The Slow Sovietization of the West

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

The circular firing squad has finally come for leftist cultural icon J.K. Rowling. Her tweet heard round the world:

Sex is not real, it would appear, to a large number of the twitterati, who promptly dogpiled Ms. Rowling whilst lamenting their now-ruined childhoods:

To understand how such a surreal sequence of events can in fact be unfolding, we offer this piece of research from a few years back. We hope you find it illuminating.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Victimization Whack-a-Mole

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Catch me if you can

[Re-post, original post here.]

In the 1982 comedy 'Tootsie,' actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is desperate for work.  A casting director tells him what's wrong:

Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie (video at link)

The reading was fine. You're the wrong height.
   I can be taller.
No. We're looking for somebody shorter.
   Look, I don't have to be this tall. See, I'm wearing lifts. I can be shorter.

I know, but we're looking for somebody different.

   I can be different.
We're looking for somebody else.


Some people, in a word, cannot be satisfied. Trying to please them is like playing whack-a-mole: their unhappiness has no remedy. You're sure you've nipped it in the bud, but no, it pops up again, and then over there, and over there... is there any way to nab it once and for all?

In our blank-slatist world, where all groups are presumed equal, puzzling 'performance gaps' leave some feeling outraged. Rather than shake their fist at Mother Nature (the real source of disparities), they continue to demand action that they are sure will Close the Gap.  When it doesn't, the target changes. Then changes again, and again...  This endless merry-go-round of finger-pointing is a clue that what they seek cannot be found. Has all logic gone down the mole hole?  Pick up your mallet and follow us...

The Progressive Project: Re-Colonizing Africa

We shall save you from yourselves

The film The Black Panther has been taking Hollywood by storm. Progressives in particular are excited:

The film is set in Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced country in East Africa which was never colonized. For people of African descent, the kingdom of Wakanda finally brings a searing question—what if the colonists hadn’t arrived and Africa had been allowed to develop unencumbered by international influence?—to the big screen.

Africa unchained

Is it true? Would an un-colonized Africa have given the world an advanced, high-tech utopia?

We at TWCS are not so sure. 

Two generations after colonialism ended, alarmed that Africa seemed to be sinking rather than swimming, Tony Blair gathered a 17-person commission to examine the question:

One more commission for Africa

When former colonies across the globe began in the 1960s to prepare themselves for independence, nobody was that worried about Africa. The anxiety was all for Asia. 

That was barely four decades ago. Today Africa is the poorest region in the world. Half of the population live on less than one dollar a day. Life expectancy is actually falling. People live, on average, to the age of just 46. 

… Africa is the only continent in the world which is stagnating. Why has it fallen so far behind?

Optimism 

African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time. Poverty on such a scale demands a forceful response. … Africa requires a comprehensive ‘big push’ on many fronts at once.  

Investing for economic growth means rebuilding African health and education systems, many of which are now on the point of collapse.

From the World Food Conference in 1974, at which Henry Kissinger declared 'In ten years no child shall go to bed hungry,' to the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, which vowed to end world hunger by 2015, Westerners have long been wringing their hands over this continent.

A Wakandian renaissance?  On the contrary, it seems the further colonialism recedes into the past, the more desperate Africa's situation becomes. 

Fifty years after independence, then, Tony Blair, Bob Geldof et al. have in effect produced a 464-page manifesto calling for...

...the re-colonization of Africa. 

On what do we base this claim?

Progressives: the New Race Realists

I will save you from your people

One hundred years ago, progressives referred to people of color as 'backward races,' 'degenerate and unprogressive,' 'non-adults.' Today's leftists, of course, believe no such thing. They think all humans are equal, as they tell us at every available opportunity.

Don't they?

Careful: TWCS is noticing a sea change.

The rhetoric and the actions emanating from the left as of late show that they have perhaps taken a U-turn—a salutary one.  People of Color, they are now saying, in fact have little agency, are near-prisoners of their instincts, and thus can't be held to the same standards as other ethnies.

 Take up the Leftist's burden

In other words, today's progressives have become de facto race realists.

On what do we base such a claim?

I Don't Belong Here

Paris, France; Ferguson, United States

France is still reeling from the Islamist attacks against satirical rag Charlie Hebdo which killed 17.

As commenter Kolia points out, many of the murder victims weren't white indigenous French--an Arab and an Afro cop, four civilian Jews. Does this mean religion trumps race?

The truth is that Arab (and Afro) immigrants to France pose two different kinds of threat to the natives.  The distinction should be made clear.

For Americans, one of these two will look very familiar, and one will not:

• (1) The daily incivility / insults / beatings / rapes perpetrated by Arabs / Blacks against indigenous white French.  No religious aspect to it at all; pure ethnic minority alienation.

