Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit

At Amazon, Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. 

No One Has Done More Damage

Says Michele Tafoya:

No one has done more to damage race relations than Robin DeAngelo. https://t.co/YAwtkn6rT2

— Michele Tafoya (@Michele_Tafoya) March 26, 2023

David E. Bernstein, Classified

At Amazon, David E. Bernstein, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.

Thirtieth Anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots (VIDEO)

I haven't been watching the news this week, but the Los Angeles Times published a front-page story yesterday, and it was weird. I was at Fresno State in May 1992, working at the Chevron station, pumping gas, not far from my dad's house. I'd be entering graduate school at U.C. Santa Barbara in the fall.

I remember being very distressed by what little news I was able to get at the time (mainly because of so much work and school, I had no time for it). I remember lots of people coming in and out of the gas station (located at one of the busiest intersections in Central Fresno) and nearly every night each and every person haunting the streets was shouting their commitments out loud, with white folks screaming the *n-word* at the black folks who were also out and about. 

It was scary being out there, even two hours away from L.A. 

Our social and political polarization is bad nowadays, but it ain't new, not by a long shot --- L.A. was a riot torn city decades before the officers' acquittal in the Rodney King trial (the Watts Riots come to mind). 

Now almost two years out from the murder of George Floyd --- and 2020's summer of riots --- it was a strange feeling being reminded of Los Angeles like that, seeing the newspaper at the AM/PM while out for gas, while my mind quickly raced with images of both Los Angeles and Minneapolis simultaneously. 

Sixty-four people were killed 1992, with at least $1 billion in property damage over a six-day period. 

Here's an hour-long NBC News video with graphic images, starting out with some random dude getting pulled out of his Ford Bronco, only to narrowly escape being stoned to death by rioters armed with slabs of bricks, broken curbstone, huge rocks, who knows what else. 

Here's another focusing on the "Rooftop Koreans," many of whom defended their businesses with handguns and rifles. 

More at ABC News 7 Los Angeles below.

And at the Los Angeles Times, "L.A. riots are remembered 30 years later with hope and pessimism."

Also, "Thirty years after it burned, Koreatown has transformed. But scars remain";

When the city started to burn, James An’s mother was driving her new BMW in South L.A.

An was 12 years old, but he knew the luxury car — and her Korean face — could make her a target. He called her car phone and urged her to “get the hell out.”

On the radio, he heard business owners pleading for police protection as their livelihoods vanished in front of their eyes.

On television, he saw much of Koreatown on fire, including an electronics store he loved, half a mile from his family’s Korean-Chinese restaurant.

His father soon left their Glendale house, gun in hand, to defend the restaurant. “Protect your family,” he told the boy.

“I remember thinking, what the hell am I going to do? I’m 12 years old,” An recalled. “How am I going to [respond], if people come to my house with guns?”

The restaurant was spared. But many of An’s favorite Koreatown haunts were in ruins: a CD warehouse, a Kinney shoe store, an ethnic grocery store with signs in English, Spanish, Korean and Japanese.

For 30 years, An has tried to understand what happened after the police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted on April 29, 1992, setting off days of looting and destruction.

As president of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, he is in regular touch with politicians and community leaders of many backgrounds.

The days of armed Koreans on rooftops defending their businesses from rioters, with the LAPD nowhere in sight, sometimes seem a distant memory.

Black-Korean relations, once symbolized by the fatal shooting of Latasha Harlins by a Korean liquor store owner, have improved one interaction at a time, from the shopkeeper who smiles and offers warm greetings to leaders like An working to build cross-racial ties.

Latinos, who are 51% of Koreatown’s population, have successfully lobbied for a sign marking the “El Salvador Corridor.” They have teamed with Koreans on workers’ rights campaigns and school issues.

But An, 42, wonders what fissures still exist underneath.

“I haven’t been able to figure that out,” he said.

After the riots, called Saigu — 4/29 — in Korean, some business owners returned to South Korea, their immigrant dreams shattered. Others were unable to get government relief or insurance reimbursements. Some were too traumatized to keep working.

