Stacey Patton, obviously an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Morgan State University purely on the basis of racial favoritism, in the Washington Post, blames all the problems and misbehavior of Black America on white people and rejects Hillary Clinton’s recent call for reconciliation and national unity.
Asking black people to participate in this reconciliation process … suggests that we bear responsibility in this mess. But we didn’t invent the concept of race. We didn’t create and don’t sustain institutionalized racism. And we surely don’t benefit from it.
Rhetorical calls for unity won’t address the fundamental sources of inequality: mass incarceration, employment discrimination, militarized policing, the school-to-prison pipeline, divestment in communities of color, political disenfranchisement, displacement of poor and working-class people of color from gentrifying cities. The emphasis on unity makes no room for discussion about growing white resentment and feelings of victimization, and it presumes that black folks bear responsibility for the entrenched problem of a “colorblind†white America that denies racism even exists.
And while Clinton may not have intended it this way, what the message of unity winds up doing is blaming communities of color for failing to assimilate, rather than acknowledging that the very fabric of this nation is built upon a diabolical, calculated and constantly evolving system of racism.
It’s really time for major national newspapers to stop pandering, and granting legitimacy and publication space, to this kind of offensive, insolent, and infantile leftist poppycock.
Pimps and drug dealers are not criminals because somebody else discriminated against them in employment. The illiterate underclass is the underclass because its members prefer the pursuit of intoxication and sex to gainful employment, not because somebody else took away their upper-middle class professional status. The world does not owe inner-city communities of thugs living in state-supplied housing who’ve ruined their own neighborhoods outside investment.
The author’s own history demonstrates that very modest cooperation with the universal free education system in this country will currently easily gain African Americans status and employment well above their actual deserts.
Ms. Patton’s expressed world-view constitutes a pathological, self-defeating fantasy of perennial victimization, and is really nothing other than one more manifestation of the long-entrenched African-American habit of using Angry Black Person dramaturgy to elevate their own personal status and to shakedown more free goodies from the liberal suckers in charge of the system. These days, if Ms. Patton writes enough of this kind of thing in sufficiently hysterical tones containing precisely this kind of bold-faced insult and accusation, white liberal masochists at the Atlantic will probably give her a really well-paying and prestigious gig helping Ta-Nehisi Coates take another poke at whitey every month.
Roofline of Berkeley College Master’s House at Yale. Don’t you love those Tudor chimneys?
The Oldest College Daily happily reports that Yale is currently well along in the process of following the examples set by Harvard and Princeton in eliminating the title of Master for the heads of undergraduate residential colleges or houses.
Apparently, a majority of current students have gradually fallen into line in support of the demands of the radical lunatic fringe that the title be changed. In their wake, hastening to come on board, can be found the actual adults making up both the Yale Administration and the Yale Corporation.
A small racially-obsessed group of leftists, quite recently, decided that 150 years after the elimination of Slavery in the United States, it must be actively painful and humiliating for students-of-color to have occasion to address a head of college as “Master.” The memories and associations, you see, are just too painful. (sob!)
At Yale, the nonsense started last year, when the current Master of Pierson College, a hyper-sensitive creep named Stephen Davis found his new title unacceptable, and sent a letter to the college urging students to eschew tradition and address him merely as “Dr.” or “Professor” Davis.
One has to bear in mind that the title of Master has nothing whatsoever to do with Antebellum Slavery. It has everything to do with Anglophilic tradition and Pretension.
19th century Yale students were members of a single college (Yale College) or (if banausic) of the Sheffield Scientific School. The poor lived off-campus in rented hovels, the better-off in rooms in college residential buildings called “halls,” then much resembling architecturally orphanages or reformatories.
Where the Master business came from was via the philanthropy of Edward Harkness, a member of the Class of 1897. Harkness was the scion of a Standard Oil fortune. He had money like God has money, and cheerfully volunteered to pay for the transformation of both Harvard and Yale into residential colleges, i.e., fantasy imitations of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, designed at Yale by his classmate James Gamble Rogers. Yale’s student body was divided among ten (later twelve) residential college and its grim Victorian architecture was augmented by a new campus of whimsical Tudor and Georgian design.
