TO SIGN OR NOT TO SIGN

A US Census lady knocked on my door over the weekend and asked very few questions compared to what were asked during the 2010 or 2000 census. After recording names, sexes, and birthdates of people who lived at my address on April 1st, she came to the inevitable race question which went something like: did I consider myself Hispanic? I told her I’m human; so is my wife, and that’s all she needed to know. With that she said she was all done and got up to leave.

Surprised, I asked her what the federal government would do with data about race if I had identified myself as belonging to one of its categories. She said would have had more questions if I had identified as “white.” She would have asked about ethnicities like Irish or Italian, but since I declined to racially categorize myself or my wife, she stopped. There were no questions about religion, occupation, or citizenship status — the kind of data useful to historians studying trends. Perhaps she knew I was a retired teacher, but wasn’t aware that I still work. We live in the same town and I know her and her family.

Government at all levels is obsessed with discriminating between people based on skin color or ethnicity, and has been for as long as I can remember. Decades ago I stopped cooperating. When encountering ubiquitous race questions on official forms, my habit is to draw in a box, label it “human” and put a check it. While distributing state testing forms in my public school classroom, I suggested to students that they could do the same. Many did.

Obsession with race is getting worse. At the University of Southern Maine in Portland — a state institution — president Glenn Cummings recently asked all students and faculty to sign a “Black Lives Matter Statement and Antiracism Pledge.” He intends to publish a list of everyone who signs it, and that, by process of elimination, would also become a list of those who did not sign it. Would they then be subject to sanctions or harassment?

What about students and faculty who, while recognizing historical oppression of blacks in America, disagree with BLM’s anti-capitalism or its inherent Marxism? How about those who object to a pledge by BLM’s Greater New York president Hawk Newsome that: “If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it”? Or how about those who disagree with Chicago BLM organizer Ariel Atkins who said BLM rioters looting stores were justified because: “That is reparations. Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.”

The University of Southern Maine pledge states that:

We stand in solidarity with those who are working for justice and change. And we invite you to join us in pledging to be a practicing antiracist at the University of Southern Maine and in all aspects of your life. We believe, as Ibram Kendi writes, that "the only way to undo racism is to constantly identify it and describe it — and then dismantle it.”

Never having heard of Ibram Kendi, I did searches on him. His latest book is: How To Be An Antiracist. About it, Christopher Caldwell contends in National Review:

Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

This is dangerous rhetoric. It assumes that “systemic racism” is a real thing — that if you’re white, you were born with “white privilege,” as well as inherent racism against so-called “people of color.” If you don’t sign pledges like the one USM President Glenn Cummings urges you to sign, if you don’t kneel during the national anthem, if you don’t constantly proclaim that you’re not racist, you might as well proclaim that you are. The USM “community” will no doubt see you as such.

USM is a state institution. It’s supported by our tax dollars and it shouldn’t be pressuring its students or faculty to support political positions, much less radical-left ideologies like those espoused by Black Lives Matter. Along with almost all levels of government, USM is obsessed by race. We would all do better to insist there is only one race — the human race — and no subsidiaries exist.

Division Dynamics

Some call him the most divisive president ever. Some say he’s also the worst while others say he’s the best. He’s been in the White House a year now. Will he serve out the four-year term for which he was elected? Not if Trump-haters have their way. They’ve been looking to prevent that since before he was inaugurated.

Even his supporters acknowledge his numerous and obvious flaws, but will overlook them so long as he fulfills his campaign promises. Many expected his narcissism to subside but, alas, it has not, nor is it likely to. President Trump has suffered the most relentlessly negative media coverage in living memory, perhaps of all time, but it hasn’t diminished his opinion of himself. Even former President Carter remarked: “I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about. I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

According to Justice Antonin Scalia's friend, Brian Garner, “Scalia thought it was most refreshing to have a candidate who was pretty much unfiltered and utterly frank.” That’s a summation of Trump upon which both his supporters and detractors will agree. Scalia may have liked him as a candidate, but whether he’d have liked Trump to be elected we’ll never know because he died ten months before election day. One of Trump’s first actions as president was to nominate a Supreme Court justice as much like Scalia as possible.

Hoping to cripple him or remove him, Trump-haters focused at first on alleged collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin to win the election. That comprised the bulk of media coverage ever since he defeated Hillary Clinton even though no evidence has emerged to support it after intense investigation by the FBI, several congressional committees, and a special prosecutor for over a year. The only evidence of Russian collusion found so far has involved the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign, but Trump-haters are not inclined to follow those threads.

