Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

RACISM, CRT, AND A BLACK MAN'S RESPONSE

 

WHY WOULD CNN LIGHTEN THE SKIN COLOR OF THE WAUKESHA CHRISTMAS PARADE KILLER?

From The Gateway Pundit:

Brooks is a black racist, a Trump-hater, an anti-white radical who barreled through a Christmas Parade on Sunday in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  CNN posted his photo on their website following his arraignment.  They lightened his skin.

Why would they do that?  Any guesses?

EXCELLENT SUCCINCT (5 MINUTE) CHRISTIAN EVALUATION OF "CRITICAL THEORY"

"What Do We Do with Critical Theory?"

Racism, White Privilege, and Christianity    07/27/20  

John Stonestreet (with Shane Morris) for Breakpoint -

Podcast

The question most central to defining a worldview, other than “Who is God?” and “What does it mean to be human?” is “What’s really wrong with the world?” It’s a tricky question, because there are a lot of things wrong with the world. The question is, what is the core problem that needs to be addressed in the world, the root cause of evil and human suffering, and what solution can be offered to fix it?

For example, we should want to see justice flourish and racism of all kinds come to an end, especially in light of our nation’s history and evidence that our African American neighbors are not treated equally before the law. But not everyone who talks about ending racism and creating justice means the same thing.

For a growing number of people, including some Christians with good motives, these goals are shorthand for an ideology that divides instead of reconciles, that sees people as either oppressed or oppressor rather than as divine image bearers created from “one blood.”

The ideas of Critical Theory, especially since the horrific killing of George Floyd, have become a central part of our national conversation. Once largely limited to the academy, these ideas have trickled down, the way ideas do, to the media, through popular culture, and into the cultural imagination. Even those not familiar with the term “critical theory” will likely recognize its central tenets.

Critical Theory originated with a group of political philosophers who applied Karl Marx’s ideas about economics to society as a whole, especially across additional categories of class distinction, such as race, sex, and gender identity. The result was an all-encompassing worldview that purported to reveal hidden power structures behind society’s problems and institutions, by dividing people along the lines of oppressed and oppressor.

As Colson Center Senior Fellow and historian Glenn Sunshine explained in a recent episode of The Theology Pugcast, Critical Theory, like the classical Marxism it borrows from, views human beings in purely materialist terms. So, according to Critical Theory our race, sexual orientation, gender identity aren’t mere aspects of who we are, they are our defining characteristics. In each of these areas, we are either part of oppressed groups or we are oppressors.

According to critical theory, the oppressed group automatically has moral authority, while the oppressor group does not. Someone who is a racial minority or a sexual minority of some kind is automatically a victim of oppression and has claims against oppressors and the unearned privilege that makes their life easier (and this part is critical) at the expense of their oppressed neighbors.

CURRENT AFFAIRS

**  Is Attorney William Barr President Trump's lap dog?  No.   The accusation stems from the incessant anti-Trump propaganda campaign.   See:  "AG Barr does hand-to-hand combat with NPR"

**  Good News: AG Barr is investigating the domestic terrorists.

**  Bad news from China:   China Trying to "Rewrite the Biblc, Force Churches to Sing Communist Anthems.

** Hypocrisy!   Minneapolis city council members who voted to defund police are getting taxpayer-funded private security.

** Black Lives Matter leader:  "If America doesn't give us what we want we will burn down this system."

** "Teen Vogue Magazine Pushes Marxism on Its Young Readers"

**  Horrible News for Democrats:  After a Month of Leftist Rioting, Looting and Arson Trump's Approval with Black voters Remains at 28%

**  Black Lives Matter Rally with no black people.   A black Republican couple look on from a distance and laugh.  

ROD DREHER AND THE STATE OF OUR TIMES

It's important to keep reading Rod Dreher.  I do not have time to offer additional or better comments on the three posts listed below, but perhaps I can do so at a later time.  Each is important reading.

 --  Here is a post on Trump's evangelical support and it's pervasive pessimism -- which reflects my own thinking.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/evangelicals-trump-shield-2020/

--  See also this on the religion of the New York Times:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/new-york-times-editorial-staff-meeting-racism-oberlin-faculty-senate/

And this on progressive education in California - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/california-to-become-yugoslavia-ethnic-studies/

OBAMA THE DIVIDER BEGETS TRUMP

Jonathan V. Last writes:

. . .  As an empirical matter . . . Obama is the most divisive president since Eisenhower, because that's when Gallup began measuring such things: By the pollster's reckoning, the partisan gap in Obama's 2012 approval rating is a yawning, historic 76 points. Remember how divisive the Bush years were? The Obama years have been worse. And it's not just a partisan divide. In 2014, a Washington Post/ABC News poll asked respondents if they viewed Obama as more of a divider or uniter. It wasn't even close among independ-ents, 59 percent of whom said he's been a divider.

