Earlier this year, some students pressed for reconsideration of the [Harvard Law School] shield. Adopted by the Harvard Corporation in 1937, it was based on the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr. the son of an Antiguan slaveholder. Royall’s bequest helped to endow the first professorship of law at Harvard. I created a committee to examine the issue and recruited faculty and alumni to serve alongside student representatives and staff, selected by their own communities. The Harvard Corporation accepted the committee’s recommendation… The experience afforded over 1,000 people a chance to participate in deliberations over our symbol and framed discussions that will continue as we review our past and rededicate our future.
The former shield
But where did this push to change the seal come from? After all, the seal itself is rather innocuous, just three bundles of wheat surmounted by Harvard’s motto, Veritas. I doubt the average student walking around Harvard’s campus gives it (or any other shield) much thought.
Research by Visiting Professor Daniel Coquillette ’71 for his new history of HLS surfaced the ties between the Royall family and slave labor. In 2007, Janet Halley also explored the topic in the lecture she gave when she became the Royall Professor. Each year, [Dean] Minow has talked to incoming 1Ls about the Royall legacy, citing slavery as an example of how injustice is sometimes perpetuated through law.
Harvard Law School was established in 1817, making it the oldest continuously-operating law school in the nation. … The school’s origins can be traced to the estate of Isaac Royall, a wealthy Antiguan slave trader who immigrated to Boston. His Medford estate, the Isaac Royall House, is now a museum which features the only remaining slave quarters in the northeast United States. The Royall chair was traditionally held by the dean of the law school. However, because Royall was a slaveholder, Deans Elena Kagan andMartha Minowdeclined the Royall chair.
So HLS changed its shield because Dean Minow wanted them to. She encouraged the student body to view the shield as a symbol of racist oppression until they reacted and demanded its removal.
Of course, if HLS were actually committed to SJW goals, the best thing they could do is shut down, fire the teachers, give their endowment to the poor, and perhaps burn it all down and shoot a few lawyers for good measure. For every HLS grad who devotes their life to getting improperly convicted death row inmates out of prison, there are a dozen others working to keep them in; for every student who swears they are going to serve the poor, a hundred spend their days defending mega-corporations; for every Obama, there’s a Scalia.
If Dean Minow were actually devoted to “social justice,” as she puts it, she would devote herself to cases like Professor Parker’s:
Seven years ago I walked into the hospital for surgery. A cervical decompression and fusion, it was supposed to help me keep on mountain hiking. In the recovery room, I woke up paralyzed. I won’t walk again. I’m a tetraplegic. …
We launched two suits—one against the surgeon, the other against the company that was supposed to “monitor” spinal signals electronically throughout the operation. …
It turned out that almost no monitoring was done. There was no doctor observing incoming data in real time; there was no recording of data during most of the procedure; what records existed were, in large part, destroyed; …
We settled. But the company twice recently had to pay big fines for overcharging Medicare and claimed to be on the verge of bankruptcy. That limited the settlement. The hospital, I understand, went right on doing business with that company. …
After a grinding delay of four and a half years—there’s a special barrier to malpractice suits—we went to trial and we lost. We lost to an insurance company affiliated with Harvard.
If anyone could use a whole school full of angry lawyers on their side, surely it’s a healthy guy rendered a tetraplegiac via medical incompetence. But no, it’s the goddam shield that gets people’s attention. How many millions of dollars did Harvard spend on this “committee” that apparently listened to a thousand people’s opinions? How much will it cost to design and manufacture new seals to hang all over campus? How many of the people SJWs claim to care about could have been helped with that money?
But the overwhelming tone of the HLS Bulletin is not “SJW,” but relentless, soul-crushing, corporate formality. I wish I had a single word for it–like “norminess,” but oh so much more.
Just as some Christians* feel the influence of their faith in every aspect of their lives, while others make a show of going to church and calling themselves “Christian” but are otherwise unmoved by faith, so to do some SJWs come across as “true believers,” who want to increase acceptance for society’s outcasts, whether drag queens or criminals, and some come across as stiff formalists who wouldn’t touch a transsexual with a ten-foot pole but still want it to be known that they disapprove of North Carolina’s bathroom bill.
*I am sure this dichotomy shows up in all religions.
Like a real estate speculator who tries to invest in land that he thinks will go up in value, I suspect that much of Harvard’s business is to attach its name to future leaders. They are, for the most part, highly intelligent folks, but if intelligence were the only criterion, Harvard’s student body would look more like Caltech’s. Rather, Harvard is interested in people like Obama, multi-ethnic, internationalist, multi-lingual, and destined for at least a diplomatic post with the state department (that bet turned out even better than expected for HLS); the recently deceased Antonin “Nino” Scalia, or Koen Lenaerts, ’78, President of the European Court of Justice.
What does it all mean?
I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s classism.
Which means classism is a lot worse than I generally give it credit for.
I did enjoy He Was Not a Crook: Former staffer in the Nixon administration continues to defend his boss:
Based on documents he uncovered from the Watergate proceedings housed in the National Archives, [Shepard’s] book contends that charges of a cover-up that ultimately forced Nixon to resign from office proved unfounded. Even the “smoking gun” tape that appeared to show the president seeking to limit the FBI’s Watergate investigation was misunderstood, Shepard contends: It was in fact an attempt to keep the names of Democratic donors to the Nixon campaign from becoming public. Yet the cover-up charges were buttressed by biased prosecutors and judges who colluded to ensure the downfall of the president, he believes.
“Judges and prosecutors aren’t supposed to get together in advance and make decisions, and that’s what it turns out they were doing,” he said. “It’s just startling, what was going on.” …
“He wasn’t a highfalutin Easterner,” as Shepard put it, nor was either one among the “sons of prominent men” like those who were introduced by one of his professors during a first-year class at Harvard Law. …
Although for many people Nixon’s legacy can be summed up in one word, Shepard says the president he served should be celebrated for his foreign policy acumen and domestic achievements, such as efforts to combat drug abuse.
“The people who have loathed Richard Nixon—just this visceral hatred of this guy from nowhere, without culture, without family, without a Harvard education, who kept winning elections,” he said, “they want to give him no credit for anything.”
In just one decade, Everett, Massachusetts, once a predominantly white city, has become the most racially and ethnically diverse in the commonwealth. Building communication between police officers and local youth is a priority for Chief of the Everett Police Department Steven A. Mazzie, who is white, as are 86 percent of his officers. Last fall he invited a team of HLS students from the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program to Everett for an impartial assessment.
(Statistically, Everett seems to be doing slightly better than average for a Boston neighborhood, crime-wise.)
Solutions from Cincinnati: Mayor John Cranley ’99 champions his city’s unique police-community accord:
Now in its 14th year, a compact on policing in Cincinnati, Ohio, focused on building strong police-community relationships is a lauded model nationwide. John Cranley ’99, now the city’s mayor, was there from the start of the landmark agreement known as the Collaborative.
While Cincinnati is not mega-violent St. Louis, with nearly 50 murders and “non-neglicent manslaughter”s per 100k citizens year, it is the tenth most homicidal city in the country. (Everett, and Boston generally, are doing better.) On the plus side, violent crime has fallen since it spiked following the 2001 Cincinnati anti-police riots, though we need a few more years to tell whether it has stabilized around 65-75 murders per year after hitting a low in 2012, or if it’s headed back up.
Welcome to the Internet of Things. It may be about to change our lives as radically as the Internet itself did 20 years ago. …
This technology is already available in everything from home appliances to Fitbits and children’s toys, and over the next 10 years, it is expected to become a multitrillion-dollar industry …
All that personal data—just waiting to be mined. The implications for privacy, national security, human rights, cyberespionage and the economy are staggering.
Hey, everybody, EvolutionistX is now one year old. *Clinks glasses* Here’s to another year!
While you celebrate, please nominate your favorite posts for inclusion in the “favorite posts” section, or suggest a topic for future posts!
Carrying on with our monthly Cathedral Roundup:
Even a critic as skeptical as Edward Said succumbs to the temptation of university, academic employment: the university’s self-legitimations stand unchallenged. … This synthesis of internal and external factors is such that university-based intellectuals are guaranteed autonomy (“specific context”) in the name of the intellectual reduced to a social agent who agrees with Enlightenment–“investigation” becomes social improvement (“promoting human community.” –Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital
I have obtained a copy of the Harvard U. Board of Overseers 2016 election pamphlet. In case you haven’t been following Ivy League politics, Ron Unz of Unz Review fame and some other folks have gotten themselves onto the ballot via petition. Somewhat amusingly, theirs is the “free stuff and ethnic animosity” campaign, banking on Asians being pissed that Harvard (and other schools) discriminates against them for doing too well on the SAT. This position is controversial because not-discriminating against Asians might mean taking fewer blacks and Hispanics who are currently being accepted on “soft” criteria rather than top SAT scores.
You have until May 20 to get your vote in (if you’re a Harvard alum and believe in voting,) so let’s see who’s running.
Eight of the candidates have been proposed by the Harvard Alumni Association Nominating Committee. Five candidates were nominated by petition, and are so identified. … The order of the candidates in each category is determined by lot.
The slate of candidates nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association is half male and half female; ethnically it is 3/4s white, with one black and one Asian candidate (based on black and white headshots). The nominated by petition slate is all male, 2/5s Asian and 3/5s white. (I’m not totally sure about Unz’s ethnicity, but I’m guessing white.)
We’ll start with the Alumni Association nominees.
Kent Walker:
… believes that the breadth of Harvard’s academic excellence uniquely positions it to have an influence far beyond its gates. … “I hope the University will continue its great tradition of integrating discoveries in science and technology, advances in the social sciences, and insights from the humanities to inspire change around the world.” … He has a special interest in global humanitarian and refugee programs. He is active with the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children, and he advises the Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund.”
Ketanji Jackson:
… is a federal judge who serves on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She was nominated for this lifetime position by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2013. As a judge, she has a particular interest in criminal justice and sentencing policy, having served a a vice chair and commissioner of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and as an assistant federal public defender in D.C.
Helena Foulkes:
“I would be honored to contribute whatever I can to Harvard’s immensely important role in improving the health and well-being of people around the world. And I’d value the chance to help encourage students, whatever their career paths, to focus on not just doing well but doing good.”
One of the side effects of spending much of your spare time trying to refine your writing abilities is that you become hyper-sensitive to minor glitches in other peoples’ writing that normal folks probably don’t even notice–like the 11 unnecessary words in Mrs. Foulkes’s two sentences.
