I. Breakfast at the IHOP
Waitress: Would you like sausage with your pancakes, sir?
Congressman John Lewis: Whatchu saying to me, lady? You trying to kill me with all that fat and cholesterol? I didn't march with Martin Luther King so I could be offered sausage with my pancakes just because I'm black, you know.
Congressman John Lewis: (under his breath) Got better service at the Kresge's lunch counter.
II. Coffee at Starbucks
Starbucks barista: Should I leave room for cream, sir?
Congressman John Lewis: Hell, no, son. Take a look at me. I take my coffee . . . black! You know what color cream is? White!
Congressman John Lewis: (under his breath) Don't understand why Starbucks always hires these pasty young racist kids.
III. Lunch at the diner
Counterman: If you want some crackers with your soup, here you go.
Congressman John Lewis: What did you say?
Counterman: Crackers. Right here.
Congressman John Lewis: No, sir. I . . . do . . . not . . . like . . . crackers. Like you.
IV. Back home in the evening
Lillian Lewis: Hi, dear. How was your day?
Congressman John Lewis: Now, don't you go talking to me like that old racist b****, Lurleen Wallace.
Story. Also here. Related.
UPDATE: "A careful review of my earlier statement would reveal that I did not compare my wife to that old racist b****, Lurleen Wallace," Lewis stated. "It was not my intention or desire to do so. I compared her 'talking' to that old racist b****'s talking. My statement was a reminder to all Americans that I'm a senile old racist, myself."
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
October 12, 2008
A day in the life of Congressman John Lewis (D-GA)
July 04, 2008
Fourth of July linkfest
For the Fourth of July, instead of re-posting old July 4 posts, I'm going to bring you a linkfest. OK, I'll re-post one old post, too, but here's the linkfest.
1. While we're appreciating our independence and our freedom, some of our fellow Americans are not. Two years ago, I wrote about one such individual. And this week, a peculiarly repellent column out of the City of Brudderly Lub by a dude named Chris Satullo, who wants to cancel the celebration because "we have sinned." (via Stop the ACLU, via Ace) You already know the rest. No reason to read the column.
2. From last week: At the Seattle Mariners' ballpark, love is dead. (via Baseball Crank)
3. Mars, Saturn, and Regulus are converging in the evening sky.
4. "Police suspect giraffe in circus breakout."
5. Drink to Obama's victory? The tee-shirt.
6. Speaking of Obama, Jennifer Rubin explains his problem with Jewish voters in a single word, er, number: 1973.
7. If you're a white dude in England, whatever you do, don't call a white security guard "Honky!" (via HotAir)
8. Finally: A definition of torture.
9. It's hard to believe, but Maryland is only the 19th most corrupt state in the union. Should be higher.
10. David Wissing says you are what you Google. Anyone who's read my "Visitor of the day" series would have to agree.
11. New York dude moves to Atlanta and finds that "New York style" pizza in the South exemplifies major suckitude, so he returns to New York to "reverse engineer" real New York pizza. (via Fark)
12. Last but not least, for the woman concerned about "pelvic fitness," your own spa. (via HotAir) In case you don't understand, the New York Times article explains: "And now comes the first medi spa in Manhattan wholly dedicated to strengthening and grooming a woman’s genital area."
June 05, 2008
Historic? Duh.
Every first grader knows we've never had a black president, and every second grader knows that no major political party has fielded a black candidate for president.
So, then, tell me this: Why do the "scholars" interviewed by the Washington Post feel they're telling us anything by saying this nomination is "historic"?
On the other hand, at least one of them can't contain himself:
Older scholars seemed more cautious in their evaluations. Leon Litwack, 78, retired professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a book on the aftermath of slavery, said he had "strong doubts about whether the American people could really elect Obama. . . . There are still strong feelings about race in this country; it is still a very significant factor in American life. I think it still remains, in many respects, a racist society."So the argument really is that if we don't elect Obama, it proves we're racist.
I have two words for you, buddy. Just take a look at the photo of Obama at the top.
May 22, 2008
Obama and the condo wars
Right after the 2004 presidential election, I wrote a piece that discussed the fact that a surprising number of Jews seemed to have voted for Bush but were keeping quiet about it. It was called "The hidden Jewish vote."
An article in the New York Times today (hat tip: Son of the Right Hand) makes me wonder whether things are getting even more complicated this year. Quoting a number of older Jewish voters in Florida, the article talks about the problems Obama may have with these people, especially because of fears about his views on Israel.