Collusion allegations have thus faded. To get rid of Trump, detractors are searching for other means. The special prosecutor isn’t limited to Russian election collusion; he can investigate anything he chooses, and he is. The special prosecutor who went after President Clinton two decades ago was appointed to investigate a shady Arkansas real estate deal called Whitewater, but instead probed not only sexual harassment but consensual sexual escapades as well. When Clinton lied about those under oath, he was impeached. Something similar could happen to President Trump.

As President Carter pointed out, some detractors claim he’s deranged and would invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. That’s never been attempted and would be a long shot at best. So now what? Mainstream media are currently in high dudgeon about allegations that Trump used the S-word to describe El Salvador, Haiti, and some African countries while negotiating immigration policy with Democrats. Accusing the president of saying sh** isn’t going to outrage many people so media are claiming the president is “racist.” Though not so in El Salvador, most people in Haiti and African countries are black. Therefore, calling them “sh**hole countries” is tantamount to racism, they insist. It’s a stretch, but mainstream media are riding it for as much mileage as it will bring them.

During a visit by the prime minister of Norway, Trump is said to have asked why we can’t have more immigrants from that country. Because most people in Norway are white, media continued piling up their “Trump is racist” coverage. Locally, Maine’s Portland Press Herald editorialized:

“This was the white nationalist vision of America that was promoted by Trump and his disgraced adviser Steve Bannon in the campaign. It is a view of America that was embraced by some large numbers of voters, who cheered Trump’s vision of a fortress America, where dark-skinned immigrants were kept out by a great wall.”

Really? Trump and Bannon “promoted a white nationalist vision of America”? Their slogan was “America First” and that’s certainly nationalist, but where and when did either of them ever say anything about skin color? Trump organized a lot of rallies and made a lot of speeches. Can the Press Herald cite anything he said to support its claim? The paper has promoted the “Russia/Trump collusion” story for a year without evidence. Now it has jumped to accusations of “white nationalism” without evidence as well. 

Is Trump dividing America, or did America’s divisions exist before he was elected? What might those divisions have been? Left vs right? Class divisions? Coastal elites vs heartland? College-educated vs non-college-indoctrinated? All of them? Was Trump elected because of those divisions? Whatever divisions there were, they’ve widened considerably since the election, but who is driving the wedge? Trump supporters or Trump haters?

Slurs Not Working Anymore

Racist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist — all these epithets now aimed at Donald Trump and his supporters used to be directed my way. Why? Because I was a teacher who taught students to think critically. I was “poisoning young minds,” said leftists who believed they knew better how issues should be covered in public school — their way and no other. I didn’t just offer “both sides,” because seldom are there only two. I offered multiple viewpoints on controversial issues, encouraged each student to pick what sounded best and defend it. I fostered the kinds of diversity that genuinely improve education: diversity of thought and opinion. To many on the left — and it may now be accurate to say most — the only kinds of diversity that count are those of skin color, sex, or ethnicity. However, Those don't help if everyone thinks alike, and that’s how it is throughout academia now, kindergarten through graduate school.

About once a month, I wrote up classroom Socratic dialogues and published them, maybe two hundred or so. Most of my other columns expressed my own opinions on the issues of the day and after about 1993 or ’94 those opinions were increasingly conservative. Many readers on the left assumed I was pushing my opinions on students and tried to have me disciplined, silenced, fired, or have my teaching license pulled. All along the way, letters to the editor appeared with the slurs listed above. I read them in class and students were surprised.

“But you don’t tell us what to believe,” they responded.

“Evidently they don’t know that,” I’d answer.

“We should all write letters back and tell them,” some suggested.

“You can if you want,” I’d say, “but not in class. You have to do it on your own.” Several did.

There were classroom dialogues on affirmative action in which I’d explain how racial quotas worked in college admissions, hiring, and awarding public contracts. After publishing those, I was “racist.” There were discussions about jihad and Koranic verses encouraging Muslims to kill infidels, etc. After them came “Islamophobic” slurs. We discussed illegal immigration and I described what I saw after flying down to the Mexican border. After those came out, I was “xenophobic.” We discussed referendum questions on Maine’s ballot about gay rights, gay marriage, partial-birth abortion, Indian casinos, and others. After writing up them up, I was “homophobic”; “misogynist” ; “racist”; and so forth.

When I read those letters aloud in class, students asked: “Don’t they bother you?”

“They did at first,” I responded, “but they don’t anymore. Calling me ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’ doesn’t make it so. Name-calling indicates the writers have run out of arguments, and slurs are all they have.”