John Moon:
…whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea, experienced firsthand the benefits of education, and he views educational access as a key to opportunity for others.
(As opposed to everyone else in the country, who didn’t get educations?)
“I would like to help ensure that Harvard remain a world-class educational and research institution that continues to lead globally. Equally important, Harvard should not only remain open to but actively seek out a diverse student body at the College and its graduate schools.”
Harvard is… already doing this. But I like to imagine he’s a stealth Free Harvard, Fair Harvard candidate.
Alejandro Magana:
“I hope to bring a continued international approach to the Board of Overseers, building on Havard’s status as a genuinely international institution, mindful that we continue to attract the most promising students and scholars from around the world and that we continue to encourage truly responsible global citizens.”
Damian Woetzel:
… former principal dancer with NYC Ballet, has combined his creative passion with his master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School to become a leader, public advocate, and activist for the arts.
“The arts are an essential element in education at every level. At a time when universities face pressures to focus on specialized job skill, Harvard is committed to the full range of liberal arts education. As an Overseer, I would relish the opportunity to draw on my national work engaging the arts in society, to focus on Harvard as a leader and model for the value of arts in the university environment.”
He is the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival.
Karen Green:
“My experiences at Harvard literally transformed me.”
I hope she became a butterfly.
“Learning experiences inside and outside the classroom caused me to adopt a much larger worldview and fostered in me a love–not only for lifelong learning, but also for Harvard.”
Darn.
At least her goals are unobjectionable:
“I wold like to work to ensure that Harvard continues to attract the very best students, regardless of their economic circumstances, and remain accessible and affordable to students of modest means.”
P. Lansdale:
… has dedicated her social science career to enhancing the lives of children through teaching and mentoring, research, and translating research into policy and practice. Much of her work addresses family strengths that lead to children’s positive social and educational outcomes in the context of economic hardship. …
“I believe strongly in addressing equity and inclusion, and in building diverse communities that thrive while simultaneously exploring new knowledge and debating various perspectives.”
“simultaneously exploring new knowledge and debating various perspectives.”
Wow. For writing a sentence that terrible, she gets to be my least favorite.
On to the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard petition slate!
First we have Ralph Nader, who was a surprise to me:
“Even with restrictions on portions of its $38 billion endowment, Harvard is easily capable of ending net tuition at the undergraduate level and setting an example for other well-endowed Universities.” …
As an advocate, author and organizer, he has been responsible for starting many enduring civic groups, including Public Citizen, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Center for Auto Safety and the student public interest groups in many states.
He has been instrumental in the passage of numerous health, safety, water pollution, air pollution and product safety laws and agencies, along with the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970 and the historic Freedom of Information act of 1974.
(So how did Nader get involved in all of this?)
Stephen Hsu:
His research areas include quantum field theory, cosmology, and computational genomics. … “As a scientist, university administrator, and technology entrepreneur, I believe I have unique insight into the challenges facing modern research universities.”
Ron Unz:
“Its 38 BILLION endowment has transformed Harvard into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with tax-exempt annual income twenty-five times greater than net college tuition revenue. Forcing families to pay tuition to a giant hedge fund is unconscionable.”
Unz is trying to play the moral highground card, but does it work? Sure, it seems wrong for Harvard to charge tuition from students who are much poorer than it is, but on the other hand, Harvard is a private institution, not a charity, and can do what it wants. Harvard’s house, Harvard’s rules.
Stuart Taylor:
“My recent work has explored the unnecessary secrecy and unfairness of the higher education admissions process, as well as the decline of of ideological diversity on faculties.” …
Taylor has coauthored two books… Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud. [and] … Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.
Lee Cheng:
“…I support affirmative action, but oppose discrimination. I believe that the University can only become truly diverse, and truly inclusive, by becoming completely transparent about admissions criteria and practices. More transparency has always improved and increased access for the underprivileged.”
… He is known for wiping out “patent trolls.” …
He is married and has 3 children… who will all be identified as ethnically Asian when they apply to college.
The pamphlet also gives us a breakdown of the occupations of the current Board of Overseers: 1 writer (NY Times); 1 lawyer; 4 government (mostly judges); 7 educators (mostly professors); 10 in business and finance; and 7 in non-profits that look a lot like the B&F positions.
Ethnic breakdown of current set based on b&w pictures: 20 white, 10 non-white–4 black, 1 Hispanic?, 3 east Asian, and 2 Indian. 14 men, 16 women.
To be honest, I don’t know how much power the Board of Overseers has to do anything, but the petition is an interesting attempt at a power grab, especially as it rides on the complaint, felt by at least some Asians, that one ethnic minority is being mistreated in order to favor other ethnic minorities.
I think the Republicans had been hoping (before Trump entered the primary race) to capture the Hispanic vote (which is why two of their primary candidates were Hispanics and a third is prominently married to a Hispanic,) in much the same way that the Democrats have captured the black vote. The problem with this strategy, obviously, is that not only is the Republican establishment having a really hard time out-competing the Democrats on “being welcome to Mexican immigrants,” but the rest of the Republican voters want nothing to do with such an agenda.
This leaves me to wonder if there is yet an opportunity for Republicans to ally with Asians (and Indians) who could be convinced that the Democrats are favoring blacks and Hispanics at their expense. Or will that, too, fall flat?
The purpose of Cathedral Round-Up is to keep track of what our betters have in store for us. This month we are headed to Harvard (and for a side-excursion, Oxford,) to witness the progressive push to expand the notion of “refugees” to include virtually everyone not already living in the West; the sheer heart-breaking difficulties of being one of the world’s most privileged black people; and Cecil Rhodes‘s pro-Muslim legacy.
Jacqueline Bhabha brings us “When Water is Safer than Land,” repeating the common claim that “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land” that was so commonly bandied about in the wake of the drowning of 3 year old Alan Kurdi. Alan’s death is a tragedy, but his family was trying to leave Turkey, a peaceful, relatively prosperous nation, not a violence-riddled war zone.
I argued back in Newton’s Third Law of Politics that the official definition of “refugee” is already broad enough to encompass almost anyone the government wants it to; Professor Bhabha wants to do away with the concept of “refugee” entirely, in favor of “distress migrant”:
… news coverage and political attention have highlighted the irrationality and inefficiency of our outdated legal and administrative system of migration management—a system now manifestly premised on incoherent dichotomies and false assumptions.
The most fundamental dichotomy lies at the very root of modern migration law, separating bona fide “refugees” with a “well-founded fear of persecution” under the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, from spontaneous “economic migrants” seeking to take advantage of greater prosperity and opportunity outside their home countries. The former are considered legitimate recipients of international protection, the latter unlawful border-crossers.
But for more than a decade, migration experts within the United Nations, in the immigration and justice ministries of many countries, and civil-society organizations such as the Women’s Refugee Commission, the International Rescue Committee, and Human Rights Watch, have acknowledged the artificiality of this dichotomy, given the reality of “mixed migration”—distress migration prompted by multiple, interconnected factors, including survival fears and economic desperation. …
Priority in these entry categories should be given to “distress migrants,” a category that should replace the now unworkable distinction between “legal” refugee and economic but “illegal” forced migrant.
In short, Bhabha thinks it’s unfair to prevent anyone who lives in a country that’s poorer than the West from migrating wherever they want to go. Migration to the West is a human right; wanting to control who enters your country is outdated and shows that you’re not a “team player”:
But such official resettlement is sustainable only if it is a joint endeavor, agreed upon by countries that are willing to host relocated refugees and share the responsibility for doing so with others in their region. The current intransigence of relatively prosperous EU member states such as France, the UK, Slovenia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic vitiates this sort of collective humanitarian endeavor and unreasonably leaves the protection “burden” only to the exemplary few (Germany and Sweden at present).
Germany broke EU rules by inviting in a few million migrants without the consent of the other member states, but Hungary is being totally meanie pants for insisting on this weird notion of “national sovereignty” instead of just lying back, spreading its borders, and thinking of Queen Victoria.
Maybe we should adopt a policy of always letting Germany do whatever it wants to its neighbors–would have saved us a lot of effort about 102 – 71 years ago.
Bhabha also notes that the current system rewards those who break the rules by migrating illegally–if you can just get to Europe, chances are you’ll be fine–while punishing those who try to obey the rules by filling out all of their paperwork and then sitting out the multi-year process just to get rejected. This is completely accurate.
Bhabha believes that “distress migration” to wealthy countries is inevitable and unstoppable, but has several recommendations for making the immigration system more humane and less likely to involve dead children:
Massively overhaul the immigration bureaucracy (this I actually agree with–bureaucratic systems tend to be awful.)
Let in all of the “distress migrants.”
Westerners should stop the wars in foreign countries (how, exactly?)
More funding for refugee camps in places like Turkey so people will stay there instead of migrating to Europe. (I don’t know what the conditions in Turkish refugee camps are like, but I bet they could be much nicer.)
Westerners need to make economic development happen in the third world so people will want to stay there, (because third worlders can’t run their own economies?)
It’s funny how people who think colonialism was evil simultaneously think Africans can’t feed their own children or run their own economies without white people stepping in.
Of course, given current fertility rates, the prospects for feeding all of Africa’s children without the rest of the world stepping in do look pretty grim:
Total Fertility Rate by Country (Wikimedia file)
Bhabha has left out the simplest, most humane solution: birth control.
Interestingly, Professor Jacqueline Bhabha is an English woman who obtained her last name via her husband, Homi K. Bhabha, son of an Indian Parsi family. The Parsis are interesting in their own right, but that is a matter for another day. Alas, I have not been able to figure out if Homi is the son of the similarly-named Indian nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha. (At the very least, if you meet a Bhabha, chances are he’s an exceptionally intelligent person.)
I have noticed that elites tend to be highly international people–born in one country, raised in another, married into a third. A highschool fiend hailed from four different countries; another attended an elite boarding school 15,000 miles away from her family. And they know each other–“Oh, you’re from Hong Kong? Do you know so-and-so? You do? What a coincidence!”
President Obama, son of a Kenyan and an American of mostly English extraction (who met while studying Russian in Hawaii,) lived for four years in Indonesia, and then ended up in Chicago.
Carlos Slim, largest shareholder of the New York Times and one of the richest men in the world, is a Mexican of Lebanese descent–“Slim” was “Salim” back when his father moved to Mexico.
And as Tolstoy notes, at the time of Napoleon’s invasion, the Russian ruling class spoke French, not Russian.
