It’s impossible to envision a world without race for the Democratic Party. For such people, it’s impossible to envision a world that gets beyond race because their bread and butter, their bottom line, their raison d'être, and everything that they’re trying to do depends upon people being kept in these boxes.
Professor Glenn Loury.
Martin Durkin’s new documentary, The Great American Race Game.
Mr Durkin’s films, which I strongly recommend, have been mentioned before.
Also, open thread.
One sudden move and I would be shot.
A student at the University of Minnesota shares his first-hand experience of racial profiling and police brutality:
After multiple questions, they turned off their lights and left me alone: no apology, no explanation, nothing. Just me: mentally and emotionally tormented with an experience that will last a lifetime.
You see,
It was brutal.
Not only brutal, but,
the most traumatic thing I have ever experienced.
And so,
Defund these bastards.
But before you start signing petitions and making placards, you may wish to watch video of the actual interaction:
When wokeness means gaslighting:
Asian Americans need to locate anti-Asian violence as part of a pattern of white supremacy… even if perpetrators of violence are people of colour.
The strained use of the word locate is, I think, the first warning that horseshit will follow. And what follows includes an exhortation to not “fall back on racist assumptions” – from a man making, and taking pride in, racist assumptions. Such that a white majority population is deemed uniquely oppressive and objectionable, unlike the majorities of other, browner countries, and people can be categorised, pejoratively, as “white” or “white-aligned.” Mr Nguyen, whose words are quoted above, is of course an educator. Shaping young minds.
If the above isn’t sufficiently vivid and perverse, I’ll direct you to this, posted recently, and in which children are apparently expected to pretend similar things, quite hard, and pretend until they believe.
Because, you see, when a black thug assaults and murders a frail 84-year-old Thai man – attacking him, unprovoked, and slamming him into the ground – this can only be because of “white supremacy.” Obviously. The thug in question, Mr Antione Watson, apparently having no agency of his own, and no responsibility, on account of his magic blackness. And that’s why Mr Watson looked so satisfied with himself as he strode away afterwards, leaving a man to die.
To watch the footage linked above and then deduce that Mr Watson, the aggressor, is actually a victim, a mere puppet of Diabolical Whitey And His Infinite Cunning – and that Mr Watson’s malevolence is in fact, somehow, someone else’s fault – is, we’re assured, “intersectional empowerment.”
Update, via the comments:
An Antifa mob tried to stop police from responding to an armed man threatening to harm others and himself in downtown Portland on Friday afternoon.
I can’t help feeling there’s something rather telling about what follows:
Officers from the Portland Police Bureau responded to calls to the 300-block area of Southwest 4th Avenue after a 30-year-old man reportedly jumped from the second story window of the apartment complex, pulled out a knife and brandished the blade at people and cars passing by. According to police, the unnamed man is schizophrenic and threatened to kill himself.
Portland Police sent in its Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team but was interrupted and threatened by hostile Antifa protesters who had already been gathering nearby at Powell’s Books calling for Andy Ngo’s upcoming book [on Antifa] to be banned. “The extra noise and distraction made it impossible for the specially trained officers to speak to the man,” said the Portland Police in a press statement. “Officers implored the crowd to stop interfering, but their energy only increased.”
Note that, being our betters, they had to make the situation about themselves. Of course, the Antifa clowns’ self-absorbed screeching and jeering – their refusal to be quiet so that negotiation could be attempted – made the subsequent use of force more likely, not less.
Police say the suicidal man’s mother arrived on scene and pleaded with the mob to disperse but they ignored her.
Because they care, you see.
A group of 13 “abolitionist librarians” from Ivy League universities… is demanding that their colleagues “immediately begin the work of divesting from police and prisons.” […] The group wants Ivy League librarians to “explicitly name policing itself as the problem” and take actions that will lead to the “complete abolition of law enforcement.”
Something-something “white supremacy” something-something “privilege.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. But really, it’s the same doctrinaire horseshit we’ve seen a hundred times. And according to which, the world will be enormously improved by the “abolition of policing in all its forms.” If that isn’t sufficiently unambiguous, our Ivy League librarians insist that their “ultimate goal” is, and I quote, “the complete abolition of law enforcement… everywhere.” Because “a world without policing” will somehow, rather conveniently, be a world without crime. And because helping people find the books that they’d like to borrow is just too boring and insufficiently high-status for minds such as these.
More than 700 individuals and organisations have signed the petition.
By the way, and before you ask, that sickly-sweet odour is the ongoing decay of your civilisation. A society in which the children of the elite are immersed in such dogma – and are told that their civilisation shouldn’t defend itself against sociopathy and predation – isn’t, I’d suggest, in the best of health. And when these mouthings are deemed high-status, both sophisticated and aspirational, a marker of in-group belonging, then the words preening degeneracy seem entirely apt.