• (2) The ever-growing calls to bend French values to mirror those of their guests: Single-sex swimming pools, halal meals, legalized polygamy, criminalized blasphemy... The most extreme is the young man radicalized by an imam who tries to launch a caliphate by holy war.

All the world's a-tizzy about (2).  While we admit Islam is a genuine threat to parts of Europe, we're going to swim against the tide and take a look at the more 'banal evil' of (1). Why? This is the everyday brutality the French must live with day in, day out, and it bears a striking resemblance to that aimed at Euro-Americans by their Afro countrymen.  What can the data tell us about hopes of assimilating these two alien minorites on either side of the Atlantic?

Afros and Transport, Today and Yesterday

The host at Chateau Heartiste kindly shares with us the above schoolwork on White Oppression from our neighbors to the north.

One is led to believe, from this anecdote, that Canada's public transport system is in the throes of a white-on-black harassment wave.  Were this true, we would do well to educate ourselves about it.

But is it true?  While data on Canada is sparse, for the U.S., where the vast majority of North America's Euros and Afros live, it is plentiful.  What can it tell us of these two groups' relations while riding mass transit, today and yesterday?

New York City subway

I. Afros and Transport, Today


1) CITY BUSES

Old San Francisco Muni bus

How are white-black relations our nation's city buses?

Sweet Little Lies

'Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.'

--Honore de Balzac  
(Image source) 

Two hundred thirty years ago, Thomas Jefferson opined:  

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

Today, Euro America (like Euro South Africa) has pushed aside such ideas.  We are sure that God the Universe has created us all equal, as we go out of our way to tell each other at every opportunity.

But do we believe it?  Talk is cheap. When a man's actions don't back up his words, we call him mistaken--or a hypocrite.

'Black and White are equal in every important way,' proclaim a great number of Euro-Americans today. We here at Those Who Can See are not so sure that they really believe it.  We argue, on the contrary, that progressive white Americans are in the habit of treating Afros as if they were slightly mentally retarded.  And that Blacks themselves often seem to agree. 


What is our evidence?

Checking our Ashkenazi Privilege

Image source

We recently explored the Blank-slatist's charge that U.S. minorities are currently under-achieving due to 'white privilege.'  What we found was that America's Asian minority is not only immune to this woe, but that they out-perform Euro-Americans on a number of measures. As we said then,

How to explain this paradox?  Are Asians creeping in at night and siphoning off the privilege from Whites' privilege-tanks?  Are they endowed with a force-field that resists the Euros' privilege-rays, ricocheting them back in a blinding flash that then cripples white performance relative to their own?

As it turns out, Asians are not the only group strangely inoculated against this danger.

One of the most persecuted, oppressed, and vilified groups in human history has settled in significant numbers in the U.S. and, despite years of mistreatment, has managed to resist the damaging effects of WASPs' privilege rays: Ashkenazi Jews.

How do we know?



1) Wealth

Forty-six percent (55% of Reform Jews) report family incomes of over $100,000 compared to 19% of all Americans, with the next highest group being Hindus at 43%.

Data source

Overcoming our Asian Privilege

 

"We swim in a sea of whiteness, it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of the campaign  organizers, said. 
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it. 

So the first step is getting white people to see it."

Headlines you may have seen recently:

• 'Duluth's "unfair" campaign tackles white privilege'  

• 'No Longer Colorblind:  Portland teachers must rank themselves by their self-assessed "White Privilege" score'

• 'What James Holmes and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell Us About White (Male) Privilege'

Let us step into another mental world: that of the Blank-slatist.

In his universe,  all human beings are interchangeable, their differences only skin-deep.  If the U.S. population is 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% black, and 5% Asian, these same break-downs must apply in every area of human endeavor: Standardized testing, educational accomplishment, politics, the arts, the sciences, the military, criminal justice, sports, etc.  Anywhere a group is under-represented (or in the case of prison, over-represented), this reflects an attack on them by...

...well, by whom?

'Institutional racism,' some have said, and have spilled much ink over it since the late 1960s (h/t Audacious Epigone) :

But as we have seen, in a country where de facto quotas routinely push out qualified Euros in favor of less qualified Afros and Hispanics in both the public and private sectors, this argument has become a tough sell.

So the Blank-slatist has settled on a new culprit: 'white privilege.'

'What is it?,' we ask him.

     'It is systematic, institutional exclusion of non-Whites,' he says.

'But we have looked at the facts and figures, and found the opposite is true--today institutional racism favors Blacks and Hispanics,' we reply.

     'We swim in a sea of whiteness.  White is the "default setting." Minority groups suffer simply from being the minority.'

'But Whites are the minority in many places--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston; even entire states like California or New Mexico, or countries like South Africa--and yet still show superior life outcomes to Blacks and Hispanics.'