Homi K. Bhabha
According to the NY Times, getting Homi K. Bhabha, who taught in the Afro-American Studies department in 2001, was a major coup for Harvard. Sure, Indian-born Homi might not look like an expert on the experiences of African Americans, but his co-professors are enthusiastic about his work:
“”He’s manifestly one of the most distinguished cultural theorists of the postcolonial and diasporic experience in the world,’ said Lawrence Buell, the department chairman.”
Other professors point out that Homi’s “expertise” may be entirely high-falutin’ smoke and mirrors:
In 1998, Mr. Bhabha won second place (Judith Butler, a gender theorist at Berkeley, took the top prize) in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature for this passage from an essay on mimicry: “If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”
“Untouchables”
A developing theme in this series is the way that elite colleges use majority-white people with a small percentage of black ancestry to pad their diversity numbers. In Homi’s case, “whiteness” is debatable, but he is clearly an elite, light-skinned Indian of Persian (aka Aryan) descent, not one of India’s dark-skinned “untouchables,” Scheduled Castes, or Dalits.
The official logic of “diversity” and Affirmative Action is that universities should correct for past oppression and reflect the racial composition of the population they serve by correcting for the negative effects of racism and poverty on test scores. The logic runs that a poor kid growing up in Detroit with one parent in jail and the other busy working two jobs just to make ends meet is going to attend fewer SAT prep classes than rich kids attending TJ, and so his SAT scores may not reflect his true potential.
In practice, places like Harvard end up with a bunch of high-class elites like Homi who can ticky-box “diversity” but are not actually part of an oppressed minority. (A bunch of white “Hispanics” get in this way, too.)
Elites love diversity–so long as “diversity” means other elites. And they can’t understand why their proles insist on icky nationalism:
“Ewww. Get it away.”
Jacqueline Bhabha on Merkel:
Germany’s Angela Merkel has emerged as the surprising heroine of the humanitarian lobby, leveraging her country’s ever-present past and robust economy to welcome more than one million refugees and to stress the potential demographic dividend of a healthy, youthful workforce for an aging continent.
Yes, I’m sure Merkel is the kind of elite who just loves spending time with the huddled masses of the third world.
And on European fears:
The notion that the magnitude of refugee arrival, on the other hand, poses any sort of threat to Europe’s future prosperity is laughable. The Syrians arriving represent less than 1 percent of the population of the European Union (EU), the world’s richest continent. In Lebanon, an incomparably poorer polity, every fourth inhabitant is now a Syrian refugee, and yet even that war-torn country is not at the brink of collapse. The current flow of refugees poses no objective threat to the future or prosperity of Europe.
Because every country wants to look like Lebanon?
Leaving aside the fact that not all of the migrants are from Syria–many of them are, ahem, “distress migrants” from Africa or Asia fleeing poverty, not ISIS–an argument that Europe can handle its current migration levels is not an argument that Europe can handle far more migrants.
Germany’s overall fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world–about 1.4 children per woman. (Slightly over 2 is necessary for population stability, neither growing nor shrinking.) This means that the population of Germany is shrinking.
As of 2014, 16.3 million of Germany’s 81.5 million people–20% of the population–were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In 2009, about 4.3 million Germans are Muslim–5.4% of the population–but due to much higher fertility rates, 9.1% of Germany’s children were Muslims.
A million migrants arrived in Germany in 2015, and more still arrive every day. Keep this up for a few years, and yes, a very large percent of the country will not be German anymore.
I know it’s unreasonable to expect Harvard professors to be able to do math, but we can:
If Germany has 81.5 million people, and about 18% of them are children, that’s 14.7 million children. Of those, 9.1%, or 1.3 million, are Muslim.
If Germany has about 4.3 million Muslims, and 1.3 million of them are children, then 3 million are adults.
Let’s suppose Germany accepts a modest 1 million refugees a year for just two more years, (for 3 million total,) and they have the same TFR as the folks already in Germany. Now 16% of German children are Muslim.
Keep it up for 9 years (10 million migrants,) and 24% of future voters are Muslim (and that’s not counting the shrinking native German population during this time.)
These are obviously extremely rough numbers, but they are not unreasonable.
If your goal is, “make Germany look more like Lebanon,” then that’s one way to do it. And perhaps the German people are perfectly happy accepting a million migrants a year. But let’s not banter about facile claims like “less than 1 percent” when advocating virtually limitless, long-term immigration policies in a world with over a billion people who would happily move to Germany (or virtually any other Western country) if they could.
Elites think that if elite migration is good for them, then the mass migration of unskilled, illiterate poor folks will be great for proles, and then are confused when the masses do not react with universal jubilation at the results:
The Daily Mail summarizes:
Alexandra Mezher, 22, fatally stabbed at migrant centre where she worked
Her family, who are originally from Lebanon, described her as ‘an angel’ …
A boy, 15, living at centre, arrested on suspicion of murder is from Somalia
Teenage killer was overpowered by other children living at the centre
Swedish police demand more cash to stem rising violence in the country
Italian police have arrested a Senegalese illegal immigrant who prosecutors believe killed Ashley Olsen, a U.S. woman who was found dead in her apartment in Florence last weekend.
“We have collected very serious evidence of his guilt,” Florence chief prosecutor Giuseppe Creazzo told reporters at a news conference on Thursday after the man was arrested and questioned in the early hours of the morning. …
She was strangled in the early hours of Friday, Creazzo said, but the autopsy revealed that she had two fractures to her skull — injuries that would also have proved fatal.
Mamadou Kamara, an 18-year-old from the Ivory Coast, allegedly slit the throat of Vincenzo Solano, 68, and then attacked his Spanish-born wife, Mercedes Ibanez, 70.
Ms Ibanez fell to her death from a second-floor balcony, during a robbery that turned violent. …
Mr Kamara was arrested after police searched his bag on Sunday as he returned to the migrant centre.
Inside they found a mobile telephone, a laptop computer, a video camera and a pair of trousers, allegedly belonging to Mr Solano, that were covered in blood.
Of course, Professor Bhabha, living comfortably in Massachusetts, does not have to worry about being raped or murdered by “distress migrants” from Africa let in under the rhetoric that Turkey is not good enough for Syrian refugees.
But Professor Bhabha isn’t just advocating for increased African migration to Europe; she has also noticed that places like Mexico and Honduras have astronomically high murder rates, and therefore wants to let them into the US. Perhaps there is some magical quality to the soil in America that she thinks will make people suddenly be less murderous when they step over the border.
Ms. Gathright starts with a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable…The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
I know pretty much everyone spouts vacuous “be yourself” bullshit, but it’s still annoying–everyone has “constrict” themselves to make other comfortable. Just because you feel like farting while in a crowded elevator does not mean you do it; just because you feel like yelling at your cubicle-mate every time he starts humming does not mean you do it; just because you feel comfortable wearing a bathrobe and slippers does not mean you wear them to a job interview. Living among other humans–even in hunter gatherer tribes in the arctic!–means paying attention to social norms and controlling one’s impulses in order to act appropriately.
Anyone who thinks they are special enough to avoid normal human social norms is a fucking sociopath.
Second, “must believe they are white.” ??? What does that even mean?
White person: I don’t see race.
POC: OMG how racist of you to deny my blackness and your white privilege!
White person: Oh, okay. I guess I’m white.
POC: OMG, how racist of you to insist on believing that you’re white!
Continuing on, Ms. Gathright describes a conversation between a guy handing out apples in the cafeteria and her “house tutor” (“RA” in common speak.)
He is standing in front of me, and I am standing next to Jonathan, my lovely, gentle, kind Lowell House tutor.
That sounds awfully intimate.
Ms. Gathright is disturbed because Jeremy and apple-guy are happily talking to each other instead of to her.
Maybe I am just woman enough, just brown enough, to be rendered invisible. It might all be in my head, but isn’t that sometimes just enough to make a moment uncomfortable?
Things that are “all in your head” can indeed make moments uncomfortable, like when you hallucinate spiders crawling under your skin. But that doesn’t make them real.
Apple guy talks about apples:
He is talking about seeds and grafting, about history. Did you know that hard cider was the Founding Fathers’ primary method of hydration? Did you know that they were all drunk pretty much all the time? …
I am distracted. His historical factoids about hard cider have gotten me thinking about a drunken Thomas Jefferson wandering around Monticello, and this image makes me sick and scared in a way that the two men next to me will never understand. [bold mine]
If you are genuinely “sick and scared” from simply imagining someone getting tipsy on hard cider, you need psychological help. That is not normal. If you are not genuinely “sick and scared,” then you are a liar.
There is a distance between my body and the bodies this place was built for. I feel it every day in Lowell dining hall, when I look up at portraits of white men and wonder if they expected me to be here.
Well, the folks it was built for are probably all dead, so unless Ms. Gathright is sitting in a graveyard while writing, I guess this is technically true.
Ta-Nehisi Coates uses “body” where a normal person would write “souls,” because he’s an atheist. There are times when he pulls it off, and times when the effect is horribly awkward.
This is one of those awkward times.
The Lowell House dining hall is not as fancy as Harvard’s freshman dining hall, but the chandelier is a nice touch:
In the Dining Hall are portraits of President Lowell and his wife; his sister Amy Lowell (Pulitzer prize winning poet, and a lover of scandal credited with introducing D. H. Lawrence to America); his brother Percival Lowell (the astronomer who spearheaded the search for the planet Pluto); and his grandfather John Amory Lowell (a fellow of Harvard College for forty years).
Lowell House was built in 1930; Harvard Medical accepted its first black students way back in 1850:
1869: George Lewis Ruffin is the first black to earn a degree from Harvard Law School. In 1883 Ruffin became Massachusetts’ first African-American judge.
1869: Harvard awards its first degree in dentistry to an African American named Robert Tanner Freeman.
1870: Harvard College graduates its first black student, Richard Theodore Greener, who goes on to a career as an educator and lawyer. After graduating from Harvard, Greener becomes a faculty member at the University of South Carolina. He is the first known black to be hired to the faculty of a flagship state university.
1870: George F. Grant graduates with a degree of dentistry from Harvard. He later serves as its first black instructor at the dental school from 1878 to 1889.
1895: W.E.B. Du Bois earns his Ph.D. in history from Harvard, the first black to do so at Harvard.
1896: Booker T. Washington receives an honorary master’s degree from Harvard University.
1907: Alain LeRoy Locke of Harvard University becomes the first black Rhodes scholar.
1912: Carter G. Woodson becomes the second black in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in history. His Ph.D. is from Harvard. He goes on to found the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and inaugurates Negro History Week in 1926.