Yet, as the years passed, many Korean Americans rebuilt their businesses or started new ones. Wealthy South Koreans poured money into the neighborhood. Korean pop culture exploded globally.

At Hannam Supermarket on Olympic Boulevard, where Koreans with guns crouched behind cars in 1992, K-pop stars filmed a music video several years ago.

On the rooftop of California Market, where armed Koreans once patrolled, hipsters snack on spicy rice cakes and Korean corn dogs.

Korean Americans gradually built enough political clout to place all of Koreatown in a single city council district. A community that once felt abandoned by the police recently rallied to make sure that the LAPD’s Olympic station stayed open.

But 30 years later, everyone who experienced Saigu is scarred in some way, whether it is the unending grief of Jung Hui Lee, whose son was the only Korean American killed in the riots, or the questions still asked by a man who as a teenager saw the stores of fellow church members burned down.

“What did we do, or what did those church members do so wrong that caused this much retaliation?” said Joshua Song, 47, vice president of a company that helps businesses bridge the divide between Asia and North America. “If I try to rethink those events, there is still no resolution. Maybe that’s why it’s so traumatic.”

In some spots, the rebuilding began quickly. At 6th Street and Vermont Avenue, a strip mall that had gone up in flames was soon rising again.

Laura Park told the owner that she was interested in moving her Korean dress shop there...

Well, what did they do? For one thing, "A Korean-born merchant at the shop accused Latasha of stealing a bottle of orange juice. Latasha was shot in the back of the head, killing her instantly."

More, "Videotape Shows Teen Being Shot After Fight : Killing: Trial opens for Korean grocer who is accused in the slaying of a 15-year-old black girl at a South-Central store," and "25 years later, a vigil will honor a black teen killed over a bottle of orange juice."

There was a powder-keg waiting to explode, no doubt.  

Charles Murray, Facing Reality

At Amazon, Charles Murray, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.

Republicans Fight Back Against Critical Race Theory

Republicans are fighting critical race theory, but what about conservatives? 

It's not hard to see the C.R.T. is going to be with us for the long haul. The problem is what to do with it. What's I'm seeing in response so far isn't very appealing, much less conservative. It's a lot of cancel culture coming from the right. It's too bad, too, for the solutions aren't too far and away. Folks should look to first principles, especially federalism. That is, push education policy down to the local level as much as possible, and as fast as you can. Get Congress out of the picture. Give states and localities the money, and then let them decide their own curricula. The real conservative bet would be abolishing the Department of Education. Can the Republicans do that? They're the putative conservative party. They should go big and call for a massive downsizing of the federal government, devolving more and more responsibilities to the states. I can't recall really any Republican administration doing that, not even Ronald Reagan's. 

Maybe you'd have to go back to Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative for such bold initiatives to reinvent government? 

Downsize, devolve, and delegate education policy down from the federal government to the states. And then get government out of the way and let the people decide what's best for their kids and communities. 

We'll see.

At NYT, "Disputing Racism’s Reach, Republicans Rattle American Schools":

In Loudoun County, Va., a group of parents led by a former Trump appointee are pushing to recall school board members after the school district called for mandatory teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias.”

In Washington, 39 Republican senators called history education that focuses on systemic racism a form of “activist indoctrination.”

And across the country, Republican-led legislatures have passed bills recently to ban or limit schools from teaching that racism is infused in American institutions. After Oklahoma’s G.O.P. governor signed his state’s version in early May, he was ousted from the centennial commission for the 1921 Race Massacre in Tulsa, which President Biden visited on Tuesday to memorialize one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.

From school boards to the halls of Congress, Republicans are mounting an energetic campaign aiming to dictate how historical and modern racism in America are taught, meeting pushback from Democrats and educators in a politically thorny clash that has deep ramifications for how children learn about their country.

Republicans have focused their attacks on the influence of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education. The concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.

Many conservatives portray critical race theory and invocations of systemic racism as a gauntlet thrown down to accuse white Americans of being individually racist. Republicans accuse the left of trying to indoctrinate children with the belief that the United States is inherently wicked.

