In defence of racial discrimination?

By Roy Swan, the head of mission investments at the Ford Foundation. He defends "affirmative action" and criticizes opponents of it. He defends his wishes by cataloguing a long list of ways in which blacks are disadvantaged, principally economicaly.

His arguments are a triumph of seeing only what you want to see. He thinks black disadvantage is solely the product of white discrimination against blacks. He ignores the fact that all other minorities in America -- Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Indians -- in fact do better on average than mainstream whites economically. And they suffer from REAL disadvantages -- poor English language skills, religious differences etc.

So why do blacks not follow that pattern? Why are they a different minority? It has to be something in blacks (e.g. high impulsiveness, low IQ, psychopathy) that makes the difference, not what they experience at the hands of white society. Swan is a pathetic appartchik to be so defiant of reality. Only the deliberately blind would agree with him

There is actually something wrong with his head. He criticizes "Race-based discrimination" at the same time as arguing in favour of it


Recently, the activist whose efforts overturned affirmative action [racial preferences at Harvard] eliminating yet another vehicle for marginalized populations’ educational and economic success, filed a lawsuit against a small, Black-owned American venture capital firm over its efforts to support Black women entrepreneurs. Never mind that they receive just 0.06% of all venture capital–less than 1/1000th of their percentage of the American population—or that white men under 35 have 224 times the wealth of Black women under 35.

To this litigant and his ilk, any attempt to acknowledge the roots of this gross inequity, much less adopt a targeted approach to remedy it, is a threat. They so aggressively defend the unequal status quo because they cannot bear the alternative: facing the abominable discrimination and oppression under de facto affirmative action for white people that has created the conditions for Black women’s inability to attract venture capital. Instead, they attack, deflect, deny, and hide historical truth and consequences.

This willful ignorance is geopolitically self-destructive and irresponsible, as today’s world order is determined by the productive and innovative power of a nation’s human capital, which drives national wealth. Keeping players off the field for ideological and racist reasons will only hold America back, while other countries steamroll ahead by tapping the full potential of all the talent at their disposal.

Our allies across the Atlantic have taken an approach worthy of emulation. In acknowledgment of its historical investment in the transatlantic chattel slave trade, the Church of England recently announced a £100 million program of impact investing, grant-making, and research with the target of alleviating the ongoing consequences of its past actions. As a member of the fund’s Oversight Group, I am heartened by the symbolic financial investment but even more moved by the Church Commissioners’ commitment to truth and reconciliation. England has taken a step in the right direction, but America’s inaction and retrenchment is a catapult backward–and a costly one.

Race-based discrimination is estimated to have set America back over $50 trillion since 1990 alone. Other estimates forecast that eliminating race-based discrimination would generate 6 million jobs and $5 trillion in American economic power in just five years.

If Americans care about global economic power, moral authority, and reputation, we must explore the nation’s ugly history of targeted Black oppression, calculate the wealth transferred through exploitation and extraction, and invest in a plan for a better future in the spirit of patriotic capitalism.

It’s time to stop using bad faith claims of reverse discrimination as a polarizing wedge and give everyone opportunities and resources to unleash their potential for the sake of the nation. And everyone has a role to play. In addition to more equitable laws and policies, we need investors to become patriotic capitalists and put market rate-seeking impact investments to work to erase the compounding economic and social damage inflicted on Black people and others oppressed because of their race.

Contrary to the zero-sum claims of history-denying capital hoarders, a more just country is a more prosperous country, too. And we all win when we all win.

https://fortune.com/2024/01/15/bad-faith-reverse-discrimination-claims-hurt-americas-economic-future-and-global-standing-investing-dei-politics/

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CAIR lets the mask slip — again

by Jeff Jacoby

In 1994, CAIR's co-founder declared he was "in support of the Hamas movement." Three decades later, that hasn't changed.

"I WAS happy to see people breaking the siege."
Thus spake Nihad Awad, the cofounder and longtime executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in an address to the annual American Muslims for Palestine convention in November. He was explaining why the Oct. 7 Hamas terror assault in Israel filled him with joy.

"The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7," Awad told his audience, employing the antisemitic device of likening Israel to Nazi Germany. "And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in."

