Showing posts with label Race and Ethnicity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race and Ethnicity. Show all posts

Monday, July 03, 2023

These Polacks Out'chere Just Really Doing The Most....,

polskieradio |  The war in Ukraine has weakened the Franco-German axis that once defined Europe, with the balance of power now shifting toward the UK and Poland, a British political scientist has claimed. 

In an op-ed featured in the British news magazine The New Statesman, Maurice Glasman, a political scientist from St Mary's University in London, highlights the profound impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the existing order in Europe.

Glasman argues that the invasion has not only disrupted the balance of power across the continent but has also had consequences for the European Union, Poland's wpolityce.pl website reported on Thursday.

Prior to the crisis, the EU functioned under a shared leadership model, with France and Germany at the helm. France assumed a dominant role in military and diplomatic affairs, while Germany focused on economic matters, according to Glasman.

However, he says the legal framework governing the EU was rooted in the primacy of EU law within member states, which ultimately created tensions in both eastern and western Europe.

These tensions were exemplified by Britain's decision to withdraw from the EU, as well as the opposition voiced by Poland and Hungary on social issues.

“The status quo was based on an understanding over the export of gas (as well as oil and coal) from Russia to Germany, most obviously through the Nord Stream pipeline," according to Glasman.

He writes: "Berlin and Moscow held the fate of Central Europe in their hands once more. German economic interests were predominant, partly because the EU did not develop a unified military strategy of its own."

Significant shift in European landscape

Glasman further states: “This is what made the status of Ukraine so explosive. Its integration into either the EU or NATO was not in German interests. It would undermine its economic interests, as the only serious industrial economy within the EU, which were predicated upon cheap energy imports from Russia.”

In his analysis, Glasman highlights the fact that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has resulted in a significant shift in the European landscape, particularly in the realms of economics and military affairs, wpolityce.pl reported.

Glasman says this shift has exposed Germany's relative weakness and hesitancy in the military sphere, sentiments that are shared by France.

He argues that in the event of a military confrontation with Russia, power and resources within Europe would gravitate towards NATO, subsequently leading to a resurgence of influence from the United States and the United Kingdom.

He writes that “it was widely assumed within academic and elite political discourse that Brexit would lead to the marginalization of Britain within Europe, and to the consolidation of the Franco-German axis within the EU. The opposite has been the case.”

He continues: “Following the invasion of Ukraine, Britain took an unambiguous position of military and political support for the beleaguered Ukrainian state. While the US was offering President Volodymyr Zelensky asylum, Britain immediately transferred weapons and led the western European political response with an unprecedented array of economic sanctions against Russia. It seemed as if Brexit had strengthened its freedom of action at a time of war."


Tuesday, May 02, 2023

Racial Self-Destruction In America..., (REDUX Originally Posted 5/23/16)


NYTimes |  Ali-Rashid Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the potential for further gunfire.

They see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly addresses.

“White folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Mr. Abdullah, who is black.

No one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans. Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.

Most parents Mr. Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.” And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.

“ ‘Not my child,’ ” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive mother. “ ‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I raised my child.’ ”

His reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children, slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our responsibility first.”

African-Americans make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.

Nationally, reliable racial breakdowns exist only for victims and offenders in gun homicides, not assaults, but those show a huge disparity.

The gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still die from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending on whether the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I. statistics show that African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent of the population, make up about half of both gun homicide victims and their known or suspected attackers.

“Every time we look at the numbers, we are pretty discouraged, I have to tell you,” said Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland.

Some researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic disadvantages that help breed violence.

 

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

We Know For Certain That Scott Adams Has No Black Friends...,

Scott Adams was trying to use this opportunity to demonstrate that the concern about racism in the US is a veneer: it’s about virtue signalling but not actually helping people get out of the social trap they find themselves in due to bad education. And he was demonstrating that people are happy to trash freedom of speech to maintain this virtue signalling.