Democrats are conflicted. Some worry that arguing America is racist to the root — a view embraced by elements of the party’s progressive wing — contradicts the opinion of a majority of voters and is handing Republicans an issue to use as a political cudgel. But large parts of the party’s base, including many voters of color, support more discussion in schools about racism’s reach, and believe that such conversations are an educational imperative that should stand apart from partisan politics.

“History is already undertaught — we’ve been undereducated, and these laws are going to get us even less educated,” said Prudence L. Carter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Attempts to suppress what is still a nascent movement to teach young Americans more explicitly about racist public policy, like redlining or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, amount to “a gaslighting of history,” she said, adding, “It’s a form of denialism.”

The debate over the real or perceived influence of critical race theory — not just in schools but also in corporate, government and media settings — comes as both parties increasingly make issues of identity central to politics. And it accelerated during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, when discussions over racism in the country were supercharged by his racist comments and by a wave of protests last year over police killings of Black people.

 

After the Massacre: Black Property Owners Leveraged Land to Bring Businesses Back

I don't think I've ever read so much about the Tulsa race massacre. Leftist media folks didn't seem to care so much about Tulsa before the 100th anniversary. Didn't see nothin' about it on the 75th anniversary, or the 80th or 90th. That's not usually how these things work when remember big, important historical events. But it's all race all the time now, so perhaps diabolical race-baiters are making up for lost time.

That said, this is good, at WSJ, "Black Land Ownership Primed Greenwood’s Rebound After Massacre":

For the past 17 months, a group of WSJ's Black journalists, along with other journalists of color worked on a series of 9 stories examining the economic ramifications of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I'm extremely proud to share our work. (outside the paywall) https://t.co/oujuQb1r5i

— Kimberly S. Johnson (@KimberlyReports) May 29, 2021

TULSA, Okla.—After all the destruction and loss of life, what survived the 1921 attack in the Greenwood district proved the most valuable and enduring in the neighborhood’s midcentury recovery: the ambition of Black entrepreneurs and landowners.

The ability of property owners to raise money by leveraging the land beneath the rubble helped seed a local economy of Black-owned businesses for the next decades, according to interviews, court filings, newspaper articles and an analysis of Tulsa County real-estate records by The Wall Street Journal.

Rebuilding Greenwood after the massacre had seemed a long shot. There was little or no government assistance. Insurers largely denied claims from people who had lost their homes and didn’t compensate business owners for lost inventory. Many residents instead used their property as collateral to secure short-term mortgages from financial institutions, more affluent individuals and community lending pools, records show.

The loans helped the neighborhood flourish in the 1940s and 1950s, residents and historians said. In 1940, the homeownership rate among Black residents in Tulsa was 49%, surpassing the rate of 45% among white residents, U.S. Census data show. In those decades, grocery stores lined the commercial spine of North Greenwood Avenue, and the district featured chili parlors, movie theaters, barbecue restaurants, drugstores, pool halls and doctors’ offices. By 1942, Greenwood was home to more than 240 businesses, according to Hannibal B. Johnson’s “Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Greenwood District.”

“All the odds were against us, and we survived anyway,” said James O. Goodwin, publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle, Greenwood’s century-old Black newspaper. Yet, this second renaissance would, too, meet its own calamity.

The story of Black property ownership in Oklahoma began well before the 1921 massacre. Many of the territory’s early Black residents were descendants of those formerly enslaved by Native Americans who had been pushed west by the U.S. government in the 19th century, according to Larry O’Dell, director of development and special projects at the Oklahoma Historical Society. In later agreements with the U.S., these Native Americans and the more than 23,000 formerly enslaved Black men and women of the tribes—known as freedmen—became eligible for allotments of as much as 160 acres in Oklahoma, Mr. O’Dell said. Many formed all-black towns in Oklahoma, largely in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The opportunity to own land drew Black migrants from other states to Tulsa. Many found work as skilled laborers and in service jobs in an economy buoyed by agriculture and, later, the oil industry. Some who settled in Greenwood started businesses and bought property.