1921: Amherst College graduate Charles Hamilton Houston becomes the first black editor on the Harvard Law Review.
1933: Harvard Business School graduates its first black MBA student, H. Naylor Fitzhugh, the founder of Howard University’s marketing department.
In other words, at the time Lowell House was built, black students had been attending Harvard for decades. There is no “distance” between Ms. Gathright’s body and the bodies it was built for, because people like her were in the group it was built for. So, yes, I guarantee you that the folks in the portraits expected people like you to be there.
You’d think she’d have Googled “when did Harvard start accepting black people” to find out if the folks in the portraits had black students before writing an article about how stressed out she was by her incorrect assumptions.
For goodness’s sake, this is Massachusetts.
But getting back to the article:
I am taking an economics class on libertarianism. I don’t consider myself a libertarian at all, so I took the class to challenge my thinking. …
One day, we are talking about the consequences of drug prohibition. Libertarians believe that the negative effects outweigh the positive effects. I’m sympathetic to the viewpoint, and I’m glad this policy debate is a topic of discussion. Professor Miron briefly lists “increased racial profiling” and the resulting “racial tensions” as a negative consequence of drug prohibition laws. He moves on—he has other slides to discuss, other lines of argument to explore. But I am stuck, still thinking about what it means for him to name “increased racial profiling” and “racial tensions” without naming Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland…I want to stand up and scream about how the things he is talking about tear bodies apart. [bold mine]
Geez. Psycho, much?
Seriously, this woman can’t watch two people talk about apples without wanting to know why they aren’t talking to HER; she cant look at her posh, crystal chandeliered cafeteria without wondering what the people in the portraits would have thought of HER; she can’t listen to a lecture without wanting to scream that the professor didn’t talk about exactly the things SHE wants to talk about.
I want to be clear here: I’m not asking my professor to re-write his lecture. He is teaching a class that doesn’t center on my experience in every moment, and that’s okay. This isn’t necessarily about my professor or my classmates or my syllabus.
When you feel compelled to clarify that it’s okay if a class doesn’t center on, “MY experience in EVERY moment,” that is a sign that you are hilariously unaware of just how narcissistic you are.
I am talking to my friend. He has had a tough couple of days. He is telling me about a class on race and gender that he is taking. He is feeling the course material in his body, he says. The readings are causing him pain. … Section is causing me pain.
I think people actually do this thing where, by constantly reading/watching/thinking/talking about something horrible, they prompt their brains to release far more stress hormones than their physical situation actually warrants. This is because our brains can’t really tell the difference between “picture I saw on TV” and “thing I saw in real life,” and a person being murdered before your eyes in real life would be a very concerning thing indeed that you probably ought to do something about (fight or flight,) thus prompting a massive outpouring of hormones.
Feminists do this by reading sixteen blog posts in a row about rape; white nationalists do this by reading sixteen blog posts in a row about “white genocide”; housewives do this by reading about children who’ve been abducted and murdered; etc. I do this by researching human sacrifice in animist religions.
By the end, you feel awful.
There are was to deal with this: First, realize that your brain is producing hormones in response to a threat that is not actually physically present in the room with you. Second, calm down. I find meditation helps, or prayer if you’re religious. Third, recognize that this is not a healthy thing to do to yourself. Take breaks, don’t let yourself get sucked into reading 16 articles in a row, and most importantly, don’t do it at 4 AM, because that is a quick road to nightmaresville.
Ms. Gathright then discusses Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind”:
I could critique their piece on several grounds. But one of the first things I thought when I read it was, “Where is this movement, and how did I miss it?” Because here is my truth: I don’t see a ton of liberal students trying to “scrub” Harvard’s campuses “clean” of offensive or uncomfortable ideas. Instead, I see all around me students, my friends, who are willing to be made uncomfortable by words and ideas all the time. I see students who willingly walk into classrooms that will make them, in the words of my friend, feel the course material in their bodies.
Oh, honey, don’t you understand that feeling bad is exactly how the SJWs want you to feel? You feel bad because you have already imbibed a political ideology that dictates how you react to the world. You are not “willing” to be made uncomfortable by words or ideas; you make these things make you uncomfortable.
There is a difference. Being willing to be uncomfortable means being willing to consider that someone else’s POV might be right.
When I read about cannibalism, I am uncomfortable, but I am not willing to consider that cannibalism is moral. When I speak with a friend about philosophy, I am willing to consider that they might be correct. If they question some deeply held assumption, I may be uncomfortable–but I am not going to have nightmares.
Some people go through this place without having to ask and answer hard questions about the spaces they occupy. I have had to constantly articulate and question my relationship with this institution: the way I fit into its history, and the way I feel in its classrooms.
Aww, it sure is hard being at Harvard. I mean, if you can’t feel insanely privileged while siting in a cafeteria with glittering chandeliers or attending classes taught by some of the most elite professors in the entire world, I don’t think anything will.
************
Oxford, Rhodes, and Syria
Hey, did you hear about the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests at Oxford?
Student campaigners have condemned an Oxford college for deciding to keep its statue of Cecil Rhodes, claiming the college has been influenced by a “dictatorship” of donors.
Rhodes, not quite bestriding a plinth.
Ella Jeffreys, a master’s student, told the Guardian: “We feel that the decision of Oriel College, due to the threat of withdrawing funding by alumni, shows that money talks over students. …
The campaign said in a statement: “Oriel has been rushed into this decision by the irresponsible threats of wealthy individuals. This is a decision for the short term. It is a decision made by authorities, not by students. It is a decision motivated by power not by principle.”
Welcome to real life. No one cares about you.
The statement said the decision lacked “legitimacy” and warned: “It is a decision that jeopardises trust between students and the institution.”
That’s okay. You’ll be gone in a few years. Oxford has been around for almost 1,000. They don’t need you:
Student activists said they would not be derailed by interventions such as those of Chris Patten, the chancellor of the university, who said in a recent interview that those involved with Rhodes Must Fall should “think about being educated elsewhere”.
At least someone has a spine.
I am personally uncomfortable with pulling down statues for the same reason that I am uncomfortable with burning books. There are times when a nation simply finds that it has an excess of statues of a former dictator, and people reasonably desire fewer of them, but England does not suffer an over-abundance of Rhodes statues.
Students called for a reckoning from the institution, and said their first demand was for Oxford to “acknowledge and confront its role in the ongoing physical and ideological violence of empire”. They want the university to apologise for its role and to offer more scholarships to black students from southern Africa.
Why? Did they help build Oxford? Did Oxford tear down their universities?
No.
Then Oxford owes them nothing.
They said they wanted to hear “the voices suffocated into silence by a Eurocentric academy”.
Then get the fuck out of Oxford. What, you can’t physically listen to people talk without a professor telling you to listen to them, first?
Simukai Chigudu, a postgraduate student in international development, said Oriel’s decision “throws into sharp relief that strong power donors have in shaping the college and underscores that it is not a free, open and democratic [process].
WHY THE HELL DID YOU THINK OXFORD WAS A DEMOCRACY? It is a college, not a country.
Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. … The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.
100 million pounds is worth about 144 million dollars.
So I decided to see how Rhodes’s colonialist legacy is working out. According to Wikipedia, Cecil Rhodes created the Rhodes Scholarships, which pay for international students to come study at Oxford, in order to:
promote civic-minded leadership among “young colonists” with “moral force of character and instincts to lead,” for the purpose of ‘extending British rule throughout the world…the consolidation of the Empire, the restoration of Anglo-Saxon unity…” and the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and to promote the best interests of humanity.”
What kinds of students win such a scholarship? Luckily for us, Harvard Magazine has a helpful article on Harvard’s winners:
The Rhodes Trust has announced that five Harvard seniors have been awarded American Rhodes Scholarships this fall. Among them, one is vice president of the Harvard Islamic Society and co-founder of the Ivy League Muslim Council, a second is pursuing Islamic studies, and a third, the son of a Syrian immigrant, is studying global human-rights institutions. …
Alacha is “concentrating in Social Studies. For his senior thesis, he is studying global human rights institutions and examining their effect on local practices in Jordan. … He is the son of a Syrian immigrant and is interested in the movement for Islamic human rights.” Alacha plans to pursue an M.Phil. in modern Middle Eastern studies at Oxford.
Huckins is “concentrating in Neurobiology and Physics. …
Hyland “majors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Islamic Studies). Her primary academic interest is the common intellectual heritage of medieval Islamic and Christian theologians. … She is a leader in community and campus work, especially addressing the problem of sexual assault. …
Lam is pursuing “a joint concentration in Neurobiology and Philosophy. He is interested in philosophical problems of free will, moral responsibility, and punishment, and has career interests in criminal justice reform. He is an active advocate of the effective altruism movement …
Shahawy “is pursuing a double major in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He has devoted himself to working with marginalized communities to correct social injustices and improve access to opportunity, while also studying Islamic jurisprudence and global health and medicine. He worked with Los Angeles County inmates with the American Civil Liberties Union, as an intern in rural health clinics in Kenya with Vecna Technologies, and as an analyst with small-business lender Liwwa Inc. in Amman, Jordan. He has also conducted research on transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the causes of Saudi Arabia’s private sector labor shortage at the Harvard Center for International Development. Hassaan is the Vice President of the Harvard Islamic Society and Co-Founder of the Ivy League Muslim Council. He has volunteered at the Children’s Cancer Hospital in Cairo, Egypt and mentors prison inmates in Norfolk, Massachusetts.” Shahawy will pursue an M.Phil. in Islamic studies and history.
“Jennifer Eberhardt’s research shows subconscious connections in people’s minds between black faces and crime, and how those links may pervert justice. Law enforcement officers across the country are taking note.
“The first time Jennifer Eberhardt presented her research at a law enforcement conference, she braced for a cold shoulder. How much would streetwise cops care what a social psychology professor had to say about the hidden reaches of racial bias?
Instead, she heard gasps, the loudest after she described an experiment that showed how quickly people link black faces with crime or danger at a subconscious level. In the experiment, students looking at a screen were exposed to a subliminal flurry of black or white faces. The subjects were then asked to identify blurry images as they came into focus frame by frame.
The makeup of the facial prompts had little effect on how quickly people recognized mundane items like staplers or books. But with images of weapons, the difference was stark—subjects who had unknowingly seen black faces needed far fewer frames to identify a gun or a knife than those who had been shown white faces. For a profession dealing in split-second decisions, the implications were powerful. … “
This is actually quite interesting research, but it does not investigate why people might have become hyper-vigilant about danger around black people to start with. Given that crime victimization surveys consistently show that blacks actually commit crimes at rates similar to their rates of incarceration, Professor Eberhardt is capturing, at best, a miniscule effect. The effect of black people actually committing real crimes explains the vast, vast majority of black incarceration, and any research on the subject that doesn’t take this into account is ignorant at best.