I’m still a loooong way from knowing what exactly Scott Adams set out to accomplish. Since his self-immolation, he’s tweeted that “the media is racist” and in the process gotten Elon Musk on board.

This doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial claim.

In addition to the fact that black folks didn’t cancel Adams, I believe we can also rather safely conclude that he doesn’t have any black friends. He doesn’t know any of the handful of black folks who live in the segregated California town he’s lived in for the past 30 years.

A little unguarded time in the company of true friends would’ve innoculated him against his original egregious miscalculation. Conversation with a B or C-list black public intellectual friend would’ve been a better rebound than conversation with manosphere D-lister Hotep Jesus.

What transpired between Gonzalo Lira and Hotep Jesus was painful to listen to, and, it shed no further light on the mystery of Scott Adam’s self-immolation. Jimmy Dore does a nice job roasting the breadth and depth of Adam’s misfire.

Monday, August 29, 2022

WW-II Never Ended - But Its Historical Narrative Is Controlled By The "Victor(s)"....,

gilbertdoctorow  |  To be sure, the demand that all Russians be barred from Europe as punishment for their war on Ukraine has not met with universal approval within the EU. Even Germany came out against the initiative, with Scholz saying that exceptions must be made for humanitarian reasons. Others have debated the legality under EU law of such generalized prohibitions directed at an entire population.  But the debate rages on.

Finally, a statement made yesterday by Latvian President Egils Levits got the full attention of Moscow. He said that Russian-speaking residents of Latvia should be ‘isolated from society’ if they oppose his government’s policies with respect to the war in Ukraine.  Just what is meant by “isolate” is not clear. Does Levits intend to intern them in concentration camps?  Given the absolute failure of Latvia to respect EU human rights norms going back from the first days of the country’s independence from the USSR in 1991, such an atrocity would not be out of character.

I have dealt with precisely this issue in essays going back to 2014 which were included in my collection Does Russia Have a Future?:  see chapter 22 “Latvia’s 300,000 Non-Citizens and the Ukrainian Crisis Today” and chapter 33 “Latvia’s failed U.S. inspired policies towards Russia and Russians.” I further explored these issues in my 2019 book A Belgian Perspective on International Relations, chapter38 “Republic of Latvia, Apartheid State Within the EU.” 

The point is that upon achieving independence thanks to the active support of many of its Russian-speaking citizenry, the government of Latvia turned around and stripped 400,000 of them of their citizenship, close to 40% of the total population at the time, and offered them a path to regain passports that only a tiny fraction of them could follow.  When President Levits speaks today of Russian-speaking “residents” of Latvia, he has in mind those who were deprived of civil rights including passports and remain stateless up to the present time.  Everything that Latvia did to its Russian-speaking population going back 30 years set the precedents for Kiev’s repressive policies towards its own 40% who are Russian speakers after the nationalists from Lvov came to power in 2014.

These various developments were the main topic for discussion in yesterday’s Evening with Vladimir Solovyov political talk show, which stood out as especially valuable.  Although I have made reference to this particular talk show frequently over the years as a good source of information about what Russia’s political and social elites are thinking, I freely acknowledge that the presenter cannot and does not fill every program with material and panelists worth listening to.  Indeed, there is a lot of sludge on air between the gems. By ‘sludge’ I mean the kind of ‘kitchen talk’ in which expert panelists talk the same non-facts-based drivel that ordinary Russians will engage in when they follow the principle of socializing described by Chekhov in Act Two of The Three Sisters:  “They are not serving us tea, so let’s philosophize.”

In any case, last night’s Solovyov was definitely worth listening to. The question of neo-Nazism in Europe was the glue binding together different elements of the discussion, ranging from Levits’ obnoxious declaration of the same day to the fate of ordinary Russians in Kazakhstan and Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what to do about all of these challenges to the Russian World.

