Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Liberals House Negro

Yes, he’s the black guy the liberals love: always ranting about white racism and how terrible it is to lock up black men. The fact that they got locked up for crimes (and not because racist whites want to hurt blacks) is something beyond his ken.


But what would an honest inventory of the problems of the black community show? Kay Hymowitz explains, discussing one of Coates’ articles:

This is not a one-time lapse. Coates’s article is marked by the sin of omission. You might think that an article on the Moynihan report and the black family would mention somewhere that today 72 percent of black children, up from 24 percent when the report was written, are born to unmarried mothers. You might assume that an analyst of the black family would explain that large numbers of those children — far more than mass incarceration can explain, by the way — will have at best erratic relationships with their fathers. You would expect him to show how one of the main reasons fathers fade out of their children’s lives is “multi-partner fertility” — parents who have children by a series of partners — and that multi-partner fertility is particularly widespread among blacks and incarcerated men. He might look at the research suggesting that children living with an unrelated father are more likely to suffer abuse. You would expect him to ponder all of this because there is abundant evidence that boys growing up under these conditions have less self-control than those growing up in more stable families, and most of all, because those boys are far more prone to commit crimes. You would think at least some of this would find its way into the pages of a 17,000-word piece called “The Black Family in an Age of Mass Incarceration,” but you would be wrong.

Coates is, to be blunt about it, the liberals house negro. His job it to tell them what they want to hear, in an angry and impassioned voice. And when they can, they will use him to try to guilt or intimidate other whites who might be reticent to admit their “white privilege” or go along with some “diversity” hustle.

Colleges and universities have a lot of people like him. It’s a growth industry.

Naima Lowe: Evergreen State College’s Incendiary Race Hustler

They Keep Coming: Another Campus Hate Crime Hoax

From the College Fix:

A note that used the n-word and threatened a black female student at St. Olaf College — sparking an intense protest that led to classes being shut down for a day as student demonstrators accused the school of institutional racism — “was not a genuine threat,” the school’s president said Wednesday.

President David Anderson said in an email to students that an investigation into the note identified a person of interest “who confessed to writing the note.”

“We’ve confirmed that this was not a genuine threat. We’re confident that there is no ongoing threat from this incident to individuals or the community as a whole,” he said.

In a second campuswide email sent later Wednesday, Anderson used stronger words to explain what happened: “The reason I said in my earlier note that this was not a genuine threat is that we learned from the author’s confession that the note was fabricated. It was apparently a strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.”

Anderson, citing federal student privacy laws, did not identify the person of interest nor use the term hate-crime hoax, but his announcements essentially confirm what some students have said privately to themselves ever since the chaos erupted at the rural Southern Minnesota campus earlier this month.

Around the same time Anderson made the announcement Wednesday, the black female student who initially told everyone she found the note on her car that used the n-word and threatened her announced on social media “I will be saying it was a hoax.”

The typewritten note had stated: “I am so glad that you are leaving soon. One less [n-word] that this school has to deal with. You have spoken up too much. You will change nothing. Shut up or I will shut you up.”

A Facebook screenshot obtained by The College Fix shows Samantha Wells, the student who reported the incident, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday that “it looks like something made its way back to me in the investigation.”

“I will be saying it was a hoax,” she continued. “I don’t care. There is nothing more that I can do. I just wanted to give y’all the heads up.”

In an email to The College Fix, Wells confirmed the post but said it’s since been deleted and that she has “nothing to admit.”

“It was a reaction to something said this morning and my wanting for all of this to end. I did not have to admit anything because there is nothing to admit,” she said.

She said the probe into her case has concluded, but that she couldn’t comment further because of legal reasons.

The April 29 incident in which Wells said she found the alleged note on the windshield of her car was the latest of a string of alleged racial incidents at the private, Lutheran college.

After receiving the note, Wells told Fox News 9 she “immediately shared the note on Facebook and with St. Olaf Public Safety,” saying “I knew I had to share it because it was another incident; it’s the third incident this week.”

Later that day, angry students blocked entrances to the college cafeteria and took over the student commons demanding redress for a string of alleged racial incidents on campus. Administrators canceled classes last Monday to allow demonstrators to air their grievances in a daylong sit-in.

Protesters also put up signs that included language such as “I’m sick of white tears” and “F*ck your white complacency.”

