June 5, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Racism: the Marxist Weapon to Transform America

Friends,

Over the past several years and more recently in the MY CORNER columns, I have written about the double-headed Hydra, that weaponized cultural Marxist template on race and gender that seems to increasingly infect  and saturate this nation’s thinking and color just about everything we are supposed to think and do.

There is no escaping it.  If you watch television or a current movie for longer than a half-second, if your son or daughter is in grammar school or condemned to attend a state-supported college, if you participate gainfully in the workplace, if you attend a church of what passes for Christianity these days, if you have dealings with the legal system, if you interact with (some) friends or relatives—it jumps out and confronts you and demands your total subservience.

Its frequency is extrapolated, it seems, almost every day to include even the slightest and most insignificant occurrences and episodes in our lives. You can’t run, you can’t hide—it’s going to catch you and require that you tearfully confess that “racist” or “sexist” joke you told to fellow workers back in 1990. And if you are a public figure or a writer whose writing is aired publicly, well, be prepared for that new burning-at-the-stake that makes those Salem witch trials of the late 17^th century look like tame Sunday school exercises.

Perhaps even more insidious than the ravages of feminism and gender ideology—but not by much—is the use of a cultural Marxist narrative on race, followed almost immediately by an explanation that includes deafening charges of the prevalence of “historic white supremacy” and “institutional or systemic racism” that can only be corrected by a total purging and transformation of American society: never-ending reparations and suffocating affirmative action, the eventual silencing of all dissent,  a total rewriting and reformulation of American history…and eventually by the “replacement” of the white population by immigrants and non-whites who will eventually out populate them.

Almost every day we hear—blared over the boob-tube, screamed by the Mainstream Media in various formats—of another instance of “police brutality” against black folks, another instance of racism, hurtful speech and actions which are now defined infallibly as “racist.” Blacks, in particular black males, commit a disproportionately higher percentage of violent crimes—it’s because of systemic racism and centuries of white oppression. Blacks aren’t allowed into “good neighborhoods”—it’s due to a subtle “real estate racism.” Blacks are prevented from voting—it’s because the white power structure demands they prove they are actually who they claim to be—obviously a racist ploy of “voter suppression” to keep them from exercising the franchise. Black students do far less well than white students in high school—it’s because of institutional racism and historic inequality in the educational system.

Professor Walter Williams points out [https://patriotpost.us/opinion/55531-educational-fraud-continues] that less than four out of ten graduating high school seniors can pass a simple English reading test, but only 17% of black students make the grade. The whites are dumb, you see; but for the black students it’s those centuries of domination and enslavement by whites that made them that way, despite more than a half century of intense remedial action and trillions of dollars spent since the 1960s.

The accepted vehicle that validates and propels this narrative and explains these disparities is the commonly accepted proposition by both the Left and by establishment conservatives, that we have failed miserably to fulfill the promise of the Founders of this nation that “all men are created equal, [and] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights….,” while turning a blind eye to historic racism and white privilege.

Those words of the Declaration, say proponents, were a promise—a dream—unrealized by even those who authored it. Those men were submerged in and derailed by immediate compromises about slavery and states’ rights. The new American nation was, thus, blighted by the sin of racism, a racism that stained it from its very inception, and had to be vigorously and militantly opposed by steadfast action, including a “civil war” and massive and organized movements for “civil rights” and equality.  

Both the Marxist “farther Left” and the dominant Neoconservatives of the Right posit this “equality” as the essential American principle, the fundamental underpinning and hope of the American republic.

For the Neocons, bound by their own acceptance of this template as the guiding light of “American exceptionalism” and “America-as-Idea,” that means advocating and pushing for the progressive (if gradual) expansion of “civil rights,” now broadened to include everything from the acceptance of affirmative action, to same sex marriage, to a defense of transgenderism. While claiming to be conservative and opposing the advances of the Left, the Neoconservatives are imprisoned by their own Marxistoid logic which they inherited from their Trotskyite forebears. Thus, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro, Guy Benson, Marc Thiessen, Max Boot, George Will, and countless others, in effect, can offer no legitimate opposition to the “farther Left.” Rather, they legitimize it and sanctify its gains, if at times begrudgingly.