Keep in mind:
The police disproportionately shoot whites and Hispanics, not blacks, and even when they do shoot at blacks, they are mysteriously less likely to kill them. Police officers are actually less likely to use force against black suspects because they fear backlash:
“A Birmingham, Alabama, police detective who was pistol-whipped unconscious said Friday that he hesitated to use force because he didn’t want to be accused of needlessly killing an unarmed man. …
“”We don’t want to be in the media,” he said. “It’s hard times right now for us.” …
“Adding insult to injury: several bystanders, instead of helping, took pictures of the bloodied officer as he was facedown on the concrete and posted the images on social media, where the officer was mocked. …
“”Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” one user wrote, employing the hashtag #FckDaPolice. Another mockingly offered the officer milk and cookies for his “nap time.””
• Officers were less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites — 25 times less likely, in fact
• And officers hesitated significantly longer before shooting armed suspects who were black, compared to armed subjects who were white or Hispanic
“In sum,” writes Dr. Lois James, a research assistant professor with the university’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology who headed the study, “this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects” in their shooting decisions.
“… I, too, am a Stanford Indian. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a proud Stanford alumna. But nothing about the caricature on that shirt represents me, my family, my community, or the hundreds of other Native students and alumni of the university.
Whenever the Stanford Indian resurfaces, I’m reminded that the Native members of the Stanford community still aren’t viewed as equals. …
Adrienne Keene, ’07, is a postdoctoral fellow in Native American studies at Brown University. She writes about Native representations on her blog, Native Appropriations.“
If Indians don’t like being used as mascots, politeness dictates not using them as mascots.
However, the idea that you aren’t viewed as an equal at a university that is at least 50% non-white is really quite a stretch; the idea that the mascot has anything to do with it makes about as much sense as saying that the Irish aren’t viewed as equals at Notre Dame.
WOW JUST WOW. THIS IS SERIOUSLY NOT OKAY.
If anything, I’d think that attending a place like Stanford is rather akin to having the world handed to you on a big silver platter, and so maybe it looks bad to complain too much that your platter isn’t shiny enough or it wasn’t handed over with sufficient deference.
Let’s take a moment to look at these two covers. Stanford recently had a “Protest” cover, showing Stanford students shutting down a highway in support of Black Lives Matter; today’s cover is even starker.
Harvard’s cover also features black people, but more subtly, and these are black people who actually live in Africa, rather than America. The overall feeling I get when reading official (non-student run) Harvard publications is one of internationalism–here are pictures of our Ugandan law students, here’s what up with our European investments, here a story about a professor in China–while Stanford’s publications feels decidedly mired in common American problems.
This is not to say that Harvard students aren’t protesting in favor of Black Lives Matter–they definitely are. But the university’s official publications chose not to highlight this the way Stanford’s do. Harvard’s vision of itself is global; Standford’s is national.
Anyway, back to the article, a discussion of how difficult it is to be economically successful in Africa, because even though food grows perfectly well there, people haven’t figured out how to get it all to market before it rots. A country like Nigeria, therefore, is reduced to importing tomato paste while millions of tomatoes rot in the countryside. So some Harvard guys are trying to teach Nigerians how to efficiently preserve their tomatoes so they can actually get them to market before they rot. (Wouldn’t the most efficient solution be sun-dried tomatoes? I know plenty of African fishermen sun-dry their catches because it’s an easy and free way to preserve food in their environment.)
Unfortunately the whole process is impeded by Fulani tribesmen who like to herd their cattle through the tomato fields.
Open borders rule!
Then we get to the meat of the article:
“Imagine a simple triangle diagram of the planet’s population. A fortunate couple of billion upper-income people—in the United States and Canada, much of Europe, Japan, Australia, and prospering urban centers in parts of Asia and Latin America—occupy the apex. The invisible hand of market capitalism supplies this prominent minority with bountiful goods and services. But that leaves a lot of people out. At the very bottom of the pyramid, a billion or more humans live in poverty (on less than $1.25 per person per day), often depending on government programs and charitable aid to subsist.
” … In a conversation, he compared the lives of these people, the base of the pyramid, with those at the top. Because they likely do not own property, and lack rent or tax receipts, they are not bankable, so they turn to exploitative money lenders for credit to stock a shop or start a small business. For medical care, they choose among local healers, vendors of patent nostrums, or queues at public clinics (where it may take a bribe to advance in line). Their labor, often interrupted by those queues or long bus trips to remit cash to a rural family, may be seasonal, itinerant, and legally unprotected. Functioning markets, he noted, imply a level playing field between consumers and producers, but most of these people aren’t getting a remotely fair deal. It is as if the broad base of the pyramid were an alternate universe where familiar rules don’t apply.
“Rangan quickly credited the late corporate strategist C.K. Prahalad, D.B.A. ’75, of the University of Michigan, for saying (most prominently in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, published in 2004) that the same rules ought to apply.”
As I have said over and over, societies are built by the people in them. At this point, invoking the Invisible Hand is tantamount to invoking Voodoo or the influence of Mercury retrograde in Taurus.
Countries where the people have high levels of trust, low levels of aggression, and low time-discounting end up with efficient, complex markets where they can do business with strangers without fear of being cheated or killed. In nice countries, like Japan, Finland, and even the US, the people depending on government aid and charitable programs to subsist do not have to bribe their way into medical care because people in those countries believe that bribery and line-jumping are immoral.
Nice countries are places where everyone agrees to cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Shitty ones are places where everyone is looking for a chance to defect–say, by running their cattle through a neighbor’s tomato fields.
“Philanthropic and development agencies tend not to scale or sustain themselves, he found, and public entities often fail to assure efficacy and efficiency. In contrast, “Through the ages, one actor has proven consistently able” to satisfy these criteria: competitive private industries.
“… Rangan applied his scholarly perspective to suggest inverting the telescope through which companies view prospective lower-income markets. “Typical marketing sells the organization to the customer,” he and research associate Arthur McCaffrey wrote a decade ago. (Need a car? We at GM/Mercedes/Toyota make good ones.) Within the base of the pyramid—devoid as it is of cash, roads, and gas stations—there are no such customers. But enormous demand exists for carts to ease the burden of hauling loads along muddy paths or cheap pumps to irrigate fields. Here, the proper paradigm is to “sell the customer to the organization.”
Long-term, I think making the opportunities to become successful available to people is actually a good strategy. The article is too long to continue quoting, but you can read it there if you’re interested in the opportunities/difficulties of investing in developing markets.
“The nature of censorship in China, to give just one example, can be explored by monitoring the types of communication suppressed by the government, a project that relies on sifting through millions of social media posts.
“At the same time, real-world experiments can inform economic, political, and social theory. Are people more likely to save for retirement with the help of targeted brain stimulation? Can gender bias in hiring, promotions, and work assignments be overcome by evaluating candidates jointly rather than individually? How do malnutrition and sleep deprivation among low-income individuals influence economic outcomes? Faculty supported by cross-school research programs such as the Behavioral Insights Group and the Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative are answering these and other questions by undertaking discipline-spanning research that can shape everything from the decisions we make at the grocery store to the votes we cast in the ballot box.”
Personally, I think trying to electrocute people into having lower time preference is really scraping the bottom of the idea barrel; you might as well just throw in the towel and say that some people just aren’t very good at delaying gratification and there’s not much you can do about it. Faust continues:
“This is a time of remarkable promise for the social sciences. Yet short-sighted federal funding cuts are threatening our ability to answer questions that have the potential to inform and shape all of our lives. The last 51 of the United States’ recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics were supported by the research divisions of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, which may soon face a more than 50 percent reduction from current federal funding. If we hope to address complex and consequential issues such as climate change, global pandemics, and inequality and human rights, we cannot ignore unique insights into the human and behavioral that the social sciences alone can provide.”
Harvard has more money than god and could send a mission to Mars if it felt like, but more taxpayer dollars to investigate whether or not we can alter people’s brains to get them to save money is critical.
Harvard then turns to women’s issues, with a spotlight portrait of history Professor Catherine Brekus:
“Catherine Brekus ’85 specializes in hearing the voices of America’s early female religious leaders, nearly lost to history …
” “I did not like studying history in high school,” the Warren professor of the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School confesses, smiling. “I was always good at it…but the idea is that you memorize a lot of facts, mostly about political history, and what happened when.” When she taught the subject to high-school students for two years, Brekus noticed that textbooks “have this narrative of political events…and then you have this little human-interest thing in a box. That was where the women would appear. My goal as a historian,” she adds, “is to get women out of those boxes and into the main texts.””
And she’s going to fix this by studying the lives of women whom no one cares about?
If you want more women in the history books, do (or encourage them to do) something worth recording in a history book.
“When Nitin Nohria became Harvard Business School (HBS) dean in mid 2010, he detailed five priorities, ranging from innovation in education and internationalization to inclusion. In setting out the latter goal, he said in a recent conversation, he aimed not at numerical diversity, but at a broader objective: that every HBS student and teacher be enabled to thrive within the community.”
If you can’t “thrive” at HBS without the faculty making special sure to pander to your needs, you do not belong in business. The idea that women are special little wilting flowers who have to be coddled at every turn because they can’t take care of themselves, even at the highest levels of intelligence and achievement, is absolutely repulsive.
““I have launched an initiative that will focus…on the challenges facing women at the school,” Nohria wrote. He created an institutional home for the work—a senior associate deanship for culture and community—and appointed Wilson professor of business administration Robin J. Ely to the post: a logical choice, given her research on race and gender relations in organizations. …
“Just as M.B.A. cases have become increasingly global in the past decade, he aims for at least 20 percent to “feature a female” leader within the next three years. (And because HBS sells cases to schools worldwide, that shift will radiate far beyond Allston.) …
“Ely recently recalled the concerns that prompted Nohria’s initial interest, including persistent underrepresentation of women among M.B.A. students earning highest academic honors.”
In other words, Nohria is making pity-jobs for women because they can’t hack it at HBS. Next time you look at the skyrocketing cost of college tuition, remember that college is now a make-work program for unemployable women.
Continuing the theme, “Not Holding out for a Hero” features an interview with the Asian Man now drawing Wonder Woman.