Still, words are nothing compared with Obama's actions: He rammed Obamacare through without a single Republican vote. And when he couldn't find even a bare majority of votes for his immigration reform or gun control bills, he simply proceeded via executive decree.

When no one on the left was asking for it, Obama pursued the narrowest-possible reading of religious liberty, resulting in Supreme Court showdowns with a Lutheran school, which wanted to be free to hire its own ministers without government interference, and with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who didn't want to be forced to pay for abortifacients. There was no reason for Obama to pursue these policies except as an exercise in premeditated divisiveness. On the question of religious liberty, Obama has sought to undo a national consensus and foment conflict. In doing so, he set in motion a slow-rolling constitutional and cultural collision that is likely to end badly. The only reason this chaos isn't apparent to the general public is because Lutherans and nuns don't riot.

Then there's race relations. Obama was elected in large part because of his promise to heal racial wounds. It hasn't worked out that way. In 2001, Gallup found that 70 percent of blacks and 62 percent of whites thought race relations in America were somewhat or very good. By the time Obama was inaugurated those numbers had flipped, with 61 percent of blacks and 70 percent of whites (having just absolved themselves by voting for Obama, one suspects) rating race relations as good. During Obama's tenure, both numbers have been in freefall. Today, only 51 percent of blacks and 45 percent of whites think relations between the races are good.

What happened? First came Obama's decision not to prosecute two members of the New Black Panthers who had been charged with voter intimidation for their actions outside a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day in 2008. (In case you think the New Black Panthers are just a bunch of scamps, in 2014 two other members of the group were arrested for plotting to kill the chief of police in Ferguson, Mo.)

Then came Obama's penchant for wading into every racial police controversy that reached the front page of the New York Times. He took sides against the Cambridge cops in their arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The police in this case were almost certainly in the wrong; but no one needed the president of the United States preening about it. He did the same with the death of Trayvon Martin, showing up unscheduled at a press availability to talk about the case the week after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting. Did Obama come before the cameras to reassure the public and vouch for the rule of law? No. He stoked the fires, telling America, "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." This was a ridiculous exaggeration. Martin was (to put it charitably) a troubled teen with a history of problematic behavior; 35 years before, Barack Obama had been a promising student at an elite private school. By likening himself to Martin, Obama was viewing the episode through the most reductive and demagogic lens possible.

When the Michael Brown shooting turned Ferguson into a powder keg, Obama was ready for the cameras, calling it "heartbreaking" and sending his Justice Department in to ferret out wrongdoing. (They found none.) In a world full of real police abuses — such as the killing of Eric Garner in New York and the shooting of Walter Scott in Charleston — Obama seems to have a knack for tying himself to the cases where the police were actually in the right. It's enough to make one wonder if Obama can't tell the difference between proper and improper police conduct — or if he just doesn't care.

All of which lead to Obama's semi-embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Heather Mac Donald has documented, Black Lives Matter is not an innocent college protest movement. It is an ugly strain of anarchic racialism that has led not just to the defense of looting but to the killing of police officers. Obama does not merely refuse to condemn Black Lives Matter — he attempts to rationalize it, explaining, "There is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities."

To his credit, President Obama has never offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who assault protesters or warned/promised violent riots should he not get his way. Donald Trump may be Obama's heir, but Trump has raised the stakes.

But it's important to understand that Trump is Obama's heir—or, at the very least, the man who wants to inherit the world Obama made. Part of the reason we have Trump today is that Obama set the table by dividing the country so completely; maneuvering so as to pit Americans against one another.

One of the hallmarks of the great dividers, of course, is that they never shut up about how hard they're really trying to unite everyone. Two weeks ago, as violence broke out in a series of incidents at his rallies, Trump insisted, against all evidence, "I'm a uniter."

And back in 2012, as he was accusing the Republican party of waging a "war on women," Obama insisted, "I don't think .  .  . anybody who's been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country. We've always tried to bring the country together."

WHOA! O'REILLY ON AMERICA'S RACE PROBLEM

Recently someone sent me the following video.  It apparently dates to August 2014, but don't let that deter you  from watching.  What O'Reilly says is timeless and incontrovertible. 

 

 

QUICK TAKES

Daniel Greenfield - The Internalized Racism of White Leftists

Walter Williams - Culture and Social Pathology

Cal Thomas - China's Big Hack Attack

Raymond Ibrahim - Islam's Jihad on Churches

David French - S.C. Suspect Caught and the Politicization begins  (* Especially important)

            Question - Was Dylann Storm Roof taking anti-depressant drugs?  Update: Apparently YES!

OPPRESSION ENVY: WHITE WOMAN PASSES HERSELF OFF AS BLACK

--  (See updates at the end of the post)

You have perhaps heard of the white woman who passed herself off as black?  

