Tag: racism

University Claims Words ‘Picnic,’ ‘Brown Bag’ Are Offensive

The University of Michigan has a “Words Matter Task Force.”

Seriously. Maybe that’s why out-of-state tuition costs more than $66,000 a year.

The WMTF, set up by the school’s Information and Technology Services (ITS) department, has declared that it finds more than two dozen words and phrases possibly offensive to people, including “picnic,” “brown bag” and “blacklist.”

“To effectively communicate with customers, it is important for ITS to evaluate the terms and language conventions that may hinder effective communication, harm morale, and deliberately or inadvertently exclude people from feeling accepted to foment a healthy and inclusive culture,” the task force said in a memo.

The WMTF offers alternative words to use, for instance urging people to say “gathering” instead of “picnic” and “lunch and learn” instead of “brown bag.”

“The word ‘picnic’ appears to be banned because of false suggestions on the internet that it originates from the racist, extrajudicial killings of African Americans,” the Daily Mail reported. “The word picnic actually comes from the 17th century French word ‘pique-nique,’ a term used to describe a social gathering in which attendees each contributed with a portion of food.”

In July, the Reuters News Agency published a piece headlined: “Fact check: The word picnic does not originate from racist lynchings.”

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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.

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New York Times Normalizes Racist Eugenics Supported by Woke Doctors

When it comes to deciding who will receive the coronavirus vaccine, the far-left New York Times is normalizing the idea that skin color is more important than need, risk, and vulnerability.

Yep, the Times is perfectly comfortable arguing that it is okay to sacrifice your grandparents on the altar of social justice.

Feel free to accuse me of hyperbole, but the truth is the truth, and the truth is that not since Nazi Germany have we seen something like what the New York Times is guilty of, which is an establishment news organization openly normalizing the idea of choosing who lives and who dies, not on need, but on race and skin color.

Wither the Hippocratic Oath.

An article published by the Times this month examined the dilemma of the Trump vaccine. “The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?” the headline read, which is a perfectly legitimate moral dilemma for a newspaper to look into. We can’t vaccinate everyone at once, so who goes first and why?

So dummy me, because I sometimes forget how far gone the media are, how morally illiterate the children who run organizations such as the Times are, I’m expecting a thoughtful debate over who is more at risk and how tough decisions sometimes have to be made. I’m even willing to accept a look at something like, “Well, if we vaccinate grandma and not Dr. Happy and Dr. Happy dies or gets sick, more people might die with Dr. Happy out of action.”

Hey, I’m an adult. I get nuance and thinking out loud. I can handle that.

I’ll tell you what I didn’t expect…

I did not expect the New York Times to normalize the openly racist practice of eugenics. I’m going to quote fully below what the New York Times published as an acceptable line of thought, and since you may not believe me, you can look for yourself right here.

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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.

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Facebook To End Race-Blind Hate Speech Moderation

Facebook is ending race-blind hate speech moderation and will begin policing hate speech directed at black Americans, Muslims, multi-racial Americans, Jewish people and LGBTQ people more aggressively than hate speech directed at white Americans, according to the Washington Post.

The “WoW Project” is aimed at automatically detecting hate speech that is “the worst of the worst,” internal documents about the project that were obtained by the Washington Post said. The project will re-engineer Facebook’s automated moderation system to try and get better at detecting hateful language aimed at minority groups.

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