The heads of Yale residential colleges and Harvard houses were called “Masters” in pure imitation of the practice of the majority of Oxbridge Colleges. Master, in this case, is a purely academical title, an anglicized version of the Latin “Magister.” It has no connection to Slavery. Nor does it imply domination of anything. A College Master at Yale has traditionally been a distinguished senior faculty member who lives in a mansion associated with a residential college and who functions essentially as that college’s master of ceremonies. The College Master is formally administrative head of the college, but he has a Dean and a bunch of secretaries and student aids to do all the shit work. The Master smiles at students, presides over functions, throws parties, and thinks up new, nice things he can do for the benefit of the undergraduates in his college.
There would be no opportunity for this particular politically correct grand gesture today, of course, had the presidents of Yale and Harvard in the early 1930s possessed crystal balls. They would then have foreseen all this, and taken care to call heads of residential colleges (or houses) “Rector” instead (as is the practice at Exeter College, Oxford and King’s College, Cambridge) or “Warden” (All Souls College, Oxford and Robinson College, Cambridge). Upon reflection, though, having to address the head of one’s housing unit as “Warden” could very possibly also have become a major issue for contemporary Ivy League students-of-color.
Andrew Jackson was a hero. While still a boy and a prisoner of war captured by the British, he stubbornly refused to clean an enemy officer’s boots, suffering instead a retaliatory slash with a sabre, which left scars on his hand, face, and psyche which he bore all his life.
Orphaned at he age of 14, he educated himself, reading law while working at a saddle-maker’s shop. He taught school, practiced law, and his extraordinary abilities soon manifested themselves. He rose, even as a young man, quickly to every kind of leadership position in frontier Tennessee. in 1796, he became that new state’s first representative in Congress, and the next year was promoted to the Senate. He became commander of the state’s militia in 1801.
In 1814, he defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. And in January of 1815, he won perhaps the most astonishing and decisive American military victory of all-time at New Orleans. Outnumbered by more than two-to-one by veteran elite British officers and regulars fresh from the Peninsular War, where they had defeated the same French infantry which had conquered all of Europe, Jackson carefully deployed an extremely mixed force made up of American regulars; Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana militia; and even Baratarian pirates behind three hastily constructed lines of earthworks. Jackson successfully obliged the British to attack frontally, and arranged to take the advancing British under indirect fire before they were even within sight of his position. The results were astonishing. The British took more than 2000 casualties. Both the Commanding General Pakenham and his second-in-command were mortally wounded. The American side had 62 casualties, and only 13 killed. Never elsewhere in history did such an apparently disadvantageous mismatch of forces deliver such a one-sided victory for the underdog.
Later, in national politics, Jackson led a libertarian, populist revolution, capturing the presidency, reining in Federal expansion in favor of individual and state’s rights, facing down nullification and secessionism, shutting down the second US Bank, and establishing a long 30 years of political dominance by his party, which ended only with the election of Lincoln, Civil War, and the armed conquest of the Southern states by the Federal government.
Barack Obama is proving himself once again the vengeful upstart of mixed race determined to punish white America by supplanting its heroes and symbols with black replacements and icons of the radical left.
Jackson is to be set aside in favor of Harriet Tubman, an unprofitable and unsaleable family servant from Maryland who preferred to decamp from her domestic chores to New York State, where she could instead give speeches, be fawned over, and live on the bounty of Northern radicals. Tubman was illiterate and the few factual details known of her life did not prevent the publication in recent decades of a whole series of hagiographic biographies intended to inflate her into a major national figure. It has been remarked, more than once, that school children today are likely to hear a lot more about Harriet Tubman than about George Washington.
