Tag: race

Activists Demand Reparations for Latinos for Land Under Dodger Stadium

Activists are demanding reparations for land in the Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles that currently sits under Dodger Stadium, part of a broader movement across California that has focused thus far on African Americans.

The New York Times reported Wednesday on “the growing call for reparations from descendants of the people who lived where Dodger Stadium was built.” It cited reporting earlier this month by Jesus Jiménez, who wrote:

[I]n the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles began displacing the residents of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop, through voluntary purchases and eminent domain, with plans to build a housing project in the area.

It was never built, and eventually, after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, the team acquired the deed to the land. A condition was that the team build a stadium with capacity for at least 50,000 people.

…

The last of the families were forcefully evicted by sheriff’s deputies in May 1959. One woman, Aurora Vargas, who was known as Lola, was infamously photographed being carried out of her home by deputies. An article in The Los Angeles Times on May 9, 1959, described the scene as a “long skirmish.” Vargas was kicking and screaming and children were “wailing hysterically,” the newspaper reported.

The activists formed an organization in 2018 called Buried Under the Blue. They drew encouragement from the successful effort to obtain restitution for the original black owners of Bruce’s Beach. As Breitbart News noted:

The owners, Willa and Charles Bruce, purchased the land in 1912 and created a beach resort catering to black clients before the city used eminent domain to seize the property.

The land was dormant for decades until the city built a park in 1960 and later renamed it Bruce’s Beach. Descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce sued, claiming the eminent domain program was racially motivated.

The website for Buried Under the Blue states that the group’s mission is “to preserve our history of our three destroyed communities” and “[t]o empower and educate all people to create healthier communities, sustainable communities, and maintain historical documents for self-determination.” While the Times describes the group as “Latino,” the website refers to the former inhabitants of the area under Dodger Stadium as “indigenous.”

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Bill Maher: Why Aren’t Major Black Celebrities Asking Why Black People Are Killing Each Other In Cities Like Chicago?

HBO host Bill Maher on Friday said Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson was “excusing horrific behavior” in a speech he delivered following several shootings in Chicagoland last week and questioned why black celebrities with large fanbases do not have opinions on these issues.

“Most of the shootings [in Chicago] are young black men killing other young black men. Is that not correct?” Maher asked.

“Yeah that’s correct,” guest Glenn Loury responded.

“Okay, much more than what the cops do. Why doesn’t anybody talk about that? Why aren’t there a hundred giant black celebrities who would have the respect of those people saying what are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?” Maher asked.

“It dishonors our community. Come on, we’re better than this,” Loury said.

“Right,” Maher responded. “It’s never addressed.”

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Segregation forever? Atlanta separates blacks from whites in ‘academic recovery’ summer program

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) took more than a year to open an investigation into allegedly intentional racial segregation in Atlanta Public Schools and purported retaliation against parents who complained.

The feds may soon face a similar complaint: keeping predominantly black and white elementary schools apart in a summer program intended to mitigate learning loss due to COVID-19 policies.

The nonprofit Committee for APS Progress asked district officials why majority-black Hope-Hill Elementary School in Atlanta would not be housed on the same site as “the rest of the cluster schools” in Midtown — majority-white Mary Lin, Morningside and Springdale — for this summer’s Academic Recovery Academy, a departure from last summer.

The program website confirms that HHES, which has far smaller enrollment than each of the other three, will continue meeting at its own site while the others will meet at Mary Lin. Only three APS elementary schools among 40 are being kept alone for the summer program.

The arrangement resembles a larger version of the race-based “affinity groups” that are popular in higher education but have prompted litigation when applied to K-12 students and municipal employees. OCR has received several complaints about affinity groups for faculty, according to anti-woke medical advocacy group Do No Harm.

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Newly-Elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Said Black People Should Not Face ‘State-Sponsored Policing’

Chicago’s new Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson told a group organizing for a “police-free future” that black people should be removed from “state-sponsored policing” as a way to fight “white supremacy.”

