Tag: racism

They told a famous story about being abducted by space aliens. A new book says it’s really about racism

There is the sound of fear in a voice: a sudden gasp, a stutter or a suppressed scream. And then there is the sound of stark terror: an adult losing all control, blubbering and gasping for breath like a kid facing their worst nightmare.

That sound of unimaginable terror is what a psychiatrist recorded when he put a man named Barney Hill under hypnosis in his office one day in 1964. Hill was a World War II vet, a big guy with a Darth Vader baritone voice and an IQ of 140.

But when the psychiatrist asked him to relive a fateful night three years earlier, he broke down in hysterical sobbing. He said he and his wife, Betty, were tracked by a mysterious light on an isolated highway in the New Hampshire mountains one night and abducted by humanoid creatures in a UFO who forced them to undergo medical examinations.

The story Hill told would become arguably the most famous UFO abductee story ever. One historian said the Hills were the “Adam and Eve of alien abduction” stories. The couple’s tale was turned into a best-selling book and a movie starring James Earl Jones, and it has provided the template for nearly every depiction of an alien encounter in pop culture since.

A new book, however, claims that the story isn’t so much about aliens as it is about race. The Hills, an interracial couple who were also civil rights activists, told a story that reflected their growing disenchantment with the slow progress of the civil rights movement, says the historian Matthew Bowman in “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America.”

As America prepares to celebrate Halloween, Bowman’s book offers an unexpected racial dimension to the famous story. He, and others, have recast it as one of the spookiest stories about racism in American history.

Keep reading

Stanford Lecturer Suspended After Separating Jewish Students, Labeling Them As ‘Colonizers’

A lecturer at Stanford University has been suspended after he allegedly forced Jewish students to stand in a corner while labeling them as “colonizers.” He also praised and justified the recent terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas, referring to the jihadist group as “freedom fighters.”

Students told the San Francisco Chronicle that the professor, who has been identified as Ameer Hasan Loggins, opened two classes on Tuesday by stating that the day’s lesson would focus on “colonialism.” He then proceeded to blame the current conflict on “Zionists” and justified last weekend’s terrorist attacks that left more than 1,300 Israelis and at least 27 Americans dead, stating that they were a necessary part of “the resistance.”

The teacher then asked Jewish students to identify themselves before ordering them to stand in a corner, stating that this is what they were doing to Palestinians, said Nourya Cohen, a co-president of Stanford’s Israeli Student Association. “He asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust,” Cohen said. When one student said six million, the professor said, “Yes. Only six million.”

“Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer,” the lecturer reportedly said.

Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, spoke to three students from the class and told the Jewish news outlet Forward that they were afraid to speak out over fears of repercussions. “He said, ‘Hamas is a legitimate representation of the Palestinian people,’” Greenberg told the outlet. “‘They are not a terrorist group. They are freedom fighters. Their actions are legitimate.’”

Keep reading

Canadian Govt Funds $5,000 Bonuses for Employers to Hire Anyone Other Than Straight White Men

A new Canadian government-funded program is offering $5,000 bonuses to British Columbia construction companies to hire apprentices who identify as anything other than a straight white male.

From Western Investor, “B.C. employers get $5,000 more if apprentices ‘self-identify’ “:

B.C. construction companies which hire trade apprentices who self-identify as other than a straight, white male with no disability will receive double a new government incentive, pushing it to $10,000 for the first year of employment.

The $10 million Apprenticeship Services program, being offered by the B.C. Construction Association (BCCA) and announced September 27, provides cash incentives to small and medium-sized construction employers who hire and register first-year apprentices in up to 39 Red Seal trades.

Funding for what the BCCA calls the “most far-reaching construction trade apprenticeship drive ever undertaken in British Columbia” is under the federal government’s Canadian Apprenticeship Strategy, which launched in September 2022.

Since then the project has issued financial incentives for the hiring and registering of 1,329 apprentices and sent payments to more than 700 employers.

The BCCA will pay employers $5,000 for each first-year apprentice they register in any eligible Red Seal trades. However, if an applicant self-identifies as a woman, person with disabilities, Indigenous, racialized Canadian or from the 2SLGBTQI+ community, the incentive doubles to $10,000.