I enjoyed playing devil’s advocate with students. It was easy to parrot arguments from left, right, or middle because I held them over the years. Like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I had been an Alinskyite radical. Then I moved right to become a liberal before finally emerging as a genuine conservative in my forties. My evolution, as described first by either Georges Clemenceau or Winston Churchill, went thus: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re forty, you have no brains.” Unless they read my column regularly, students didn’t know what I really thought.

Efforts by leftists to have me silenced or removed from teaching flared up sporadically for ten or twelve years and I kept a file throughout. After retiring, I wrote it up and tried to shop the manuscript around to various agents with no success. Times are a-changin’ however, as witnessed by the evening and morning of November 8 and 9. Liberals controlling media were shocked to discover that, like me, there are millions out here who have become inured to their ubiquitous slurs. They shot everything they had at Donald Trump and others who didn’t march in lockstep, then sat back expecting their favored candidates to win as they always had, and were shocked when they didn’t.

From 9:00 pm Tuesday night and 1:00 am Wednesday, I flipped through the liberal news channels: NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and ABC. Pundits were all lined up but gone were the smug expressions of election nights past. They were ashen — all of them. How could we have been so wrong? they asked each other. Why did all those “working class” white guys switch to Trump? Did they not listen to us? Well no, they didn’t. They heard you cry wolf for decades and they’re not listening anymore.

Maybe it’s time to shop my manuscript around again. I had been calling it “Poisoning Young Minds,” but maybe it’s time to call it something else. “Teaching While Deplorable” perhaps? “Irredeemable Instructor”? "Privileged Pedagogue”? I have to think about this.

White Privilege? Oh Please...

Been thinking lately about teachers and cops. Both are besieged by left-wing, multiculturalists and results are disastrous for schools, cities, and everywhere else. The left needs a public perception of pervasive white racism and it’s stoking the fires whenever it can. Reality has little to do with the campaign, and our mainstream media is assisting whenever they can. Former Attorney General Eric Holder saw this effort as his primary responsibility. According to an article in National Review Online:

“When Department of Justice officials arrived in Ferguson, Mo., one day after the death of Michael Brown, it wasn’t just to conduct an investigation on potential civil-rights violations. In fact, officials from one Justice Department office were conducting meetings with Ferguson residents to educate them on subjects such as ‘white privilege.’”

First Holder put out the notion that a higher percentage of black men in prison as opposed to white men was in and of itself proof of racial discrimination by cops and courts, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that black men commit many more serious crimes than whites. Then he and President Obama accused white teachers and principals in public schools for creating a “pathway to prison” by suspending a higher percentage of black teenagers than whites. Again, both ignored overwhelming evidence that black students misbehave much more than white students. It’s racial discrimination, they insisted, ordering schools to reduce black suspensions.

Leftist educators feeling guilty for being white ordered staff indoctrination in “white privilege,” the trendy notion that white people are unconsciously racist and need to acknowledge, then shed their “privilege.” Completely ignored are fifty years of Affirmative Action during which blacks have been given privilege over whites in hiring, granting of public contracts, and college admissions.

The St. Paul, Minnesota school district spent over $3 million to educate white teachers and principals about their “privilege.” EAGnews (Education Action Group) had to file Freedom of Information requests to learn the amount the district spent over a five year period. The money went to an organization called Pacific Educational Group founded in 1992 which offers conferences around the country at which caucasian teachers can flagellate themselves for their “White Privilege” and their sins of unconsciously propagating “Systemic Racism.”

According to a New York Post article by Paul Sperry: “[Pacific Education Group does] the racial-sensitivity training of teachers as part of professional teacher training workshops, reprogramming them to think that THEY are the problem, not the misbehaving kids, that their ‘whiteness’ and ‘cultural insensitivity’ is the reason African-American students tend to be, on average, more disruptive and violent than other students and tend to underperform academically.”

“Some of the teachers come out of the workshops sobbing,” wrote Sperry. “It’s classic brainwashing.”

St. Paul’s school behavioral policies were modified to make sure the number of suspensions for black students was the same as that of white students based on the percentage of each in the student population. That is, there were racial quotas for suspensions. Once the quota for black suspensions was reached, no more could be suspended until the white quota went up too. Meanwhile, misbehaving black students were given “time outs” instead, as recommended by the all-knowing and all-wise Pacific Education Group.