The overriding point was that the Russophobia and ‘cancel Russian culture’ movements that have swept Europe during 2022 mean that Russians are the Jews of today. They are what the Hitlerites called Untermenschen, against whom all manner of rights violations if not outright murder can be practiced. This arises in its worst form in Ukraine, where Russians as a people are systematically dehumanized in statements from the top leadership of the country.  In Ukraine, the ultra-nationalists call Russians “Colorado,” a reference to the bugs that infest potato crops. These insects carry the orange and black colors of the St George’s ribbons that patriotic Russians wear. This is the same logic that made possible the biological weapons attack on Russian soldiers in the Zaporozhie that was carried out last week by Ukrainian forces, sending the victims to intensive care treatment for botulism poisoning. That development probably did not get coverage in your daily newspaper.

The conversation on Solovyov was particularly interesting in the ‘what is to be done’ segment. Acknowledging that a ‘special military operation’ against Latvia is not practicable yet given Latvia’s membership in NATO, a panelist who heads the State Duma committee on relations with the Former Soviet Union states, said that those Russians who profited from the transit business between Russia and Latvia for decades should now pay up and contribute financially to relocating the Russian speakers in Riga to the Russian Federation, meaning providing good housing and jobs that till now were never on offer to incentivize immigration. A fellow panelist broadened the proposed assistance to suggest a government program of resettlement modeled on what Israel did some decades ago to facilitate the relocation of certain Black African Jews from their country of persecution to the State of Israel.  And it was suggested that similar relocation offers should be extended to Russian speakers in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries where they have all been second class citizens since these countries became independent of the USSR.

Friday, February 04, 2022

Jews Weren't White Until They Were

usatoday |  If race were real – in a biological sense – it would stay the same across history. But it doesn't. It changes.

That's how people like me became white. Yes, you read that right. Jews weren't white … until we were.

 The horror of the Holocaust thoroughly discredited the idea of Jews as a race. But race itself – as a concept – was still going strong. Slowly, and unevenly, white Americans welcomed Jews into theirs.

Tensions between Jewish and Black people

That has been a source of tension between Jews and African Americans ever since. James Baldwin wrote in 1967 that Black people were tired of Jews claiming that their own experience of prejudice was “as great as the American Negro’s suffering.” That was false, Baldwin wrote, and it fueled Black antisemitism.

“The most ironical thing,” Baldwin added, “is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man.”

You could hear echoes of that frustration in Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on Monday, when she denied the racial dimensions of the Nazi genocide against Jews.

“This is white people doing it to white people,” she said, when challenged on the claim, “so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”

She was wrong about that, and – to her credit – she apologized for it. But she was right that most Jews have changed their race since that time, which has never been an option for African Americans.

Race makes us imagine that our differences are inherent. And from there, it's just a short step to the idea that some people are inherently superior – or inferior – to each other. We need a new language to talk about all of this, openly and honestly. Jews aren’t a separate race, biologically speaking. But neither is anyone else.

Jewishness (And Anti-Semitism) Is WTF WE TELL YOU IT IS!!!

israelnationalnews |  The Anti-Defamation League, which has faced charges in recent years that it has become too politically active, changed its definition of racism for the second time in two years after critics attacked its previous definition as narrowly focused.

According to a report in Breitbart, the ADL’s original definition of racism was: ”Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”

In late 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the ADL changed its definition of racism to state: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

The ADL said that the new definition was created to “reflect that racism in the United States manifests in broader and systemic ways.”

Yet, critics argued it was too narrow and left out other types of racism. The ADL also began to categorize Jews based on skin color – with fellowships aimed at “Jews of Color,” Breitbart reported.

But this week, the ADL again changed its definition of racism to an “interim” definition that was broader and was more reflective of the previous definition.

The interim definition states: “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explained the change in a Medium op-ed published on Wednesday, saying that while the updated definition “explicitly acknowledged the targeting of people of color – among many others – by the white supremacist extremism we have tracked for decades,” the “new frame narrowed the meaning in other ways.”

