Black Lives Matter
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Think this deserves it's own thread. With US elections coming up, expect that thread to heat up a bit.
I've moved the larger, more discussion generating posts here, but not all the one-line replies (as I got bored). If think I've missed an important one, buzz me so I can ignore you.
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This is a fantastic read. I've posted some of my wife's musings here in the past and this very much aligns with her thoughts as well. Have posted it in full for ease of reading:
Note from Editor: I was sent this and felt the need to share it to a wider audience on Twitter. I shared a link to the original post in the tweet. Then, the post was removed, and I made the decision that this is an important perspective not given an equal share in the marketplace of ideas. It is for this reason that UncoverDC now publishes it, not only because it is newsworthy, but because it is a critical piece of history. Wilfred Reily, mentioned in the letter alongside Thomas Sowell, retweeted my original tweet confirming that he personally received the email, thus verifying its credibility.
Tracy Beanz
Dear profs X, Y, Z,
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.
In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.
The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.
A counter-narrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.
Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.
If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews.
None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.
Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.
I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.
The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.
Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. No discussion is permitted for non-black victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of non-black violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd.
For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.
The claim that black interracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.
The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race,
all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.
There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship. Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.
MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?
As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors. And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise.
Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.
It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.
The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.
No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.
I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.
I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end. I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.
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@nzzp said in US Politics:
those who decide what's ok
Therein lies the problem.
That is why we are now allowed to express differing opinions on here - Google don't decide.
(A bunch of random blokes do, but the they are pretty tolerant).Actually tolerance is part of the discussion - accepting that Mr Fang thinks that all violence is newsworthy, not just the more obviously racist stuff.
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@No-Quarter thoughts on the author comparing relatively recent Jewish and Asian history/experience versus hundreds of years of black history? That was the weakest part of what was a well written statement imo. Not saying there is a competition going on here but acknowledging that there is some deep and long term history underpinning black life in the states.
Anyone caught Chappells latest musings btw?
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@Paekakboyz agree, that was the only talking point my wife and I had with it. Ignoring the historical context of African Americans that has led to them being over represented in crime and poverty. You see the same in other countries; Maori in NZ and Indigenous Australians across the ditch. You can't ignore the effects of the past on people today. But I guess the point he is making is that it is possible for people of any race to be successful today, that the system today is not explicitly racist and does not favour one group over another.
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@Paekakboyz I distinctly remember Chappelle used to be funnier!
He did well explaining the emotion behind the protests, that shouldn't be ignored but Dave like a lot of these protesting seem to be saying "Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd was murder!!!" as though people actually disagree with them. No one does, like at all. Everyone left, right, black, brown, all agree it was murder and he should be imprisoned. You're preaching to the damn quire David!. Maybe, just maybe you could find one crazy white supremacist sitting in his grandma's basement putting something pro Chauvin on an anonymous twitter account..if there is I'm sure the Guardian or Independent will find it (or create it) and set that as a front page story next week.
Chappelle listed some (most?) of the unarmed or potentially innocent black people killed by police in recent history. I think most people are pretty familiar with the names (I know I am) because they are huge stories each time. And for the most part they shouldn't never have happened (Though when you read investigation reports it isn't quite as cut and dried as Mr Chappelle says it is). What he didn't do of course..and for some reason neither does media, is compare this to the killing of unarmed white, asian or hispanic people. Surely that would be the first port of call to determine if there is a systemic racism problem in the police force rather than a number of individual problems? Why don't they do that? Shouldn't you at least look right? Or are we at the point where all statistics that don't agree with a persons point of view are automatically discarded? Are we just going to disband logic and reason and degenerate our society into chaos? I'd love to see the stats on unarmed blacks killed by police vs blacks murdered over BLM protests.
We had a thread on here year ago on 'The failed policy of multiculturalism' which at the time I thought was an insane point to make, we have problems of course but in general things were progressing ok. Looking now as activists are looking to destroy war memorial even as far away as small town NZ I'm starting to really worry about the future .
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@Rembrandt 9 unarmed black people killed by police last year. 30 something other races. Think I heard David Webb quote that or a black cop on Rubin last week. The 9 figure is what I remember best. The cop also caution that the unarmed classification doesnt account for the behaviour in that incident.