Ace is really peeved about it, by the way. He makes the valid point that the article minimizes the Jewish voters' concerns about Obama's foreign policy and blames the negative views toward Obama on racism and false rumors about him. I would not deny, of course, that there are some older Jews who hold unfair negative opinions of blacks. But in fairness to them, it's based on fear and the generalization of particular experiences, rather than on conventional hatred. The man in the article whose mother was "mugged and beaten by a black assailant" is a good example. (I'm not trying to explain it away, just to explain it.)
But I look at the article through a different lens.
If you read the piece I wrote on the hidden Jewish vote, you'll see a discussion of what Judith Weiss called "the condo wars." In 2004, this same group of older Jewish voters was fighting with each other, and the hostility directed at Bush voters was boiling over. Some of these Bush voters decided to shut up about it to avoid the hostility.
What interested me about today's article is that these older Jewish Floridians were more willing to discuss in public the possibility that they would commit heresy by voting for the Republican. And one line, directed by one woman at her daughter, an Obama supporter is even more interesting:
“Aunt Claudie will kill you!” hissed her mother, Linda Poznak, 47, who said she would vote for Mr. McCain.So now we have family pressure to vote for a Republican? Wow! It's all the more surprising, because the Democrat is (or likely will be) a black man. Bradley Effect, anyone?
I suspect, though, when all is said and done in November, most of these folks will vote for Obama. It's just too difficult for them to change.
The Times article concludes by mentioning their congressman Robert Wexler's vow to "convert voters one mah-jongg table at a time." Wexler is an Obama supporter. But the article finishes on a note that's too optimistic for me: "Still, Mr. Wexler admits, he has not yet been able to persuade his in-laws to vote for Mr. Obama."
It doesn't say they're supporting McCain, just that they're not supporting Obama.
UPDATE: Soccer Dad shares Ace's annoyance.
April 27, 2008
Sunday evening linkfest
Passover has (finally) ended, and now, once again, it's time for a linkfest of links that have been forming plaque on the walls of my intertubes for the past two weeks or so. Some of them are seriously OLD, but I want you to have them, anyway. Please stay with me till the end, because way at the bottom of this post, I have a couple of future classics from the Sunday New York Times that are almost worth the price of the paper.
1. In the past couple of weeks, the biggest issue in politics, in case you're a Japanese World War II fighter who's been holed up in the Pacific until yesterday, has been whether Obama flipped the bird at Hillary while speaking to his supporters following the final debate in Pennsylvania. The Hillarosphere demands to know. And Baseball Crank has another photo that may provide circumstantial evidence.
2. The Democrats' Nightmare Scenario (via Instapundit)
3. More popcorn, please!
4. McCain goes to NOLA, and an African-American participant at a town-hall meeting says this: "I want to inform you that everybody in the camp here is not a Republican." Does he mean (a) literally no one is a Republican, or (b) colloquially, not everyone is a Republican? Who cares, anyway, besides anal-retentive grammar wackos like me?
5. As Warner Wolf might have said, if you studied math in school since about 1961 . . . YOU LOST! On a related topic, Hillary Clinton does some math trolling for delegates and votes from Michigan.
6. Gov. O'Malley calls a special session of the legislature to pass a law declaring the official state dessert of Maryland. (Only kidding about the special session. Beats the hell out of raising our taxes, though.)
7. The man-cave: "Like most stories that end up with a man mowing his friend's lawn in a dress, it started out innocently enough." (via Fark, of course)
8. Sometimes it pays to test your personal machinery before reporting its theft by voodoo to police. As the police chief himself put it: "'I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke,' Oleko said.
'But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, "How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it",' he said."
9. Public Service Announcement: Be careful when eating in Canadian restaurants.
10. "Le Petit Singly is a farm that specializes in making cheese from women's breast milk." (via Ace)
11. This one's so old, it's already been overtaken by events. You remember the McLean school that banned tag in the schoolyard? Well, tag's back, but not before a week of "reorientation lessons on playground safety." I swear I'm not making that term up.