“By being so narrow, the resulting definition was incomplete, rendering it ineffective and therefore unacceptable,” Greenblatt said. “It’s true, it’s just not the whole truth. It alienated many people who did not see their own experience encompassed in this definition, including many in the Jewish community.”

 

ADL Deeply Disturbed By Characterizations Of Jews As A Race

ADL  |  New Orleans, LA, February 26, 2018 … Anti-Defamation League (ADL) South Central Regional Director Aaron Ahlquist issued the following statement regarding Joshua Bonadona’s employment discrimination lawsuit against Louisiana College:

“ADL is deeply offended by the perception of Jews as a race found in both allegations against the College and the plaintiff’s assertions in the lawsuit.  According to a court filing, the administration was motivated in its actions because of Mr. Bonadona’s “Jewish blood” and Mr. Bonadona is attempting to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s religious employer exemption by characterizing his “Jewish heritage” as racial.

The notion of the Jewish “race” originated from the 19th Century concept of “racial science,” which took root in Western Europe.  In response to the decline of the influence of traditional Christianity, as well as the rise of Jewish assimilation and social mobility, anti-Semites adopted racial arguments as a new rationalization for their hatred of Jews.

The idea that Jews are not only a religious group, but also a racial group, was a centerpiece of Nazi policy, and was the justification for killing any Jewish person who came under Nazi occupation –– regardless of whether he or she practiced Judaism. In fact, even the children and the grandchildren of Jews who had converted to Christianity were murdered as members of the Jewish “race” during the Holocaust.

Based on Congress’ 19th Century conception of race, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s ruled that the definition of “non-white races” found in post-Civil War anti-discrimination laws, includes Arabs, Chinese, Jews and Italians.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which explicitly covers national origin and religion, does not embody these antiquated views.  Although Mr. Bonadona’s attorney certainly could try to bring claims under these 19th century laws, we believe that attempting to create similar legal precedent under the Civil Rights Act perpetuates harmful stereotypes and views about Jews.

What unites Jews as a people, whether they come from Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, is a common culture, rooted in a common religion. Jews throughout the world are joined by a religious and cultural heritage rather than a racial sameness.  The allegations against Louisiana College, if true, would indicate a very troubling and deeply offensive view by the institution that it perceives and discriminates against Jews as a race.”

Monday, November 09, 2020

Black Teens Create More Online Content Than Any Other Group

suntimes  |   In the book, Stuart cites a University of Chicago study that says Black teens create more online content than any other racial group. In February, the Sun-Times reported that less than 5 percent of workers at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Black.

Drill also crosses paths with hip-hop’s “Blog Era’ — a period where local artists such as The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall made names for themselves by releasing new content via music blogs instead of relying on music industry gatekeepers, along with rappers with strong, national DIY followings such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Curren$y, and Gary, Indiana, native Freddie Gibbs, among others. 

“These guys all blew up and had all these videos with millions of plays, and all this notoriety and songs and mixtapes getting downloaded,” said Andrew Barber, owner/creator of “Fake Shore Drive,” a Chicago music blog. “But none of it counted toward the new certifications that the RIAA has in place or the Billboard charts.”

Due to the subgenre’s reputation, many record companies refused to sign drill artists; their music was banned by venues.

“I just thought you need to have these ridiculous bar guarantees and rental fees, and later in life I find out that was just a Black thing, or a risk assessment type of thing, even though there was never a risk,” said concert promoter and Complex Studios co-founder Marques “Merk” Elliston, who says he partnered with Hologram USA to have Chief Keef’s hologram perform at a Hammond, Indiana, venue before local police shut it down citing safety issues. “That’s why you see the lack of remorse for a lot of these people [venues].”

Due to those fears, some of the genre’s artists are opting to move away from the drama. 

