Elsewhere (300)
Charlotte Allen on the farcical racial pantomime of Jessica Krug:
On September 9th, Krug abruptly resigned from her job as associate professor of African history at George Washington University. Apparently fearing imminent exposure, she confessed that she had passed herself off for more than a decade as being of black-African descent from an ever-shifting range of backgrounds. In graduate school, she told fellow students she was of Algerian origin with a German father. Later, she claimed that she was from the inner-city “hood” with a spiritual kinship to the late rapper Biggie Smalls… Her final self-proclaimed provenance seems to have been the South Bronx slums, where she identified as a “boricua,” or Stateside-dwelling Puerto Rican, whose mother had been a drug addict. She also moonlighted as a salsa-dancing community activist with the tag “Jess La Bombalera” and was videoed at a New York City Council hearing in June 2020 berating the police for violence against “my black and brown siblings.”
In fact, Krug is white, Jewish, and from suburban Kansas City. She attended a Jewish day school growing up and then the preppy Barstow School in Kansas City, where 12th-grade tuition is currently more than $22,000.
Needless to say, things then get a little odd. And rather telling, not least regarding the widespread pretensions and woke neuroticism, and the dismal intellectual standards, of academia’s Clown Quarter.
Seth Barron on the cost of noxious woke pretensions:
The Department of Education has called Princeton’s bluff on the question of systemic racism, and not a moment too soon. The entire country has been forced to listen, for months now, as a parade of elite institutions—universities, banks, media outlets, a national political party, entire professions—issue laments about systemic American racism and their own complicity in the perpetuation of whiteness. This orgy of recrimination is patently insincere. Does anyone believe these people, or imagine that their contrition is real? Of course not. Qui s’accuse, s’excuse, the French say: who accuses oneself, excuses oneself. The whole rigmarole is a self-justifying performance by whites for an audience of likeminded other whites: beatified souls who have achieved a state of grace. They stand in opposition to bad whites, who refuse to apologise for their privilege.
And Heather Mac Donald on avoided truths:
Activists and their media enablers present racial disparities in police activity—be it stops, arrests, or officer use of force—as prima facie evidence of police bias. They generate those racial disparities by comparing policing data to population ratios. In New York City, for example, a little over 50% of all pedestrian stops conducted by the New York Police Department have a black subject. But blacks are slightly less than a quarter of the city’s population. Voilà! Proof of racism, declare the mainstream media, Democratic politicians, and virtually the entirety of academia.
Census data is the wrong benchmark for evaluating police behaviour, however. The proper benchmark is crime rates, because policing today is data-driven, deploying officers to where criminals prey on their victims.
Blacks in New York City commit over 70% of all drive-by shootings, according to the victims of, and witnesses to, those shootings, who are overwhelmingly minority themselves. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for nearly 100% of all shootings in New York City. These numbers mean that virtually every time an officer gets a “shots fired” call over his radio, he is being called to a minority neighborhood, on behalf of a minority victim, and being given the description of a minority suspect, if anyone is cooperating with the police for once. The cops don’t wish this reality into being. It is forced upon them by the facts of crime.
It's Heather Mac Donald, so there are plenty of facts to chew on.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
From the Charlotte Allen piece on Jessica Krug:
It’s almost funny.
It’s almost funny.
Almost, yes.
Number 300, David? My goodness!
In fact, Krug is white, Jewish, and from suburban Kansas City. She attended a Jewish day school growing up and then the preppy Barstow School in Kansas City, where 12th-grade tuition is currently more than $22,000.
Oh … my … God …
Nothing, literally nothing, in that sentence quoted above could possibly have prepared me for what was in this video.
Here are some actual quotes of things she actually said in the persona of Jess La Bombalera:
“I’m ah here in the Barrio, it’s Harlem … You probably know this neighborhood because [the New York City Council] sold mah fuckin’ neighborhood to developers and gentrifiers”
“So I got a couple a’ things to say and y’all come on an’ tell me mah time stops, fuck outta here!”