12. Patch (for women) aims to make you (not you, you) feel sexy. (via Ace)
13. Rick Monday saves the flag. In 1976. But now, there's a video.
14. American expat in Paris whines about the falling dollar. My heart bleeds.
15. False advertising from Moron Pundit: a very non-moronic defense of the tax deduction for child dependents.
16. Doubleplusundead on more misery with McCain. For me, if you want to know why McCain hasn't sealed the deal with conservatives -- I'm going to vote for him, anyway -- read George Will's column this morning. Two words: campaign finance.
17. The Children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt by a Pharaoh who took great pleasure in persecuting gays, who were brutally forced to arrange flowers for the Egyptians. Hence, the orange on the seder plate. Funny, I had always heard that it was supposed to represent Pharaoh's fear of the vagina.
18. And finally, the moment you've been waiting for -- the two classics from today's New York Times: (a) In the travel section: "In 2007, nude recreation represented a $440 million industry — up from $400 million in 2001 and $200 million in 1992." (b) In Sunday Styles: A family adjusts to the father's sex change -- "Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change."
March 18, 2008
Tuesday linkfest
Once again, I'm here with the extra links I've been saving for no particular reason. Some of them are, in internet terms, pre-historic. But I'll let you make the judgment.
1. Before I begin, I want to mention doubleplusundead, the latest addition to my regular, non-Maryland blogroll. DPUD is a moron. (You'll understand what I mean by that if you read Ace, who's a self-described moron-blogger.) In fact, DPUD has a frequent feature of "links from around the moronosphere," covering the other morons. Since I'm an idiot -- but also an honorary moron -- I've been included a couple of times. Check DPUD frequently, because there are a lot of amusing posts over there.
2. While American forces are doing the hard work, the folks in Prescott, Arizona, are singing kumbaya and erecting a peace post at the fifth anniversary of our intervention in Iraq: "A new monument stands in Prescott - a simple wooden pole bearing the same phrase in four different languages: May Peace Prevail On Earth." (via SondraK, who has a mouseover making fun of this)
3. The Daily Show goes to Berkeley, home of anti-Marine radicalism. Hilarity ensues.
4. Enthusiastic about voting for John McCain? No, but you'll force yourself to do it, anyway? Here's your next stop: The Reluctant Voter (hat tip: fee simple)
5. Eliot Spitzer isn't the only rich dude who uses high-end escort services. "'With the wealthy,' Mr. Prince says, 'it's all about power and control and new experiences.'" (via Fark)
6. Going on a date in China? Looking for a restaurant? Here's my recommendation: "There are several varieties of steamed, roasted and boiled penis at Beijing's quirkiest diner." (via HotAir)
7. Ten great inventions for St. Patrick's Day. Sorry I missed posting this yesterday. Save it for next year. Or consider it on Purim, which falls on Thursday night.
8. "Neocon" transportation policy? (via Heh, indeed.)
9. Shelby Steele on Barack Obama on race bargaining: "And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were 'challengers,' not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin."
10. In my family, we have a running joke about enraged bees. There was a story some years back about a truckload of bees that overturned near the Tappan Zee Bridge, which runs over the Hudson River near where I grew up, and the article referred to "enraged bees." ("When the trailer overturned on the westbound exit ramp leading to the Thruway at 8:35 A.M., millions of the enraged bees emerged.") Today's story of an overturned truck carrying bees comes from California: "Millions of swarming honey bees were on the loose after a truck carrying crates of the insects flipped over on a California highway." This article doesn't mention enraged bees, but it refers to "bee wrangling": "Bradley said several beekeepers driving by the accident stopped to assist in the bee wrangling."
UPDATE (3/19): 11. Too good to pass up. Feminist Marianne Williamson (video): "Well, first of all, I'm not going to vote with my vagina."
12. Ten people to avoid at the ballpark. (via MetsBlog) Some of the comments are better than the post.
March 11, 2008
A Harvard professor goes to the movies
Prof. Orlando Patterson: I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw Macauley Culkin, that pasty blond boy in "Home Alone," defending his house, I immediately thought of the son of the plantation master keeping the slaves out. You see the black faces lurking in the bushes . . . and don't tell me those burglars are white, 'cause it don't mean s---. What's important is the image, and the image is of white America in gated communities keeping the black man down and locking him out.
Prof. Orlando Patterson: Yeah, and don't even get me started about the way they treat O.J. in "Naked Gun."
UPDATE (3/12): Double or nothing from the prof.
January 21, 2008
A dream
The real "I Have A Dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bill Clinton has a dream during an MLK Day speech (screenshot and video at link).
