Race Free Zone responds to comments

I keep hearing this "You can't understand unless you're black," excuse all over. It's the same as saying, "I've lost the reasonable discussion, so I'm going to claim that only blacks can possibly understand, which eliminates my having to pay attention to anybody else's opinion." It you want to lie to yourself, that's your business. At least accept that many prominent blacks who are skilled race relations experts, scholars, politicians, and successful businesspersons are saying exactly what Race Free Zone is saying, and they're . . . black. Many of them came out of poverty in the real Jim Crow era, and managed to ignore race obsession and make good on the American promise. Please scan our "Quotables" section to read their own words: Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, John H. McWhorter, Ward Connerly, Star Parker, and more. If you only take the word of blacks, there they are.

This is not new--it goes back to the slaves, like Frederick Douglas, who rejected paternalism and encouraged blacks to make it on their own because America was the one place where they could do that. When we say that "real racism" is mostly gone, we're referring to the old-fashioned kind of racism that resulted in such ridiculous moments as a white father's not letting a black medical specialist work on his child. I provided a very clear example so the readers would understand.

While there is still racism because that's natural and will never completely go away, largely because of the paranoia encouraged by social programs, the media and squabbling over money, set-asides and hand-outs, America is much better than ever before in history for a person of any heritage to "make it here." It's still one of the best places in the world for a person of any color to succeed. Only those who are held back by the chips on their own shoulders are doomed to fail in America.

My Hispanic son will never be affected by racism because he will simply shrug and move on to the next best opportunity, rather than wallowing in self-pity and victimhood. He's not a victim and he knows it. He's in charge of his life. Notice that I did not say he would not ENCOUNTER racism--I said he would never be AFFECTED by it. That's because what happens to you is random, while how you react to it is your own choice. Go out into the world and be a person. Don't be a color. Be an American.

Diane Carey - Race Free Zone

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A Word Too Far : Blogger and Law Professor, Ann Althouse, teaches us how political correctness does the opposite of what it was intended to do

A Word Too Far

By ANN ALTHOUSE


Published: March 3, 2007
Recently, the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski had to grovel after one of its recruiters used a racist epithet in an interview exercise at Duke University Law School.

The recruiter was quoting a Waco, Tex., prosecutor in a 1920s murder case in which Leon Jaworski, one of the firm’s founding partners, represented a black defendant.

But never mind. One student heard an upsetting word and lodged a complaint.

Without explaining the context of the partner’s use of that horrible word, the law school’s dean, Katharine Bartlett, sent e-mail to students, saying: “I appreciate the strong feelings this incident has raised.” And before long, Steven Pfeiffer, the chairman of the firm’s executive committee, was traveling to Durham, N.C., to apologize.

As reported in the Texas Lawyer, Pfeiffer said, “There is no excuse for what happened on this campus. There is no context for which that is permissible conduct.”


Closer to home, a perplexing event took place at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where I teach.

As reported in The Capital Times: “Clearly, eloquently and sometimes tearfully, the seven young Asian women who raised the issue of a law professor’s allegedly insulting remarks about the Hmong told their story at a public forum Thursday night.”

What were these “allegedly insulting remarks”? Well, we’re only talking about alleged remarks, because even though the incident in question took place in mid-February, we have yet to hear the law professor’s version of the story of what he said to his class. Teaching a lesson about the failure of the law to take cultural differences into account, Prof. Leonard Kaplan said something about the Hmong that upset several students.

Despite the confusion about what happened, demands for apologies and remedies fill the air. The truth that seems to matter is the fact that the students felt bad.

You might think that a law school would want to teach scrupulous procedure, including a passion for the search for the truth and the need to find the facts before devising the remedy. But the notion instead seemed to be that we could simply treat the feelings and try to make everyone feel good again.

Ironically, you have to care enough about engaging energetically with issues of race to run into this sort of trouble. It’s so much easier to skip the subject altogether, to embrace a theory of colorblindness or to scoop out gobs of politically correct pabulum. It’s only when you challenge the students and confront them with something that can be experienced as ugly — even if you’re only trying to highlight your law firm’s illustrious fight against racism — that you create the risk that someone may take offense.

Perhaps students will jot down the few words you just said that made their ears perk up. What was the rest of this complicated pedagogical exercise, intrusively stirring up difficult emotions?

It would have been so much easier to teach using simple, straightforward lecturing, with every sentence carefully composed, with a sharp eye on the goal of never giving anyone any reason to question the purity of your beliefs and the beneficence of your heart.

Your colleagues may sympathize with you in private, but most likely they’ll be rethinking this idea — heartily promoted in law schools since the 1980s — that they ought to actively incorporate delicate issues of race into their courses.

Publicly, the school goes into damage-control mode. After all, it has worked so hard to bring together a diverse student body and to convey a feeling of welcome to everyone. How can we bear to hear a student say, as one Wisconsin student did on Thursday, that “unless we have a safe learning environment,” the school’s commitment to diversity “doesn’t mean anything”?

But this is madness! Our question should not be about what we can do to make you comfortable or how we can make your life pleasant again.

We owe our law students respect, but part of that respect is the recognition that they are adults who are spending many thousands of dollars and hours of study trying to acquire the critical thinking and fortitude that will enable them to serve clients and to stand up to adversaries who are only too ready to shake their nerve — like that real racist, the prosecutor who tried to intimidate Leon Jaworski in Texas in the 1920s.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. This is her last guest column.

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Race Free Zone commentary: American History Month

By Diane Carey



When we agreed to adopt a little boy who had been born in Guatemala, the adoption agency called us the next night to give us a chance to “get out of it.” Of course, we wondered what was wrong. They told us, “Well . . . he’s dark.”