Mona Charen comments appositely:  [my bolding]

In the 1950s and before, ”passing” referred to a black person who presented himself to the world as white. So is it progress when a Caucasian flips it? Shall we all celebrate another historic “first”? Rachel Dolezal, the first white to pass as black? There is already a lot of discussion on Twitter about “race and what it means.” There will presumably be a back and forth about attempting to appropriate some other group’s suffering, but let’s face it, the left in general has a huge case of oppression envy. It’s the coin of the realm. Being oppressed, or being a member of a group thought to be oppressed, brings real world benefits like deference, university professorships, and much more. This racial consciousness is an American disease that began as oppression, moved on to guilt, and has now entered the realm of farce.

Me:  It's perhaps of interest that the woman in question, Rachel Dolezal, is a college teacher, more specifically, she serves as "professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, where her research interests include 'the intersection of race, gender and class in the contemporary diaspora with a specific emphasis on black women in visual culture.'”   This information may further the negative opinion now gathering momentum towards what passes as education on college campuses today.  

Update 1:  See video below.  Allahpundit writes:

The first eight minutes show Dolezal rambling on about the mysterious hate crimes committed against her and her kids. The action starts at 7:55, when the interviewer surprises her by asking her to confirm that the black man she claims is her father really is her father. It’s all downhill from there.  [Brief transcript below]

 

“I was wondering if your dad really is an African American man,” Jeff Humphrey of KXLY4 asked Dolezal.

“That’s a very … I mean, I don’t know what you’re implying,” Dolezal said.

“Are you African American?” Humphrey said.

“I don’t understand the question,” Dolezal said. She walked off-camera as Humphrey asked: “Are your parents, are they white?”

Dolezal did not return requests for comment.

Update 2: Among various quotes of the day there is this:

When Rachel applied to Howard University to study art with a portfolio of “exclusively African American portraiture,” the university “took her for a black woman” and gave her a full scholarship.

And this:

She is trans racial. All white people should claim that they are the same. The US will not be able to blame whites anymore.

Update 3: 6/16/15

-

 

REVIEW OF "DON'T MAKE THE BLACK KIDS ANGRY"

Jack Kerwick reviews Colin Flaherty's Don't Make the Black Kids Angry, noting: 

Flaherty frequently cites Marlin Newburn, a prison psychologist who “has been on the front lines of racial violence for 30 years.” According to Newburn, these “predators,” do not reflect “a subculture,” but “a primary part of the black culture [.]” This culture “is one of sadistic and primitive impulse where they [the predators] believe themselves to be 10 feet tall, bulletproof, very smart, good looking, gifted, and tougher than anyone.” These “predators” live “without any sense of personal responsibility or boundaries with others.” Hence, while “assaulting or killing someone, the absence of a conscience is considered among their peers as an indicator of strength and power.” The expression of “joy in the process [of violence] only heightens their street cred.”

When two Muslim thugs shot up Charlie Hebdo, segments of the American media were apoplectic over the number of France’s “No-Go” zones, Islamic neighborhoods that non-Muslims dare not enter. Yet America has had legions of its own No-Go zones for decades: We just call them “inner cities.”

Later in the review:

JAY NORDLINGER - THE VALUE OF LIFE

Jay Nordlinger correctly observes:

Possibly the most sickening thing about America is its racial selectivity. White person kills white person. Zzzzz. Black person kills black person. Zzzzz. Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops. Or explodes.

(And if the person doing the shooting is not quite white, à la George Zimmerman, you can add a little bleach, dubbing him a “white Hispanic.”)

It’s not just that some life is held to be more valuable than other life. It’s that the value of life is measured by the color of the person who takes it. Which is a little weird, at a minimum.

Michael Brown’s life or Trayvon Martin’s life would be just as valuable if a person of a different color had done the shooting. But we would not know the victims’ names, of course.  . . 

SOCIOLOGIST: GARDENING SPREADS RACISM, FACISM

This will have to be placed on my "hard to believe" pile.   Whacky whacky whacky.  Read on:

Katherine Timpf of National Review Online reports: 

A sociology lecturer at the University of Westminster is claiming that panelists on a BBC radio show are covertly spreading racist and fascist messages when they talk about gardening.

Dr. Ben Pitcher claimed that people on Gardeners’ Question Time are really just using gardening as a covert way to talk about white identity without seeming racist.

“Gardeners’ Question Time is not the most controversial show on Radio 4, and yet it is layered with, saturated with, racial meanings,” he said on another Radio 4 show, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

“The context here is the rise of nationalism,” he continued.

