Tag: racism

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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University of Wisconsin Declares Large Rock to be Racist; Votes to Remove

The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to remove a large rock from campus after students complained that it is a symbol of racism because it was referred to in a local newspaper in 1925 using a word regarded as a racial slur.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported Wednesday:

UW-Madison is moving forward on a plan to remove a boulder from Observatory Hill after calls from students of color who see the rock as a painful reminder of the history of racism on campus.

The 70-ton boulder is officially known as Chamberlin Rock in honor of Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, a geologist and former university president. But the rock was referred to at least once after it was dug out of the hill as a “n***erhead,” a commonly used expression in the 1920s to describe any large dark rock.

…

The Wisconsin Black Student Union called for the rock’s removal over the summer. President Nalah McWhorter said the rock is a symbol of the daily injustices that students of color face on a predominantly white campus.

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McWhorter also faulted the Wisconsin State Journal for printing the vulgarity in a 1925 news article.

According to the State Journal, the 1925 news article is the only known instance of the offensive term being used.

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School District Decides Asians Aren’t Students of Color

One school district in Washington state has evidently decided that Asians no longer qualify as persons of color.

In their latest equity report, administrators at North Thurston Public Schools—which oversees some 16,000 students—lumped Asians in with whites and measured their academic achievements against “students of color,” a category that includes “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students” who have experienced “persistent opportunity gaps.”

Most indicators in the report show that the achievement gap between white/Asian students and “students of color” is fairly narrow and improving over time. It would probably be even narrower if Asian students were categorized as “students of color.” In fact, some indicators might have even shown white students lagging behind that catch-all minority group. Perhaps Asians were included with whites in order to avoid such an outcome. (The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.)

What the equity report really highlights is the absurdities that result from overreliance on semi-arbitrary race-based categories. The report also measured “students of poverty”—those who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches—against non-poverty students, and unsurprisingly found a much more significant achievement gap. Students of poverty perform 28 percent worse on math tests, for instance. That socioeconomic category captures something real and meaningful in a way that the gerrymandered race category does not.

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