“Ah also wanna call out all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak an’ that did not give their time to black and brown indigenous New Yorkers …”
That comment didn’t age well.
“And thank you, much power to all my siblings, who was standing up, all my black and brown siblings …”
“The NYPD is a colonial occupation force. Let’s be real honest -“
Oh, the irony!
“Y’all know they’re bein’ trained by the IDF”
Fuck me!
Number 300, David? My goodness!
The Elsewhere posts have dipped a little in frequency of late, but I have been doing this for… oh sweet Lord… thirteen years.
Oh … my … God …
And Ms Krug was indulged and fêted, and had status and funding thrown at her negligible talents, precisely because she was acting out a racial caricature, a parody. This is the moral foundation of woke academia. Behold their credentials.
Again, it’s almost funny.
And Ms Krug was indulged and fêted, and had status and funding thrown at her negligible talents, precisely because she was acting out a racial caricature, a parody. This is the moral foundation of woke academia.
Progressives love blackface.
Progressives love blackface.
It’s not unlike basing one’s estimation of women, and one’s feminist credentials, on a really bad drag show.
For too long, false confessions of racial piety have been used as a cudgel to intimidate reasonable people and transform American institutions.
That- with a footnote that such pernicious nonsense is not confined solely to the U.S.A.
Number 300, David? My goodness!
Right, but who are the Greeks and who are the Persians?
And to think: all these years she’s stolen a teaching job from a genuinely belligerent, hate-filled, semi-literate race huckster. Students deserve the real thing!
Naomi Schaefer Riley describes the inevitable result of progressive
antiracist indoctrination at one of New York’s elite prep schools.As at “woke” universities, the drive to enrol self-evidently unprepared cohorts of minority students actually creates racial disparity between competent white students and their artificially-engineered less capable coloured colleagues. Leading directly to inescapable internecine conflicts and complaints. A bizarrely self-fulfilling immolation!
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll poke about in the spam filter.
Krug confesses to “mental health issues” behind her decades-long masquerade? How convenient!
The parricide throws herself on the mercy of the court pleading her status as an orphan.
When Krug was Black her scholarship was deemed first rate. But as a white person it is shoddy.
Low expectations, anyone?
When Krug was Black her scholarship was deemed first rate. But as a white person it is shoddy.
That would seem to be the implication, albeit one revealed inadvertently.
“It’s the Democrats who push for gun control, yet it’s the Democrats in power in my city who are leaving me with no choice but to arm myself”
https://quillette.com/2020/09/23/l-a-s-failed-homeless-policies-turned-my-home-into-a-prison/
My favourite comment made by a JackConnor3 under the Charlotte Allen article:
The Department of Education has called Princeton’s bluff on the question of systemic racism, and not a moment too soon.
One way to beat the left is to hold them accountable to their own standards. Not just point out how they’re failing to live by their own standards, but actually hold them accountable.
Unfortunately we live in an, “oh look, a squirrel” world where accountability requires too much work to police.
What BBC bias?
https://twitter.com/cjsnowdon/status/1310181934174216192
One way to beat the left is to hold them accountable to their own standards. Not just point out how they’re failing to live by their own standards, but actually hold them accountable.
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules, eh squire?
Jessica La Bombalera or Martina Martinez?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQW3KwRtZj4
She also moonlighted as a salsa-dancing community activist with the tag “Jess La Bombalera”
For reasons that escape me, what came to mind was the Clive James Show’s, um, chanteuse Margarita Pracatan.
Same energy, perhaps.
The question is why Krug would want to pass herself off as any of those things.
Another avoided truth: Per the CDC, the leading cause of death among black males 14-35 in the U.S. is … homicide, by other black males.
Ponder that statistic for a moment.
Not traffic accidents, workplace accidents, cancer, drug overdoses, or anything else. Homicide by people of the exact same demographic.