The topics discussed on the show include different plant species and soil purity, which Pitcher identified as code language for racial purity. The Caucasian sociologist said radio personalities use discussions of “invasive” and non-native plant species to express opposition to foreigners. Another guest on Radio 4 — a baroness and former professor of cultural studies — agreed with Pitcher, comparing British concerns about rhododendrons to anti-Pakistani sentiments in the 1980s.

A frequent panelist on Gardeners’ Question Time, the aptly named Bob Flowerdew, called Pitcher’s claims “ridiculous.”

“Does he want us to stop using words altogether? Perhaps we shouldn’t use Latin names to avoid offending the Romans,” Flowerdew said.

OPRAH - OBAMA CRITICS ARE RACISTS

Sterling Beard reports:

Oprah Winfrey today shared some thoughts on race and President Obama with the BBC while in the U.K. to promote The Butler.

When asked by the BBC’s Will Gompertz if she thought Obama had to deal with racism, the queen of talk responded in the affirmative.

“Probably it’s crossed my mind more times than it’s crossed your mind,” Oprah said.

She went on to say that there is “a level of disrespect for the office” that “occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he is African American. . . . There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”

In order to further racial progress, she said, “generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, . . . they just have to die.”

To which Victor Davis aptly commented in a piece titled, "The Moral Decline of Oprah," the following:

. . . Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls. In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.

Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).

That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office. Instead, in this raciallyobsessed world of Oprah, that Obama is faring no different from his predecessors is now the country’s fault. And as remedy, he must be given deference if the country wishes to avoid the latest therapeutic rant from Oprah.

In fact, Oprah has no record of worrying about the level of disrespect shown the office. If she did, she might have said something a few years ago when her president was routinely being compared to a Nazi, and often by her own fellow celebrities, writers, politicians, civil-rights activists, and filmmakers. That she said nothing then, but now says a lot, explains not America’s problem with race, but her own race obsessions, which have blinded her to her own prejudices and hypocrisies.

THE MOVIE "THE BUTLER" DISTORTS RACE RELATIONS

I'm always bothered when movies rewrite history.  Most moviegoers accept the screen story as accurate.    Richard Epstein tells the true story.

QUICK TAKES

Ed Morrissey - Amnesty International: Haters of Western Civilization and defenders of Jihad.  Really?  Yes. Right up there with CAIR and Human Rights Watch.

--  Mark Steyn - Shame!  Black Congressmen lie about racial epithets   Breitbart - $100,000 offered for evidence.  No takers

AL SHARPTON'S RACIAL DEMAGOGUERY

Who will expose this charlatan for who he is?  It falls to Michelle Malkin.  If you want to know this man's sordid past behavior (which the oldline, liberal press refuses to talk about), read her column. 

HAS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION "EVOLVED BEYOND RACE" OR THE OPPOSITE?

Victor Davis Hanson says "the opposite" and foresees a probable eventual "polarization we have not seen in generations."   Oh my... !   VDH elucidates:

Did Jones [the black czar who just resigned] or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?

The Jones mess brings up a larger issue. Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE "GATES INCIDENT"

VDH adds (update):

Somehow the president in the last few hours, in his now characteristic stereotyping, has managed to  insult the nation's police with his "stupidly" comment, the nation's surgeons with his reference to greedy tonsil-cutting, and the nation's elderly with his aspirin quip — all reminiscent of the "typical white person" castoff, Pennsylvania clingers speech, and the Special Olympics one-liner. Given his propensity to apologize abroad for the purported sins of other earlier Americans, can we expect some "I'm sorry"s  for his own clumsy generalizations? No wonder Robert Gibbs and Joe Biden have little worries that their own logorrhea will have any consequences.

Original post:

. . . if the public comes away with any lasting impression, it will be that an impromptu Obama, for all the post-racial rhetoric, still sees controversies in prisms that reflect stereotyped us/them racialism rather than looking at each incident empirically.

 

There were no winners in this comic tragedy — but one clear loser: last night, the president of the United States.   [MORE . . ]

Sidenote: Roger Kimball isn't impressed with Gates' vaunted scholarship.  Click here.

Update: "Anonymous says," Dr. Gates' behavior a product of the Ivy League Effect

Update: VDH on the Obama presidency: what might have been if Obama had not chosen to govern from a neo-socialist, hard left position.

SHELBY STEELE - "WHY THE GOP CAN'T WIN WITH MINORITIES"

To my mind, Shelby Steele has written an article with extraordinary explanatory power.

Heather MacDonald Answers Attorney General Eric Holder - What's Really Cowardly is Racial Dishonesty

MacDonald writes:    (HT: HotAir)

Attorney General Eric Holder. . . recently told his Justice Department employees that the United States was a “nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable,” Holder said. “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

To which MacDonald unleashes an energetic, fact-filled response.  Most of us would be hesitant (cowardly?) to respond to Holder's accusation with such boldness and vigor.  But can she be faulted?