[…] So far, 51 per cent of the project apprentices have declared themselves to be a member of one of an “equity deserving group,” according to a BCCA release.

This takes “train your replacement” to a whole new level!

Keep reading

Banning Criminal Background Checks Will Lead To More Housing Discrimination, Not Less

America needs more housing. Pressure for reform is only growing as available homes get less and less affordable. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the root cause of high housing prices—an epidemic of local overregulation that prevents enough homes from being built—some legislators continue to flirt with social experiments that can harm both landlords and renters.

For example, some states and localities have implemented well-meaning “fair chance” laws banning criminal history on background checks for prospective tenants. Progressive Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) recently introduced the idea as federal legislation. In a statement, Pressley said, “It’s time we remove the systemic obstacles that have exacerbated the prison-to-homelessness pipeline.”

We do indeed have an overcriminalization and overincarceration problem in this country, so on its face, this seems like a good idea. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,0000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, not counting the nearly 6.9 million people on probation, on parole, or still in jail or prison at any one time. Far too many face undeserved challenges when trying to re-acclimate into society and not reoffend.

That’s partly because relatively few landlords want to rent to people with criminal records. Landlords minimize the risk of delinquent or destructive tenants by selecting the best applicants on a given margin. From this perspective, avoiding people with criminal records seems like an easy choice, even though it means some potentially great tenants are rejected. The best reforms would correct the real problems of overcriminalization and overincarceration. That’s politically difficult and may take a long time. Equally important would be removing all artificial barriers to building more homes.

Keep reading

North Korea Deports US Soldier Who Tried To Defect Over ‘Racism’

North Korea on Wednesday deported the American soldier who tried to defect by bolting across the demilitarized zone from South Korea earlier this year. 23-year old US Army soldier Travis King was among a group of tourists when he ran across the border and was immediately taken into North Korean custody in the July incident.

King, who had actually been facing Army disciplinary action after spending two months in a South Korean jail on assault charges, claimed he was running from “inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination” in the US Army.

King’s statement to the North Koreans also said he was “disillusioned about the unequal U.S. society.” It seems he was trying to gain sympathy by playing into Pyongyang’s standard propaganda narrative about the West. Two US officials have confirmed to the Associated Press that King is now back in American custody.

Keep reading

Gas station sparks backlash over sign banning Romani women

A Chevron gas station in Rowland Heights, California has triggered outrage over an ostensibly anti-shoplifting sign that banned women of Romani descent from the premises.

“The sign contained two ethnic slurs commonly used to portray Romanis as traveling thieves,” reported Nicole Comstock for CBS News. “‘It’s been used against them as a weapon frequently,’ said Hemet resident Anya Regewell. ‘Much like the N-word is to Black people, Gypsy that’s what that is to Romani people from Europe.’ Regewell said a Romani community member sent her a picture of the sign. Since then, she has tried to call the gas station and took the issue to social media, hoping that it will get the hateful sign removed.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits businesses from excluding people based on racial or ethnic categories.

Keep reading

West Point is SUED by group that ended affirmative action after Biden allowed academy to discriminate against white applications – even though Army has MORE black soldiers than general population

A campaign group which successfully ended affirmative action is now suing New York’s prestigious West Point military academy, claiming it discriminates against white applicants. 

Students for Fair Admissions, founded by Edward Blum, is seeking to erase an exemption in the SCOTUS ruling which is allowing US Army schools to keep using race as a factor in admissions. 

It cited the example of two white high schoolers it believes were perfect candidates for the prestigious upstate New York school, who Students for Fair Admissions believes are banned under current rules ‘from competing for admission on an equal footing’. 

This comes after President Joe Biden pushed for the military to be allowed to continue filtering applications by race – despite the racial makeup of the Army already being more diverse than the general population. 

The Biden administration’s push for so-called positive discrimination to achieve ‘equity’ comes despite the Army having a greater proportion of black soldiers than the general population – and only slightly fewer Hispanic recruits. 

Keep reading

Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research Hasn’t Produced Any Research

Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research made headlines this month when it announced it would axe a third of its workforce. But those layoffs may not have much of an impact, considering the center has hardly produced any original research at all.

