The Politics of Racism

Has Democrat identity politics so saturated our culture that we must all think our race the primary determinant of who we are? It sure seems that way when listening to what passes for political discourse these days.

It’s been a long time — so long I cannot remember the last time it bothered me when someone called me a racist. It did sting the first few times and it put me on the defensive. I felt compelled to refute the charge, but I don’t anymore. The accusations are most often in anonymous comments on my web site, but also in signed letters to the editor in newspapers carrying my column.

When on my “Left & Right” TV show, one leftist opponent habitually calls Republican policies or individuals racist, I ask for specific evidence. His answers indicate he doesn’t know what racism actually is. Dictionary.com defines it as:

a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.

Early charges of racism against me came after I wrote columns arguing against Affirmation Action policies enforced by the federal government. According to HG.org Legal Resources:

The purpose of affirmative action is to promote social equality through the preferential treatment of socioeconomically disadvantaged people.

My point was that in order to grant preferential treatment to historically disadvantaged groups like blacks and women in hiring, college admissions, and granting of government contracts, other groups like white men must necessarily be passed over. That, of course, requires bona fide racial and sexual discrimination.

There can be no argument that so-called “affirmation action” discriminates against white men. College admission policies discriminate against Asian men and women as well as whites as evidenced in recent lawsuits against Harvard University by Asian students who have been denied admission on the basis of race. Evidence indicates other Ivy League colleges do the same.

A 2015 LA Times article reported on a Princeton study using SAT scores to measure advantages and disadvantages of applicants according to their race. It was summed up by a college admission specialist named Ann Lee who said: 

African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 [SAT] points. Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

It’s the ultimate irony that Asians and whites who argue against such racially discriminatory policies are the ones accused of racism. Who is making these racist accusations? New York Times columnist David Brooks last week claimed that for the past twenty years: “

…white educated Democrats have moved left is true, but it’s not the essential truth. The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.

While I find myself agreeing with Brooks less and less lately, I’m with him on much of what he says in this column. Charges of “racism” hurled against me for more than twenty-five years have nearly always come from educated white liberals. Though many are still impressed by them, I’ve learned that college degrees do not prove intelligence, and I believe educated liberals yell “racism” when they run out of logical arguments. Another driving force behind accusations of racism is “white guilt,” especially as described by Shelby Steele in his 2006 book by that name. Educated white liberals are terrified that anyone may think them racist, so they bend over backward to forestall any such possibility.

As Brooks put it last week: 

“…if you’re a rich white child of privilege you have to go to extraordinary lengths to prove you’re one of the good children of privilege and not one of the bad ones. In this take, white progressives don noble clothing to make themselves feel good…

Are educated white liberals signaling their virtue when calling the rest of us racist? It was less than three years ago that candidate Hillary Clinton labeled half of Trump supporters racist. Compared to today’s far-left Democrat candidates she was a moderate. It’s Tuesday as I write this and I expect charges of racism against the president and his supporters to dominate tonight’s Democrat debate in Detroit.

Our Supreme Court recently forbade the 2020 US Census to ask people if they’re citizens of the United States but has no problem with questions about race — for which there are over a dozen possible categories. If even the United States government is now officially more concerned about people’s race than their citizenship, what kind of country have we become?

Graffiti A Sign of Cultural Decay

It was a bad sign and disheartening to see. While strolling along the new, upper-cliff walk at Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth, Maine — one of my favorite places — I saw the graffiti. Park officials had cleared brush from a small level area and put in a picnic table surrounded by a semicircle of ten or twelve boulders rolled into place. Then some selfish, depraved individual came along with a can of red spray paint and defaced them.

It’s an otherwise lovely spot in a stunningly beautiful park with views of Portland Head Light, the shipping channel to Portland Harbor, islands in Casco Bay, and the open Atlantic beyond. Now, however, anyone enjoying a picnic there is forced to look at undecipherable symbols on most of the boulders and a good old, “F*** You” on one of them. If I were a judge and the apprehended vandal came before me, I would force him (it’s most likely a young male) to sand off every bit of that red paint by hand, however long that takes, or go to jail for the maximum sentence.

Graffiti signals a deteriorating society, the cultural equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. It should be eradicated as soon as it is detected. To leave it is to invite more. I’d liken it to the “broken window theory” first put forth by George Kelling and James Wilson in a 1982 Atlantic article: “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” It’s the same with graffiti. Leave it up and it will spread.