For the cultural Marxists, its demands for equality are the Trojan Horse by which they are enabled to exact “justice” for centuries of white supremacy and oppression, as those inherent characteristics of white dominance violate egregiously that original (and obscured) promise. But, in fact, the totem of “equality” becomes for them only a wedge, a means to inject a revolutionary progressivism into the discourse which, fully realized, radically alters and transforms the very fabric, the history, and the nature of the American nation.

The problem for this egalitarian interpretation is that it reads the American Founding erroneously, that its proponents misunderstand and misconstrue the meaning of those words in the Declaration of Independence, that they attempt to fit American history into their own ideological Procrustean bed—and if it doesn’t fit, then to rewrite it or throw it out.

Abraham Lincoln—so deified by the Neoconservatives—is held up as the first American president who really understood the meaning of those words in the Declaration’s Preamble.  That is, it took eighty-seven years for a president to finally comprehend just what America was all about. Not Washington, not Madison, not Adams, not Jackson, not even Jefferson, but a president elected by a sharply regional minority to lead a rump portion of the fractured country in the middle of a war between the states, and who stated more than once that his motives were strictly war  related and propagandistic—it was he who finally understood that “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

I have written previously at some length on this process [cf. https://www.unz.com/article/american-exceptionalism-the-south-and-the-brain-robbery-of-conservatism/  and also,   http://www.unz.com/article/black-white-in-culturally-marxist-america/ and, http://www.unz.com/article/the-conservative-rout-and-donald-trump/], which I have termed a kind of intellectual and historical “brain robbery of American history,” and I have cited a number of historians on the topic who have written in detail to disentangle the misreading of the thinking of the Founders and Framers and their intentions: in particular the late Dr. Mel Bradford (Original Intentions, 1993) and Professor Barry Alan Shain (The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context, 2014), and before them, Professors George Carey and Wilmoore Kendall (The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, 1970).

In sum, the American nation was not founded on the promise of “equality” of all men. Those justifying words of the Declaration were largely directed at the British Parliament which the Second Continental Congress believed was treating the American colonies unfairly. On the contrary, the Founders and Framers understood fully that the very concept of egalitarianism was not only unnatural and unrealizable, but potentially destructive of the very fragile republic they were attempting to create. 

Thus, in a real sense, the key to combating the race hustlers and Marxist ideologues on the far Left as well as the egalitarian Neocons on the supposed Right is a clearer and far better understanding of our Founding, our basic documents, and our history.

Unfortunately, you will not get that in most high school textbooks or in most college history classrooms. You won’t get it from Hollywood. You won’t hear it from most politicians. You won’t hear it on “conservative” Fox News, bound up as it is in presenting the Neocon vision of America-as-Idea which is fulfilled in the imposition of universal equality (and democracy and all that flows from that).

Yet a fundamental counter-revolution must occur if there be any hope for recovery, restoration, and throwing back the seemingly irresistible assault by those who would pervert, destroy, and transform our Western Christian culture and history. The only other alternative is our ignominious disappearance from history, itself, to quote T. S. Eliot, "not with a bang, but a whimper."

Three short items I remit today which, in diverse ways, offer some perspective on this situation.

First, Pat Buchanan asks the question whether America’s racial divide is permanent, will it get worse, and just what may happen?  Second, I pass on a portion of a recent CNN interview with “social justice warrior” and activist, Michaela Angela Davis (not the notorious Communist Angela Davis, this one is worse) on the inescapability of “white racism”—if you are white, you are, by definition, a racist.

Lastly, there is Fred Reed’s caustic and humorous view of affirmative reaction: behind his delicious irony there is a whole lot of truth to be had.