During the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, Johnson came out in support of the “defund the police” movement and spoke on a panel titled “We Don’t Call Police: A Town Hall on a Police-Free Future” in which he praised organizers for pushing “an agenda that actually can transform people’s lives,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

“And part of it is removing ourselves away from this, you know, state-sponsored policing,” he said, “but also the tools that have been placed against Black folks that have been used violently, whether it’s policing, or administering standardized tests, or … around how white supremacy finds its way in every facet of our lives, that we have to fight and resist that.”

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Agatha Christie Books Get Woke Makeover, Join Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming

The sensitivity readers have found another target: Agatha Christie.

Books by the acclaimed mystery author—who was born in the 19th century and passed away in 1976—have been edited, ostensibly to comport with modern sensibilities. “The new editions of Christie’s works are set to be released or have been released since 2020 by HarperCollins, which is said by insiders to use the services of sensitivity readers,” noted The Telegraph. “It has created new editions of the entire run of Miss Marple mysteries and selected Poirot novels.”

As was the case with recent edits to the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, the changes hardly seem necessary; there are few readers clamoring for them. The sensitivity readers, who are hired to rewrite texts and prevent offense, are making the books less colorful and descriptive. In the original Death on the Nile, some characters were described as Nubian—as in the ethnic group from the region of Nubia in northern Africa—but no longer. A character in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who was referred to as a Jew—because, well, he is a Jew—is now just a person. And a servant identified as black no longer has a race at all.

It’s one thing to change outdated ethnic references or references that specifically malign a specific race. Christie is no stranger to that: Her 1939 book, And Then There Were None, was originally published under the name Ten Little Niggers in the United Kingdom, where the racial slur was not as broadly offensive. (The book was named after a children’s rhyme.)

It’s quite another matter to delete all references to ethnicity because… why do it? Who is offended by knowing the race of a specific character? Should books cease acknowledging Africans, Jews, and Indians?

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CNN Blasted After Lecturing People Not To Use ‘Digital Blackface’

Mass backlash has ensued after a CNN report accused white people of using ‘digital blackface’ by posting memes of black people’s reactions as a way of expressing their feelings about situations.

In the piece, headlined What’s ‘digital blackface?’ And why is it wrong when White people use it, CNN writer John Blake states the following:

“If you’re White and you’ve posted a GIF or meme of a Black person to express a strong emotion, you may be guilty of wearing ‘digital blackface,”

Blake argues that such memes and gifs are “radicalized reactions,” and that while black people “get a pass” for using them, white people posting them have “inadvertently perpetuated one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism.”

Blake goes on to declare that the use of the memes by whitey is a “modern-day repackaging of minstrel shows.”

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Kidney Transplant Controller Wants To Distribute Human Organs Based On ‘Equity’

If someone donates one of their kidneys and later needs a new one, should they go to the top of the transplant waitlist? Yes, say good people. Yes, say normal people. Not anymore, say the bureaucrats in charge of the transplant waitlist. Instead, they say it’s time for a “more equitable approach.”

Currently, the people at the top of the kidney transplant waitlist are people who have donated one of their organs to someone else (living donors), young children who are a great biological match with an organ, and patients who are very hard to be matched with any organ. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is a private non-profit that holds a contract with the federal government to run the transplant waitlist, and they want to change that. UNOS wants to remove these “hard boundaries” in favor of a new system that erodes the protections for living donors.

A report commissioned by UNOS envisions a drastic reduction in prioritization for living donors — going from the current virtual guarantee of getting a new kidney to a slight bonus on the waiting list — equivalent to as low as 10 percent of the total prioritization score. This policy would betray those who have already donated an organ and discourage others from donating in the future. They are pushing this policy even though their own research shows that changing from the current policy will not reduce death rates but lead to a higher rate of failed kidney transplants in the first year after surgery.

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Why so many Canadians pretend to be indigenous

‘Pretendians’ must be among the fastest growing cultural groups in Canada. A Pretendian is someone with little or no indigenous background who pretends to be indigenous. The latest to be uncovered is Vianne Timmons, president of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Last week, Timmons was forced to apologise for misrepresenting her background and is now taking a leave of absence.