And how is that working? It’s a disaster. According to City Pages:

“At John A. Johnson Elementary on the East Side, several teachers, who asked to remain anonymous, describe anything but a learning environment. Students run up and down the hallways, slamming lockers and tearing posters off the walls. They hit and swear at each other, upend garbage cans under teachers’ noses. Nine teachers at Ramsey Middle School have quit since the beginning of this school year. Some left for other districts. Others couldn’t withstand the escalating anarchy.”

On another level, cops face a similar quandary. President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and countless mainstream media outlets fabricate the narrative that “racist,” white cops are to blame for the crimes of young black men. When they’re told to stand down in the face of looting and arson in Baltimore, to use only one example, chaos reigns. “No,” insisted Baltimore’s black police chief Anthony Batts, according the New York Daily News. Cops were not told to stand down. Rather, they were instructed: “Do not engage,” as if there were any difference.

Anthony Batts

Teachers are demoralized when told they are the reason for disruptive behavior by black students. They back off and chaos takes over. Cops are demoralized when they are blamed for the crimes of young black men. They back off and crime skyrockets. Chaos reigns in cities across the country.

Just a few of the killer gang members in Chicago

Even in rural Maine where I live, cops are demoralized. They go into law enforcement thinking of themselves as the good guys who are there to protect people from bad guys. They take their “To Serve and Protect” motto seriously. The Obama Administration and mainstream media assault on the character and integrity of all police has enormous effect on morale. That 95% of “racist” incidents are fabricated or exaggerated is the worst part. It’s all so unnecessary.

How will it all end? Not well, I’m afraid. We still have another year and a half before it can even begin to get better.

Asinine Education Officials

September’s coming, so let’s look at the latest way our federal government screws up public schools.Black students are suspended or expelled far more than white students - 350% more. President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, claims it’s because of white racism. I think that’s baloney. Black students are disciplined more because they misbehave more, but it doesn’t matter what I think. Liberals are in charge of the US Department of Education, most state education departments, and all teachers’ unions. What they think is what matters. They think they can solve the problem the same way they try to solve so many other social problems - by blaming it on racism and spending money on it.

The result is always the same too: It gets worse and we go further into debt because nearly half the money they spend is borrowed from China. Obama Administration officials and civil rights advocates like to repeat one phrase, according to Heather MacDonald, writing in her City Journal essay Undisciplined: the “school to prison pipeline.”

They think racist schools steer black students to prison. They believe white racist discrimination causes poverty and poverty causes crime. They’re completely stuck in that sixties mindset and cannot think any other way. That would be fine, but they’re running our schools and spending billions. MacDonald points out that white boys are suspended or expelled twice as often as Asian or Pacific Islander boys, but administration officials ignore that. It doesn’t fit their world view.Neither do they seem to notice correlation between black misbehavior in schools and the black murder rate. “The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined,” writes MacDonald. “Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.”Why the blindness? It’s easy to explain. These officials are all devout members of the multicultural priesthood. They mustn’t look at cultural clues among black students like fatherlessness, drug use, (c)rap music, domestic violence, graffiti, sexual behavior, “ebonics,” generational welfare, domestic violence - to name just a few. It’s okay to bring up those things if you’re going to blame them on racism, but if you were to suggest that the black community itself might share responsibility for any of it - or might even foster it in some cases - you’d be quickly labeled “racist” and shunned.

In graduate school during the 70s, I was trained to apply standardized tests to students measuring intelligence, achievement, and various other learning abilities. If I obtained low scores measuring intelligence, there were items to rule out lest it skew an individual student’s profile, and one was “cultural deprivation.” It had to be considered when trying to determine if a student had enough gray matter to learn what the school was trying to teach. In other words, he might be intelligent but his culture was holding him back. But as I said, that was back in the 70s. Writing anything like that in a student’s folder today would be dangerous to one’s career.

When black students or any other students are suspended or expelled, follow them out to their cars. Watch them struggle to get in with their pants hanging down below their asses and their hats on sideways. What do you hear as they pull away? Even if you’re deaf, you would likely feel the air around you literally vibrate from a deep base box in the trunk with a (c)rap music beat. Listen to the anger and hate in the “ebonic” lyrics. There are definite cultural clues there about what may be affecting their behavior, but Arne Duncan and his ilk have to ignore them. To acknowledge them would force a modification of their entire world view.

