Tag: racism

Wisconsin’s Capital City Is Trying To Ban White People From Police Oversight Board

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he offered Americans, of all races, a compelling vision of a society no longer prejudiced by race. He envisioned a country where citizens are judged “by the content of their character” and not “the color of their skin.”

But to listen to today’s most prominent “antiracists,” King’s dream is what stands in the way of racial justice in 21st-century America. The result is the return of legal racial discrimination.

In Madison, Wisconsin, the famously leftist city government recently established a Police Civilian Oversight Board in response to activists concerned with police relations. The board’s mission is rather vague: “provide input,” “engage in community outreach,” and “make policy-level recommendations.” What the board is not vague about is who is allowed to participate.

Six of the board’s 11 members must be black. No Asians, American Indian, Hispanics or Latinos, or Whites can sit in those six seats: “Blacks Only,” to use the terminology of the City’s Alder Workgroup, which explicitly mandated “50 percent Black members.”

Furthermore, one board seat is reserved for an Asian; one board seat is reserved for an American Indian; one board seat is reserved for someone identifying as “Latinx.” Finally, one board seat is reserved for a “member of the LGBTQ community,” although the city presumably would allow someone to be both a minority and LGBTQ at the same time.

Heralded as a serious effort at “equity” and “inclusion,” Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board intentionally discriminates based on racial categories—a practice with an ugly and pernicious past. This is also the vision of America’s most prominent “antiracists.” For example, in his 2019 book, “How to be an Antiracist,” best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi is explicit that, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Unfortunately, Madison is not alone in this kind of legal racism. California now imposes racial quotas on private companies’ boards. NASDAQ is following suit. Many private companies, such as Delta Airlines and Wells Fargo, are promising to impose quotas.

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Michigan School’s ‘Equity’ Training Calls ‘Objectivity’ A Form Of White Supremacy

Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) Superintendent attended an “equity learning” seminar, which taught school leaders that objectivity, among other traits, is a characteristic of white supremacy.

According to a post from AAPS Superintendent Dr. Jeanice Swift, on Feb. 13, she attended an equity seminar led by the organization Equity Leaders. In the course, district leaders were shown a slide describing the “characteristics of white supremacy culture.” Characteristics included but were not limited to, perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, fear of open conflict, individualism, and objectivity.

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Robots may be future of policing but activists warn they could be racist

Ayanna Howard, a robotics researcher at Georgia Tech, is concerned that robot technology, that ultimately uses human inputted artificial intelligence, will show biases against blacks. She tells the New York Times that “given the current tensions arising from police shootings of African-American men from Ferguson to Baton Rouge, it is disconcerting that robot peacekeepers, including police and military robots, will, at some point, be given increased freedom to decide whether to take a human life, especially if problems related to bias have not been resolved.”

Howard and others say that many of today’s algorithms are biased against people of color and others who are unlike the white, male, affluent and able-bodied designers of most computer and robot systems

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Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up

Last week, the ODE promoted through its newsletter a short course called the “Pathway to Math Equity Microcourse.” The “microcourse” is designed for middle school teachers to teach them to use its toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.”

The toolkit, according to a Fox News report, includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” supposedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” The ones cited include that the “focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer’,” and students are “required to ‘show their work,’ ” which used to be keys to teaching math to grade-schoolers.

The toolkit says that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so.” It adds that “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

Objectivity must be banned because its exercise disproves what the wokeist whackos are saying.