Liberals claim that the disparity in crime rates results from a disparity in enforcement by police. Perhaps, but you can’t exercise discretion when you’ve got a corpse. The number of corpses represents hard, impossible to game, data.
The question is why Krug would want to pass herself off as any of those things.
Why, to be oppressed, of course – no doubt systemically – with grants and status, and fast-track promotions, and tenure, and a disregard for incompetence.
grants and status, and fast-track promotions
As long as she was able to keep it up, her imposture paid off for her. It was just a con, and for the usual venal motives. She could be prosecuted for fraud, if it can be demonstrated in court that “academic race-baiter” is a legitimate occupation for which “race-faking” ought to be disqualificatory. I doubt her employers or publishers have the heart to try. Besides, it’s not like it was their own money they threw away on her.
Further to my comment above, just thought of: a taxpayers’ class-action suit against wokeademic fraud…. Not in real life, no, mischief upon mischief is a recipe for devils, but the idea’s intriguing enough, I think, if anyone aches to write a Tom Wolfe-style novel about our current climate.
Another item for the files.
Early Morning ‘Cult Or Activist Group’ Gathering Escorted From Point Molate
Why, to be oppressed, of course – no doubt systemically – with grants and status, and fast-track promotions, and tenure, and a disregard for incompetence.
Yeah, I get that, but you’d think self-esteem would inhibit one from passing oneself off as a loser. Which category includes all of her personae.
“It’s almost funny.”
When Sacha Baron Cohen did it, it was funny.
Advice goddess deals with Mayor Yoga Pants’ Los Angeles
When Sacha Baron Cohen did it, it was funny.
Does anyone really want to see Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman?
chanteuse Margarita Pracatan
The Clive James show was a favourite in our house and we all looked forward to Margarita’s performance at the end. As it is a public holiday here in Western Upsidedownlandia, I have just wasted an hour watching clips of her on iTunes. Time well spent.
Heh.
Today’s word is mistake.
Regarding Heather McDonald’s piece:
Americans deserve the truth about crime and racial statistics from the governments their tax dollars pay for. Until the public understands why cops are in the neighborhoods they are, and why they interact disproportionately with black suspects, it will be impossible to counter the false and dangerous narrative about police racism.
I’m just playing Devil’s advocate here, but how would getting this information out to the public really make a material difference to the “anti-cop narrative” from the “[a]ctivists and their media enablers”?
For instance, they’d be highly unlikely to deny that in New York “70% of all drive-by shootings, according to the victims of, and witnesses to, those shootings” are committed by black felons or that “blacks commit about 80% of all shootings and murders” or that “blacks commit up to 100% of all homicides, though they are less than 50% of the population” in St Louis.
And the reason why they would not deny it is because they would present these data as direct evidence of the consequences of earlier generations of racist discrimination and, ultimately, slavery, arguing that criminal gangs form whenever more legitimate routes to making a successful life are closed off to what is presumably a majority in those neighborhoods (thus making racism the ultimate cause of crime).
Likewise, they would surely suggest that the reason why “[b]lacks resist arrest at four times the rate of whites, according to one study” and also why “a decade’s worth of data show that black males make up over 40% of all cop-killers, though they are 6% of the national population” is precisely because of the decade’s worth of racial prejudice from law enforcement, such that many young black men would rather risk their own life than again be harassed and humiliated by a racist police.
Just Devil’s-advocating here, but still …
Nothing to see here. Move along!
https://youtu.be/ZWK56l2VaLY
Nikw211: I have had many encounters with leftists who did indeed deny that blacks committed crimes far more than did whites. Thus, making the true crime data widely and easily available will make it much harder for leftists to use those lies.
Today’s word is mistake.
Q: What’s the difference between the Devil and the ACLU?
A: The Devil wants to be God while the ACLU wants to be the Devil.