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Is America's Racial Divide Permanent?

http://buchanan.org/blog/is-americas-racial-divide-permanent-129405

By Patrick J. Buchanan   Friday - June 1, 2018

For Roseanne Barr, star of ABC's hit show "Roseanne," there would be no appeal. When her tweet hit, she was gone.  "Roseanne's Twitter statement, is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," declaimed Channing Dungey, the black president of ABC Entertainment.

Targeting Valerie Jarrett, a confidante and aide of President Barack Obama, Roseanne had tweeted: If the "muslim brotherhood & the planet of the apes had a baby=vj."   Offensive, juvenile, crude, but was that not pretty much the job description ABC had in mind for the role of Roseanne in the show?

Roseanne also tweeted that George Soros, 87-year-old radical-liberal billionaire, had been a Nazi "who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps and stole their wealth."   The Soros slur seems far more savage than the dumb racial joke about Jarrett, but it was the latter that got Roseanne canned.

Her firing came the same day that 175,000 employees of 8,000 Starbucks's stores were undergoing four hours of instruction to heighten their racial sensitivities.  These training sessions, said The Washington Post, "marked the start of Starbucks' years-long commitment to new diversity and sensitivity programs after two African-Americans were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12."

The Philly Starbucks manager, a woman, had called the cops when the two black men she took to be loiterers refused to leave.  Rachel Siegel of the Post describes the four-hour session:

"At first the employees are prompted to find differences. They watched a video in which (Starbucks head) Howard Schultz talks about his vision for a more inclusive company and country. They reflected what a place of belonging means to them. And they examine their own biases.

"Each group viewed a documentary underwritten by Starbucks and directed by Stanley Nelson. In the film people of color talk about experiences of being followed in stores. Footage from the civil rights movement quickly progresses to 21st-century cellphone videos capturing people being dragged off a plane, threatened in a New York deli and choked at a North Carolina Waffle House."

On reading this, the terms "Orwellian" and "re-education camp" come to mind.

Earlier in May, the NFL issued a rule saying players who refuse to stand for the national anthem must remain in the locker room. If they take a knee on the field this coming season, they can be punished and the team fined.

Great was the outrage when this ruling came. The First Amendment rights of black players were being brutally trampled upon.  Yet the NFL has always had restrictions on behavior, from evicting players from the game for unsportsmanlike conduct to curtailing end-zone dances.

What is the common thread that runs through these social clashes from just this last month?

It is race. Each episode fits neatly into the great media narrative of an irredeemably racist America of white oppressors and black victims.

Had it been two white guys hanging out in that Philly Starbucks, who were told by the manager to buy a cup of coffee or get out, the spat would never have become a national story.

These incidents, coming as they do 50 years after the historic advances in civil rights, induce a deep pessimism that this country will ever escape from the endlessly boiling cauldron of racial conflict.

Today, because of cellphone videos, social media, 24-hour cable and the subsequent nationalization of even the most trivial incidents, our national conversation is more suffused than ever with matters of race.

For many, race has become a constant preoccupation.  And in each of these incidents and disputes, the country divides along the familiar fault lines, and the accusations and arguments go on and on until a new incident engenders a new argument.

The America of the 1960s, with its civil rights clashes and "long hot summers," was a far more segregated society than today. Yet the toxic charge of "racist" is far more common now.

And how much do these conversations correspond to the real crisis of black America? Here is a sentence culled from another Post story this week: "Three fatal shootings ...over the Memorial Day weekend brought the (Ward 8 total) to 30 homicides so far this year." 

Are white cops really the problem in Ward 8, Anacostia, when 30 people in that black community have been shot or stabbed to death in the first five months of 2018?  Washington, D.C., spends more per student than almost any other school district. Yet the test scores of vast numbers of black kids have already fallen below "proficiency" levels by the time they reach fourth and eighth grade, and the high school truancies have reached scandalous levels.

