Culture matters

Rich, Black, Flunking:

The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

[..] [Professor Ogbu] and his research assistant moved to Shaker Heights for nine months in mid-1997. They reviewed data and test scores. The team observed 110 different classes, from kindergarten all the way through high school. They conducted exhaustive interviews with school personnel, black parents, and students. Their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as "acting white." Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn't deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.

"The black parents feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that's where their role stops," Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. "They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn't supervise their children that much. They didn't make sure their children did their homework. That's not how other ethnic groups think."

(reddit, 1200 comments)

Florida school cancels "To Kill a Mockingbird" play

...because it contains a racial slur! Way to miss the fucking point. What are we banning next, Huckleberry Finn? The Catcher in the Rye?

A young Mexican boy walks up to his mother

...with his face covered in flour and says, "Look mami, I'm a white boy!" His mother takes one look at him and slaps him across the face. She replies, "Go show your father what you have done!"

So the little boy runs to the other room where his father is and shouts, "Papi look! I'm a white boy!" Just as the mother did, the father slaps him across the face and says, "Go show your grandmother what you have done, maybe she can knock some sense into you."

The little boy runs out to the garden where his grandmother is and says, "Grandma, look! I'm a white boy!" His grandmother slaps him across the face, grabs him by the ear and sits him on the floor. She gives him a long speech about why he should be proud to be Mexican and why he shouldn't try to ever cover up his true identity.

The boy then slowly walks back into the kitchen, past his mother. She asks him, "So, what did you learn?" The boy replies, "I've only been white for 10 minutes and I already hate you people."

Two Rand Paul/CRA afterthoughts

Read Julian Sanchez

Ummm...

The Dish yet again:

Wiegel stands up against the "racist" critique. Robert A. George counters smartly:

Why aren't they -- as libertarians -- outraged that Jim Crow laws themselves infringed on private property and free exchange of goods? Jim Crow said whites and blacks couldn't eat together or live in the same hotels. If you were a white restaurant owner and wanted to serve blacks, you could be shut down. Once again, Jim Crow prevented whites and blacks from engaging in a basic economic relationship. That is the power of the state at its worst.

Smartly? Perhaps the reason is because libertarians actually are, and were, always outraged and against Jim Crow laws?

Le sigh.

Sentences to ponder

Via Tyler, discount babies edition:

The paper finds the cost of adopting a black baby needs to be $38,000 lower than the cost of a white baby, in order to make parents indifferent to race. Boys will need to cost $16,000 less than girls.

Presumably that holds at the margin only, not for all parents.  Here is more, from Allison Schrager.  It seems that most couples prefer to adopt non-black girls.

False dilemmas

Obama regrets the stupid comment

He seems to have aptly defused the situation and, in typical Obama fashion, turned it in to a teachable moment—so hopefully the frenzy will die down now..

At least some amusement came out of it with the lawn comments at the end.

Earlier I thought "Gates is the new Sanford" because I found this to be an unwelcome distraction from more substantive issues. But maybe that's selfish of me and shedding light on this kind of thing really is "part of the portfolio"—so hopefully he won't botch it into such a great frenzy next time.

Doctor apologizes for insensitivity

Regarding that "disgustingly racist" image, TPMMuckracker posts the doctor's P.R. apology statement:

DR. DAVID MCKALIP SENDS APOLOGY DIRECTLY TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
McKalip apologizes for sending insensitive image via e-mail

St. Petersburg, FL (July 23, 2009) - David McKalip, M.D., brain and spine neurosurgeon of St. Petersburg has never been shy in expressing where he stands regarding President Barack Obama's health-care reform. Despite McKalip's position on health system reform, he sends a sincere apology for a forwarded image of President Obama in an e-mail depicting the president in Papua New Guinean tribal garb with a logo beneath it saying, "Obama Care."

"I genuinely regret the decision I made in passing this e-mail message along. Directly to President Obama, I sincerely apologize for offending him. This was, in no way whatsoever, my intention. The image has nothing to do with my feelings or thoughts on any race or culture. I recognize that this image is offensive and hope that the nation refocuses on assuring all Americans have access to high-quality, affordable health care with no party interfering in the patient-physician relationship. My intention is to focus directly on the issue at hand, which is putting financial and decision-making power into the hands of patients and taking it from government and insurance companies," said McKalip.

The image forwarded was from a long chain of e-mails and not created by McKalip.

It's a shame that such a statement is necessary, but c'est la vie. Taking on sensitivity police isn't something many people have the time or will for, especially busy doctors who don't want interference with their work or hospital's reputation.

Obama and racial hypersensitivity

(meme) Commenting on the TPMMuckraker story, LGF calls this image "disgusting racism"...

Really? So if I say I think it's pretty funny, does that make me a disgusting racist?

I recently read about shamans, witch doctors, and other primitive "spiritual" medicine in the early chapters of Robert Wright's The Evolution of God. And it seems to me that painting parts of Obama's health reform (like the public option) as running the risk of stifling innovation and leading to more primitive outcomes for medicine should fall within the norm of political satire.

