Tag: Vibrancy is our strength

The wondrous benefits of diversity in action:

On April 22, Baltimore resident Richard Fletcher looked out his window and saw two teenage girls fighting — on top of his car. He went outside to ask them to take the fight elsewhere, and was then jumped by approximately 50 “teens” and beaten within an inch of his life. The attackers crushed his eye sockets and broke his nose, as well as several ribs.

61-year-old Fletcher is now out of the hospital but facing medical bills of “$200,000 to 400,000.”

According to the Daily Mail, the teens kicked Fletcher until he fell to the ground and then continued to beat him once he was down. Police have since arrested 17-year-old Antoine Lawson, a 15-year-old girl, and three others in connection with the beating “and are hoping to bring all of the teens, who are believed to be students at Baltimore Community High School, that participated in the beating to justice.”

Teens. The vibrant youth, the hope of tomorrow’s America. Just remember, no matter what happens, diversity is good. And the Zombie Apocalypse is totally about the undead.

Repent, racist white people! Celebrate diversity! Surely nothing like what befell Richard Fletcher will ever happen to anyone who believes with his heart and confesses with his tongue that there is no such thing as race.

Speaking of a true believer, Glenn Reynolds directs us to the attention of a white male who is is burdened by his Original Sin:

I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore, and that the torch has passed to writers of other communities whose voices have too long been silenced or suppressed. I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this, since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were. Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called “other”; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s experience, violating that person by telling his or her story. It feels like a Catch-22. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more urgent; write to learn what you don’t know and risk colonizing someone else’s story. I genuinely am troubled by this. I want to listen but I also want to write—yet at times these impulses feel at odds with one another. How can I reconcile the two?

 My advice? Stop appropriating and othering, move to Baltimore, and start experiencing vibrancy in all its diverse fullness. After all, nothing makes a poet’s name like a young and untimely death.

By Yuji Aida
Volume 6, Number 2 (Winter 1995-1996)

[The editors of the San Francisco Examiner gave this brief preface to the article which we second This article is indicative of an influential minority viewpoint in Japan which some people may find offensive. We publish it to illustrate what is being said there.]

TOKYO – Americans are proud of their melting-pot heritage. But as blacks, Hispanics and Asians gradually come to outnumber whites, that ideal will fade. Like the Soviet Union today the United States will have to deal with contentious ethnic groups demanding greater autonomy and even political independence. That could prove to be industrial America’s undoing.

Many Americans, however, feign ignorance of the problem, partly because of the official ideology. The United States sees itself as a pluralistic, multiethnic society with a single national identity based on the principles of freedom and democracy. In fact, discrimination is rampant, but the illusion of equality is vital to maintain a sense of unity.

Nonetheless, it is only a matter of time before U.S. minority groups espouse self-determination in some form. When that happens, the country may become ungovernable…. Do blacks and Hispanics, for instance, have the skills and knowledge to run an advanced industrial economy? If the answer is yes, America will maintain its vitality through the next century and beyond. But I’m skeptical.

As am I, and I am part-Hispanic. It’s because I know my Hispanic Catholic relatives that I am extremely dubious they are capable of serving as an adequate replacement for the Anglo-Saxon Protestants that they will eventually replace as the USA’s dominant ethnic group. The ironic thing is that even though we are 20 years deeper into the experiment of ethnic America and Mr. Aida’s case looks stronger than ever, his article would probably not be publishable today; it might even be deemed criminal in some places.

But no amount of pretense, thought policing, and determined belief in the magically transformative powers of geographic translocation are going to make any difference in the future. Either the replacement population will be capable of maintaining a First World European-style society or it will not be capable and that society will see its living standards degraded.

And then, of course, there is the entirely separate problem of those non-European groups rejecting the very European, indeed, very Anglo-Saxon concepts such as the Common Law and the Rights of Englishmen. Which happen to include a few minor things such as limited government and so forth. I think a very good case can be made for Continental immigrants never quite grasping these concepts in their entirety. It does not appear subsequent waves of immigrants are doing any better in this regard.

Now, I realize that millions of people very genuinely believe that the ethnic demographics of a society are totally irrelevant. I understand that millions of people genuinely believe that IQ does not measure intelligence and that every human sub-species is equally capable of all things. Of course, I also recognize that most people are idiots.

So here is the question I have for those people who firmly believe that the ethnic composition of a society is not a controlling factor in what that society will be like. Have you ever stopped to consider what is going to happen if you are wrong? Have you ever wondered how future generations are going to regard you and the fate you inflicted upon them with your fervent dedication to diversity, equality, and inclusivity? Aren’t you not only betting the house, but Western civilization, on an untested and unproven idea?

What if you are wrong?

What is the point of permitting blacks to govern themselves if whites are going to be held responsible for them anyhow?

IN the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Mo., commentators noted the absence of black representatives among Ferguson’s elected officials and its police leadership. A Department of Justice report highlighted how Ferguson’s mostly white City Council and its courts spurred on explicitly racist policing, in part to harvest fines from black residents.

Then came Baltimore. The death of Freddie Gray, like those of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Rekia Boyd and so many other unarmed African-Americans, at first seemed to fit the all-too-familiar template — white cops, black suspect, black corpse.

But unlike New York, Chicago and other cities with white leaders, Baltimore has a black mayor, a black police commissioner and a majority-black City Council. Yet the city still has one of the most stained records of police brutality in recent years…. The problem is not black culture. It is policy and politics, the very things that bind together the history of Ferguson and Baltimore and, for that matter, the rest of America.