How does ABC's cashiering of "Roseanne," or apologies to the two guys at Starbucks, or restrictions on the rights of millionaire NFL players to kneel during our national anthem address the real crisis?

Is white America really black America's biggest problem?

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 Michaela Angela Davis: All Trump Voters Are Racist

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/05/30/michaela-angela-davis/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20180530

30 May 2018

Wednesday on CNN’s “New Day,” culture critic Michaela Angela Davis said “yes” all the people who voted for Donald Trump are racist.

Partial transcript as follows:

DAVIS: They made a connection together right when Trump touted her ratings, almost took credit for them, said it was about us. They made their relationship clear. And he’s made it more popular, I think, to be openly racist. And I think it’s important we don’t make Trump seem this untouchable thing that no one gets to be Trump but Trump. Tens of millions of people voted for him after he showed his cards for years.

BERMAN: Are you suggesting that they’re racist —

DAVIS: Absolutely yes. Yes.

BERMAN: All the people that voted for Donald Trump are racist?

DAVIS:  Yes. They may not be violently racist, they may not be — he’s targeted. He’s very clear and strategic. Look anti-blackness is a strategy that has been the foundation of part of the American project. So if you — we have to grapple with the idea if that if you heard someone at their rally say ‘build a wall, kill them all.’ If you heard someone say—

CAMEROTA: You know that people interpret this differently and to paint as broad a brush saying you are that saying everybody who voted for him is racist. They’ll say that people compartmentalize during Bill Clinton and you overlook the things that you’re uncomfortable with because you like the policy. You can’t paint that broad of a brush stroke.

DAVIS: Racism isn’t broad. What you are not hearing is there’s so many different levels of racism and how it works itself out.

CAMEROTA: I hear you.

DAVIS: There’s levels to how it is interpreted and there’s levels to how it is acted out and most of the time we are operating in racist structures, so you as an individual may not —may not understand that you are racist but you are working in a racist structure. So that’s how policemen of color can be participatory. So it’s not — it is so complicated and that’s why we have to have sustained complicated, nuanced conversations that ground themselves in history.

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THE UNZ REVIEW

Affirmative Action and the American Mind: If Any

https://www.unz.com/freed/affirmative-action-and-the-american-mind-if-any/

FRED REED • MAY 29, 2018

 “Affirmative action” means hiring people because they can’t do the job well. Near-synonyms are “diversity,” meaning groups that cannot do the job well, and “inclusiveness,” which means seeking people who you know cannot do the job well. These underpin American society, and have ruined education. For some time the sciences seemed less susceptible to the prevailing enstupidation because mathematics would present an impenetrable barrier to the the insufficiently bright. This, astonishingly, is changing. The sciences are being dumbed down to–are you surprised?–spare the feelings of included affirmative diversity.

Which somewhat curiously brings us to international politics and an aspect of scientific schooling that does not appear in the mainstream press: Psychometrists, people who endeavor to measure intelligence, universally agree that the Chinese are more intelligent than Eurowhites. So are the Koreans and Japanese. Since for the most part psychometrists are themselves white, their conclusions presumably do not spring from racial chauvinism. The Chinese advantage is measured at around five IQ points. This is not great but makes a considerable difference at the high end of the distribution.

As a matter of observable–if, to many, unwelcome–fact, virtually all of the work in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in America is done by whites. Blacks contribute nothing and Hispanics, to date anyway, very little. For reasons of politics we must pretend not to notice. When a piano is falling toward one’s head, one may pretend that it is not, but not for long. The arrival of the piano will ensure this.

America’s prosperity and place in the world very much depend on invention and excellence in the STEM fields. Boeing sells airliners, and provides jobs to Americans, only because its airliners are technically equal to those of AirBus. A lowering of technical capacity will have unfortunate consequences for the country.

America’s whites number at about 200 million, the Han Chinese of China about a billion–five times as many.