Timmons claimed in CVs and elsewhere that she was descended from Mi’kmaq First Nations peoples. A recent CBC News report questioned whether or not Timmons actually had any First Nations ancestry at all. Looking at her family tree, the report found that she is probably only one-1024th to one-2048th indigenous.

Timmons’ story is noteworthy because she is a high-profile academic. She is director on the board of Universities Canada. She was named as one of Canada’s Top 100 most-powerful women in 2008 and was the 2013 winner of the Saskatchewan Humanitarian Award from the Red Cross. In 2017, she was even named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her lifetime contributions to inclusive education, family literacy, indigenous post-secondary education and women’s leadership.

Timmons even accepted an Indspire trophy – ‘the highest honour the indigenous community bestows upon its own people’ – while holding an eagle feather. At that ceremony, she claimed that her father once told her: ‘We’re Mi’kmaq, but I was raised to be ashamed of it so I hid it, all my life.’ In 2021, Timmons spoke about ‘discovering’ her indigenous roots: ‘It’s like trying to find your story that somebody hid from you, not just hid from you, but changed for you.’

Timmons is far from the only high-profile academic to have claimed minority status on dubious grounds. In 2016, author Joseph Boyden, an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction about First Nations Canadians, faced doubts about his claims to indigenous ancestry. A 2020 CBC investigation raised similar concerns about filmmaker Michelle Latimer, whose film, Inconvenient Indian, won the People’s Choice Award for Documentaries and the award for Best Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2021, the CBC revealed that Carrie Bourassa, Canada’s leading indigenous health scientist, appeared to be of entirely European ancestry. She had to resign her position at the University of Saskatchewan. Last year, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond – a former judge, scholar and another recipient of the Order of Canada – was also found to have made inconsistent claims about her heritage.

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Woke VA middle school bars Whites, Asians from joining college prep program

Cooper Middle School in McLean, Virginia sent out an email inviting students to apply to the College Partnership Program (CPP) offered by Fairfax Country Public Schools (FCPS). The email to parents outlined the criteria for application, which indicated that Black students and Hispanic students can apply. But the same correspondence also stated that all non-disabled Asian or White students whose family members have attended college are not welcome to the CPP.

Those who are accepted into the program can avail of academic counseling, college experiences, assistance with completing college and scholarship applications, a summer experiential learning opportunity and receive news and information related to colleges and careers.

The exclusion of White and Asian students from the CPP criteria appears to be intentional. As per the website of FCPS, a “typical CPP student” is either Black, Hispanic, native American or native Alaskan.

Cooper Middle School’s racism did not sit well with many parents in the school district. One lawyer whose child is enrolled at the school said the CPP was problematic.

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Stanford University Accused of Racial Engineering, Reducing Number of White Students

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is the end product of the left’s obsession with equity.

The Stanford Review reports:

Stanford’s Racial Engineering

Stanford’s enrollment rate for white students in the Class of 2026 was 22%, a drop from 40% for the Class of 2016 just ten years ago. While Stanford claims that “the University does not use quotas of any kind in its admission process,” a further exploration of Stanford’s enrollment statistics by the Review reveals that the university has seemingly taken part in racial engineering over the past several years—practically exchanging white applicants for Asian applicants while holding other racial group enrollment rates constant.

Over an eleven-year period, the data demonstrates that Stanford has decreased enrollment of its white students by approximately 15% and increased the enrollment of its Asian students by about 10%. All other racial groups, however, have remained roughly the same.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke that racial quotas were unconstitutional. Stanford claims to comply with Bakke, but the data points to a different story. Black and Hispanic enrollment rates for the Class of 2026 vary only by 0.76% and 0.44% from their enrollment rates for the Class of 2015, respectively. Whites and Asians in the Class of 2026, however, vary by 12.35% and 8.37% from their enrollment rates over a decade ago in the Class of 2015.

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