P.S. Thompson was among the Greenwood residents who mortgaged property to rebuild after the massacre. He filed a claim against the city for failing to protect his house and drugstore from destruction, fires and looting, according to documents with the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum and research compiled by the Oklahoma Historical Society. The following year, Mr. Thompson and his wife, E.B. Thompson, used their property as collateral to obtain a $750 loan from L.S. Cogswell Lumber Co., about $12,000 when adjusted for inflation. The loan was for 15 months at an annual interest rate of 10%, according to records from the Tulsa County Clerk. The average U.S. mortgage rate was around 6% at the time. The couple paid off the loan and obtained several more short-term mortgages in amounts from $500 to $1,500.

Well-to-do Greenwood residents made loans to other members of the community. In the 1920s and 1930s, James Henri Goodwin, a businessman and real-estate investor, extended mortgage loans to local residents, according to county clerk documents, and borrowed himself. Some Greenwood property owners were able to borrow from savings-and-loan associations.

Restrictive real-estate covenants limited the mobility of Black residents and property owners beyond Greenwood’s boundaries. Private-lending practices, common across the U.S., rated the presence of Blacks in a neighborhood as an elevated property risk, historians said, and blocked many Black home buyers from getting mortgages.

By 1958, the proportion of white home buyers had grown dramatically. Black residents made up 10% of Tulsa’s population but only 3% of buyers of new housing in the city, according to a Tulsa Urban League report issued that year.

Even with new homes being built, very few Black buyers could qualify for financing, according to the report, provided by the University of Tulsa’s Department of Special Collections. The passage of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s began to open up opportunities for some residents to move out of Greenwood amid efforts to desegregate communities, a move that cut into business owners’ clientele...

Still more.

 

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.

William Julius Wilson, The Bridge over the Racial Divide

At Amazon, William Julius Wilson, The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.

Terrifying Collapse of Rule of Law Across America

I've been waiting for this, from Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Darkness Falls: The collapse of the rule of law across the country, intensified by Antifa radicals, is terrifying":

Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians.

Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic.

My latest @CityJournal https://t.co/mTZef4vnZP

— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) June 1, 2020

This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political bloodstream.

Facts don’t matter to the academic victimology narrative. Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.

If white mobs were rampaging through black business districts, assaulting passersby and looting stores, we would have heard about it on the national news every night. But the black flash mob phenomenon is grudgingly covered, if at all, and only locally.

The national media have been insisting on the theme of the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of the black family that drives it.

Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers...

RTWT.

Teaching That America is Hopelessly Racist

A great piece, from Peter Wood, at Minding the Campus.

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told

At Amazon, Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

The Revolution Transforming Our Society's Cultural Foundations

It's really not just a "socialist revolution" transforming our country. It's a postmodern revolution, which includes doctrinaire socialist (Marxist) ideologies, but is really the whole pantheon of "critical theorists" dating back to at least Nietzsche.

A good piece, whatever the case.

At the Epoch Times:

The likes of Fredrick Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Michael Foucault began a #Socialist revolution that is transforming out society’s cultural foundations. #Socialism

Commentary by Dr. Charles McVety https://t.co/jFJ4AGbozt

— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) July 19, 2019

Majority of Whites Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination

Well, it's part of the Trump phenomenon, I guess.

Perhaps part of the reason he won.

Interesting, either way. Leftists take heed.

At NPR:

Lolz: Majority of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination: https://t.co/vzEQj35l4c

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 25, 2017

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

A Trump Presidency Damage Report

I don't think these leftist outlets are getting it. They're a major part of the reason why we got Trump. Frankly, this kinda stuff is only boosting his reelection chances.

See, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The First White President."

Look for our latest issue online Tuesday, featuring cover stories from @jacklgoldsmith @EliotACohen and @tanehisicoates pic.twitter.com/JdffSeEtdk

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) September 8, 2017

More Than 70 Percent of Republicans Approve of President Trump's Response to #Charlotteville

I didn't check the poll, from Brad Parscale, but since leftist mass-media polls have been slamming the president's response, I'll bet this America First survey nails it.