“It was a part of our lives; we saw it as normal,” said Bronzeville native Sasha Go Hard, who is featured in the theme song for the Comedy Central series “South Side.” “It became a trend to start dissing people. … These are not just songs that people are making; it’s really happening. It was easy for me to branch away from drill. I went a different route by touring overseas and making EDM songs.” Fist tap Big Don

Sunday, November 08, 2020

An Anonymous, Whydte-Identified Gamma Jew Loses His Shidt Over Hozumi's Musty Panny-Hustle...,

tremr  |   Tada is correct in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups. 

In general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured. While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage" that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.

Such a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them "marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their three studies as follows:

"Our goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI. Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally, Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and psychological adjustment."

In their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism" was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the word "racism" has.

The obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that, on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at racism from a purely personological perspective.

Tuesday, November 03, 2020

The Hidden Cost Of American Criminal Injustice

Time  |  We all know getting entangled in the criminal justice system leads to serious consequences. But few among us really understand that the slightest brush with the law bears an even stricter potential sentence – a lifetime trapped in an inescapable cycle of poverty.

A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law shows that $372 billion in earnings are lost in the United States each year for those who have a criminal conviction or have spent time in prison. That is enough money to close New York City’s poverty gap 60 times over.

While it is no secret that our criminal justice system has economic implications for those who serve time, we now understand just how devastating those impacts are. Time in prison slashes annual earning potential in half, which results in a loss of nearly half a million dollars over the course of a career. But if you are a person of color, these gaps widen even more dramatically. Blacks and Latinos who have a prison record experience a nearly flat trajectory in earnings after imprisonment, while their white counterparts’ earnings climb steadily across a lifetime.

These findings have enormous implications for the U.S. economy. More than 7 million people living in the U.S. have served time in prison and more than 45 million, and well over a tenth of all Americans, have been convicted of a misdemeanor, such as shoplifting.

These lost earnings impact the entire country, and they disproportionally drain resources and wealth from communities of color. Blacks are jailed at more than triple the rate of whites, and nearly half of all people serving effective life sentences are Black. This overrepresentation exacerbates an already disturbingly wide racial wealth gap that sees the median white family holding 10 times the wealth of the median Black family.

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Great Reset's Intersectional Hijacking Of Non-Whydte Wymyn Victim Vectors

strategic-culture |  People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the future of pluralist and republican forms of governance since the rise and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then, society had to be built up from a war. Today’s war has been an economic war of the oligarchs against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus pandemic is being used, on the political end, as a massive coup against pluralist society. We are being confronted with this ‘great reset’, alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people have already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen. This is a regimen that can only be explained as some toxic combination of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven society on the foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust for power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.

Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a ‘Build Back Better’ sign, speaking to the need for a ‘great reset’. ‘Build Back Better’ happens to be Joe Biden’s campaign slogan, which raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are the handlers who manage ‘Joe Biden’, and those managing ‘Boris Johnson’ working the same script?

The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this ‘great reset’ being carried out? Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon the theory and practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers as puppets of a morally decaying oligarchy.

What Johnson calls the ‘Great Reset’, Biden calls the ‘Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice’. Certainly the coming economy cannot be left to Boris Johnson or Joe Biden.

How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a ‘great reset’, whereas just months ago when those outside the ruling media paradigm used this phrase, it was censured by corporate Atlanticist media as being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by Neil Clark.

And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official press talking about how economic life after coronavirus will never be the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has even run numerous opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization – a fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.

Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists in lieu of globalization, and what the economy looks like in various parts of the world if it is not globalized. We have consistently spoken of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was utilized frequently in western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about the post-globalization paradigm.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