Specifically, the problem rests on the continued profitability of racism. Freddie Gray’s exposure to lead paint as a child, his suspected participation in the drug trade, and the relative confinement of black unrest to black communities during this week’s riot are all features of a city and a country that still segregate people along racial lines, to the financial enrichment of landlords, corner store merchants and other vendors selling second-rate goods. The problem originates in a political culture that has long bound black bodies to questions of property. Yes, I’m referring to slavery.

So exposure to lead paint is why Baltimore’s residents burned down their own neighborhoods? That’s dancing dangerously near reality for the New York Times. But there is a kernel of truth to the claim that black culture is not to blame, in that black culture is a consequence, not a cause. Baltimore is merely the most recent result of decades of US policy flying in the face of reality. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that a population that is disproportionately aggressive and possesses shorter time preferences on average will tend to behave in a manner that is different than, for example, a predominantly Chinese population.

The more stubbornly Western public policy refuses to accept the historically observed and scientifically established fact that not all human population sub-groups are entirely equal in every way, the more those policies are guaranteed to catastrophically fail. And the longer people insist on pretending that red herrings like “the legacy of racism” or “the daily violence of poverty” are to blame, the longer those problems will persist and the more serious they will become.

The game of let’s pretend doesn’t help anyone, least of all those whose tender feelings it is designed to spare. Look at the sheer absurdity of the columnist’s recommendations:

By avoiding the language of individual failings and degenerate culture, political leaders, black and otherwise, can help us all see the daily violence of poverty. More, they can better use the power they have to do something about it. By calling a nationwide “state of emergency” on the problem of residential segregation, by devising a fairer tax structure, by investing in public space, community policing, tenants’ rights and a government jobs program, our leaders can find a way forward.

More racial Kabuki and government spending is not going to solve anything. After 50 years of “civil rights” and “war on poverty”, that should be abundantly clear by now.

Apparently we need to readjust our vocabularies again. It’s no longer white/yellow/red/brown separatism, it’s just militant-shaming.

As a nation, we fail to comprehend Black political strategy in much the same way we fail to recognize the value of Black life.

We
see ghettos and crime and absent parents where we should see
communities actively struggling against mental health crises and
premeditated economic exploitation. And when we see police cars being
smashed and corporate property being destroyed, we should see reasonable
responses to generations of extreme state violence, and logical
decisions about what kind of actions yield the desired political
results.

I’m overwhelmed by the pervasive slandering of protesters in Baltimore this weekend for not remaining peaceful….We need to clarify what we mean by terms like “violence” and
“peaceful.” Because, to be clear, violence is beating, harassing,
tazing, assaulting and shooting Black, trans, immigrant, women, and
queer people, and that is the reality many of us are dealing with daily.
Telling someone to be peaceful and shaming their militance not only
lacks a nuanced and historical political understanding, it is literally a
deadly and irresponsible demand.

The political goals of rioters in Baltimore are not unclear—just as they were not unclear when poor, Black people rioted in Ferguson last fall. When the free market, real estate, the elected government, the legal system have all shown you they are not going to protect you—in fact, that they are the sources of the greatest violence you face—then political action becomes about stopping the machine that is trying to kill you, even if only for a moment, getting the boot off your neck, even if it only allows you a second of air. This is exactly what blocking off streets, disrupting white consumerism, and destroying state property are designed to do.

Black people know this, and have
employed these tactics for a very, very long time. Calling them
uncivilized, and encouraging them to mind the Constitution is racist,
and as an argument fails to ground itself not only in the violent
political reality in which Black people find themselves, but also in our
centuries-long tradition of resistance, one that has taught effective
strategies for militance and direct action to virtually every other
current movement for justice.

There is your choice, white America. Racism, aka “civilization and the Constitution” or living amongst an entitled and vibrant population that feels entirely justified in burning down the city around itself. I think it’s long past time for forced integration. But not for schoolchildren, for those who claim to oppose separatism. Let’s bus every self-professed “anti-racist” to Baltimore and make them live and work there.

They seem to think all of White America would rather die than be called racist. And they’re probably not wrong about the SJWs. But what the advocates of multiculturalism forgot is that Mexicans and Asians despise blacks in a way that few whites ever have, and they feel absolutely no guilt for the so-called “legacy of slavery”.

And if you’re going to try to make American Indians feel guilty about racial separatism, well, good luck with that.

Yet another example of why racial and national separatism is inevitable is provided in living color:

Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan has declared a state of emergency and has put the state’s National Guard “on alert” after a day of rioting, looting and violence targeting police in Baltimore. The violence broke out just hours after the funeral for Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old Baltimore man who died in police custody April 19, a week after he was arrested on a West Baltimore street and dragged into the back of a police wagon. Police said Mr. Gray died of severe injuries to his spine and are still investigating the circumstances behind his death…. With demonstrators threatening to take the protests to the city’s
prosperous downtown area, Major League Baseball officials announced the
cancellation of a planned game between the Baltimore Orioles and the
Chicago White Sox.

Well, there is nothing like spirited public protest to revive the flagging spirits of democracy in America. Meanwhile, we are reliably informed by one DeShawn that his boy DRAYQUAN, of the Baltimore Loot Crew, IS GOIN OUT TO POP SUM PIGS.

He seems nice. No doubt after he dies in a hail of bullets after pointing that pig-shooter at the police or some National Guardsmen, we will learn all about how he wanted to go to college, how he liked to arrange flowers, and that he was really just a sweet ickle boy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Is it a parody? Perhaps. That’s the problem. How can you possibly tell anymore?