It’s no surprise, in today’s race obsessed political environment, to find yet another instance in which race is being used to deflect from troubling behavior or bad news. This time, the entire idea of ethics is being challenged as racist. You see, there are just too many black members of Congress being investigated for corruption.
Politico reports complaining, and cries of racism, coming from the Congressional Black Caucus regarding the number of their members currently in the spotlight for ethics violations.
The politically charged decisions by veteran Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel of New York and Maxine Waters of California to force public trials by the House ethics committee are raising questions about race and whether black lawmakers face more scrutiny over allegations of ethical or criminal wrongdoing than their white colleagues
…The question of whether black lawmakers are now being singled out for scrutiny has been simmering throughout the 111th Congress, with the Office of Congressional Ethics a focal point of the concerns. At one point earlier this year, all eight lawmakers under formal investigation by the House ethics committee, including Rangel and Waters, were black Democrats. All those investigations originated with the OCE, which can make recommendations — but take no final actions — on such cases.
There’s a “dual standard, one for most members and one for African-Americans,” said one member of the Congressional Black Caucus, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The article continues on without the authors ever once considering the most obvious explanation. Maybe CBC members are being “disproportionally” investigated because they are disproportionally unethical.
This explanation is not to say that blacks are more likely to be unethical than whites. Rather, I think there are other forces at work.
Politicians, as 
a general rule, are scum. It doesn’t matter what race they belong to. They would almost all commit the worst of crimes if they thought they could get away with them (and many do think this quite often, usually to be proven right). The question is, in so far as they do hold back from unethical behavior, what is the cause and why might it impact some politicians more than others?
The answer to the first question is easy. Politicians are interested in getting elected. If they think something will harm their electoral chances, they will usually refrain.
The next question, then, is whether there is any reason to believe that black politicians are less likely to be punished by their voters for ethical violations than white politicians.
Black politicians tend to be elected in overwhelmingly black districts, often gerrymandered for the purpose of ensuring “minority” representation. Their voters, having been inundated with destructive identity politics propaganda for generations, have come to believe that they can only be fairly represented by someone who looks like them. Race becomes the dominant qualifying criteria in these districts, much more so than other electorates. White politicians are hardly ever voted for simply for being white (it wouldn’t make sense to do so even if some voters were so inclined, as they are usually running against white opponents). The same is not true of black politicians. A corrupt black politician is still preferable to a white representative under this racial representation paradigm.
Black politicians are thus taught by their electorates that they are entitled to their positions. Nothing they do can justify removing them from office, for the simple reason that they can never lose their color, the defining characteristic in the world of identity politics.
While career politicians who routinely commit ethics violations are ultimately to blame for their actions, the voters who avert their eyes from such behavior have to take their share of the responsibility for creating politicians, like Charlie Rangel, who think that they are above the law. If the Congressional Black Caucus really wants to know why so many of their members are running afoul of what little ethics enforcement politicians can muster to bring upon themselves, maybe they should start by asking their voters to care more about the character of their representatives, instead of their color.
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British moonbats have taken political correctness to a whole new level:
Leave a commentWilliam Hague was last night plunged into a row over new Foreign Office rules which ban white males from gaining work experience at his department.
…Under the tightly-drawn rules, only women, people from ethnic minorities and the disabled are entitled to apply for a chance to work at one of the great offices of state.
…Westminster sources last night said the programmes came about after Robin Cook, the former Labour Foreign Secretary, arrived at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s headquarters in Whitehall and was horrified to see so many former public schoolboys working there.
Last night, the FCO insisted the schemes were legal and were designed to appeal to students who might not normally consider a career in the FCO.
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The ongoing Shirley Sherrod affair is the sort of issue I often don’t get to until late in the game, if at all. I’m always loathe to be dragged away from actual issues to talk about gotcha scandals, merit or no. In this case, however, I think there’s an aspect being overlooked in the discussion I’ve seen elsewhere. Thus, it’s time to weigh in.
For some background, Sherrod was employed at the USDA until very recently, when she was fired by the White House after Big Government posted video of her recounting how she let her racism impact her work at a previous job. Specifically, she didn’t want to help a white farmer, and instead pawned him off on “one of his own kind” to deal with.