The Sociology Of Race And Racism In The Digital Society

sagepub  |  An early reader of this article posed a provocative question: is there anything analytically distinct about the Internet? My answer revealed my priors. “Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to say. But that is arguing from an embarrassingly basic logical fallacy. The question of what the Internet does analytically that, say, “capital” or “economy” or “culture” or “organizations” does not already do is important. My answer is debatable, but the debate is worthwhile. I do not know if the Internet adds something analytically distinct to our social inquiries, but it adds something analytical precision. Other constructs capture important dimensions of social life in a digital society. For instance, one can argue that Silicon Valley is a racial project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters 2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020) or color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006) can elucidate how ironic humor about Black people, Muslims, and immigrants in online gaming platforms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild 2020; Gray 2012). These are just two examples of noteworthy approaches taken to studying Internet technologies and “mainstream” sociological interests (i.e., economic cultures and discourses, respectively). Still, sociological practice does not systematically engage with the social relations of Internet technologies as analytical equals to the object of study. If there is anything particular about Internet technologies for sociological inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once explicit, we should give it the same theoretical care as states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013) points us in the right direction when she argued that

the reality is that in the networked society . . . racism is now global . . ., as those with regressive political agendas rooted in white power connect across national boundaries via the Internet, a phenomenon that runs directly counter to Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the State as a primary structural agent in racial formation.

Daniels named to the global nature of both racism and the networks of capital we gesture to when we say Internet or digital. It is an argument for bringing back the political economy of race and racism. Internet technologies are specific in how they have facilitated, legitimized, and transformed states and capital within a global racial hierarchy. An app with which underemployed skilled labor sells services to customers (e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a U.S. racial project. But the capital that finances the app is embedded in transnational capital flows. Global patterns of racialized labor that determine what is “skill” and what is “labor” mediate the value of labor and the rents the platform can extract for mediating the laborer-customer relationship. Even the way we move money on these platforms—“Cash App me!”—is networked to supranational firms such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020). Internet technologies have atomized the political economy of globalization with all the ideas about race, capital, racism, and ethnicity embedded within. An understanding of the political economy of Internet technologies adds a precise formulation of how this transformation operates in everyday social worlds: privatization through opacity and exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are distinctly about the power of Internet technologies. And each characteristic is important for the study of race and racism. Understanding platform capitalism helps us understand how these two characteristics are important.

Internet technologies have networked forms of capital (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020), consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum forthcoming; Dube et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations (Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and produced new containers for culture (Brock 2020; Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017). By that definition, the Internet has amplified and reworked existing social relations. Platform capitalism moves us toward the analytical importance of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational arrangements among owners, workers, and consumers (see “prosumers”). Even more important for the study of race and racism, platforms introduce new layers of opacity into every facet of social life.

Thursday, September 10, 2020

How Come A Small Minority CULTURALLY Promotes And Profits Off Hoodrats But Not Walmartians?


advancingtime  |   We need a new demographic category: WALMARTIANS.

They are almost always overweight, usually functionally illiterate, often incapable of all but the most basic personal hygiene, not merely unemployed but also unemployable, addicted to corn syrup junk food and TV they were force-fed as children, convinced that nothing is their fault because they've never heard otherwise and physically aggressive whenever there is no prospect of immediate punishment. 

Such types were rare when I was a lad but now they are 10 to 20 percent of the population and increasing.

It's not their fault but it's time to cull the herd.

It should be noted that I started witting this article in December of 2019 but dropped it onto the back burner because of its questionable nature. At times, it seems deviant and dysfunctional behavior overlap. On occasion I have found myself, surprised, shocked, amazed, and even appalled at just how much the shape of the human body can be distorted by obesity or a lack of exercise. Widening the scope to people "deviating from the norm," at times it appears these often atypical humans are in a race to present us with the most bizarre. Some of these folks are not just offbeat or unusual but seem to be making an over the top effort to give new meaning to the term freaky.

An article by Ralph Nader that appeared on Common Dreams explored the idea that if you want to see where a country’s priorities lie you should look at the direction its culture is moving. The article which is linked above exhibits a very strong bit of a "leftist tinge," however, some of the points he makes seem valid. Nader writes, Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. He contends that while teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions.

It may be simplistic to label this or that, good or bad but it could be argued our culture and society is geared much like the caste system. Today we are seeing inequality soar and it can be argued this tends to reduce the ability of individuals to move up the social ladder. The question is just how much of this is by design and due to the culturally elite putting their foot on the head of those below them.