Woodford's Corner http://portlanddaily.cradockphotography.com

I’ve witnessed the phenomenon over the past seven years driving up and down Portland, Maine’s Forest Avenue every week. Stuck in traffic, I’d stare at graffiti on buildings and rooftops. At first, property owners would hastily remove it either by sandblasting it off brick walls or painting over it on other surfaces. After a year or two, however, those efforts slowed down. Now it appears proprietors have given up and the contagion is getting out of control.

"Graffiti is Art, Not Vandalism" claims an article in the Temple University newspaper Temple News. The argument is ridiculous at best. Graffiti spoils someone else’s property. I’d liken it to a dog lifting his leg on a building to mark his territory. How would a genuine artist feel if he or she purchased a large canvas and a graffiti “artist” sprayed on it in the dark of night? If vandal “artists” won’t rent billboards, how about they walk around wearing a sandwich board to display their “art”? One commenter wrote: “Graffiti is filth, period. That is like saying I took an artistic dump on the sidewalk.”

Subway in Rome

In Rome four years ago I hired a guide to show us around the Eternal City. He pointed out endless fountains — repetitive, stone-carved, muscular nudes laying around displaying genitalia. We, especially my grandson and I, were more interested in historical sites like the Colosseum and the Vatican, but each day I would ask him his opinion of the graffiti we were seeing everywhere. “Oh, that’s art too,” he insisted. On the third day, we encountered old paintings under an archway defaced by someone with a spray can. Finally, he admitted, “That is sh*t!”

This pushed our guide over the edge

Guides are licensed by Italy’s government to comment only in certain ways, but our guide got so exasperated he finally ignored those constraints. Rome was bad, but Athens, Greece is by far the worst graffiti-ridden European city I’ve seen so far. It’s a rather ugly city anyway, apart from the Acropolis and a few other sites, and graffiti is epidemic. On that trip, I was part of a larger family group and didn’t want to rain on the parade by asking our guide about it — a lovely older woman named Dora. There was much less in the rest of Greece outside Athens which was amazingly beautiful.

Walking back from Acropolis in Athens

The graffiti I saw at Fort Williams was fresh. Park officials there are very diligent and I hope they will have either painted the stones or replaced them by the time I return next weekend. The City of Portland is attempting to alleviate their problem by advising property owners, but I’m sad to report that it seems to be losing the battle.

Working With Words and Images

This weekly column pleases some and annoys others. One of the newspapers in which it runs editorialized years ago that people either love it or hate it. Last week’s edition featured a letter from Connecticut residents who summer in Casco, Maine and describing my columns as “filled with vitriol and hate.” The writers threatened to cancel their subscription should the columns continue to appear. This week, a letter from a local woman appeared declaring the columns to be a “breath of fresh air.” She sends them to friends in Connecticut who “enjoy [my] approach on state and national issues.”

My photographs are received differently. Some people love them while others just seem indifferent. Photographs don’t generate controversy the way columns do. They either resonate with viewers or they don’t. Some people like them well enough they throw down money for enlargements to hang on their walls, but no one has yet felt compelled to express a negative opinion.

Thinking and feeling go into creating both a photograph and a column. When I see something beautiful or dramatic, I have to think about how to frame the scene — what angles to use and what settings to make on my camera and lens. Then come cropping and editing. Lastly, I must decide which photos to keep and which to discard. Columns and photographs each communicate my view of the world to others, yet some ideas expressed in the columns grate on people while images in the photos do not.

Often I need a break from writing when my brain gets tired as I struggle to find words that adequately express what’s in it. I’ll get up and walk around a bit, then return to the computer and pull up photographs to edit instead of the unfinished column. I’m using my brain again, but a different part of it. Working with images can energize me after a search for words has exhausted me.

There’s deadline pressure when writing columns every week, but there can be time pressure when taking photographs too. Walking or driving, I’ll stop and try to capture a passing scene, but by the time I have my camera in hand with the proper settings, the light has changed and the opportunity has passed. In another case, I’d been watching a nesting loon on Kezar Lake for weeks, boating to the site several times trying to be there for a photo of her chick. Last Saturday I saw that she had left the nest. I looked all around that section of the lake for her and the chick but never saw them.

Some letter-writers have declared my columns are the sole reason they buy a paper. Others fulminate against them, heaping scorn on both me for writing them and the paper for publishing them. I wonder why they don’t just skip over the column. What compels them to read it? It must be something akin to attending a horror movie or reading a Stephen King novel. Why take the time to view something you know will disturb you? Is it the adrenaline rush? Maybe they’re progressives trying to expose themselves to a conservative view — and then get so incensed they must write something scathing in opposition.

