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By now, most Scragged readers know of the controversy involving Shirley Sherrod and her speech at a NAACP meeting. To summarize:
Those of us who've been following racial politics for a long time have known that essentially all blacks and most liberals have been extremely tolerant of black people discriminating against white people and even of black criminals attacking white people. The disproportionate amount of black-on-white violent crime as compared to almost-nonexistent white-on-black violent crime has simply been swept under the rug along with a host of other anti-white actions.
NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;" they plainly intend to discriminate in favor of colored people on the basis of race. It's both possible and highly laudable to advance colored people by encouraging them to get a good education, helping them start businesses, and otherwise giving them a hand up. Encouraging colored people to be all they can be doesn't have to translate into attacking white people.
Unfortunately, today's NAACP has chosen the latter course. Rather than encouraging income to be earned by the hard personal work of its members, the NAACP has long favored income transfer, welfare payments, and affirmative action, where white people are treated worse than similarly-qualified black people.
The NAACP has clung to this overtly racist policy even though affirmative action hurts black people as much or more than it hurts whites. Being treated unfairly makes white people who otherwise wouldn't be racists see blacks in an unfavorable light and opens any black to the suspicion that he or she isn't really qualified. The NAACP also accuses police of racial bias when they lock up more black people than white people even though black people commit far more crimes per capita than white people.
Unfortunately for social stability, various groups have been fanning the flames of racial hatred in order to gain political power. Conservatives blame Democrats for encouraging black people to see themselves as victims who have to vote for Democrats to keep welfare payments coming. Bob Herbert, a liberal New York Times columnist, accuses conservatives of exaggerating racial incidents to encourage whites to vote against Democrats:
While racial discrimination is overwhelmingly directed against black people in the U.S., much of the nation and the media are poised to go berserk over the most specious allegations of racism against whites.
Where's this guy been for the last 20 years? What is affirmative action but government-sponsored racial discrimination directed against whites? Hasn't he heard of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group of members of the US Congress who happen to be both black and Democrat? If the Black Caucus refusing to admit non-blacks who represent overwhelmingly black districts isn't anti-white racism, what is?
To be fair to Mr. Herbert, he pointed out that the Obama administration had acted despicably in firing Ms. Sherrod without listening to her side or getting all the facts:
The Shirley Sherrod story tells us so much about ourselves, and none of it is pretty. The most obvious and shameful fact is that the Obama administration, which runs from race issues the way thoroughbreds bolt from the starting gate, did not offer this woman anything resembling fair or respectful treatment before firing and publicly humiliating her.
Only too true; as far as Ms. Sherrod is concerned, Mr. Herbert hit the nail on the head. Long sad experience, alas, tells us that he'd have approved of a white person being summarily sacked under similar circumstances.
This incident is the latest in a series which suggests that the tide of false racism accusations may be beginning to turn.
The Washington Times reports racial bias within the Obama administration by citing former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams statement under oath that, in Eric Holder's Justice Department,
"There is an open hostility to race-neutral enforcement of the voting rights laws," he stated. Officials, he said, openly refuse to bring "cases against black perpetrators [on behalf of white voters]."
The Times also admitted that affirmative action programs for admitting less-qualified blacks to colleges has hurt whites:
Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.
This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars "for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students," leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.
The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren't racial minorities; they're working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. [emphasis added]
It's hard to decide what represents the bigger change in writing about anti-white racism: the fact that Princeton would publish a book which pointed out the unfairness of government mandates to favor blacks over whites or the fact that the Times would write about the book at all.
The Times isn't the only major paper to subtly shift its reporting policies. The front-page story "For racial politics, a new twist" in USA Today of July 22 listed a number of racially-biased actions by the Obama administration:
Ponder how these incidents would have been treated had they occurred during the Bush administration even if the races hadn't been reversed. They aren't current news in that they mostly happened some time ago, but the fact that USA Today would portray a pattern by putting them in a list is an indication of how much the atmosphere has changed.
It's taken longer than we thought it would, but the media are finally beginning to criticize the actions of our most overtly racist administration since before Abraham Lincoln.
The mainstream media have been pussyfooting about the race of criminals for decades. The recent New York Times article about the "sleeper killer" neglected to mention the detail that both the killer and most of his victims were black, but the race of white criminals is just about always mentioned explicitly.
Ordinary citizens caught on long ago. The New York Times 1993 article about a man who fired more than 30 shots in a Long Island Railroad train and killed seven people didn't mention his race, but people weren't fooled. I have a friend who remembers discussing the incident as the news spread. "It's got to be a black man." he was told. "If the shooter was white, they'd have told us."
Consider the major progress in race relations indicated by this recent report from the New York Times:
Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults. [emphasis added]
Non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, committed 5 percent of the city's violent crimes in 2009, 1.4 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.
The Times couldn't bring itself to point out that minorities are such a small fraction of the overall population that any given black or Hispanic man is far, far more likely to commit a violent crime than a white man, but publicly admitting the obvious about black violence is a major step forward.
The most important aspects of this incident are:
The NAACP has been anti-white for all of living memory and recently accused the Tea Party people of being racist. Instead of rolling over, the Tea Party folks started firing back at the NAACP and the Obama administration.
This sort of slanging helps no one. The vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of any form of racism and are now almost as fed up with false accusations of racism.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this whole racism thing - which we'll discuss in the next article in this series.