Trump Republican approval to Charlottesville 70%+ in swing states. Only 17% disapprove. #FakeNews just pushing their agenda. #BetterDataWins pic.twitter.com/zyHvtB051O

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) August 21, 2017

Los Angeles Residents Expect New Race Riots (VIDEO)

It's the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots, and leftist agitation has got the city on edge. You know, "black lives matter" and all that.

At the Los Angeles Times, "For first time, more L.A. residents believe new riots likely, new poll finds":

For Nicole Cuff and her friends, the 1992 Los Angeles riots used to feel like a piece of history, told in old stories by their parents or discussed and analyzed in school.

Recently, though, it’s started to feel much more real to her — like something that could happen again in the near future.

Cuff, a coordinator at an entertainment management company who is half black and half Filipina, said her feelings come in part from several years of headlines, viral videos of police force and Black Lives Matter protests over police shootings of African Americans.

“It evokes some unfelt anger that hasn’t been tapped into,” said Cuff, 26, who has a diverse group of friends who have become much more politically engaged in the last few years. “When nobody pays a price for it … it could set people off.”

Her view reflects what researchers who study public attitudes about the L.A. riots say is a distinct shift: For the first time since the riots, there is an uptick in the number of Angelenos who fear that another civil disturbance is likely, according to a Loyola Marymount University poll that has been surveying Los Angeles residents every five years since the 1992 disturbances.

Nearly 6 out of 10 Angelenos think another riot is likely in the next five years, increasing for the first time after two decades of steady decline. That’s higher than in any year except for 1997, the first year the survey was conducted, and more than a 10-point jump compared with the 2012 survey.

Young adults ages 18 to 29, who didn’t directly experience the riots, were more likely than older residents to feel another riot was a possibility, with nearly 7 out of 10 saying one was likely, compared with about half of those 45 or older. Those who were unemployed or worked part-time were also more pessimistic, as were black and Latino residents, compared with whites and Asians, the poll found.

Researchers theorized that the turnaround may be linked to several factors, including the more polarized national dialogue on race sparked by police shootings in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere, as well as by the tenor of last year’s presidential election. Moreover, many parts of L.A. still suffer from some of the economic problems and lack of opportunities that fueled anger before the riots.

“Economic disparity continues to increase, and at the end of the day, that is what causes disruption,” said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor who has worked on the survey since its inception. “People are trying to get along and want to get along, but they understand economic tension boils over to political and social tension.”

More.

Florida State Senator Frank Artiles Resigns

He probably should have resigned, considering that nasty alcohol-fueled rant he unleashed.

Yeah, he got caught in the web of political correctness, but I have the feeling that the alcohol just worked like a truth serum for him, and out came some nasty bigoted thoughts from deep inside. He even called fellow Republicans "niggas."

I just don't know sometimes. Some things are just about basic human decency, not politics.

At the Miami Herald, "Miami lawmaker resigns over racial slur scandal."

Brutal Chicago Video is No Surprise in Climate of Racial Lies

From Mark Davis, at Town Hall:

The toxic roots of this outrageous crime are on display every day. They are found in the sick and malicious rhetoric that filled the air in reaction to the Trump campaign, that has only intensified since his victory. And it wasn’t only from liberals.

How many people on TV, in elected office, from the stages of shrill rallies, have spread the following damnable lies:

-- Donald Trump is a racist.

-- Our cops are racist.

-- Our country is racist.

Pour this poison into the heads of kids already damaged by the societal dysfunctions around them, and we might wonder why we don’t get videos like this with nauseating regularity.

The animus of the left is on constant display. Black Lives Matter tells America that waves of racist cops are out to kill our black youth. Democrat politicians have maligned Trump as a bigot for pure sport, joined by some unhinged NeverTrumpers.

Astride it all, we have had a President for eight years who has discouraged none of this, while adding his own winking double-talk that makes clear his belief that racism is still rampant in the nation that elected him twice.

So don’t let anyone get away with feigned bewilderment over how this barbaric cruelty happened. The responsibility for it is shared by anyone who has engaged in the slanders that fill the daily talking points of the left.

Hat Tip: Blazing Cat Fur.