Tag: race

San Francisco will give $5,000 to help your small business, unless you’re a white guy.

No check for the privileged.

At least that’s the plan in San Francisco where they’re passing out $5k grants to small businesses, but making sure only the right kind of people get the relief.

They say they are using this as an opportunity to advance the city’s “equity goals.”

In a press release from the mayor, she says they are prioritizing “minority-owned businesses including women-owned, immigrant-owned, people of color-owned businesses,” with the money.

Tough luck, white male business owners!

For those unfamiliar with history, this is a practice formerly known as “discrimination.”

Keep reading

NYU prof: What if White Americans’ taxes were investigated for ties to slavery?

A New York University professor suggested that White people should be forced to submit their taxes to be checked for ties to slavery.

On Nov. 18, the University of California-Berkeley hosted a panel titled “The Future of Freedom: Reparations after 400 Years.” The goal of the panel was to “consider what the question of reparations means for this freedom’s fulfillment and what kind of future could follow for African-Americans beyond 400,” according to the video description. 

The panel consisted of professors Bertrall Ross and Jovan Scott Lewis, both of UC-Berkeley; Katherine Franke of Columbia Law School, and Michael Ralph of New York University.

Each professor provided past examples of reparations given to marginalized people, and said these could be examples of how to pay reparations to African Americans for 400 years of “systemic and violent racism.” 

Keep reading

The New York Times Helped a Vindictive Teen Destroy a Classmate Who Uttered a Racial Slur When She Was 15

Jimmy Galligan is an 18-year-old college freshman from Leesburg, Virginia. He may also be cancel culture’s Count of Monte Cristo.

Some months ago, Galligan—who is biracial—posted a years’ old, three-second video of a white, female classmate using a racial slur. Galligan had sat on the video for a long time, waiting for the moment it would do the most damage. After the girl—a cheerleader named Mimi Groves—was accepted to the University of Tennessee, the time had come.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” said Galligan.

The video depicted Groves, who was 15 at the time, and had just obtained her learner’s permit, saying “I can drive, [slur].” The remark was not directed at anyone in particular. The brief video clip featuring it circulated on Snapchat until it was obtained and saved by Galligan, who had grown furious at how often he heard his white classmates using the N-word.

Galligan shared it publicly in June. In response, Groves lost her spot on UT’s cheerleading squad. Then the university pressured her to withdraw from the school entirely. The admissions office had apparently received hundreds of messages from irate alumni demanding blood. Groves is now attending a community college.

This story is a powerful example of several social phenomena: the militant streak in social justice activism, the naivety of today’s teens and their not-actually-disappearing Snapchat messages, social media’s hunger for mob justice, and even the capacity for elaborate cruelty that has always existed among high schoolers. But the wildest thing about this incident is that most people will learn about it by reading The New York Times.

“A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning.” That’s the title of the Times‘s article on the subject, published the day after Christmas. Reporter Dan Levin tries to add considerable context by detailing a history of alleged unpleasantness at Heritage High School, which Groves and Galligan attended. It sits in a wealthy, predominantly white county where “slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds.”

“In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs,” notes Levin. “A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a ‘growing sense of despair’ among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students.”

Levin connects the outcry from aggrieved students to the broader Black Lives Matter movement and protests that occurred this summer following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. But nowhere does his article reckon with a very basic fact: The New York Times has opted to assist a teenager’s desperate quest to ruin the life of a young woman who said something stupid when she was 15.

Keep reading

Real headline, folks: The Votes of Black Americans Should Count Twice

Black votes in this country are worth less than white votes. Joe Biden won the Electoral College because Black voters in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia turned out in significant numbers. But even with overwhelming Black support—94 percent of Detroit voted for Biden!—the outcomes in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were worryingly close.

The Argument is a column where writers and thinkers propose a provocative idea that may not be politically realizable in the short term but that pushes one to think broader about a pressing issue of public importance.

One core problem is the Electoral College. Wyoming, which has just 580,000 residents and is 93 percent white, gets three electors because of its two senators and one representative in the House. By comparison, Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District—which includes Atlanta, has 710,000 residents, and is 58 percent Black—has no dedicated electors or senators and can only occasionally overcome the mostly white and conservative votes from elsewhere in the state. This devaluation of Black votes allows our political system to ignore Black lives, and the consequences are devastating. Unequal representation has led to unequal health care outcomes, which the Covid-19 pandemic has only worsened. Without sufficient voting power, Black communities receive substandard education, and politicians are free to appoint judges who sanction mass incarceration, abusive policing, and electoral disenfranchisement.

This is all by design. The Constitution’s framers set up the Electoral College to protect the interests of slave states. Along with the Senate, the Electoral College was critical in the endurance of slavery and its continuation by other means. Abolishing this system would mean that ballots cast by Black voters—or any voters, for that matter—would count the same.

But there’s another way to undo the damage of the Electoral College and other structurally racist political institutions: We can implement vote reparations by double-counting ballots cast by all Black residents. The poisonous legacy of slavery applies to Black people regardless of when we or our ancestors arrived in this country. Vote reparations should also extend to Native Americans. Slavery is rightly called America’s original sin, but so too was the United States’ genocidal seizure of land from its original inhabitants. Various legal forms of disenfranchisement have applied to them. It wasn’t until 1962 that all Native Americans were allowed to vote, and even then they faced—and still face—electoral obstacles. These are not the only examples of American oppression; we should include in vote reparations others who have suffered similar disenfranchisement.

Keep reading

Can’t make it up: Cornell University has a new vaccine mandate — and it only applies to white students!

Cornell University has a new flu shot mandate in order to try and keep flu cases down so healthcare resources stay open for Covid patients. But the mandate applies to white people only, because of course it does, because we live in a clown world that gets clownier by the day.

That’s right, at Cornell you can duck the mandatory flu shot by claiming your race as an exemption. Unless you’re white, obviously.

Cornell has a FAQ page “especially for people of color” that explains how victimized they’ve been by white people and thus how they can’t be expected to trust someone to require them to get vaccinated (or something?) and ends with an invitation for non-white people to send an email to the department for an exemption to the vaccine mandate.

Keep reading