After she recounted her story, however, her speech turned into a mea culpa. She advocated that the NAACP get passed such naked racism (and instead focus on class warfare). The White House is now groveling and they are looking to get her job back. Good for her. End of story, right? A clear cut case of an overreaction to an old speech taken out of context? Not quite.
First of all, the context was never hidden in the piece posted by Breitbart. The end of the video clip he posted contained her mea cupla, and she simply expanded on that point later. Sherrod was never Breitbart’s target anyway, the NAACP was.
But that’s not the important point. What I’ve seen no one else talk about is why her firing was, in fact, justifiable. Yes, she no longer admits to being an open racist. I’m happy for her. But her problem wasn’t simply that she was racist, it was that she let her bias impact her work.
That she no longer holds that particular bias, according to her, doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be similarly unprofessional for other reasons. What if she decides she doesn’t like people who didn’t vote for Barack Obama, or don’t hold her same political views? Will she refuse to assist them, as well? She’s proven a willingness toward such unprofessional behavior in the past, and it’s perfectly reasonable for an employer to conclude based on such that she isn’t someone they want on staff.
Granted, it’s also reasonable to conclude that something which happened so long ago isn’t necessarily indication of how she behaves today. People deserve second chances. The point is, her firing is not unreasonable on its face.
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With the latest blockbuster reporting from the Daily Caller on Journolist, the defunct liberal media mailing group started by WaPo’s blogger savant Ezra Klein, the worst perceptions of the liberal media have been confirmed. They conspired to not only to shield candidate Obama from legitimate negative stories, like his connections to the bigoted Reverend Wright, but also to smear conservatives as racists for no other reason than to distract from Obama’s weaknesses.
1 commentAccording to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
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The NAACP, which by definition only cares about the welfare of those of a particular race, has decided to pass a resolution condemning the Tea Party, an organization which welcomes all Americans, for its “continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements,” and the resolution “calls on the tea party and all people of good will to repudiate the racist element and activities within the tea party.” This is the same moronic organziation that called a Hallmark audio card racist because it said “black holes,” which they claimed was actually “black whores.”
Anyway, in response to the resolution, Big Government has posted a serious of posts by black conservatives condemning the NAACP for its blatant partisan gimmick and reprehensible behavior.
- I Condemn the NAACP: Where Is the Evidence of Tea Party Racism? by Deroy Murdock
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Has Tarnished its Reputation by Jerry Brooks
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Has a Selective Memory on Race by Mychal Massie
- I Condemn the NAACP: Call Me a Racist! by Rich Holt
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Should Stand With Tea Parties by Lisa Fritsch
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Is Grossly Out of Touch by Darryn “Dutch” Martin
- I Condemn the NAACP: Screaming ‘Racism’ Discredits the Organization by Ak’Bar A. Shabazz
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Needs to Wake Up! by Emery McClendon
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Has Lost its Way by Jimmie L. Hollis
- I Condemn The NAACP: They Are Obsessed With Identity Politics by Robin Martin
- I Condemn the NAACP: The New Black Panther Party Are the Real Racists by Deneen Borelli
- I Condemn the NAACP: It Has Been Taken Over by the Hard Left by Kevin L. Martin
- I Condemn the NAACP: Get Back to Freedom by R. Dozier Gray
- I Condemn the NAACP by Marie Stroughter
- NAACP Is Not At All Serious: They’ve Missed the Real Issues by LTC Allen West (USA, Ret.)
Understanding why they have decided to pass this particular resolution at this particular time is simple: the Tea Party is relevant; the NAACP is not.
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On Saturday the New York Times printed a collection of op-eds from various “legal experts,” describing “the kind of justice the court needs.” Here’s the list they came up with:
- A Politician
- A Veteran
- A Young Person
- An Evangelical
- A Nonbeliver
- An Immigrant
- A Gay Person
- An Asian
- A State Politico
- A Great Heart
The scourge of identity politics has so permeated our society that not a single one of these “legal experts” thought to recommend “A Good Judge.”
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In my recent post on Bill Gate’s exclusion of whites from his scholarship, I insinuated that Bill Gates might be racist by saying that people are free not to purchase the products of such a person. What I didn’t do was explain my terminology, which lead to James Joyner of Outside the Beltway asking the question, “Does Bill Gates Hate White People?”
Brian Garst observes, “Now, he is free to direct that his money be spent however he pleases. The rest of us, likewise, are free not to purchase the products of a racist.” He’s right on both counts. But is Gates really a racist?