Circling back to the subjects of weirdos, diversity, and individuality could it be this is all being encouraged to weaken and divide the power of the masses? For years Japan has been pointed to as a society that functions with little friction. Much of the credit is attributed to their culture and its homogeneous nature. Japan has a strong sense of group and national identity and little or no ethnic or racial diversity. Another unique aspect of Japanese society has a highly structured approach to managing and resolving these differences. 

Wednesday, September 09, 2020

Jessica Krug Performed "Blackness", Just Not As Well Or As Usefully As Obama Or Kamala...,


jacobinmag |  Simply put, Jessica Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature. But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in liberal academic circles.

I don’t know George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug. I have no special insights into either her motives or personal struggles, nor do I have any reason to feel personally betrayed by the recent revelations that she had been passing for black for many years.

But while the court of public opinion has already found her guilty of at least one, perpetual count of “cultural appropriation,” in my view this conclusion misses the mark. To be clear, if I did not find “Jess La Bombalera” offensive, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this essay. Still, if one considers, first, that culture — the folk’s shared sensibilities informed by common experiences — exists, on some level, to be appropriated, second, the variety of black experiences precludes the existence of a singular black culture, and third, the implications for mass culture of thirty-years of mainstream hip hop, then calling Krug’s performance “appropriation of black culture” only compounds the problem Krug personifies.

If Krug is not guilty of appropriating “black culture,” she is guilty of attempting to establish her bona fides as a scholar of black people through a persona that both pandered to and reinforced commonplace stereotypes about black and brown people. Simply put, Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature.

But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in some liberal academic circles.

Because I’ve lived most of my life either on the near periphery or within academia, I’ve had nearly four decades of experience with the creepy essentialist language of “racial authenticity” that lives and thrives in more than one corner of putatively liberal academia. As a result, I learned a long time ago that some white liberals expect black and brown people to “perform” in ways that comport with their well-meaning, usually underclass-informed, and fundamentally racist expectations of black people.

Monday, September 07, 2020

Racism Like Marriage? Marriage Is A Relation Among Men For Which Women Are The Means



counterpunch |  One learns what it means to be white from other white people. It comes in stories and warnings and descriptions as part of childhood. Most of those stories are about black people. For white racialized consciousness, black or brown people become characters in a system of narratives, anecdotes, and images. In later life, white people relate to black people through those stories. And they relate to other white people who see those stories the same way. They enter into friendships and find social residence in their common understanding language and attitudes of those stories. In effect, it is not black people they relate to as they become white, but the white people who tell them the stories, and to their a white community.

In sum, racism is not a relation between white people and black. It is a relation between white people for which “black people” are the means. (As Simone de Beauvoir used to say in a parallel vein, marriage is a relation between men for which women are the means.) How is a white person to talk about race if they look at it as a black-white relation?

There is no reciprocity with respect to black people. The power, gratuitous hostility, domination, inferiorization, patronizing attitudes, etc. that characterize racism only go in one direction. The stories are just there to teach white people how to do it. Violence also only goes in one direction. White people kill, harass, patronize, and renarrativize black people as part of racializing them. They know they are dealing from the bottom of the deck. It is a power given them by white supremacist institutionalities. Thus, racism provides the terms by which white people can take each for granted.

When black people appear to reciprocate, to fight back, to scorn, to ignore, to placate, those are not gestures of violence but of self-defense and possibly rebellion. When done individually, the deck is stacked against them.

If racism is a form of street-level solidarity among whites, it will often be enforced by various means, even those of violence. The solidarism among segregationists, for instance, can take the form of enlistment to action, sometimes as a racializing project, and sometimes as “behavior modification.” Against the segregationists, the liberals argue that a hard exclusionary stance against black people will only cause trouble and rebellion. The better path is to integrate with its subtle long-range stratifications. Both see themselves looking out for the stability of white society, while preserving different forms of black subordination.