When seeing my photographs hanging somewhere, people can either can stop and look or just walk on by. Unlike angry readers, those who see my photos don’t feel compelled to share negative impressions. I’ve never gotten an email, a letter, a phone call, a text, or a comment that my photos are incendiary, hateful, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, or vitriolic.

It’s not as if all my images depict beautiful things. I have pictures of gruesome things like a hawk tearing a robin apart, an eagle ripping up a fish, an approaching thunderstorm about to snap off trees or uproot them, a gathering of angry protesters, a fight between an eagle and an osprey, and hunters looking for deer to kill. People seem to just accept these images as depictions of reality, but when I write about unsavory actions by leftist politicians or by certain protected minority groups, I’m excoriated as a hate-filled villain.

Every week I spend hours both writing and working with photographs. The extra income is nice but I do it because I like it, especially moving from one to the other. Photography takes me outside. It gets me up early to catch morning light. Never do I catch all the beauty in a scene that inspires me, but sometimes I can obtain a reasonable facsimile. Writing makes me sit down and reflect on things.

I can think of worse ways to spend my remaining time on this earth, so I guess I’ll continue.

Politically Correct Discrimination

At exclusive colleges and universities in 2016, conservative students held satirical “Affirmative Action Bake Sales” to spotlight discrimination against whites applying for admission. Cookies were sold to Native Americans for 25¢ whereas blacks were charged 75¢, Latinos $1.00, Asians $1.50, and whites $2.00. Women of any race got 25¢ off. SAT scores required for admission to those elite schools also varied according to race and pretty much correlated to the prices of cookies. Asians needed higher SATs. So did whites. Lower scores were accepted for minorities and women.

Protesters at UT bake sale

Young Americans for Freedom hoped to initiate civil discussion of Affirmative Action policies at the University of Texas and there was some, but things went downhill and the event ended in violence according to campusreform.org. Opponents shouted epithets like Nazi! You deserve to be punched! Others yelled “Get the f*** out!” Still others tried to steal the cookies and overturned the table on which the cookies were displayed.

Last weekend, SkyNews reported on an event in Detroit along the same lines, but it wasn’t satirical like the event at the University of Texas. It was serious: “The organisers of the AfroFuture Fest, set for 3-4 August, are charging lower rates for tickets bought by ‘people of colour’ than for ‘non-people of colour.” Early bird tickets for ‘POC were $10 and $20 for ‘Non-POC.’”

In the FAQ section of their web site, they explained: "Why do we have POC (people of colour) and Non-POC (white people) tickets? I'm glad you asked! Equality means treating everyone the same. Equity is insuring (sic) everyone has what they need to be successful. Our ticket structure was built to insure (sic) that the most marginalised communities (people of colour) are provided with an equitable chance at enjoying events in their own community (black Detroit).”

Tiny Jag

In response, one entertainer has withdrawn from AfroFuture Fest: “Tiny Jag, a biracial rapper based in Detroit, has quit the event and insisted AfroFuture Fest removed her name from all promotional material… ‘I was immediately enraged just because I am biracial… It seems almost like it has spite, and unfortunately with spite comes hate…’ [she said.]”

Good for her, but it would have been better if she’d quit on principle alone and not because she’s “biracial.” Most of us are multiracial — or multiethnic at least — as more and more people learn when they get results their DNA analysis after paying $50-$100. It’s way past time to put all race-based quotas in our rear-view mirror and affirm that there’s really only one race — the human race.

The word “discriminate” used to be neutral, meaning “distinguish”; “discern”; or “differentiate.” It described an ability to detect finer differences between similar things. It had at least one positive connotation when used to describe someone with nuanced taste in art, in food, or in human character. Then in the 1950s and 60s it developed a strongly negative connotation when describing racist attitudes — referring primarily to some white people averse to other races. In that context it was often employed as part of the phrase: “discriminate against.”

Forced, race-based, school busing is back in the news after some 2020 Democrats put their fingers up into the political winds. California Senator Kamala Harris scored points against front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden in their first debate when she criticized Biden’s sponsorship of an anti-busing bill while he was a US Senator from Delaware back in the 1970s. There actually were conservative Democrats in those days, and not a few of them either. They opposed racial segregation in schools when black students were denied admission, but could not support forced busing when imposed by a federal judge and left-wing Democrats because some schools were majority black.