In Empathy and Imagination, author Ceridwen Dovey (now there’ a British name for you!) talks about how guilty she feels over apartheid in her childhood home of South Africa, a place she doesn’t actually bother to live in anymore, now that her political activist parents’ goal of racial harmony and integration have been achieved.
“Motherhood also played a role [in the writing of her new novel]: “It made me more grateful for the time I have to write,” she adds—and ultimately more creative, especially while finishing Only the Animals in 2013. The nature of pregnancy, nursing, and caring for a newborn intensified her kinship with “the whole family of mammals.”
“… Like Coetzee, Sax, an author and academic best known for his writings on animal-human relations, has influenced Dovey, who also admits to feeling “bewildered to the point of inaction in terms of the ethical responsibilities we have toward animals and the obligations we owe them as the dominant species on earth. We treat animals in the most appalling ways right now.” …
““I am very aware that we are all creatures who suffer together, and that existence is hard for us all,” Dovey reflects. “There is something, also, about the bond we have with animals, the care and connection that we don’t appreciate or see the magic in as much as we should.””
As Staffan points out, vegetarianism and Englishness (in this case, perhaps Welshness) are extremely correlated:
Map of self-reported English ancestry (green)Map of per capita distribution of vegetarian restaurants (green)Graph of the correlation between vegetarianism and English ancestry
The English and their near kin are probably unique in the world in their ability to consistently extend their circle of concern not only to non-tribally related humans, but even to animals–even other whites do not share this trait:
Graph showing the much lower correlation between “whites” and vegetarianism
Since the English are included in whites, removing them from the graph would result in an even lower correlation.
“In those distant days, every Harvard and Radcliffe first- and second-year student was required to complete one full Gen Ed course in each of three broad areas: only 18 (not 574) two-semester courses qualified for “Humanities,” “Social Science,” or “Natural Science” credit, plus a two-semester Gen Ed A writing course required of virtually all entering freshmen.”
Hopefully I can get back to this in more depth later, but I suspect the massive increase in the sheer amount of media (books, movies, TV shows, etc.,) available to everyone over the past hundred years, while in many ways quite wonderful, has contributed to an intellectual fracturing where we no longer have a common set of ideas and metaphors at our disposal with which to communicate with others.
I was going to do Princeton and Yale, but Harvard gave me so much material that I’m just going to save them for next month.
“On May 18, 2009, just two weeks before Smith’s graduation from Harvard, her boyfriend Copney and two accomplices shot and killed Cosby in the basement of Kirkland’s J entryway.
“An aspiring songwriter from New York City who frequently visited Smith and stayed in her room, Copney was convicted of felony murder of the first degree at the conclusion of his trial in April. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. …
“A senior in Lowell House at the time, Smith watched Jiggetts load the gun in her room before the men brought Cosby to Kirkland House to arrange the drug rip. Smith gave Copney and his accomplices her Harvard ID to gain access to the Kirkland basement, where Cosby was shot. Cosby later died from a bullet wound to his abdomen.
“Upon Copney’s return from Cosby’s shooting, Smith hid the gun in her blockmate’s room in a bag under her bed. She then called a taxi to help with the men’s getaway to South Station, where the four boarded a bus to New York. Smith returned to Harvard the next day.”
“The U.S. Department of Education has dismissed a complaint filed against Harvard this spring by 64 Asian-American groups accusing the University of discriminating based on race in its admissions practices.
“The complaint, filed in May, accused the University of unfairly denying admission to highly qualified Asian-American students while admitting similar applicants of other races.”
Everyone knows they do it, but they still get away with denying it. (A similar lawsuit is ongoing, though.)
“The MIT Physics Department is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty and student populations to improve our excellence and to better serve the society that supports our work.”
“Like in many physics departments, white males are over-represented in our student and faculty populations. There are several reasons to pursue change, seeking to increase the number of women and under-represented minorities in our community:”
Make that two minority groups: “Under-represented minorities” is code for “Piano-playing Asians need not apply. We have enough of you already.”
The whole thing is a painful ball of nonsense and lies. Putting more of group X, Y, or Z into the MIT physics department has zero effect on whether or not the department serves the society that supports its work. For that matter, who the hell do you think supports the MIT physics department? Asian men, white men, and Jewish men. THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE THAT SUPPORT YOU. Don’t shit on them.
When I need some physics, maybe a quark proven to exist or a new state of matter created, do I care the race or gender of the physicist? No! I just want them to prove that quarks exist and create new states of matter.
“TRACEY MEARES: It’s a pretty good example of a police officer. He’s angry because she said no.
“KASTE: Tracey Meares is a professor at Yale Law. She was also on President Obama’s police reform task force. She’s actually surprised by how well this traffic stop went at first. But the cigarette was the turning point. Meares says it looked like a case of contempt of cop. That’s when a police officer tries to reassert authority in the face of disrespect. And she says it’s not justified.
“MEARES: Given that he is a police officer with the power to take her life that it’s incumbent on him to make the first move and maybe tolerate a little bit more disrespect.”
“Also, we’ll sit down with a Yale Law professor who is on President Obama’s task force examining policing, as America grapples with a series of deaths of African Americans after confrontations with police.”
(The rest of the interview is audio, so you’ll have to listen to it yourself.)
“Despite the improvements, East Haven police still have work to do, including fulfilling the remaining requirements in the consent decree, said Michael Wishnie, a Yale Law School professor who represented the plaintiffs in the civil rights lawsuit.
“The kinds of structural racism and practices that have long existed in East Haven take a long time to change,” Wishnie said. “I think it’s far too soon to claim victory.”
“In Connecticut, California slaying suspect Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez would have been held for pickup by Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials only if he had a violent felony in his background or there was a court order in the case. …
It agreed to hand over the person if they already were the subject of a removal order; they were gang members or part of an anti-terrorism database; of if they had been convicted of a felony. This was codified into statute as part of the Connecticut Trust Act. …
“Under the revised policy, the Connecticut Department of Correction will no longer enforce ICE detainer requests and Administrative warrants solely on the basis of a final order of deportation or removal, unless accompanied by a judicial warrant, or past criminal conviction unless it’s for a violent felony,” Commissioner Scott Semple wrote in a memo to ICE. “
Maybe I’m just too tired, but I can’t figure out what this article is trying to say about the difference between Conn and CA law.
“President Barack Obama’s war against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq currently is illegal, many scholars say, and as the one-year mark for U.S. intervention approaches one constitutional law expert has an idea for how to prove it in court.
“Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman, like other critics of the war’s current legal grounding, says Obama is violating the War Powers Resolution by committing the U.S. military to hostilities without specific authorization from Congress.
“It’s historically been tough to establish standing to make such claims in court. But Ackerman has a plan. …”
“The effort is part of a broader National Science Foundation-funded AccessEngineering initiative, which supports students with disabilities in pursuing engineering careers and promotes accessible and universal design in engineering departments and courses.
“A lot of universities are creating these more casual prototyping spaces where students can have more of a DIY experience, as an alternative to a traditional machine shop,” said AccessEngineering co-principal investigator Kat Steele, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering whose Human Ability & Engineering Lab focuses on developing tools for people with cerebral palsy, stroke and other movement disorders.
“Because this is a big growth area for engineering schools, we wanted to help with some best practices and guidelines so that as these new spaces are being created they can be accessible to the widest group possible.”
Cerebral Palsy is caused by brain damage, and somewhere around 30-50% of sufferers are also intellectually disabled. While I know personally a very capable engineer who must use a wheelchair, severely disabled people, on the whole, tend to have things wrong with them that also impact their brains. Making cerebral palsy accessible labs will catch only a very small number of geniuses who happen to have cerebral palsy; by contrast, just spending the same money to hire people who have already graduated with STEM degrees and can’t find jobs would do far more to create more science in the world. Instead of actually hiring scientists to do research, universities want to throw buckets of money at specific identity groups just to look good.
“The move distances Harvard from a corruption case involving one of the contractors who helped oversee the land, and comes shortly after a change in leadership at Harvard Management Company, which invests the University’s $35.9 billion endowment. …
“HMC began purchasing timberland in 1997. It invested heavily in timber under the guidance of then-President and CEO Jane L. Mendillo, who resigned in 2014 after a tumultuous six-year stint as the head manager of Harvard’s endowment. Her replacement, Stephen Blyth, comes from a background in public markets and faces high expectations to bring Harvard back to its pre-recession dominance in investment returns.”
“Unlike the procedures for students at other parts of the University, Law School students involved in cases of alleged sexual harassment will now be guaranteed access to an attorney, paid for by the Law School, during the different stages of a case. After professional investigators examine a case, a separate adjudicatory panel, whose members are not affiliated with Harvard, will determine guilt, potentially after a hearing. A school-specific Title IX committee, staffed by tenured professors, will oversee the process for investigating and adjudicating cases of alleged sexual misconduct between Law School students. …
“The apparent implementation of the school’s procedures marks the close of a lobbying process that Law School professors, unhappy with Harvard’s new approach to Title IX, began last year. Harvard’s new policy and procedures, unveiled last July, altered its new definition of sexual harassment and centralized its process for handling cases, a fact administrators lauded as a positive step forward. It also adopted the preponderance of the evidence standard for determining guilt.
“But quickly afterward, both in closed-door meetings with top University officials and in an open letter published in The Boston Globe, several Law School professors pushed back. They charged that the University’s framework was biased against the accused and did not offer adequate due process. …
“The discord between the Law School and central administrators has also made some Law professors increasingly wary of centralized administrative rule at Harvard.”
This is perhaps an excessive level of formality given A. the number of people who get raped at HLS every year, and B. the fact that rape is already illegal under completely normal criminal laws, so I don’t see any reason why universities should set themselves up as parallel court systems in the first place instead, but at least HLS appears to be holding back from the full madness.
And over at the Harvard Crimson, we get some student opinions:
“Today, Ferguson, Missouri will be holding its first city council elections since Michael Brown was shot and killed last August. The city of Ferguson has been around for 121 years; during those first 120 years, only three black candidates ran for city council. This year, there are four black candidates for the Ferguson city council. This is no coincidence. Many of those in Ferguson realize that to prevent the next police officer’s bullet from killing another unarmed, black teenager, they need the ballot.
Yet, fresh off the heels of the 2014 midterm elections, which saw the lowest voter turnout since World War II, I am still worried. I am worried that our generation is losing sight of what it means to even have the right to vote. I am worried that not enough young people, people of color, and people who care about social justice are participating in the political process.”