@Nikw211
As an ex-leftist there are several “standard” responses
1. Challenge the data. McDonald uses witness reports and the ethnicity of the victim to undercut such criticism, but fundamentally all statistics can be manipulated. In this case why concede ground to their critics – just quote population proportions vs arrest proportions
2. Claim that different crimes tend to be committed by different groups but that overall the ratios of criminals must be the same. So when McDonald talks about say drug crimes, this may well be disproportionately committed by blacks but this measure excludes white collar crimes committed disproportionately by white people such as fraud.
3. Claim that behaviour follows stereotype rather than the other way round. So during the 1980s it was a common campaign demand that broadcasters not mention the race of a suspect. The logic being that such labelling did not occur when the suspect was part of the majority; the cumulative result being that blacks were unfairly associated with crime. Since all blacks were treated as potential criminals we should not be surprised that some did turn into actual criminals. If you want to be more sophisticated then argue that societal wide discrimination led to status being only achievable by joining a gang culture which in turn led to criminality.
None of this adds up. I find 3 to be particularly foolish – it has led to a phenomena of “the man of no appearance” whereby the absence of description leads listeners to make an assumption, which virtually always proves to be true.
However despite the fact that there are standard responses we should still demand that the statistics be publicised. Make the BLM articulate the excuses. At the moment they can assume (correctly) that no one knows any different.
…during the 1980s it was a common campaign demand that broadcasters not mention the race of a suspect. The logic being that such labelling did not occur when the suspect was part of the majority; the cumulative result being that blacks were unfairly associated with crime.
I first noticed that demand back in the mid 1960’s.
@pst314
On reflection I agree it predates the 1980s. But I’m in the “punk” generation so my activism was the 1980s.
The interesting thing is that the activism was successful by the late 1980s, at the latest. It hasn’t worked in any sense to deliver the outcomes expected. Consequently the left does what it always does: keep doubling the dose until it does work.
Adam: When Krug was Black her scholarship was deemed first rate. But as a white person it is shoddy.
David: That would seem to be the implication, albeit one revealed inadvertently.
No, the inadvertent implication is much black scholarship (her’s being first rate, worthy of grants, etc) is shoddy.
On reflection I agree it predates the 1980s…
No worries: I was offering that emphatically *not* as a correction but merely as a personal observation–and with the silent speculation that still another commenter might up and say they encountered it in the 50’s.
Nikw211 and TDK correctly point out that a common leftist excuse for why blacks commit crimes at disproportionate rates is “racism makes them do it; they don’t have any reasonable alternative ways to succeed in life.” Leaving aside the thorny philosophical question of whether a life spent “succeeding” by robbing, killing, taking advantage of others’ addictions, etc. is really preferable to a life spent being poor but virtuous, it also needs to be mentioned that much the same excuse was used to justify the presence of significant numbers of Italians, Jews, Irish, etc. in organized crime. Of course, as time went by, it turned out that the Mafia types were merely a small and psychopathic minority within each of those groups, and that the majority had instead spent their lives working away to improve the lives of their families, which in turn brought each of those groups into a well-deserved place in the American mainstream. Similarly, even among blacks, most of the crime is committed by a small group of people; many of the rest spend their lives trying to be honest and working towards their dreams and supporting those of their children, and quite a few have been successful at it. It does the black community no favors to hide this truth.
As at “woke” universities, the drive to enrol self-evidently unprepared cohorts of minority students actually creates racial disparity between competent white students and their artificially-engineered less capable coloured colleagues. Leading directly to inescapable internecine conflicts and complaints. A bizarrely self-fulfilling immolation!
Of course, if we didn’t have affirmative action, we might actually have to deal with the real problem, which is that inner-city public schools are uniformly awful–and Lord knows we couldn’t have that!
Why, to be oppressed, of course – no doubt systemically – with grants and status, and fast-track promotions, and tenure, and a disregard for incompetence.
And another one.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=15762