The Boston University-based center has produced just two original research papers since its founding in June 2020, according to a Washington Free Beacon review. Output from the center’s scholars largely consists of op-eds or commentary posted on the center’s website. The group’s plans to “maintain the nation’s largest online database of racial inequity data in the United States” quickly fizzled out, and the database has been dormant since 2021.

The Center for Antiracist Research is the latest left-wing group to fall on hard times. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $140,000 to Kendi’s center, cut 40 percent of its staff in June. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s revenues fell 88 percent from 2021 to 2022, as support for the movement plummeted to an all-time low.

It is unclear how much money remains in the Center for Antiracist Research’s coffers. Boston University did not respond to a request for comment.

Kendi had high hopes for the center, which employed at least 45 employees as of July. The nonprofit would “foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven education and advocacy campaigns, and narrative-change initiatives,” Kendi said, in order to “figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly tractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.”

In December 2020, the center launched the “Racial Data Lab,” which Kendi claimed would “give us the ability to see the hotspots of racial inequity in real time in this country.” As of September, the Racial Data Lab only compiled information on COVID-19 infections and deaths. That COVID-19 tracker stopped collecting information in March 2021. The center has since removed the names of anyone who worked on that project from its website.

The center’s scholars have produced only two research papers, both of which were co-authored with a number of other academics. Elaine Nsoesie, who leads the Racial Data Tracker project at the center, appeared last in a list of co-authors of the January paper “Association of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Composition and Historical Redlining With Build Environment Indicators Derived From Street View Images.”

Nsoesie’s low ranking among her co-authors could suggest she contributed the least to the paper, which concluded that neighborhoods with a higher concentration of black residents had more “dilapidated buildings.”

Keep reading

Like other ‘antiracist’ activists, Ibram X. Kendi proves he’s only in it for himself

The real measure of an individual’s character isn’t what he portrays to the public but how he treats people in private.

Truly righteous people treat others with respect and dignity when there is no one else around and no social credit to be earned for doing the right thing.

This distinction matters — especially for people who’ve made a career lecturing others on the appropriate way to treat people, especially those perceived as having less power in society.

But when no one was looking and nothing was to be gained, it seems Ibram X. Kendi used his power and privilege as the director of a think tank to exploit and mistreat the people who worked under him as if they were people who are beneath him.

Amid confirmation of layoffs being made at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, former and current faculty have spoken out about Kendi’s mismanagement, “exploitation” and enrichment.

“There are a number of ways it got to this point, it started very early on when the university decided to create a center that rested in the hands of one human being, an individual given millions of dollars and so much authority,” stated Spencer Piston, a BU political science professor. 

Keep reading

Comic Hasan Minhaj Admits He Makes Up Stories About Experiencing Racism — and Doesn’t Regret Smearing Real-Life Acquaintances

Comedian Hasan Minhaj has admitted to inventing several first-person tales of facing discrimination — including a racist attack on his daughter — that undergird his standup comedy act and his politically-themed TV shows.

Minhaj, born in 1985 in the United States to Muslim Indian immigrants, made a name for himself on The Daily Show and his own Netflix comedy series, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. He won a Peabody Award in 2018 for the short-lived (2018-2020) Netflix series.

The comedian has become a favorite among left-wingers for skewering America as a hateful and inherently racist country, often with personal stories of discrimination against him and his family.

Minhaj — who joined Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Steward in 2014 — made headlines as host of the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (WHCD), where he ripped President Donald Trump, calling him the “liar-in-chief” and “the orange man behind the Muslim ban.”

His comedy was even panned by Saudi Arabian officials, who forced Netflix to remove one of his 2019 episodes of Patriot Act that criticized the Kingdom over the Jamal Khashoggi incident.

Minhaj relays several stories during his show. To name a few, he has claimed that a white girl refused to go to a high school homecoming dance with him, tells the tale of a “brother Eric” who infiltrated a mosque for the FBI, and even told the harrowing tale of an envelope with “white powder” in it spilling all over his daughter.

He also tells the story of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner arrogantly sitting in a chair reserved for a formerly imprisoned Saudi activist at a Time 100 gala in 2019. He now admits that never happened.

At long last, Minhaj has admitted that none of these stories of discrimination ever happened, though he tells them on stage and on TV as if they are real.

Keep reading