(C)Rap is the signature music of a sick, black subculture. Unfortunately though, it’s celebrated in countless award ceremonies televised around the world. It’s worshiped and glorified by Hollywood and by students of all races and it’s not good. It’s poison, and the solid black Christian culture from which emerged people like the Reverend Martin Luthor King Jr. wanes as the sick, black subculture spreads.American Heritage Dictionary defines multiculturalism as: “The view that the various cultures in a society merit equal respect and scholarly interest. It became a significant force in American society in the 1970s and 1980s as African-Americans, Latinos, and other ethnic groups explored their own history.”To the multicultural priesthood, I’m obviously a heretic and I don't march in their parade. I believe that good and bad are perfectly fine adjectives to use when describing culture. Cultural trends that degrade women and kill children are bad. Cultural trends that nurture them are good. Our educational elite doesn’t seem to get this because they drink multicultural Kool-Aid every day. That’s how they “race to the top” of their profession. And yes, the puns are intentional.

Regardless of race, students who misbehave must be removed from classrooms lest they deprive others students of their right to education. Anyone who doesn’t understand that shouldn’t be making education policy. They shouldn’t be in the profession at all.

Mainstream Media Racism

Our liberal Mainstream Media (MSM) has few qualms about stoking racial resentment. For example, we all know who the late Rodney King was. Why? Because we were bombarded with reports of his beating by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Having seen the video countless times as every other American over forty has, I’m persuaded the police were much more violent than the situation seems to have called for - beating King with a nightstick after he was prone and kicking him as well. That’s very difficult to justify. Their acquittal led to the worst black riots in LA history, killing 53 people, injuring 2383, starting 7000 fires, damaging 3100 businesses, and numerous black racist assaults against whites and Koreans.

We all know who Trayvon Martin was too. Why? Because we’ve been bombarded with coverage of his death. We’ve seen countless images of him as a sweet, 12-year-old boy with soft eyes who died after buying some iced tea and Skittles. We’ve been told that his killer, George Zimmerman, is a “white Hispanic” racist who killed the sweet little kid because of he was black and he was wearing a “hoodie.” Later, it emerged that Trayvon was six foot three, was on suspension from school for drug offenses when he was killed, and had earlier been in possession of burglary tools and a bag of women’s jewelry. He also had a Twitter account on which he called himself “NO_LIMIT_N***A” (without the asterisks). He’d evidently claimed to have assaulted a bus driver on this account and chose a more recent picture of himself looking anything but the sweet little boy with skittles. You won't see it in the Mainstream Media though. Are any pictures available showing George Zimmerman as a nice young man? Probably, but you won't see those either.

The facts of the King case have been thoroughly aired, but not so the Martin case. That the MSM chooses to magnify some information about that unfortunate killing that serves their agenda and ignore other information that contradicts it is the problem. News anchors like Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley, and their ilk on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, etc. would be indignant with the opening statement of this column and deny it vehemently, but it’s nonetheless true. They so over-report or sensationalize white-on-black crimes and so under-report or ignore black-on-white crimes, that Americans of all races get distorted views of what’s really happening out there.

More than 90% of blacks are killed by other blacks, but the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson don’t show up to protest those killings. Why not? Because they make their livings propagating the notion that young black men are under siege by a white power structure and not their own malignant subculture. In this, they’re assisted by the MSM who smugly think they know best what Americans should hear about and not hear about. Sharpton has his own show.Black-on-white crimes outnumber white-on-black crimes by a wide margin. According to Heather MacDonald writing in National Review Online:

There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined.

If you relied only on the MSM for your understanding of the problem, however, you’d likely conclude that it’s white racists who kill the most blacks. Young black men are far more dangerous to other young black men than white racists, but that’s not what the MSM depicts. And why is that? Because it doesn’t fit the collective world-view of the coastal, urban, elite, liberal, cocktail-party set that comprises the MSM. When Senator Barack Obama described red-state America as comprised of people who “get bitter and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them as a way to explain their frustrations,” he mirrored MSM condescension toward the broad middle of America. He was speaking to elite liberals in Marin County. To them, we’re ignorant rubes. We’re not as sophisticated as they are, so we can’t possibly understand that we are the problem. Young black male killers? They’re our victims. If MSM reporters really want to look for racists, they'll find more looking in the mirror.

Making things worse, young black men see the same skewed MSM reports and believe them. As a result, many feel justified when they target whites, Jews, or Asians. Some sing about it and the Hollywood elite glorifies their (c)rap “music” with televised award ceremonies. They even get invited to the White House.
The Mainstream Media are steadily losing audience share because they’re not the only show in town anymore. Americans are getting more balanced reports from alternative sources which reflect more accurately what they see around them, and that’s going to continue. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to deal with the widely-held misperceptions resulting from decades of skewed MSM reporting.