“It is difficult to believe that the Republican Party will win a presidential election in the near future when Tea Party candidates like Ted Cruz—whose announcement speech included numerous religious references and alluded to repealing the Affordable Care Act and eliminating the Internal Revenue Service—run in the primaries and pull the eventual nominee into supporting more ideologically extreme platforms.”
Yup, Ted Cruz sure did turn out to be the right-wing ideologue for liberals to fear.
This is part two on bullying as an emergent social/political behavior and an exploration of the basic thesis that in a dispute between two people, elites will justify or outright lie about violence toward the lower status individual. For a longer explanation, see Part 1: Everything Adults say about Bullying is Bullshit.
“I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” said Ms. Morrison, who also has won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, which includes the bestsellers “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.” “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
Welp. That took all of 5 seconds to find via Google. Does Ms. Morrison not own a computer? Or is she ignorant by choice?
The Mother Jones data (above) records not a single white who shot at the NYC police, yet whites were 20% of those shot by the police. Approximately 70% of the people who actually tried to shoot a police officer were black, but only about 40% of those shot by the police were black. Hispanics make up about 30% of those who shot at the police, and 40% of those shot by the police.
In other words, NYC police officers appear to be preferentially shooting whites and Hispanics, not blacks.
Even when we compare the “fired upon by police” bar vs the “struck by police” bar, we notice that the police seem to be much better shots when shooting at whites than at blacks. When they shoot at blacks, they appear to be trying not to actually hit them, whereas they appear to have no such compunctions when shooting at whites.
So where are all of the protests and marches for whites and Hispanics murdered by the police? Does even Stormfront give enough of a shit about murdered whites to block a highway or steal a microphone?
But that is just Mother Jones and the WaPo. What stats do other folks cite?
“Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use figures from the website Killed by Police. …
“Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.
““If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos. …
“Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use figures from the website Killed by Police. Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races. …
“Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.
“If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and author of the book “Cop in the Hood.”
But do others agree with Mr. Moskos’s numbers?
“The investigative journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage in an Oct. 10 article, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.
“The fact-checking website PolitiFact concluded in August 2014 that police kill more whites than blacks after the claim was made by conservative commentator Michael Medved. PolitiFact cited data from the Centers for Disease Control on fatal injuries by “legal intervention” from 1999 to 2011.
“Over the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct,” said PolitiFact.”
“Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!”
So, the article is saying that we should be out in the streets marching and protesting about the preferential killing of whites and Hispanics by the police? Because this is, of course, what the data actually shows.
But what about that pesky matter, crime?
The Baltimore Sun has a widget that lets you see where all of the homicides in Baltimore have been committed since 2007:
All Baltimore homicides in 2014Baltimore Homicides as of August 13, 2015
I’m guessing the year’s total will come out somewhere around 280, breaking the general trend of falling homicide rates.
“Milwaukee, which last year had one of its lowest annual homicide totals in city history, recorded 84 murders so far this year, more than double the 41 it tallied at the same point last year. …
“The number of murders in 2015 jumped by 33% or more in Baltimore, New Orleans and St. Louis. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, the homicide toll climbed 19% and the number of shooting incidents increased by 21% during the first half of the year.”
But sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words:
I’m going to quote a few bits from the Slate Star Codex article linked at the top:
“Then I found a huge review paper on the subject, written by a Harvard professor of sociology, which concluded after analyzing sixty pages of exquisitely-researched studies that:
“‘Recognizing that research on criminal justice processing in the United States is complex and fraught with methodological problems, the weight of the evidence reviewed suggests the following. When restricted to index crimes, dozens of individual-level studies have shown that a simple direct influence of race on pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled. For these crimes, racial differentials in sanctioning appear to match the large racial differences in criminal offending. Findings on the processing of adult index crimes therefore generally support the non-discrimination thesis.’ …
“Police records consistently show that black people are arrested at disproportionally high rates (compared to their presence in the population) for violent crimes. For example, blacks are arrested eight times more often for homicide and fourteen times more often for robbery. Even less flashy crimes show the same pattern: forgery, fraud, and embezzlement all hover around a relative risk of four. …
“The second hypothesis has been strongly supported by crime victimization surveys, which show that the percent of arrestees who are black matches very closely matches the percent of victims who say their assailant was black. This has been constant throughout across thirty years of crime victmization surveys. …
“Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date. … Older national data skews more toward the New York City side with little evidence of racial bias, but I don’t know of any recent studies which have compared the race of shooting victims to the race of dangerous attackers on a national level. There is no support for the contention that white officers are more likely than officers of other races to shoot black suspects. …
“a more recent Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 66% of accused blacks get prosecuted compared to 69% of accused whites; 75% of prosecuted blacks get convicted compared to 78% of prosecuted whites. …
“Summary: Most recent studies suggest a racial sentencing disparity of about 15%, contradicting previous studies that showed lower or no disparity. Changes in sentencing guidelines are one possible explanation; poorly understood methodological differences are a second. Capital punishment still sucks.”
But don’t just take my word for it; go read Scott’s whole post. Obviously he put a lot of effort into it.
Presidential hopeful and US Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign website helpfully explains his thoughts on the matter:
“Issues: Racial Justice
“We must pursue policies that transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of its people of color. That starts with addressing the four central types of violence waged against black and brown Americans: physical, political, legal and economic.
“Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Samuel DuBose. We know their names. Each of them died unarmed at the hands of police officers or in police custody. The chants are growing louder. People are angry and they have a right to be angry. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that this violence only affects those whose names have appeared on TV or in the newspaper. African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. …”
CNN weighs in on the Bernie Sanders/Black Lives Matter incidents:
“Many observers are perplexed by the decision of some Black Lives Matter activists to twice disrupt attempted addresses by presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“Well, I am not perplexed. The new generation of civil rights activists never accepted “trickle-down economics” from conservatives. Today they are rejecting “trickle-down justice” from the liberals. …
“But we have needed and wanted more. Our economic problems include an unemployment rate that is double that of whites, racially biased policing and court systems, predatory lenders who deliberately target black neighborhoods and public schools that expel black children at staggering rates for minor offenses. …
“Sometimes, it seemed some Democratic politicians were happy to publicly name and embrace every part of the Democratic coalition — immigrants rights defenders, womens’ rights advocates, environmentalists and champions of LBGT equality. But not black people.”
Yes, clearly the one thing Democrats fail to talk about is Black people. Really, I’ve hardly heard anyone talking about black people and their issues for the past few decades. Maybe during the LBJ administration there was some talk about black people, but that was ages ago.
“In case anyone missed the memo after Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston, here it is: the Obama era of black silence on issues that matter to us is over.”
That’s what you call “silence”?
“It turns out the Seattle activists’ actions were aimed less at Sanders himself and more at racist practices and policies being tolerated by local liberals in a supposed progressive bastion like Seattle. The Seattle Police Department has been under investigation for years for racist scandals and problematic use of force. Black children in King County schools are suspended at higher rates than their white peers. And the region is wasting $210 million on a new jail instead of investing in communities. … any fair discussion of “income inequality” must necessarily include a denunciation of our racially biased criminal justice system. Always.”
“This is the Civil Rights Movement Part II, and our leaders should want to get in on the side that promotes human rights—full stop. … You cannot look at a group of people living in fear and dying in droves and tell them they are protesting incorrectly. It’s easy to sit back and critique the method when it isn’t your life on the line. But if someone were being choked, the last thing they would need is a passerby saying, “I’d love to help you out. But could you at least say “please?” Convince me why I should save your life, and do it politely.” White people have the time and the luxury to wait for the system we created to work in our favor.”
“Attempting to soar where her rivals have recently floundered on issues of racial justice, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd of nearly 400 in South Carolina Thursday and said unequivocally: “Yes, black lives matter. …
“Last weekend, black activists interrupted a presidential candidate forum at the Netroots Nation conference … O’Malley has since apologized for adding “white lives matter, all lives matter” to the protesters’ calls.
“…the protesters showed up slightly before the event started and, according to the Clinton campaign, were not allowed into the main event because the room has been shut down due to capacity by the United States Secret Service.
“A Secret Service agent on site confirmed this to CNN.”
How about those evil racists on the Republican side?
“I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed.”
So… Rand Paul wants to repeal almost the entire body of criminal law, including homicide and rape? I confess to being not particularly impressed with whatever train of thought produced this promise.
Even the Harvard Crimson weighs in, with perspectives from some of America’s future (and current) movers and shakers:
“In our stern voices, we chanted: “Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!”
“Confused, boisterous, and starkly naked, they replied: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
“During this year’s Primal Scream, we were a part of a group of students who stood in front of Hollis Hall as part of a peaceful protest in response to the recent non-indictment of Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, police officers who are responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, respectively.
“With the support of the administration, we hoped to delay primal scream with a 4.5-minute moment of silence, symbolic of the 4.5 hours that Brown’s body lay on the street after his death. Black lives matter, and we wanted to engage the larger Harvard community on some of the most salient issues of our time: systemic racism, oppression, and brutality on black and brown bodies. And yet, to our dismay, the efforts of several administrators who rallied for students to respect the moment of silence were muted by the chanting of the naked mass.”
In case it’s not obvious, “Primal Scream” is one of those old-school college traditions in which (probably drunk) students strip naked and run through Harvard Yard at midnight on the night before finals. Oh, and it’s in the dead of winter, which means it’s really fucking cold. Probably not the best time to try to get a hundred or so drunk, naked people get on board with an agenda of standing around in the cold for a few minutes.
“More than 200 demonstrators poured onto the streets of Central Square in Cambridge Wednesday evening, extending a series of marches and protests both nationwide and in the Greater Boston Area against racial prejudice in the criminal justice system.
“This is just a continuation,” Divinity School student Rachel A. Foran said, clutching a sign on which read “White silence is state violence.” Foran, like others at the event, emphasized the need for uniting in protest following two separate non-indictments of white police officers late last year who killed unarmed black men. …
“Along the way, organizers handed off a milk crate podium to one another as they invited individuals to decry prejudices against African American men and implore Cambridge residents to join the movement.”
I think Central Square, Cambridge is significantly blacker than Harvard.
“The energies that fuel art are similar to the ones that power politico-economic movements, and the line between the two can often blur. The protest can be considered a form of performance art, and movements at Harvard and beyond have utilized the intersection between the two. …
“Harvard is in a unique position within the genre of protest-performance art, organizers say. And since Harvard is constantly scrutinized by the media, revolutionary art produced on Harvard’s campus—protest-based or otherwise—has unusual reach and staying power.