The announcement that Tubman’s unattractive visage would be replacing General Jackson’s on the $20 was widely hailed by Quisling conservatives, eager to avoid becoming the objects of racial accusation, as a victory for private gun possession (apparently, when leading some of her relatives out of Maryland, Harriet Tubman carried a revolver which she used to threaten to execute on the spot any of her liberated beneficiaries who happened to try to change their minds about relocating to the North) and Republicanism, carefully overlooking the obvious fact that the Republican Party of the 1850s was the party of radicalism, statism, and leftism, precisely what the Democrat Party is today; while today’s Republican Party is the party of limited government, of individual and states’ rights, of strict constructionism, in fact, the true heir to the philosophy of Andrew Jackson.
Nobody in the Conservative Movement is defending President Jackson these days, except for Pat Buchanan and, deep, deep in the fever swamp, Alexander Hart at Peter Brimelow’s VDare.
Jay Caspian Kang, delivers for the New York Times, one of those insolent and offensive expressions of the support for minority vulgarity and vices as a perverse kind of contrarian opposition to the values and culture of the European-descended American majority.
By instinct, honed reflex and general contrarianism, I root for all “flashy†“showboats†who are “disgraces to the game.†It has been this way since I left Boston at age 10 to move to North Carolina, a state with no notable baseball team save the minor-league Durham Bulls, who, at least when I was growing up, seemed more a Hollywood relic than a ball club. Freed from having to like the Red Sox, I began to root for Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics, mostly because I liked how deeply he squatted while taking a lead off first base. He seemed as if he were taunting the pitcher. As I grew older and started feeling alienated from my white classmates, I gravitated toward athletes who, in some way, flouted the white, stoic traditions of American sports — Allen Iverson, Ken Griffey Jr., Rasheed Wallace, Pedro Martinez. I felt as if this was a moral choice.
Nothing guarantees acceptance and applause by prestige publications in the community of fashion than some vigorous expressions of racial and cultural treason.
Ian Tuttle describes the repulsive dynamic driving the largest percentage of voters in the current election.
[E]nvy sells. And make no mistake, that is what Sanders is selling. After all, socialism is inevitably a politics of envy: Wealth is by definition finite, so more in your pocket means less in mine — and if I have less than I want, it must be your fault. Because Sanders has no room in his cramped understanding of the world for the complex interplay of free economic actors, he must default to simplistic moral explanations — Greed!: of Wall Street bankers, pharmaceutical companies, and America’s 536 billionaires — and simplistic solutions: to wit, frog-marching Goldman Sachs executives down Fifth Avenue and divvying up their stuff. They’ll have less, so you’ll have more. …
Unlike Sanders, Trump has no determinate position on any matter of public policy, but that’s of little importance. He is not pitching a movement; he is pitching himself. His promise is not any particular slate of policies; it’s Donald Trump writ large. An America with Trump at the helm is one in which America “wins,†like Trump wins; makes good deals, like Trump makes good deals. In Donald Trump’s America, everybody gets to live a little like Donald Trump. This is at least partly why Trump’s supporters are so vicious toward his detractors: The latter threaten their chances to live bigger.
It’s envy, en masse, on both sides. Somebody else has it (cheaper tuition, cheaper health care, business-class tickets, a Mercedes, &c.), and I want it. Under Sanders, top-hatted Uncle Pennybags will do the perp walk; under Trump, we’ll put the screws to Beijing and Uncle Pennybags himself will cut me in on the deal; but in either case, I get what should’ve been mine all along. And all for the low, low price of a vote. Those who believe that politics is little more than personal psychodrama played out on a grand stage might be closer than usual to the truth this election cycle. Neither Trump nor Sanders, despite their claims, is ushering in a revolution. They are ushering in a politics more petty, vulgar, and low — more animated by voters’ base inclinations — than any in recent memory. If New Hampshire is any indication, voters are not about anything so high-minded as constitutional government or national security or racial justice or even “hope and change.†They’re about me getting mine, by hook or by crook. Free college, free health care, and winning. This election is the Gollum-cry of the masses: WE WANTS IT.
“Stringer Bell”, a student currently at Yale, comments on the Social Justice Revolution underway at Yale.