October 17, 2007
Wednesday linkfest
1. They made the trains to Auschwitz run on time: A poll of Germans finds that 25% say that National Socialism had some good things about it. (via Hot Air)
2. "Yeah, that's the first thing I would notice to look at them." -- Baseball Crank, quipping about a Reuters article in which Lynne Cheney's disclosure that Big Dick and Barack "Messiah" Obama are eighth cousins is found puzzling: "The two men could hardly be more different. Cheney is an advocate for pursuing the war in Iraq to try to stabilize the country, while Obama wants to get U.S. troops out of Iraq."
3. The Washington Post is amazed -- amazed! -- that when Republican candidates speak to a Jewish group, they're aware that they're speaking to Jews.
4. "'A police officer who did not tell me he was a police officer just yelled, "shut the f up." I yelled back, "mind your f'in business." That's as far as it went,' Herb recounted." This has got to be the best line in a news story for at least this week, maybe longer. Dawn Herb, a West Scranton (PA) woman frustrated with an overflowing toilet, let loose with some bad language -- and was given a disorderly-conduct citation for her troubles. The Volokh Conspiracy weighs in with some analysis of the Pennsylvania statute under which she was charged. Picture here.
August 07, 2007
Competition and marriageability
When I was in college, my black roommate once complained about a black classmate who had announced to her black friends that she would never marry a white guy. My roommate thought this was extremely intolerant of her.
I defended her. More precisely, I said I could understand her position. I told my roommate that I planned to marry within the faith and that while there were many perfectly wonderful women in the world who were not Jewish, I didn't plan to marry any of them.
In today's Best of the Web Today, James Taranto notes a news story about black women who are beginning to shake off the rules imposed by their mothers against dating and marrying white men. He argues that the story would not have been told in as sympathetic a light if the races had been reversed.
That's true, certainly, but it isn't his main point. He argues that anti-white prejudice is more harmful to blacks than anti-black prejudice is to whites. Blacks who refuse to marry whites rule out 87% of the population (actually, it's quite a bit less, because there are other races), while whites who refuse to marry blacks rule out only 13% of the population. Of course, it's harmful only if there's something wrong with the men who are black. The news story suggests there is, at least in the minds of black women: "She reflects many black women frustrated as the field of marriageable black men narrows: They're nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than white men and more than twice as likely to be unemployed."
So it may well be true that refusing to consider marrying white men hurts black women, but Taranto goes on to make a more debatable argument: that the attitudes of black women actually cause (in part?) the unmarriageability of black men.
What the AP misses is that the unmarriageability of black men is an effect as well as a cause of black women's attitudes. Competition for mates is an important incentive for young men to succeed in the economic marketplace, to be willing to make romantic commitments, and otherwise to behave responsibly. If a large number of black women are unwilling to consider dating or marrying nonblack men, this competitive pressure on black men is vastly reduced, and with it the incentive to succeed.This is interesting economics but dubious sociology. Although I know nearly nothing about the sociology of American blacks, I do know a small amount about the sociology of Jews over history.
Through most of the two-millennium history of the Jewish diaspora, Jews did not intermarry with non-Jews. Given that Jews were always a minority in the societies in which they lived (modern Israel, of course, excepted), Taranto's theory should have applied to them. If Jewish women were unwilling to consider marrying non-Jewish men, and limited themselves to their own small minority group, why didn't this reduce the pressure on Jewish men to succeed? (Yeah, I know; they all had Jewish mothers. Very funny.)
Not only didn't it reduce the pressure on Jewish men to succeed but it may in fact have increased the pressure to succeed in a culture that valued marriage highly. If there were limited marriage choices among the Jewish women in the community, and only Jewish women were marriage candidates, surely the more successful Jewish men would get the more highly prized women. (In some communities, the best young scholar would be matched up with the daughter of the leading rabbi. In others, presumably, the most successful young man would get the woman from the wealthiest family.)
Which leads me to believe that Taranto's economic theory leaves out a critical factor: the importance of marriage in the subculture. In the Jewish subculture through the ages, marriage was valued above almost all else. In modern America, regardless of religion or race, marriage is valued somewhat less, and it appears that among contemporary black men, marriage may be valued even less. If marriage were a focal point of American black culture, it wouldn't matter if blacks insisted upon marrying only within their race. There still would be pressure for men to succeed and to become marriageable, despite the smaller group of potential wives. But since marriage is not terribly important to black men, why should anyone think there would be any competitive pressure on them to succeed in order to marry?