But wait, we can't do that because it might suggest African-Americans are primitive, because of Obama's part-African heritage? Sigh.

I think distributing images like this is a bad idea only because it has the misfortune of serving as bait for the anti-racism police. And dealing with them is more tedious than the ordinary PC brigade, because of how harshly "racism" is demonized (justly so, in the case of actual racism).

Growing up bilingual and as a cultural minority as I did, I think I can state with a fair amount confidence that I'm pretty far removed from being racist. I was the only white kid in grade schools I attended and had some painful (as well as nonphysical) altercations with bona fide anti-yankee racism. So I know first-hand what the real shit is like, and this ain't it.

At worst, this image is racially "insensitive". Due to the bubble they live in, there are plenty on the right who have a real lack of racial sensitivity—but this does not mean they're "disgusting racists". And while I know being racially—or more broadly, culturally—sensitive can be is helpful for avoiding misunderstandings, this is not to say that being a sensitivity troll is helpful. Shame on TPMMuckracker and LGF.

"The Curtain Lifts" [updated below]

Byron York:

Obama's sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Andrew:

I'm with Benen. What can that last phrase possibly mean, except that African-American opinion does not count as much as everyone else's? Yglesias and Weigel pile one.

York is not implying that the opinions of black people matter less, as the others suggest. All he meant is that black approval of Obama has more to do with racial identification than Obama's policy positions.

Weigel shows that York is factually wrong about the degree and reason for Obama's popularity among blacks relative to other Democratic pols, so that's a lot of egg on York's face.

But there's no "curtain being lifted" or actual racism being exposed—York simply made an unwarranted assumption about black racism and failed to look at the data to disprove it.

Update: CBS/NYT had some very high approval numbers among the black community, so maybe there is something to what York is saying. When approval is so high, polls vary, because you need a pretty large sample size to figure out how high with more precision.

Quote of the day II

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." —Chief Justice John Roberts

The McCain Belt

It's not Appalachia, once you exclude all blacks (they went for Obama by 96%)



Gee, I wonder what all that red down there has in common?

KKKarnival!

Cañon City, Colorado, 1926. It seems even bigots need their fun.

IQ of local populations, pre-migration

Here's something the PC police doesn't want you to know...

Click images for their Wikipedia articles. This type of research is highly controversial within academia, but we know truth is often politically incorrect.

Why are more Asians math whizzes while more Africans play basketball?

Hint: it's not arbitrary. Evolution really does happen within regions—be it of the biological (genes) or social darwinian (culture) kind.

Fresh-squeezed grapefruits are especially evil

(ht Goldberg)

In defense of PETA

Via Andrew, two activists dressed up as KKK members at an American Kennel Club show to protest pure-breeding, and Macon D vented:

While the point about show dogs is that they're being abused in order to create a favored, but congenitally unhealthy and in some cases freakish "master race," the parallel abuse alluded to by the mock Klan robes is that ... of the KKK by its victims. Thus the implicit, boneheaded comparison that PETA makes here is that of KKK victims, primarily black people, to dogs.

What is boneheaded is to think PETA is comparing only blacks to dogs and thus implying that non-blacks are something better than dogs. This is not the case, PETA is actually comparing the entire human species -- black, white, or whatever -- to dogs. People compare species all the time; there is nothing offensive about drawing parallels between whole species.

Under their comparison, non-whites are like a dog race with some undesirable traits, and whites are like a "pure" dog race with traits the breeders are trying to preserve. Yes this is offensive, but only in the same way the KKK offended in trying to keep human races seperate.

And that's precisely the point: dog race breeders are analogous to the KKK race police. Of course this only matters if -- like PETA -- you are for the ethical treatment of animals. If not, then dog race breeding won't bother you.

Update: I see there's a Digg story with hundreds of shrill comments bashing PETA for this. I'm sure PETA has done plenty of objectionable things, the above objection is illogical hysteria.

I had a dream, ctd.

(ht Library Grape)

Recall CNN's poll:

More than two-thirds of African-Americans believe Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision for race relations has been fulfilled, a CNN poll found -- a figure up sharply from a survey in early 2008.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King's vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech -- roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

389 YEARS AGO...

Link blag

Politico: Obama remakes political rules (more African-Americans consider statewide office)

Daily Beast: Obama's 10 best moves and 5 worst stumbles so far

LAT: Executive orders preserve renditions as a counter-terrorism tool. @TAC complains, hilzoy objects to the story, Andrew concurs with her.

American Conservative: Afghanistan drug labs and trafficking are now military objectives?

AP: 51% of Iraqis cast ballots

NewMajority: Wall Street salary caps are a dumb idea.

Adam Smith: Rounds up criticism of U.S. protectionism in the stimulus bill.

UK's Telegraph: The formerly extinct ibex has been cloned from frozen DNA samples. Next up: Mastodons and Jurassic Park?

I had a dream

CNN:

More than two-thirds of African-Americans believe Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision for race relations has been fulfilled, a CNN poll found -- a figure up sharply from a survey in early 2008.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King's vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech -- roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

But whites remain less optimistic, the survey found.

"Whites don't feel the same way -- a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King's vision," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.