In the 1960s, former Democrat Congresswoman Louise Day Hicks opposed any plan to bus Boston first graders across town and pointed out that schools in Boston’s Chinatown were majority Chinese, in the North End they were majority Italian, and in South Boston or Charlestown (where my family comes from) they were majority Irish. These were neighborhood schools and people wanted their kids to attend school in their own neighborhood. It wasn’t about race until the US government under Federal Judge Arthur Garrity made it so by forcing six-year-olds to be bused past the school on their block and sent across town because of their skin color.

The federal government’s forced busing plan was based on racial discrimination pure and simple. Then-Senator Joe Biden was right to oppose it, but he’s backtracking now and that’s no surprise. Biden has demonstrated over forty years that he goes where the wind blows. California Senator Kamala Harris resurrected that highly-charged busing issue because she would do anything to peel away support from the front-running Biden.

Biden is an old, white guy and she’s a younger black woman. In today’s Democrat Party, racial and sexual identity politics come right after abortion on its list of most important issues.

Free Everything For Everyone

What can 2020 Democrats say to the millions of Americans who have scrimped and sacrificed for a decade or more to pay off student loans? Do Democrat presidential candidates give them any thought at all when proposing to erase a trillion-and-a-half dollars of student debt that others owe? Will there be a reparations program for those who worked like slaves to pay off their loans? Or, must we pay the debts others incurred as well? Where is the justice in that?

My choice of where to attend college was based on what I could afford and Massachusetts state colleges and universities were within my reach. Others at my small, Catholic high school went on to expensive, private colleges because their parents could afford to pay, or because they took out loans. Taxpayers in Massachusetts subsidized the universities from which I graduated and I appreciate that, but I paid taxes too because I’ve worked since I was sixteen, including while I was in high school and college. I worked full-time during two years of undergrad and another two years of grad school.

Working is what I was doing while many of my peers were smoking weed and drinking beer in dorms and frat houses. Never did I take loans or grants from government, and I didn’t ask my parents for money either, knowing I was one of eight children. I paid my own way, but when my wife went back to school later in life she took out some loans because we had four children, some of whom were also going to college. We paid those loans off within a few years and celebrated the last installment.

Not only would some 2020 Democrats forgive student loans, but they’d also make college free as well. Taxpayers would fund students who major in women’s studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and other majors of questionable academic value even though there are few, if any, jobs for which those “studies” prepare them. Democrat candidates are promising all kinds of free stuff — and not just for Americans either. During last Thursday’s televised debate, a moderator asked how many of them supported free healthcare for illegal aliens and every hand went up. Two weeks ago I wrote about hundreds of illegal aliens from Africa who walked across the Rio Grande and instantly became legal by telling border guards they were seeking asylum. From Texas, they were put on buses to Portland, Maine.

The Democrats who have retaken control of Maine government are working hard to renew state welfare subsidies for the City of Portland when that city gives welfare to former illegal aliens — now asylees. California recently authorized free healthcare to illegal aliens. Most of the Democrat presidential candidates promise “Medicare For All” if they’re elected. What they don’t tell us is that hospitals and other health care providers would go out of business if they had to accept only Medicare rates for their services.

When my primary care physician (PCP) was fired from Bridgton Hospital for refusing to take on the huge caseload new management tried to impose on him, I had to search for a new PCP. My wife’s PCP had left Bridgton Hospital earlier and joined Intermed in Portland, but that practice wasn’t taking on any more Medicare patients — which is what I had become when I turned sixty-six. I understood why; they were losing money on Medicare patients. Fortunately for me, however, my wife’s PCP agreed to take me on anyway.

My point here is that private health insurance payments far exceed low Medicare rates, but even with those de facto subsidies, Medicare is still projected to go broke. Still, Democrat presidential candidates are declaring they would abolish private health insurance if elected — which would, of course, hasten Medicare’s bankruptcy. About 150 million Americans pay for private health insurance policies.

Here’s hoping I’m not wrong in my belief that voters in 2020 will realize we cannot afford what Democrats are proposing. Heck, we can’t even afford what we’re doing now with the national debt increasing at almost a trillion dollars a year. In 2019 our $22 trillion debt eclipsed our gross domestic product (GDP) and shows no sign of slowing down. The two biggest drivers of annual budget deficits are Social Security and Medicare and politicians of both stripes lack sufficient courage to tackle those “third-rail” issues.

I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will likely vote for him again in 2020 if present trends continue. However, he’s not doing much about deficit spending. He has increased economic growth with tax cuts and reduced regulation. Federal revenue is up as a result, but not enough to balance the budget. Unfortunately, the best I can say about Trump and the deficit is that the Democrats are likely to be worse than he has been.