9 out of 40 million, if you want to put it that way.
And if we're going to analyse this racism thing we'll have to learn how many black police officers are involved in these confrontations too.
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@Kirwan said in US Politics:
Part that stood out for me was being pulled over the day before by the cop that killed the guy the next day.
I’m not convinced they have a racist cop problem, but they have a police brutality problem for sure.
I think they probably have both
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@Kirwan said in US Politics:
Part that stood out for me was being pulled over the day before by the cop that killed the guy the next day.
I’m not convinced they have a racist cop problem, but they have a police brutality problem for sure.
I agree on the police issue, though there are no doubt plenty of racist cops around.
But I also don't think people outside of the States can fully wrap their head around the historical context regarding race relations there. And I don't think people (both inside and outside the States) can really comprehend what it would be like knowing your direct family were slaves, and the trauma that would be passed down through the generations as a result.
The stats only tell part of the story of what has happened and how that impacts peoples lives today. As I said in my previous post, groups like African Americans, Indian Americans, Maori, Aboriginals and Indigenous Australians that have faced significant oppression and hardship at the hands of others are not doing nearly as well today as a result.
People like to throw stats relating to "black on black murder" and "percentage of crime committed by black/brown people" as a way to deflect away from the idea that racism is to blame. But the reality is extreme racism from the recent past, that is still a factor today, is a key driver for those statistics.
To generalise, at the moment a lot of what I see is people on the right basically denying racism is even a factor, and people on the left going way too far the other way and victimising the hell out of anyone that isn't white. None of this actually seeks to address any of the problems facing these communities.
I know there's no easy answer. And I strongly believe there are no obvious "good guys" and "bad guys" to blame. But much of what I see from both sides today seems to be actively making things worse.
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Also I watched the Chappelle bit and thought it was really interesting. I'd encourage people to listen to what he is saying, and try to understand where he is coming from without tying it back to anything political (particularly the "culture war" that is being waged on social media where everyone tries to one-up the other side).
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@No-Quarter I really really struggle with the notion that the lives of my grandparent's grandparents have any influence on me in the year 2020.
To subscribe to that flimsy theory is to confirm that a race of people are all born inferior to those born with no "documented" slavery.
Show me a population or society where absolutely everyone is in poverty, and I'll reconsider the idea of " ancestral oppression "
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@Siam I'm not sure how you could deny the effects when it is plain to see. To put it bluntly, children born into poverty and raised by parent(s) that are full of (understandable) resentment towards society are far less likely to be successful and far more likely to fall into a life of crime. And then the same for their kids.
That there are those who have managed to overcome that (against the odds IMO) does not mean it's not a significant factor. I don't see an issue with acknowledging that. What we do about it is a different question altogether.
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@Siam said in US Politics:
@No-Quarter I really really struggle with the notion that the lives of my grandparent's grandparents have any influence on me in the year 2020.
To subscribe to that flimsy theory is to confirm that a race of people are all born inferior to those born with no "documented" slavery.
Show me a population or society where absolutely everyone is in poverty, and I'll reconsider the idea of " ancestral oppression "
You're white aren't you mate....?
I am sure you can look right through NZ history and find examples of the indigenous people being screwed over by those in charge.
Back on the subject of the US, I watched an episode of Basketball, a love story, on ESPN. One of the players (college and NBA star), who played back in the 70s(?) recounted how his parents were essentially cotton picking slaves in the South. They got him out of the town he grew up in when he was 15 and sent him to Detroit to have a chance at a better life, because the system there would have found a way to indenture him to the cotton farm. Just like his folks. That was only 70 odd years ago
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@No-Quarter said in US Politics:
@Siam I'm not sure how you could deny the effects when it is plain to see. To put it bluntly, children born into poverty and raised by parent(s) that are full of (understandable) resentment towards society are far less likely to be successful and far more likely to fall into a life of crime. And then the same for their kids.
That there are those who have managed to overcome that (against the odds IMO) does not mean it's not a significant factor. I don't see an issue with acknowledging that. What we do about it is a different question altogether.
Those people are often very suspicious of the authorities as well. So well meaning solutions may not succeed because they can feel they have been forced on them
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It's Spencer Haywood. Read the account, you couldn't make it up, like being used as target practice by members of the local white country club