The toolkit encourages teachers not to focus on students getting the “right” answer but to come up with more than one answer to questions that are “equally right,” as if that were, ahem, mathematically possible. It also encourages teachers to adopt its guidelines to help “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

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Everything They Don’t Like Is Now a Public Health Emergency

Dissecting the Letter

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” The language used here is important. White supremacy is lethal. Racism kills people. What is not written is, “Sometimes white supremacists, acting out of hatred, kill black people,” or even, “All white supremacists are culpable in the murder of black people.” Instead, the agency is assigned to racism itself. It is racism, not racist people, that is the public health issue; it is white nationalism that kills people. This is the same tactic used by antigun lobbies in their slogan “Guns kill people.” If guns kill people, guns need to be illegal. People killing people with guns is already illegal, just as white supremacists killing black men is already illegal. To advance further legal change, you have to change the language. “White supremacy kills people” leads the same people who want guns outlawed to want white supremacy outlawed. While the letter does not draw out these ideas to their logical conclusions, the logic employed is well down the slippery slope of sacrificing free speech.

“We do not condemn [demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy] as risky for COVID-19 transmission.” That’s weird because every other kind of gathering is condemned by these people as risky. 

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New York School Principal Urges Parents To Become ‘White Abolitionists’ With Propaganda Graphic

A New York college prep school sent white parents literary materials asking them to identify their “level” of whiteness, ranging from “white supremacist,” which is depicted in red, to “white abolitionist,” depicted in green.

According to race education watchdog Christopher Rufo, white parents of sixth- through 12th-graders received the “tool for action” from the principal of East Side Community School asking them to work toward becoming white traitors and abolitionists by “subverting white authority” as well as “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.”

“This is the new language of public education,” Rufo tweeted along with a graphic depicting the “8 white identities.”

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How ‘too white’ has become the meaningless default criticism of the morally superior elite determined to racialize EVERYTHING

Everything from US states to the classics to British TV is now routinely criticised for being ‘too white’. How has this happened when describing something as ‘too black’ would be considered unacceptable?

Have you heard of the expression ‘too white’? In the jargon of the Western elites, ‘too white’ serves as a synonym for words like ‘unpleasant’, ‘problematic’ or ‘toxic’.

Just listen to Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee in the US. He claims that New Hampshire is ‘too white’ to have the first primary for the election of a president. He also thinks that Iowa is ‘too white’ to have the first caucus during the election campaign.

According to the New Republic, the American Department of Justice is ‘too white’. A survey of minority businesses in the US concludes that local chambers of commerce are ‘too white’. Apparently American TV is also ‘too white’. Television in the UK does not get a free pass; Sir Lenny Henry insists that it is ‘too white’. A former head of comedy at the BBC agrees with this assessment and suggests it would not commission Monty Python today, because it is ‘too white’.

It appears that the UK’s green sector is also ‘too white’. Former head of Friends of the Earth, Craig Bennett, insisted that it must leave behind its “white middle class ghetto.” Even poor old Extinction Rebellion is indicted for being “too white, too middle class and lacking in empathy.”

The sense of outrage conveyed by the term ‘too white’ can attach itself to the most unexpected of targets. I am obviously unaware – because I did not know, but now I do – that even ‘dyslexia heroes are too white’.

Numerous sources insist that classical music is ‘too white’. Time and again I hear the claim that philosophy is ‘too white’. Some would even want to cancel the most important philosophers that ever lived, like Plato and Kant, because they are ‘too white’. In fact, virtually every university discipline – from classical music to mathematics through to history – has been condemned for being ‘too white’.

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Now even classical music is racist

In a world where, sooner or later, everything is racialised, it was only a matter of time before classical music became a target of the crusade against whiteness. So I wasn’t particularly shocked when I read this headline in the New York Times: ‘Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles over Race and Free Speech.’

The obscure musicology journal in question is the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The journal’s editor, Timothy Jackson, a music-theory professor at the University of North Texas, is under fire for his hard-hitting response to the claim that the interwar Austrian-Jewish composer and theorist Heinrich Schenker personified the white racist attitudes that dominate classical music. Jackson’s university has launched an investigation into his behaviour, barred him from editing the journal, and suspended funding for the Schenker Center, which he runs.

Jackson has been vilified by the Twittermob and ostracised by his colleagues. Graduates who have previously worked with him are now worried that their association with this fallen professor could harm their career prospects. How did this all happen?

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