Dark?

I asked, “Dark green?”

In Guatemala, apparently, there’s a “caste” system—where people are judged along a color scale of light to dark. The lighter-skinned children, usually of Spanish descent, are preferred for adoption, while the darker-skinned children, mostly Central American Indian, are “lower class.”

Of course, my husband and I don’t care about color. We adopted our beautiful boy and he’s now hail and hearty at 12 years old, playing football, shooting archery, and thinking of himself as an all-American, because that’s what he is. He’s still dark, but in America nobody really cares. We pretend to be obsessed with race, but on an individual basis, we really don’t care. Gone are the days when a white father would say, “I don’t want that black paramedic working on my child.” That’s real racism, and it’s mostly gone.


We are Americans, no matter our color. Each of us should be completely equal to the next, a person without “category.” We are made up of myriad complex and mixed bloodlines.

“White” Americans are often painted as one homogenous group, but that’s not accurate. In fact, “white” means a thousand bloodlines—British, Irish, Jewish, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Basque, many strains of Middle-Eastern mixes (like me), and hundreds of others, and a smattering of religions. Many “white” people have American Indian or Negro blood because there was so much mixing on the frontiers. America was the place where the “mixed” could find prosperity as color lines blurred.

Asians living in America are also not a single bloodline. There are multiple roots for “Asian” – Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian, Polynesian, Manchurian, Mongolian, and so on. Hispanics the same—Mexican, Spaniard, Guatemalan, Brazilian, Venezualan, coming from much different regions of the globe. The only thing that these groups have in common is that they have nothing in common. Yet we lump them together into “Asian” and “Hispanic.”

We do the same thing to “blacks.” The Negro race is actually made up of dozens of genetic roots who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other, had separate religions, separate languages, separate cultures, different physical features and different skin tones. Often they were (and are) bitter enemies, engaging in wholesale slaughter of each other. Black slaves were captured and sold by other blacks.

Many modern black Americans have ancestry much more deeply and recently rooted in the Caribbean or South America than in Africa. Most black Americans have been American much deeper into their family history than white Americans like me whose ancestors didn’t immigrate until the 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries.

My son comes from Guatemala, where everybody speaks Spanish, but my son is almost pure Mayan, or Central American Indian, while others in Guatemala are various other strains, usually measured by color. He is much closer genetically to the American Indians and Eskimos than to Mexicans or the Spanish. His ancestors were from this continent, while the Spanish-Hispanics were not.

Spanish-Hispanics? What are we doing to ourselves! Is this any sillier than Something-American? That hyphen is killing us, driving us apart, separating us from other Americans in order to get a “group identity,” because we’ve forgotten that we’re individuals, each with his own identity.

Instead, we pander to “group identity.” We celebrate only the group, not the individual. We convince ourselves that whatever comes in front of the hyphen is more important than what comes after it: “American.” We celebrate everything except being American. A case in point: Black History Month.

Why do we have this? I haven’t noticed that Black History Month really celebrates accomplishments. It seems more to spotlight America’s old bad habits which have been repudiated by most of “white” society. Among whites, a white racist is a pariah. We shun him. He embarrasses us. Instead of letting him crawl into the corner and die, we trumpet his existence by shoving Black History Month down the throats of every child in American, black, white, and otherwise. Is there anything more goofy than Black History Month in Hawaii and Alaska?

Black History Month tells black children that they are separate and will never be just Americans. It hammers the faulty idea that “whites” did something bad to “them.” We tell white children that they “did” something which they never did, and that they should be ashamed of things done four hundred years ago by people who looked something like them. We tell black children that white society owes them, and the pay-off is Black History Month, a separatist and pandering concept with no substance, and that they’re dopey enough to be satisfied with such skin-thin tokens. It tells them their identities are frail, their individualism non-existent. It treats them like spoiled brats who must get one more Christmas present than anybody else so they won’t sulk.

The dream of the slaves was one of freedom from this kind of behavior, an America that didn’t even remember the times of separation by race. The dream of M. L. King, Jr. was that his children, and mine, would be judged by the content of character, while the color of their skin would be a non-factor. Instead, we enshrine color of skin. We celebrate separation by race and force ourselves to remember the ugliest details, as if that heals anything. Don’t we know the danger of reopening old wounds? We end up with infections like Black History Month.

We can tell that Black History Month is nothing more than political pandering by noting which blacks are celebrated. When’s the last time a conservative black was showcased? When have Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas been celebrated as the “first blacks” of their high accomplishments? Of course they can’t be celebrated, because they were appointed by a white Republican president, and we can’t have that remembered, can we?

When have the brilliants writings and accomplishments of Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly or John McWhorter been read by black and white school children? In the politically correct “celebration,” there are no black conservatives. There are no blacks who think outside the “group” box. There are no blacks who want to concentrate on the content of character, not the color of skin. They just don’t exist.

We don’t have Irish History Month, Chinese History Month, or Jewish History Month, even though these groups were also persecuted on American soil. Frederick Douglass, who was raised in slavery—real slavery, not the fake image we teach our children in school—cheered America as the great hope of blacks. He said that blacks had come here as heathens and now had the Bible in their hands, that blacks had come in chains and now held the American ballot. He saw America as having given blacks a great gift—an identity that was not in any way African. He demanded that blacks in America be wholly recognized as full-fledged Americans, not Black Americans.

Black History Month is white guilt at its worst. In the words of black American author Shelby Steele, it treats American blacks like pets getting thrown a cookie. It balms white embarrassment for things most never did and never would do. It cleaves American from American and assures that we will never see each other as brothers under one flag.

We are all one race: we are the American race. Let’s have American History Month.

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