Beijing understands perfectly that technological virtuosity is crucial to the country’s well-being. It spends heavily, and successfully, on increasing China’s performance. Those who follow such things note the speed of the the advance. A fully developed China will be able to deploy several times as many researchers and engineers, these being at least as intelligent as America’s, on problems of its choosing. Numbers count. They will count more as time goes by.

This strongly suggests that, unless Washington starts a major war to prevent it, or China collapses from within, the future is in the East. It also suggests that the United States would be well advised to do all it can to maintain its competitiveness for as long as it can. Instead it seems to be committing imperial harakiri, deliberately lowering the quality of education in all fields at all levels.

America’s suicide note: How Identity Politics is Harming the Sciences, by Heather Mac Donald. It is long but well worth reading. It documents the systematic lowering of intellectual standards in the sciences to increase the numbers of women and underperforming minorities. This, as she makes clear at length, is strongly supported by the federal government. A few examples:

“Entry requirements for graduate education are being revised. The American Astronomical Society has recommended that Ph.D. programs in astronomy eliminate the requirement that applicants take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in physics, since it has a disparate impact on females and URMs….” (These are “Underrepresented Minorities.”)

“Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.”

“A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.”

“The National Institutes of Health are another diversity-obsessed federal science funder. Medical schools receive NIH training grants to support postdoctoral education for physicians pursuing a research career in such fields as oncology and cardiology. The NIH threatens to yank any training grant when it comes up for renewal if it has not supported a sufficient number of “underrepresented minorities” (URMs).”

“Medical school administrators urge admissions committees to overlook the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of black and Hispanic student applicants and employ “holistic review” in order to engineer a diverse class. The result is a vast gap in entering qualifications.”

Mac Donald goes on to tell of school after school accepting diversity with credentials well below those of real students, of schools dropping the GRE requirement because it makes obvious that in STEM fields women and minorities are not performing as desired. (“Minorities” always means “poorly performing minorities.” Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and so on don’t count.)

The comparatively young may be so steeped in such corrupted pedagogy that they do not know how the sciences were formerly taught. A description:

I went to a small Southern school, Hampden-Sydney College, of respectable but not astonishing credentials. I believe the pre-dumbing-down SATs were a bit over 1100. This was before social justice had replaced competence as a reason for study. Freshmen were expected to be fully literate and know algebra cold. Remedial courses would have been thought crazy. If you needed them, you needed to be somewhere else. In any event, if you had graduated from high school without being able to read, you were unlikely to learn.

Freshman chemistry at H-S–much like freshman chemistry in other schools I suppose–was not a cooperative shared learning experience that avoided unnecessary facts. It did not exist to avoid disturbing heartwarming but dim-witted minorities. It was–boom!–s-p hybrid bonding orbitals, resonance in benzene rings, the wave equation del-squared psi and a bunch of constants, probability densities, quantum degeneracy, equilibrium constants, Pivnert the ideal gas equation, the mathematics of a mass spec, the Krebs cycle, and endless problems: 2.4 grams of phlogiston anhydride are dissolved in 2 liters of 2,4-diethyl-polywannacrackerine. What are the products and the weights and molarities of each at equilibrium?

It was real chemistry, sink or swim, and most of us swam because we were looking at med school or graduate work. If there had been affirmative-action students–”students”–most of the material would have had to be eliminated. Mathematical illiterates do not balance redox equations or interpolate four-place log tables which, in those slide-rule days, we did.

Pop quiz. Take out a sheet of paper. Question: Are Chinese students, there or here, studying de-mathematized semi-chemistry for reasons of identity proportionality? Or are they, at every high-end university or elite high school in America, eating the white kids alive?

The same madness appears below the level of college. Walter Williams writing of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress in America: “Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.”

What?

Affirmative action in the sciences needs to be scrapped. For everybody. The purpose of studying astrophysics should not be to make social-justice warriors feel good about themselves. If women do not do well at engineering mathematics, let them become neurosurgeons.

Fred Reed is a retired news weasel and part-time sociopath living in Mexico with his wife and three useless but agreeable street dogs.