These events have allowed people’s true motivations and opinions to be revealed. What some students are realizing is that their very existence is perceived as a threat. The encroaching ideology holds that by existing in the world as a white person, white people are unaware of the privileged status they hold. Anything short of continually reminding themselves that they are white, they are oppressors, and any interactions they have with a people of color have power struggle implications, is pure racism.
People are no longer individuals; we are representatives of our respective pasts. A white male speaking with a black female is not merely one human being interacting with another—no, it is one representative of the oppressor class speaking with another representative from the oppressed class.
White students, and to a lesser extent Asian students, are targets. I’ve listened to white students describe their feelings of shock and betrayal at having been accused of racism for the sin of existing. While they will readily agree that racism is a problem, many look utterly bewildered when you tell them that they are supporting “systemic racism†because they don’t take the time to incorporate the experiences of every minority group into their perspective at all times. The protesters have overplayed their hand.
It’s not all about race, ethnicity, or gender, however—ideology trumps all. Generally, white students who parrot the right opinions have been able to move through Yale with fewer accusations of racism than students of color who remain neutral or question the “Next Yale†movement. An undercurrent of resentment is forming among the dissenters of all backgrounds.
Keep in mind that the people at Yale are as liberal as they come. This grand university may soon no longer be worth saving. At this point many students are focusing on getting their degrees and getting the fuck out of here.
Victor Davis Hanson, like many of the rest of us, is tired of all the whining.
The cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous. Two high-school football players in Texas, angry that their team is losing and galvanized by their whining coach, decide to take out a referee and smash him with two cowardly hits. The reason? They claim the flattened ref got what he deserved — because of course he was a racist. The Marine Corps has discovered, as Nature might have advised it, that male ground troops on average perform more muscularly and effectively in rough combat-simulated training than do women. They apparently prove stronger, more combative, blood-thirsty, and aggressive, and fight with greater stamina. One reaction is not to accept the data, but, of course, by whining how the data has been improperly — and no doubt — socially constructed in sexist fashion, or is irrelevant altogether, maybe the standards can be lowered a bit.
In the logic of whining, Michael Brown did not commit a felony or two in the last minutes of his life, from strong-armed robbery to assaulting a police officer, but was instead begging for his life with “hands up†and shouting “don’t shoot.†There is less cause and effect anymore, only someone who must be excused from responsibility and culpability by his own claims on victimhood.
The 21st century has become a cowardly era in which we point to collective race, class, or gender rather than own up to our record of behavior and performance when our exalted expectations are not met. …
The culprits are not just our obsessions with race, class, and gender, or the careerist aspirations of elites. We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.
The bane of our age is not poverty but parity, or rather the perceived absence of a state-mandated equality of result. It no long matters how much one has, much less in comparison to those abroad or to Americans of our past. The rub is whether someone has something more or better than your own — and why and how that can still be possible in the American horn of plenty. Given those requisites, whininess is the lubricant of our national machinery.
On the other end of the social scale is the whining of the established elite, who bitch that the public has forgotten that they must be exempt to cross-examination and therefore must remind us of that by perpetual whining.
Katherine Timpf, in National Review, reports that sociologists have identified a new class of victims with a long history of oppression and discrimination based upon societal intolerance grounded in traditional religious beliefs.
Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires†— so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird.
“Most vampires believe they were born that way; they don’t choose this,†said Dr. D. J. Williams, the study’s lead researcher and the director of sociology at Idaho State.
The study is based on the experiences of eleven “real†vampires — which, by the way, are different from “lifestyle vampires.â€
“Lifestylers,†the study explains, are people who just do things like wear fangs and sleep in coffins as lifestyle choices, and although “real vampires†may do these things too, they all also have one major thing in common that distinguishes them from the “lifestylers:â€
“The essential feature of real vampirism is their belief in the need to take in ‘subtle energy’ (called feeding) from time to time from a willing ‘donor’ in order to maintain physical, psychological and spiritual health,†the study explains.
“Unlike lifestyle vampires, real vampires believe that they do not choose their vampiric condition; they are born with it, somewhat akin to sexual orientation,†it continues.
