncing what Omar said, just as Nancy Pelosi was denouncing what Omar and the Squad were saying and doing when she mocked their posturing and green agenda.

BV says:

Buchanan’s definition is on the right track except that he conflates race with skin color, which is but a superficial phenotypical indicator of race.

True enough. Race is more than skin deep, and skin color is among the least significant manifestations of racial differences. More significant manifestations include certain physical proclivities (e.g., “white men can’t jump”) and marked differences in the distribution of intelligence.

Races are nothing more (or less) than subspecies of Homo sapiens under this taxonomy:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Suborder: Haplorhini
Infraorder: Simiiformes
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Tribe: Hominini
Genus: Homo
Species: Homo sapiens

It is hard to pin down races (subspecies) with great precision. There are gradations of differences within the broadly defined races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid). Consider, for one example, the range of “subraces” comprised in the Mongoloid category.

There will be even more gradations as a result of international mobility and the erosion of social barriers between whites, Asians, blacks, and Latinos (or Hispanics) — the latter of which include groups that are admixtures of Caucasoids (mainly Spaniards) and Mongoloids (various Amerindian strains of long-ago migrants from Asia).

The subtlety of racial gradations is captured by the (not uncontroversial) study of genetic clustering:

Genetic structure studies are carried out using statistical computer programs designed to find clusters of genetically similar individuals within a sample of individuals….

These clusters are based on multiple genetic markers that are often shared between different human populations even over large geographic ranges. The notion of a genetic cluster is that people within the cluster share on average similar allele frequencies to each other than to those in other clusters….

A major finding of Rosenberg and colleagues … was that when five clusters were generated by the program (specified as K=5), “clusters corresponded largely to major geographic regions.” Specifically, the five clusters corresponded to Africa, Europe plus the Middle East plus Central and South Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The study also confirmed prior analyses by showing that, “Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%.” [But significant differences flow from the 3 to 5 percent, such as the aforementioned differences in athletic ability and intelligence.] …

Rosenberg and colleagues … have argued, based on cluster analysis, that populations do not always vary continuously and a population’s genetic structure is consistent if enough genetic markers (and subjects) are included. “Examination of the relationship between genetic and geographic distance supports a view in which the clusters arise not as an artifact of the sampling scheme, but from small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance for most population pairs on opposite sides of geographic barriers, in comparison with genetic distance for pairs on the same side….

Think of “K” as representative of the degree of commonality, where K=1 represents a loose relationship and K=7 represents a much tighter one. Here, for example, is a graphical presentation of the result of a K=7 analysis:

From: Low Levels of Genetic Divergence across Geographically and Linguistically Diverse Populations from India Rosenberg NA, Mahajan S, Gonzalez-Quevedo C, Blum MGB, Nino-Rosales L, et al.PLoS Genetics Vol. 2, No. 12, e215 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0020215[1] (fig. 2A) original caption: “Representative estimate of population structure for 1,384 individuals from worldwide populations, including 432 individuals from India. The plot represents the highest-likelihood run among ten STRUCTURE runs with K = 7 clusters. Eight of the other nine runs identified a cluster largely corresponding to India, and five of these eight produced plots nearly identical to the one shown.”

The presence of distinct physical and political-cultural boundaries is obvious in the sharp breaks that occur at five points (reading down from the top). Also striking is the closeness of the clustering patterns for Europe, North Africa, and the near Middle East. (The inhabitants of those areas used to be identified as Caucasiod.)

Where an American belongs on the graph depends on where his ancestors came from. Despite much genetic mixing, the origins of most Americans are still readily identifiable — especially “Americans” like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Occasio-Cortez. And so race — as we have known it — is still an important distinction that can’t be removed simply by saying that “race is a social construct” or “race is only skin deep”.

(See also “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications“, “The IQ of Nations“, “Why Race Matters“, “Is Race a Social Construct?“, and “Real Americans“.)

About Trump’s “Go Back” Statement

What did Trump actually say? This:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

Trump is inarticulate (perhaps purposefully, in part). There are those who read Trump’s statement as racist, and an attempt to silence The Squad.

Trump’s message, as I read it, wasn’t that The Squad should be denied its right to speak. It is that The Squad (and its adherents) are enemies of liberty and prosperity. There’s nothing racist in calling attention to the fact that the members of The Squad (whether immigrants or not) have their roots in countries and regions which are just as Trump describes them.

Reading racism into Trump’s statement is just an attempt to perpetuate the myth that Trump is a racist. Whence that myth? It is rooted in Trump’s commitment to stem the flow of illegal immigrants from south of the border — illegals who also happen to be “persons of color”.

The real racism is The Squad’s use of “racism” to divert attention from the promotion of policies that are subversive of liberty and prosperity. That’s The Squad (and its friends) in action.

Reparations and Me

Daniel J. Flynn, writing at The American Spectator in “Master Beto“, nails the faux-Hispanic good and hard:

Beto O’Rourke divulges that a “paternal great-great-great-grandfather of mine” owned slaves and that a “maternal great-great-grandfather” likely owned slaves, as well (he adds that his wife’s line includes a slave owner and a man who fought for the Confederate army)….

“Ownership of other human beings conferred advantages not just to Andrew Jasper and Frederick Williams, but to Jasper’s and Williams’ descendants as well,” O’Rourke writes for Medium of his slave-owning ancestors. “They were able to build wealth on the backs and off the sweat of others, wealth that they would then be able to pass down to their children and their children’s children. In some way, and in some form, that advantage would pass through to me and my children.”

Ostensibly for these reasons, O’Rourke supports reparations. But rather than pay them voluntarily, he wants to force every American — including people like myself, whose paternal line did not live in the United States during slavery’s existence and whose maternal line did live here briefly during slavery’s existence, but in the first state to abolish the institution, about 70 years prior to their arrival — to pay them. If O’Rourke believes that he accumulated some portion of his wealth through racial expropriation, he can donate, without a government program ordering him, to a charity benefiting African Americans. But he refrains from showing the courage of his convictions by paying off the debt he believes he owes.

In this matter, O’Rourke (an unusual Hispanic surname) emulates the very-rich who want higher income-tax rates because the don’t pay “enough” in taxes. There is a way to make a contribution to the U.S. Treasury, of which any very-rich person’s accountant should be aware. But I am unaware of contributions by the very-rich, who (sensibly) seem to do all that they can to take advantage of tax-avoidance schemes (and, sometimes, tax-evasion schemes).

In any event, I am with Flynn. None of my ancestors — all of whom were of the “lower” classes — owned slaves. Nor, as Northerners, did they have any part in sustaining the practice of slavery. My father, as I related in an earlier post, was the first of his male lineage to have been born in the United States (Michigan, to be exact) — 52 years after the end of the Civil War. My mother was descended from French-Canadians who emigrated to Michigan in the middle of the 19th century, unattended by slaves.

Nor do I put any stock in the theory that American blacks, on average, earn less and have less wealth than whites because of slavery (or even because of racial discrimination). There is a compelling explanation for the income and wealth gap, but cuck-servatives dare not refer to it.

My own view is that American blacks, on the whole, owe me a large tax refund for my “contributions” to various welfare programs. I am thinking not only of the usual handouts to “welfare queens” and the like, but also Social Security and Medicaid, which are designed to transfer income from those with high earnings to those with low earnings (or none). Then there are the taxes that I pay for “public safety”, which are undoubtedly higher than they would be if blacks comprised a smaller proportion of the populace.