The slaughter of more than 1,200 civilians, the frenzied sexual mutilation of women and girls, the burning of homes with families in them, the abduction of hundreds of hostages, the worst massacre of Jews since the end of the Holocaust — in Awad's telling, that was simply the people of Gaza engaging in their "right of self-defense." He made no reference to Hamas. Instead, he emphasized that Israel was not entitled to defend itself. "Yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense."

When an excerpt of Awad's speech was made public on Dec. 7 by the Middle East Media and Research Institute, it drew an appalled rebuke from the Biden administration.

"We condemn these shocking, antisemitic statements in the strongest terms," presidential spokesman Andrew Bates told reporters. The Hamas atrocities "shock the conscience," he said, and "every leader has a responsibility to call out antisemitism wherever it rears its ugly head." Last spring, the White House included CAIR in a list of organizations supporting its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. After Awad's comments became known, CAIR's name was scrubbed from the document.

To hear Awad tell it, CAIR is being unfairly maligned. An "anti-Palestinian hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning," he claimed after his comments became known. All he had meant to say was that "average Palestinians who briefly walked out of Gaza and set foot on their ethnically cleansed land in a symbolic act of defiance against the blockade and stopped there without engaging in violence were within their rights under international law."

There are a few problems with Awad's protestation of innocence. For starters, MEMRI, the media database that called attention to the CAIR director's speech, is a highly regarded source of accurate information from across the Arab and Muslim world. Far from being a "hate website" as Awad described it, MEMRI strives to convey the entire scope of Arab/Muslim discourse — good and bad, ugly and admirable. It makes a point of focusing as much on reform in the Muslim world as it does on jihad and Islamism.

If Awad's words had really been taken out of context, the easiest way to prove it would be to let people view online the entire recording of his speech for themselves. Only — it's gone. American Muslims for Palestine, the group that organized the conference at which Awad spoke, has taken down the video of his remarks. Hmm.

CAIR holds itself out as a Muslim human rights organization, and that is how it is routinely described in news stories and headlines. CAIR-sponsored publicity events are given media coverage, and CAIR is invited to participate in — and at times even to host — roundtable events with local government officials. Journalists often turn to CAIR for comment in stories dealing with American Muslims and conventionally describe CAIR as "the nation's biggest Muslim civil rights group." One week before the Oct. 7 attacks, CAIR was invited to attend a White House program on "protecting places of worship."

But CAIR has a long history of sympathy with, and connections to, Hamas.

In 1994, the same year that Awad cofounded CAIR, he candidly told a Florida audience that he was "in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO." According to the Capital Research Center, CAIR opened its office in Washington, D.C., with a grant from the Holy Land Foundation, a charity listed by the Treasury Department in 2001 as a "Specially Designated Terrorist" group. In 2008, five former leaders of the foundation were convicted of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. A year later, the Obama Justice Department severed its ties with CAIR, noting that "the evidence at trial [had] linked CAIR leaders to Hamas . . . and CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case." FBI officials were directed to "significantly restrict" any "non-investigative interactions with CAIR" and to steer clear of including CAIR in community engagement or public relations activities.

Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, noted in 2014 that at least seven former board members or staff at CAIR were "arrested, denied entry to the US, or were indicted on or pled guilty to or were convicted of terrorist charges." In 2014, the United Arab Emirates included CAIR on a list of more than 83 terrorist organizations, along with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban.

For all that, CAIR insists that it is "principled and consistent" in opposing antisemitism. It regularly issues press releases condemning acts of antisemitic vandalism or violence in the United States. But such statements are best regarded as protective coloration intended to camouflage CAIR's mission of encouraging hostility to Israel and Israel's supporters in the United States.

Again and again, CAIR officials have let the mask slip.

Last February, for example, the head of CAIR's Los Angeles branch, Hussam Ayloush, declared that American police forces are "becoming more brutal, more racist, and more like an occupation army" because they are "being trained by Israel." In December 2021, the head of CAIR's San Francisco chapter exhorted supporters to oppose not only "vehement fascists" but "the polite Zionists, too," labeling as "enemies" the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish federations, "the Zionist synagogues," and Hillel chapters on college campuses. In October, CAIR's Maryland director, Zainab Chaudry, sneered at the outrage over Hamas's killing of "40 fake Israeli babies."

