Jesse Jackson, The Emperor of Black People, Speaks About Racism

Do I have to apologize now?

I will be writing more stuff on Jesse Jackson in the near future for reasons soon to be revealed, but until then, I thought I would just comment on this sentence from him. I don't know if the quotation is exactly right, but it comes from our friend, Tony Krickl at the Claremont Courier. He quotes Jackson as saying,

"[Minorities] have achieved freedom but not equality. From the last 5 graduating classes from this school [CMC], the white student went on to make more money than the black students. They have more life options, because that’s the real world."

Ah!!! Too many variables! Is that supposed gap a function of black students' choice in major or is it a function of racism? How do you figure for such things as SATs scores (which are a good predictor of freshmen GPA and vary widely with race) overtime when that data isn't released on the basis of race? And what about that sample size? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, affirmative action ends up hurting those black students in their choices because employers don't know if they are good students or deserved application to CMC in the first place? Hmmm....one has to wonder.

P.S. Lest I be called a "racist," let me just say that the phrase "emperor of black people" comes from South Park.

Thoughts on Sapphire At the Ath Tomorrow

Not all Sapphires are gems

No, I won't be going to see Sapphire come to the Athenaeum tomorrow night -- I really can't go to the Ath ever single night, folks -- but I would welcome any notes of anyone who is able to make it.

For those who don't know, Sapphire wrote that novel, Push, which served as the basis of the film, Precious, which is easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen. (Fortunately, I didn't pay for it.)

For those wanting to know why Precious is easily one of the worst films of the decade -- and yet overly hyped movies -- see this review by John Nolte that just savages it. (By the way, I really, really like John Nolte's work and remember early freshmen year when I smoked a cigar with him at the John Bolton dinner. He was quite the gentleman and gave me some good advice on blogging.)

Anyways, I saw Precious after reading a review of it on the website, Big Hollywood, and saw it compared less than favorably to one of my favorite movies of the past year, The Blind Side. I didn't just like The Blind Side because of its message. I liked it because it shows a vision of race as it really is. (Naturally, Hollywood removed the churchgoing of the heavily Christian family, but hey, the Christians seem to have known what was up anyways and turned it into a blockbuster film.) Here's a rather long excerpt of the film review comparing these two films.

And so we get Precious. Trapped in an apartment with her government-subsidized mother, who allows her boyfriend (Precious’ own biological father) to do unspeakable things to her from infancy onward; lost in a school system that ignores her, and bound by her own ignorance, she escapes the horrors of her life by living in a fantasy world of pop culture dreams that flicker across her television, and she is utterly failed by every government system created to save her. The government monopoly on public schools fails to educate her; the Social Services Department fails to protect her; the welfare system fails to lift her out of poverty.

But if Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was instead the secretary of Health and Human Services, undoubtedly she would say, “The system worked.” It certainly worked for Precious’ mother, who knows exactly how to work the system, as we see whenever she bats her eyes and plays the victim for the social workers who fall for her act and keep the checks coming.

And in fact, in Precious, the system does work in exactly the way it was designed. The system was created by liberals to make themselves feel good, not to bring any actual benefit or relief to victimized children like Precious. She and her countless counterparts are doomed by dangerously mistaken liberals who think:

“I will vote to create taxpayer-funded bureaucracies that will fix this problem by taking up a forced collection from all my fellow Americans, and I will never have to get my hands dirty or do something disgusting like open my home to her, or actually do anything to help her myself. I will let the government take care of her, and since I vote for Democrats who create these bureaucracies, I have helped her, and I am better than those selfish Republicans.”

And if you think that assessment of liberals is too harsh, just remember: these are the same people that define their goodness by their Prius and their mulchers, and the way they meticulously sort their trash into different colored bins. When you think you can save the planet just by carrying your reusable bag to Trader Joe’s, there’s really no need to do anything really difficult or icky like becoming a Big Brother or a foster parent or adopting a child.

Which brings us to those awful conservative Christian Republicans in The Blind Side. Michael Oher, one of thirteen children born to a drug-addicted mother living in public housing, whose life up to that point had probably been somewhat similar to Precious’, is walking down a freezing cold Memphis street in only a T-shirt when Leigh Anne Tuohy drives past him and says to her husband Sean, “Turn the car around.” His life is changed forever, by an awesome act of love and kindness from a private citizen.

The insane and utterly racist backlash from some quarters against The Blind Side seems to boil down to this: rich white people shouldn’t be adopting poor black kids. And as usual, this stupidity does not come from the right, but from the bigoted statists on the left, who want to protect the government mechanisms they have constructed to keep these problems out of their sights.

Left out of The Blind Side, apparently, were the long lines of black families that the Tuohys elbowed out of the way in order to get their white hands on Michael Oher. What sort of person could argue that Michael Oher — or Precious, for that matter — would be better off staying in the system if the alternative is to be taken care of by white people? And what kind of an idiot would think that a family would take on the responsibility of another human being and feed him, clothe him, pay for a tutor to help him learn, all just to get him to play football for their alma mater?

The best way to deal with this hateful nonsense is to dismiss it completely, as Leigh Anne Tuohy demonstrated, in her inimitable style, on 20/20:

Deborah Roberts: What do you say to people who say they feel a little offended that this white couple took this black kid in and tried to kind of mold him into what they wanted?

Leigh Anne Tuohy: No one has the guts to say that to my face. No one has ever said that to my face and if they did I would tell them don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

At the end of Precious, a bracing dedication comes up on the screen: For Precious Girls Everywhere. Perhaps the saddest fact in the comparison between these two films is that this might be one instance where the fictional character is more real than the true-life character. After all, there is only one Michael Oher, adopted and loved by Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, now the Baltimore Ravens’ left tackle.

But how many Precious girls and boys are still out there, trapped in a system that works only to keep them in it, waiting for a Leigh Anne Tuohy to say, “Turn the car around?”

But this being the Athenaeum, we would never invite someone who actually, you know, helps solve a racial problem of this magnitude. Instead, as she's a guest of the campus for Martin Luther King day, we are going to be exposed -- yet again -- to a failed welfare ideology that doesn't work and that creates thousands of Preciouses. But if anyone wants to ask a tough question for me (and I'm not holding my breath here), ask her why it is that we continue these failed welfare policies. I'd sure like to know.

Claremont Authors in the Pages of The Weekly Standard

The Weekly Standard continues to print some rather fantastic articles by Claremont McKenna-affiliated writers.

I have already blogged on the article, "Mugged by Ultrasound," by David Daleiden and Professor Shields, but now it seems as if other CMC professors and alumni have been printed in its pages.

Government Professor and director of the Salvatori Center, Mark Blitz, has written a review of a book on the life and work of Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher whose close embrace of Nazism colors some of his thought and lectures. Titled, "Natural Reich," it is worth reading, especially for students who have taken Blitz's introduction to political philosophy.

Finally, John B. Kienker, managing editor of The Claremont Review of Books (where I am an employee), has written a review of Matt Spalding's We Still Hold These Truths. Unfortunately, the review is gated -- you'll need a Weekly Standard subscription -- but on the off chance that it becomes available, here's the link.

If the name Spalding sounds familiar, it ought to. Spalding is a graduate of Claremont McKenna (and Claremont Graduate University) and is the husband of CMC Washington semester program Professor Elizabeth Edwards Spalding.