     'None of that matters. The very fact of being white gives them an unfair advantage. Check your privilege.'


Taking him at his word, that this nebulous White Privilege beams out its rays twenty-four hours a day and forces Afros, Hispanics, and Asians to under-perform their Euro subjugators, let's fire up our privilege radar and see if his argument holds up.

Hunting the Yeti: Institutional Racism in the 21st Century

Image source

Omar Thornton, the beer-filching delivery man who, upon hearing he was to be fired for his thieving ways, unloaded a Ruger SR9 into ten of his co-workers then himself, has a posthumous website (h/t Crimes of the Times).  Created by his mother. Why?

It's hard to swing a cat these days without hitting someone decrying Institutional Racism.  It has become the catch-all excuse for Afro under-performance in relation to other ethnic groups...

Top Chicago Cop Links U.S. Gun Laws to Institutional Racism

Failing the Test of Fairness: Institutional Racism and the SAT

DC Million Hoodies March Denounces Institutional Racism

...And so forth.

Like the elusive Yeti, it has to be out there--we've heard stories, terrifying stories, of it ambling hither and yon leaving carnage in its path. Its footprints are visible everywhere. And yet...when pressed, no one seems able to cough up hard proof of its existence. 

Just as great footprints in the snow are no proof of the Yeti, the fact that Blacks do not score as highly as Whites on firefighter exams is no proof of Institutional Racism.  But the charge is a serious one. It deserves a serious response. Our question is not, however, 'did institutional racism exist in decades past?'--it unquestionably did--but rather, 'does it exist today?'  We at Those Who Can See have taken our snowshoes and our rucksack and gone in search of this beast:  Down what trail lies the evidence that Institutional Racism continues to harm Afro-Americans in 2012?

Who's Afraid of Affirmative Action?

 Image source

Meritocracy is rare indeed, however far back in history we may look.  Member-of-my-family-ocracy, on the other hand, can be found almost everywhere.  Political dynasties are as old as time.  Ancien régime France let state posts be passed down from father to son, like a house.  In clannish Arab lands today, one's spot in college, the army, or the civil service is largely determined by the power of one's relatives.  David Pryce-Jones on Arab society:

To take the everyday matter of wanting to obtain a job, a young man approaches the head of his family or clan, his patron.  The head of the family is under obligation to do his very best to make sure that his kinsman is given what he asks for.  The honor of the whole family is at stake. [...]  In the event  of the job going to someone else, the patron becomes the object of shame, and his standing is under threat [...] Whether or not the young man deserved the job is no kind of consideration.  Civic spirit, the good of the community, or mere consideration of who could best perform the job in hand has no part in these proceedings.

Where meritocracy is allowed, the results can be impressive.  The Ottomans' Janissary corps is one example. The ancient Chinese civil service exam system is another.  In the modern West, outbred and commonweal-oriented as we are, nepotism rubs us the wrong way.  Shouldn't the best man get the job?

Enter racial quotas.

We may understand why they came to be, and loudly proclaim their time has gone. But the affirmative action coin has two sides.  What happens when a foreign group arrives among us and out-performs us?  Are we in our rights to establish quotas to keep them from forming an alien elite?  Indians in Uganda, Chinese in Malaysia, Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S., Europeans in South Africa--all have been excluded via quotas by a native population ill at ease with their success.  Is this fair?  When are quotas justified?

The Mis-education of Afro-Americans, Yesterday

Image source

Paul Kersey leads with this story--Nutshell: Teachers in failing black school districts routinely change kids' test scores to comply with No Child Left Behind, fraud investigation ensues, hands are thrown in the air, shall anyone ever succeed in closing The Gap?


It may surprise us that one hundred years ago, as today, much ink was spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations had passed since Emancipation; what progress had been made on the great project of lifting up this 'race in its childhood'? W.H. Collins, in 1918:

But notwithstanding the fact that the illiteracy of the Negro race had been reduced by 1910 to about thirty-three per cent, there is a widespread feeling of disappointment in Negro education. Not that it has made the Negro more criminal as has sometimes been said, however, this is not yet well determined, but rather that it has failed to make him a greater producer, or to aid him to adjust himself to economic conditions. Instead of firing him with the desire to do more and better work, too often he quits it altogether.   (1)

They [Southern men around 1904]  unite further in the opinion that education such as they [Blacks] receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.   (2)

Aside from some unqualified successes like the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, Afro education had not yet produced the desired results.  Blacks still had higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.


A century on, what has changed?  Much ink is still spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations have passed since the end of Segregation, and...

...and Blacks still have higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.  Now, via standardized testing, we also know that they lag far behind in the classroom.