Whatever else CAIR is, it is no true champion of civil rights and interfaith harmony and never has been. In 2021, the Simon Wiesenthal Center put CAIR on its Global Antisemitism Top Ten list, charging it with "unleashing pollution of antisemitism into America's mainstream." Thirty years after CAIR was launched by a cofounder who openly acknowledged being in support of Hamas, it remains a front for Islamist extremism and anti-Zionist bigotry. To treat it as a legitimate "civil rights organization" that speaks for US Muslims is to set back the causes of civil rights and Muslims alike.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27462/cair-lets-the-mask-slip-again

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Our Leftist rulers have embraced the Taliban practice of destroying public art that is out of kilter with their current ideas

Do you, too, long for the good-old days when the philistines tearing down statues did so on their own dime and on their own time?

“The National Park Service proposes to rehabilitate Welcome Park to provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors,” read a press release announcing William Penn as the latest victim of statuary murder. The public did not regard Penn’s erasure from a park bearing the name of the ship bringing Pennsylvania’s founder to Philadelphia as “accurate,” to say nothing of “inclusive” or “welcoming.” Uproar caused the National Park Service to reverse course on removing the Quaker’s statue.

Destruction of public art, de rigueur in the heady summer of 2020, now moves from the rabble to our representatives. Just as we went native in forcing masks not just on women but everybody after years in Afghanistan, we also embraced the Taliban practice of destroying public art out of fashion with the ruling ethos.

Shortly before Christmas, the Congressional Naming Commission succeeded in removing a 32-foot bronze Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery. To honor the Southern dead in a cemetery built on land expropriated from Robert E. Lee’s family struck some as too much to tolerate.

“This was a memorial to men who committed treason in defense of the supposed right of some humans to ‘own’ other humans as property,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, opined. “The very idea that this monument was still here until today reminds us not just how far we’ve come but how much further we have to go.”

The following week, Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan ordered the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” removed. She denied erasing history or destroying art. “By removing the Confederate monument from Springfield Park,” she strangely claimed, “we signal a belief in our shared humanity.”

Recall that those pushing to remove public art once argued it belonged not in parks but in museums. It turns out they really did not want it in museums, either.

Houston, years after taking down statues of Christopher Columbus, Confederate officer Dick Dowling, and an angel representing the “Spirit of the Confederacy,” advanced the process of removing them from the city’s art collection in October.

Around the same time, Charlottesville secretly melted down a statue of Robert E. Lee. “Well, they can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Andrea Douglas, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s executive director, exclaimed as the artwork melted in a furnace. “There will be no tape for that.”

The previous year, New York tore down the “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt” that had long sat in front of the Museum of Natural History, a place owing its existence in great part to the former president.

“The board of the TR Library believes the Equestrian Statue is problematic in its composition,” the chief executive officer of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library divulged in a statement. “Moreover, its current location denies passersby consent and context.” He noted the agreement meant hiding the statue in storage while the library’s decisionmakers thought about “context,” its “problematic” composition, and much else.

In so many instances, governments forbidden from “abridging the freedom of speech” do just that — or, at least, something contrary to the spirit of freedom of speech. Beyond this, historians, museum curators, artists, and others professionally bound to oppose Talibanning art memorializing history instead cheer it on. The Orwellian shift of San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Committee and the city’s Arts Commission, for instance, witnesses people charged with protecting art and history destroying it in a city that nevertheless tolerates more than a half-dozen memorials to mass-murderer Jim Jones’ aiders and abettors.

The unforgettable Doctor Who episode “Blink” features malicious white statues that come alive when people look away. Neither bronze William Penn nor marble Robert E. Lee possesses this power. But the statuary murderers act as though they do. Their hateful behavior toward inanimate objects makes one wonder what they would do to flesh-and-blood political opponents should the rest of us blink.

https://spectator.org/attempted-statuary-murder-statues/

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Arguing with the woke left: Like wrestling an eel

Take the gender pay gap. The broadly held assumption is that this is wrong and needs to be reduced. The argument then leaps into proposals for various misguided means of reducing the pay gap. Examples include imposed pay hikes for female-intensive occupations or forcing companies to reveal information about their gender pay gaps.