June 28, 2007
Compare and contrast
"In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race." Justice Harry Blackmun, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) (separate opinion).
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (2007).
June 18, 2007
Stacking the deck against Justice Thomas
A book-review editor can elicit a positive or negative review of a book (and the subject of the book) simply by choosing a reviewer with known views.
You know all you need to know about the New York Times's feelings toward Justice Clarence Thomas (as if you didn't know it already) when you see that the Times Book Review assigned the review of "Supreme Discomfort, The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas" to Orlando Patterson. Patterson, a respected black intellectual, is a sociologist, not a lawyer. If the Times had had any interest in examining Justice Thomas's legal views, it would not have offered the review to a non-lawyer.
Why is that relevant? Justice Thomas has been a member of the Supreme Court for 15 years and, contrary to the ever-present sneers about his taking orders from Justice Scalia, he has developed a strong and individual jurisprudence over that time. You'd barely know this from reading Patterson's review.
First, Patterson assumes, without bothering to argue for his position, that affirmative action is good. Thus, he suggests that Justice Thomas is, if not a hypocrite, at least a very bad man for not recognizing that he himself was a beneficiary of affirmative action. As part of a longer bill of particulars,* Patterson writes:
It is incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces the policy and has persuaded himself that it played little part in his success.But has Patterson even read Justice Thomas's separate opinion in the Grutter case regarding the University of Michigan Law School's admissions program? For Patterson, the legal arguments seem to be irrelevant; he cannot contemplate the possibility that Justice Thomas might be correct. Had a lawyer reviewed the book, the lawyer would have had to give those arguments the respect they deserve, even if he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Patterson does admit that "recent evaluations of his opinions by scholars like Henry Mark Holzer and Scott Douglas Gerber indicate that [the arguments] should be taken seriously," but even this is a cop out, as Patterson himself recognizes when he adds, "Well, by lawyers anyway." Patterson, as I've suggested, cannot be swayed and does not even try to make a pretense of open-mindedness.
Second, when Patterson does try to weigh in on Justice Thomas's opinions, he gets it wrong. Patterson says, about Justice Thomas's 1992 dissent in Hudson v. McMillian, that "notoriously, he has held that beating a prisoner is not unconstitutional punishment because it would not have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers," but that's demonstrably wrong. What Justice Thomas actually wrote is that cruel and unusual punishment was traditionally understood as limited to sentences and that it was not concerned with prison conditions: "For generations, judges and commentators regarded the Eighth Amendment as applying only to torturous punishments meted out by statutes or sentencing judges, and not generally to any hardship that might befall a prisoner during incarceration." The same applied, he explained, to early commentators on the Constitution. This is quite different from saying that prison beatings wouldn't have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers, as Patterson claims he said. Justice Thomas also wrote that in his view, "a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortious, it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not 'cruel and unusual punishment.'" That is, the fact that it wasn't cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment didn't make it lawful.
In short, instead of giving Justice Thomas the respectful treatment that any other justice would get, with an analysis of his jurisprudence, the Times stacks the deck against him. Patterson doesn't bother with Justice Thomas's opinions at all, and barely considers his views, except in caricature.
Mission accomplished.
_______________________
* You really have to read Patterson's entire bill of particulars to believe it:
Thus, although he seriously believes that his extremely conservative legal opinions are in the best interests of African-Americans, and yearns to be respected by them, he is arguably one of the most viscerally despised people in black America. It is incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces the policy and has persuaded himself that it played little part in his success. He berates disadvantaged people who view themselves as victims of racism and preaches an austere individualism, yet harbors self-pitying feelings of resentment and anger at his own experiences of racism. His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives. He frequently preaches the virtues of honesty and truthfulness, yet there is now little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings — not only about his pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v. Wade.Most of this is grotesquery. For example, Justice Thomas's respect for state power does not mean he would ignore the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and allow an anti-miscegenation law to stand. And there may be "little doubt" at Harvard that he lied at his conformation hearings, but those outside the academic Left have great doubt indeed.
June 11, 2007
And loving it
Tomorrow being the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down a state ban on interracial marriage, Jeff Goldstein decided to have a conversation with Senator Robert Byrd’s (D-WV) Grand Kleagle hood.
I highly recommend it. And stay with it to the very end.
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