“PERFORMING PROTESTS
“Harvard is familiar with the tradition of performance art as a form of protest. For instance, Divest Harvard, a group that calls for Harvard to divest from fossil fuel companies, recently used a tactic that showcases performance art: They initiated the Divest Harvard Fast, a hunger strike in all but name. The hunger strike is an age-old tactic, used by groups ranging from suffragettes to Indian nationalists to Cuban dissidents. The act of fasting has a peculiar evocative power to it: an asceticism that brings up images of emaciated fakirs and a willingness to use the body as a canvas, a la Marina Abramovic.”
“If the American government were sincere about wanting peace in Cambodia, it would stop supporting a repressive dictatorship, and allow the people of Cambodia — represented by the Khmer Rouge and the supporters of the deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk — to determine their own destiny,”
and of Slate Star Codex’s recent review of “Chronicles of Wasted Time,” the memoirs of a liberal journalist who got his wish to visit Stalin’s utopia, witnessed Holodomor first-hand, and then couldn’t get anyone back home to publish his articles about it or pretty much anything that wasn’t uplifting lies about the awesomeness of the USSR, which you should also read:
“He is reduced to sending secret messages at the bottoms of people’s suitcases, only to find to his horror that even when they successfully reach the Guardian offices back in Britain, his bosses have no interest in publishing them because they offend the prejudices of its progressive readership. …
“The plan goes without a hitch, he passes himself off as a generic middle-class Soviet, and he ends up in Ukraine right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Famine. He describes the scene – famished skeletons begging for crumbs, secret police herding entire towns into railway cars never to be seen again. At great risk to himself, he smuggles notes about the genocide out of the country, only to be met – once again – with total lack of interest. Guardian readers don’t look at the newspapers to hear bad things about the Soviet Union! Guardian readers want to hear about how the Glorious Future is already on its way! He is quickly sidelined in favor of the true stars of Soviet journalism, people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Russia correspondent, who wrote story after story about how prosperous and happy and well-fed the Soviets were under Stalin, and who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his troubles.”
Speakerpedia claims that Tim Wise commands a $10,000 speaker’s fee to lecture about White Privilege to college students (and other groups) across the country; he has apparently spoken at over 800 colleges. Does anyone ever get invited to speak about black crime, the targeting of whites and Hispanics by the police, or black on white crime at universities? I bet Jared Taylor would speak for free.
Black Lives Matter has the official support of Harvard University, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Twitter, and the mass media establishment.
(No, seriously this is what the inside of the Twitter headquarters looks like:
Everyone lies. All the damn time. Most lies are completely inconsequential, of course, but lying about who is murdering whom seems like the kind of lie that could result in real consequences: people dying. But even to mention the truth in public carries serious consequences: ostracization, loss of job, harassment, banning, etc. Only low-class losers care about crime against whites; rich people, of course, have no such petty concerns. Maybe because they can live in million dollar neighborhoods where the gates/ferry rides “keep out the riff-raff.”
Whose lies are believed? Whose are not?
Conclusions: The police and whites who worry about getting killed (or get killed) are low-status. Blacks and wealthy whites who proclaim how much they love blacks are high-status.
Does this sound counter-intuitive?
Why? Socially, blacks are more popular than whites.
As I noted yesterday,
“White people want to have black friends; it lets them prove to themselves (and others) just how non-racist they are. It makes them feel better about themselves and assuages some portion of guilt. To have a black friend makes a white person feel like a good white person. …
“Black people, by contrast, have no particular desire to prove how non-racist they are.”
The imbalance puts whites in a position of lower social value, attempting to get social status via black approval. But don’t just take my word for it. Remember that article in the New Yorker about the Vermont couple who adopted 20 kids?
“All the teen-ages were nervous about being black in Vermont, but Fisher and Lilly were wildly popular in high school. Lilly was a track star, and Fisher was cool and good-looking.
“Fisher: I was popular. It went to my head, I won’t lie to you. All the little white girls saw I was the best dancer in the school, and I was the only black guy.”
Fisher dropped out of college, got three girls pregnant and went to prison for beating one of them.
Were you popular enough with women to have three kids before your mid-twenties?
“In NEWSWEEK magazine this week, we suggested that part of the problem [racial self-segregation among students] stems from white parents’ refusal to talk to their young children about race and ethnicity. This inadvertently teaches children that race is a taboo topic. …
“Nevertheless, the scholars are finding stunning racial patterns in the kids’ responses. They found that black kids who self-segregate ─ who only hang out with other blacks ─ are more popular than black kids who have white friends.
“This means that an average black student could increase her popularity by hanging out with other black students. Meanwhile, if she chooses to have white friends, she could put her popularity at risk. Many kids don’t have the social capital or confidence to make this tradeoff.
“When the scholars ran the analysis a second time, substituting how much kids were liked for how popular they were, a similar troubling pattern emerged. Black kids who self-segregated were liked by more black children. Having white friends decreased a black child’s “likeability” ─ at least in the eyes of other black children.
“For white children, in contrast, self-segregating hurt their popularity. …
“Overall, black students were more popular than white students. And both the white and black kids in his study agreed which black kids were popular.”
Newsweek concludes the article by claiming,
“Twenty or thirty years ago, no black kids would have been seen as popular by white kids ─ and few black kids would have had social influence. Black kids would not have been setting the social standard, school-wide. Now they are.”
Really?
In “Blacks in the White Establishment,” Zweigenhaft and Dumhoff write about the effects of the ABC program–A Better Chance of Andover–established in 1967 to give scholarships to black and other minority students so they can attend Andover High School:
“Perry’s study found that ABC students felt themselves to be popular. In fact, in response to an item asking, “How popular do you think you are in school this year in comparison with all the other students in your grade,” black ABC students indicated they felt more popular than did a control group of white students at their schools. (More than one-third of the black respondents felt themselves to be among “the most popular” and less than one-tenth thought themselves to be among “the least popular.”)
“Not only were black ABC students popular, they were also valued as leaders in dealing with teachers and administrators. … the student body of 840 students (40 of whom were black) surprised many people (including the faculty, the administration, the New York Times, and, most likely, themselves) by electing blacks as presidents of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes for the 1969-70 academic year. As the New York Times breathlessly and historically informed its readers, Andover, “the alma mater of the Lees and Washingtons of Virginia and the Quincys and Lowells of New England, has elected three Negro students from the ghettos of Chicago and Oakland as class presidents for 1969-70.” (Bold mine)
Of course, 1969 is 40 years before the Newsweek article was published, not 20-30, so perhaps black kids got a lot less popular sometime between the 60s and the 80s. Or maybe Newsweek just employees people who want certain fictions to be true.
“African American—but not European American—children had more segregated relationships and were more disliked by cross-ethnicity peers when they had fewer same-ethnicity classmates. African American children’s segregation was positively associated with same-ethnicity social preference and perceived popularity and with cross-ethnicity perceived popularity. European American children’s segregation was positively associated with same-ethnicity social preference but negatively associated with cross-ethnicity social preference and perceived popularity.”
“I’ve been to many different middle schools and highschools (we moved alot for dad’s job) and it always seemed as though blacks are more “popular” than anyone else in the school?
“My area is majority white…and most of the Black people at my school(and there isn’t a lot) are quite popular. Same with a lot of the Asian kids at my school.
“Well usually I feel as though they have more culture…I don’t know.. more fun then just and I am not trying to “Generalize” the american girl population, but most of us are annoying slutty brats, who just want to take pictures all the time in the same god damn position.
“We’re just always expected to be cool and popular, honestly…and it’s just that most blacks are raised to be more outgoing, so it carries on with them through school. I get along with most people, but I’m not that popular.
“the blacks in my school tend to be popular because some of them make trouble. Source(s): im black,and im not popular”
The general explanation for black crime (if you get one at all) is that blacks feel bad because of racism, they have low self-esteem, they’re unpopular, people are constantly mean to them, they suffer microaggressions, etc.
The “self esteem” racket is quite a thing, and has been going on for quite a while (since the ’80s, at least). I recently happened across a treasure trove of old books a former kindergarten teacher was giving away for free because she was retiring, and gratefully took the whole stack. Many of the books were on the expected topics of “Kindergarten is awesome” and the ABCs, but a substantial subset were books aimed at raising black self-esteem, such as, “I Like Myself”
Actually, there were two copies of this book in the stack.
Here’s a page from the book:
People the MC would not like to be: a baby, an old woman, or a police officer–all white.
And another page:
Remember, whites get bullied more than black kids, but how many books do you think you can find in the average kindergarten class depicting a white kid being bullied by a black kid, and encouraging the white kid to be proud of themself?
“Teach your kids to constantly question the media’s narratives, especially about black people, including what stories the media tells and doesn’t tell, what images they show and don’t show, and the ways that black people and other people of color are made less than human by the media, while white people, even mass murderers, are allowed full humanity. Point out to them the differences in headlines and language used to describe people of color vs. white people and make sure they understand the motives behind them.”
The Cosby Show must have been really hard on her self-esteem.
“By the 1970s, a majority of empirical studies found that Blacks had high self-esteem (Simmons, 1978; Taylor & Walsh, 1979; Rosenberg & Simmons, 1972; Harris & Stokes, 1978; Porter & Washington, 1979). Cross (1991) also reviewed studies published from 1968 to1980, and found that 74% of the studies reported that Blacks had equal or higher self-esteem than Whites. …
“a plethora of quantitative and qualitative studies have reported that Black adolescent girls consistently present high self-esteem scores (Adams, 2003; Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1999; Brodsky, 1999; Brown et al., 1998; Dukes & Martinez, 1994; Gray-Little & Hafdahl, 2000; Makkar & Strube, 1995; Milkie, 1999; Twenge & Crocker, 2002). In an empirical review of race comparative research published from 1980-2000, Adams (2003) found that 23 of 26 studies reported that Black girls had higher self-esteem than White girls. Black adolescent girls may be facing difficult circumstances but they consistently rate higher on self-esteem than any other racial group (Twenge & Crocker, 2002).”
“A Birmingham, Alabama, police detective who was pistol-whipped unconscious said Friday that he hesitated to use force because he didn’t want to be accused of needlessly killing an unarmed man. …
“”We don’t want to be in the media,” he said. “It’s hard times right now for us.” …
“Adding insult to injury: several bystanders, instead of helping, took pictures of the bloodied officer as he was facedown on the concrete and posted the images on social media, where the officer was mocked. …
“”Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” one user wrote, employing the hashtag #FckDaPolice. Another mockingly offered the officer milk and cookies for his “nap time.””