First, to state the obvious, Gates looks, um, white. I mean, he could be the archetype of whiteness. Granted, there’s such a thing as self-loathing. But charges of racism against your own kind do tend to require a higher burden of proof.
Second, the stated purpose of the Gates Millennium Scholars program is “is to promote academic excellence and to provide an opportunity for outstanding minority students with significant financial need to reach their highest potential.” Given that whites remain the majority (if not for long), we’re excluded by definition.
Both of these points are valid. I don’t think Gates hates white people, or has anything against white people at all. One possibility that Joyner missed, however, is that Gates might see non-whites as less capable, and therefore in need of special advantages. That kind of paternalistic racism is hardly uncommon these days. I don’t actually know that Gates sees non-whites in that way. I give him the benefit of the doubt and just assume that he has been sucked into the popular culture that has come to treat minorities in such a fashion without second thought. But one thing I hammer over and over again on this blog is the idea that something doesn’t have to be hateful to be racist. Identity politics is, by its very nature, a form of racism.
Whites are not a minority, but men are (a fact often obscured since the word “minorities” is often preceded by the words “women and.”) Why is race a pertinent characteristic and not gender? Left-handed people are a minority, too. What makes race more worthy of singling out than any other such characteristics? Nothing, other than the fact that so many people cannot look at another human being and see anything other than their race. That’s a kind of racism.
Is Bill Gates doing good with his scholarship? Absolutely. But his decision to bring in a characteristic absolutely irrelevant to education as a qualifier is a hallmark of the kind of racism that I despise, precisely because so few realize how destructive it is. After all, it isn’t hateful. Yet no matter how well meaning, this kind of identity politics perpetuates and exacerbates tensions between races for no good reason. It is just this kind of paternalistic racism that prevents us from ever reaching the day when we look at our neighbors and just see Americans, without any hyphens.
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This is not a new story, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Apparently Bill Gates has explicitly barred whites from applying for scholarships from his foundation. In order to qualify, an applicant must check the box for either African American, American Indian / Alaska Native, Asian Pacific Islander / American, or Hispanic American.
Now, he is free to direct that his money be spent however he pleases. The rest of us, likewise, are free not to purchase the products of a racist.
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Another leftwing myth shattered:
Today is Equal Pay Day. Feminist groups and political leaders have set aside this day to protest the fact that women’s wages are, on average, 78 percent of men’s wages. “This date symbolizes how far into 2010 women must work to earn what men earned in 2009,”says the National Committee on Pay Equity. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has enlisted supporters to wear red “to represent the way the pay gap puts women ‘in the red.’” There will be rallies, speak outs, mass mailings of equity e-cards, and even bake sales featuring cookies with a “bite” taken out to represent women’s losses to men. The National Organization for Women (NOW) suggests women gather together at local bars for “Un-happy Hours” where they can share their dissatisfactions. “See if a local bar, club, or restaurant (try the women-owned ones first!) will give you drink specials [where] women pay 78% of their tabs and men pay 100%.”
I seriously doubt women are paying for 78% of their drinks to begin with. Sorry, back to the smack-down:
Leave a commentExcuse me for interrupting, but this holiday has no basis in reality. Even feminist economists acknowledge that today’s pay disparities are almost entirely the result of women’s different life choices—what they study in school, where they work, and how they balance home and career. This is not to deny that some employers will try to pay Jill 78 cents and Jack $1.00 for an identical job. But our strict laws give Jill the right to take that employer to court. The claim that American women as a group face systemic wage discrimination is groundless.
…Psychologist Susan Pinker has aptly noted that men are more likely than women to give priority to salary and promotions over personal fulfillment. Women are not as ready to sacrifice their deep interests in, say, history, psychology, or public policy—“all in order to fix, sell, or distribute widgets” or “to spend the best years of [their lives] planning air conditioning ductwork for luxury condos.” Men also work longer hours and are more willing than women to take dangerous but well-paid jobs as truck drivers, loggers, coal miners, or oil riggers. (My American Enterprise Institute colleague Mark Perry has suggested we designate October 11, 2020, Equal Occupational Fatality Day. That is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2008 alone. )
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Another video challenging leftwing racism:
My favorite line: “I’m afraid of the President because he’s a white man. What does Keith Olbermann have to say about that?”
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