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:
Heather Mac Donald on the new woke rules:
Sunday’s anti-cop riots in Lancaster, Pa., have made the current de facto rules of engagement clear: Officers may never defend themselves against lethal force if their attacker is a minority. They should simply accept being shot or stabbed as penance for their alleged racism.
Mr Ricardo Munoz, 27, the noble, oppressed citizen in whose name our betters rage, can be seen being lively here. Mr Munoz had a history of involvement in stabbing incidents, including the stabbing of women and children, and a history of resisting arrest.
The stuff of sainthood, clearly.
One could easily get the impression that as a civilisation we’re suffering the equivalent of kidney failure, in that the toxins that inevitably accumulate are no longer being expelled. We even have a loud and influential demographic, including children of the elite, telling us, quite forcibly, that kidney failure is a good thing, something we should want. Such is wokeness.
Update, via the comments:
The implications of the unrest that followed the demise of Mr Munoz fit rather well with an all-too-common strain of leftist thought – or posturing, at least – according to which, we should not defend ourselves against habitual predation and malevolence, even if our lives may be in peril. And according to which, the creatures violating us, treating us as mere prey, people from whom things can be taken, are the ones most deserving of our sympathy and indulgence. Pretentious sympathy, of course. But still.
See also the second item here, on leftist theories of crime, and the airy pronouncements of Mr Clive Stafford Smith – a man who believes that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” And who regards anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation as plebeian and unsophisticated, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of justice as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes.”
Update 2, via Ed at Instapundit:
Further to rumblings in the comments,
Yes, one minute, it’s masks, mobs, and Sturmabteilung tactics, complete with Flammenwerfer. The next, it’s “I’m just a little flower girl, please don’t hurt me.”
Mr Matthew Banta, our fearless Antifa warrior, also likes biting people.
Heather Mac Donald on post-watershed facts:
YouTube’s age-restriction policy lists vulgar language, violence and disturbing imagery, nudity and sexually suggestive content, and portrayal of harmful or dangerous activities as factors that could lead to an age restriction. None of those categories has any bearing on my talk. I used federal data to show that the claim that police are wantonly killing black men is a product of selective coverage by a politicised press and an elite establishment dedicated to the idea that racism is America’s defining trait. There was nothing racy or incendiary about the talk — unless you find criminological research titillating — unlike the soft-pornographic and anarchist videos that YouTube allows on its site without age restriction.
Ms Mac Donald’s apparently scandalous video – which was promptly deleted by YouTube and only restored, for consenting adults, following appeals by the talk’s organisers – can be viewed in full here. As Larry Elder adds,
Not only does [your evidence] give perspective, it’s uplifting. Isn’t it good to know that whatever is going on is nothing to do with “institutional, systemic, structural” racism? Isn’t that good news?
And not entirely unrelated, Coleman Hughes on the life and work of Thomas Sowell:
Sowell has encountered countless smears, though the usual avenues of attack—accusations of racism, privilege, and all the rest—have not been available. Someone should have told Aidan Byrne, who reviewed one of Sowell’s books for the London School of Economics blog. Doubtless convinced that he was delivering a devastating blow, Byrne quipped: “easy for a rich white man to say.” It’s hard not to laugh at this hapless reviewer’s expense, but many mainstream commentators differ from Byrne only in that they usually remember to check Google Images before launching their ad hominems. The prevailing notion today is that your skin colour, your chromosomes, your sexual orientation, and other markers of identity determine how you think. And it is generally those who see themselves as the most freethinking—“woke,” while the rest of us are asleep—who apply the strictest and most backward formulas.
A selection of videos featuring Dr Sowell can be found here, here, here, and here.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Andy Ngo reports from Seattle’s super-woke world of tomorrow:
Those unfortunate enough to have homes or businesses within CHAZ — an estimated 30,000 residents — have no say over their new overlords. Residents have discreetly voiced their concerns to local media. Gunshots and “screams of terror” at night have been reported… Every business and property inside CHAZ has been vandalised with graffiti. Most messages say some variation of “Black Lives Matter” or “George Floyd,” but other messages call for the murder of police. Most businesses are boarded up. “ACAB” — all cops are bastards, an Antifa slogan — is written over them.
Needless to say, there’s more, much more, including armed warlords, triumphant racism, bomb-making, and the sexual assault of deaf women. But hey, we mustn’t judge. After all, we’ve been assured that it’s a precursor, a blueprint, of a brighter, kinder, more liberated world.
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