The more legitimate way of thinking about this issue is to ask why the gender pay gap, using the best measurement possible, exists, and why it persists. The next step is to see if the factors that typically influence earnings can explain the gap. These include education, qualifications, occupation, industry, hours of work, job tenure, and the like. Note that we are in the positive realm.

After taking these factors into account, it turns out that the residual gender pay gap can be almost totally explained by the existence of ‘greedy jobs’ that require long and unpredictable hours and often extensive travel.

Women typically shy away from greedy jobs. The pay gap is not about systemic discrimination according to the evidence. Indeed, Claudia Goldin of Harvard was awarded the Nobel Prize last year for this insight and her empirical research.

Now unless we can do away with greedy jobs – and that seems unlikely although a degree of job redesign is possible – the gender pay gap is likely to continue notwithstanding the bleatings of the woke left and many gormless politicians. Costly, ineffective policies are an inevitable consequence of the failure to accept the evidence.

But let me return to the direction of argument used by the woke left when they know they are beaten on facts and logic. One typical accusation is to label the opponent in a debate as ‘alt-right’ or ‘far right’. This conjures up notions of white supremacy, even the KKK. The idea is that if the label can be made to stick, then no one need pay any further attention to the points being made by the dubious contrarian.

But here’s the thing: when this alt-right/far right tagline is ignored, you will often find that what is being proposed is actually sensible stuff, common sense in most instances. Pointing out the dangers of the rapid exit of coal-fired power plants and their replacement with highly subsidised intermittent, land-gobbling energy is hardly alt-right. It’s pointing out the bleeding obvious.

Another tactic of the woke left is to accuse opponents of engaging in conspiracy theories. The idea is that rational people don’t believe in conspiracies and so any line of argument put forward by conspiracists should be immediately rejected.

We saw this in relation to the Covid vaccines that were rapidly developed. It simply makes sense to point out that there was no long-term evaluation of the vaccines and there could always be unforeseen risks, such as serious adverse reactions.

The fact that it became clear very quickly that the vaccines had no measurable impact on population transmission had to be concealed by the advocates of vaccine mandates. Accusing anyone who pointed this out of being a conspiracist was a handy way of achieving this. When dictatorial public health officials, working hand-in-glove with Big Pharma and self-serving politicians, are in charge, this is the puerile level to which debate can quickly descend.

Another more subtle manipulation of debate is to suggest that opponents are mere populists and therefore their arguments should be dismissed. According to elite opinion, anything that smacks of populism must be rejected.

Of course, this rather begs the question of what is populism. It can’t just be something that is popular. After all, politicians can never get elected if they simply propose a suite of policies that are deeply unpopular. The underlying message seems to be that if something appeals to a large number of relatively uneducated people, this is populism and, by definition, is bad.

We saw this argument being used in overdrive during the Trump years in which many of his policies were decried as mere populism. But surely ‘draining the swamp’ was essentially a good idea; standing up to China made geo-strategic and economic sense; and attempting to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants was much needed.

Talking about immigration, many on the left are in favour of completely open borders and essentially disapprove of any initiatives to control the flow of migrants. To counter any alternative points of view, it is common for accusations of xenophobia and racism to be thrown about.

In other words, impugn the character of those making the case for limiting immigration, be it legal or illegal, and hope this is a winning device in the argument. Of course, it’s also necessary to ignore the preferences of the citizens, but the populist point can be made in this context.

The short-hand accusation of labelling something as neo-liberalism or trickle-down economics is often used as a device in debates about economic policy. The idea is that those who disagree with the woke left policy prescriptions of higher government spending and taxes as well as more government regulation and intervention should just be dismissed because they are using discredited theories.

It’s not clear what the proponents mean by these terms – is neo-liberalism just standard economic theory? – but the intent again is to query the standing of those who make alternative arguments. It’s so much easier than debating the main points. There is always the fear that, head-to-head, it is entirely possible that the contest would be lost.

Arguing with the woke left does seem akin to wrestling an eel. But the reality is that when opponents resort to fatuous tactics which are not really any more than name-calling, you know that you are on the winning side. If that’s all they’ve got, sticking to the theory and empirical evidence will always be a winning formula in the long run.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/arguing-with-the-woke-left/ ?

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

<> http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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