Both segregationists and liberals are fulfilling duties of membership in whiteness. And neither will disown it. Perhaps they refused to hear Kaepernick’s gesture of revolt out of a premonition that it would require them to deny their whiteness. But that is not the question. If one learns one’s whiteness from other white people, from whom could one learn to unlearn it?

In closing, we might mention one great vulnerability in whiteness, the esthetic dimension. It resides in the recognition that the difference in color between people is actually beautiful. The contrast between a white arm and a dark brown one set alongside each other is imminently pleasing if seen in its reality, free of the imposition of “good vs. evil.” The early colonists in Jamestown saw this immediately when the first Africans arrived in 1619. The colony quickly tried three times to outlaw mixed marriages, each time with harsher penalties. And each time it failed miserably. (Cf. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, Temple UP, 2003, pp 54-57)

Is Critical Race Theory Anti-American?


realclearpolitics |   On a Friday evening and as November looms, the White House has opened another front in the culture war. At the direction of the president, the Office of Management and Budget is ordering all federal agencies to “cease and desist” any government training programs that include any reference to “critical race theory” or “white privilege,” RealClearPolitics has exclusively learned.

The theory has long been in vogue within academics. Trump now seeks to root it out within the administrative state. Among the ideas underpinning CRT, now formally condemned by the White House, is that the law and all accompanying legal institutions are inherently racist, and that race itself has no biological grounds. The concept of ethnicity is, instead, the product of a white society that uses systems and institutions to advance its own interests at the expense of minorities.

Why does this academic thesis matter? Because it drives government action. And because, during this summer of unrest following George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, the president has been asked numerous times if he believes that systemic racism is a problem in America. His answer has been no, and a clearer picture of his thinking comes in the form of a memo authored by OMB Director Russ Vought.

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Vought writes in the memo, obtained first by RCP.

“For example, according to press reports, employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” he continued.

As the country grapples with questions of race and equality in policing, Trump has ordered that any programing relating to “white privilege” end immediately. According to the White House, such ideas are “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Thank GAWD Smart Bruvvas Have Never Fallen For The WEF/BLM Buhshidt


nonsite |  In light of recent events we thought to republish Adolph Reed’s 2016 essay on racial disparity and police violence. We include a new introduction to the piece by Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” that considers the essay in view of the contemporary situation.   
 
Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions.

We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1 For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.

Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise2 called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.
But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days.

Monday, July 06, 2020

9/3/15 REDUX: School Choice A Funded Vestige Of Integration Avoidance


politico |  In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero. 

In  Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening. 

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes. 

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.” 

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990. 

The  Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.” 

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans. 

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus. 

Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit  unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.

The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption. 

For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since  Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”

5/11/16 REDUX: Public School Choice Tied To Neighborhood You Can Afford (Hidden Structure)


WaPo |  "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we have segregated schools."

If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago — that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods. School quality is capitalized into housing prices, making those neighborhoods unaffordable to many families. Imagine, for instance, if all the public schools in the District or the Washington region were integrated and of comparable quality. Families might pay more to live in Northwest to be near Rock Creek Park. But you'd see fewer home-bidding wars there just to access scarce school quality. More to the point, homes families already paid handsomely to buy might lose some of their value.

Politically, the two topics that most enrage voters are threats to property values and local schools.  So either of these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school policy to affect housing — would be tough sells. Especially to anyone who has secured both the desirable address and a seat in the best kindergarten in town. Parents in Upper Northwest, for instance, deeply opposed the idea of ending neighborhood schools in Washington. And Gray's proposal never came to pass.

But, Owens says, "I feel more hopeful in studying these issues today than I did five years ago." At least, she says, we are all now talking more about inequality and segregation.

Africom Expelled From Niger Just Like Little French Bishes...,

abcnews  |   On Saturday, following the meeting, the junta’s spokesperson, Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, said U.S. flights over Niger’s ter...