“The campus admins are allowing the commons area to become a bulletin board of complaints against white people. No action has been taken to remove the signs, and no students dare to touch them since there are newly-installed cameras everywhere,” a student who emailed The Fix said.

As the protest took on a life of its own, an email chain among students and scholars at the school shows Wells said she didn’t want the incident to be investigated.

The email thread, which had a subject line of TRACK DOWN RACIST BEHIND THREATS, includes college members discussing how St. Olaf could use its technology to find those behind the alleged racist incidents. As the chain of emails progressed, one student said she was speaking with Wells, who told her “she doesn’t want people tongo [sic] through computers to find the person who wrote the note to her. She does, however, want everything possible to be done for the others.”

The next email in the thread came from Wells.

“I would like to echo Krysta and say that I do not want my case to be investigated,” Wells wrote. “Not because I do not want to let this person go but because I am very stressed and I think that efforts could be utilized elsewhere. That said, I do want them to investigate both previous and possible later cases.”

Wells added she was stressed.

“Also, this message could have been printed off school grounds and could have been printed days, months, or years ago,” she wrote. “I mean heck, I printed off a form today for work (that I didn’t get to turn in whoops) right before I went to my car so I too could be a suspect but even I am not that extra.”

While the investigation into Wells’ case has concluded, Anderson, St. Olaf’s president, said investigations into the other alleged events are ongoing.

There have been nine reported incidents, six of which occurred in April, Anderson said in a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio.

Anderson told students last month in an email that the racial incidents appear to be “the work of one or a small number of people.”

“This person uses the same modus operandi every time this happens; even the handwriting on the notes is similar from incident to incident,” he wrote.

The reported note in Wells’ case was typed.

Yes, they keep coming. Why?

Quite simply, there is a huge demand. There are lots of social justice warriors and bureaucrats with “diversity” or “inclusion” in their titles who need racist incidents to justify their jobs.

Add to that black students who, because of affirmative action, aren’t really up to the demands of a selective college. When they struggle, it’s easy to decide that “racism” is the problem, and if there were more diversity programs and more black professors things would be better.

And as these student struggle, they are easy prey for leftist faculty who find it easy to convince them that pursuit of racial grievances (and not studying for their classes, or working on their papers) is the way to achieve.

It’s a toxic situation, and it seems to be worst in hot-house liberal institutions. But that is poetic justice.

Faked Hate Crimes on College Campuses

Two sources that are not new, but continue to have relevance whenever somebody claims to have been victim of a “hate crime” on a college campus. First, from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 22 (Winter, 1998-1999), p. 52:

In the 1990s hoaxes disguised as hate crimes have become common. JBHE’s sister publication The Race Relations Reporter has documented about a dozen such racial hoaxes over the past several years. Hate crimes have been staged at several college campuses. But in these cases the motive for the hoaxes has not been financial gain. Rather, the hate crime hoax is usually conceived as an effort to energize black student activism or to press the administration to move more quickly on black students’ concerns. Here are some examples of hate crime hoaxes that have occurred on college campuses in recent years.

The article also includes a short list of racial hoaxes.

Then there is John Leo, writing in U.S. News & World Report:

Like Tawana Brawley’s hoax, some recent fake hate crimes seem intended to cover personal embarrassment. . . . But more of the college hoaxes seem to reflect an acted-out commitment to a cause, not just personal difficulties. One factor is that colleges now stress the need for each identity group to express its “voice” or “narrative,” without much scruple about whether the narratives are literally true. (Postmodern theory says there is no such thing as truth anyway.) After the Brawley hoax, an article in the Nation magazine argued that it “doesn’t matter” whether Brawley was lying, since the pattern of whites abusing blacks is true.

This, of course, has not changed since the 1990s. What the literal, empirical truth is matters less than what serves a politically correct agenda.

Indoctrination at Marquette: Bridging the Racial Divide, Theology in Black and White

In the wake of the racial polarization caused by the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman affair, it seems like a good time to examine a course at Marquette called “Bridging the Racial Divide,” taught by Robert Masson of the Theology Department. The notion of bringing blacks and whites together to address the issue of race seems, in principle, a good one.  But how does it play out here?  From the course description:

Examination of racism, ethnic tension, and theology from the perspective of “white privilege” and African-American experience in American Christianity. Reflects on the intersection of these areas to discover, on the one hand, what race, ethnic tension, and struggles for social justice can tell us about theological notions, and on the other hand, to discern how specific theological notions contribute positively or negatively to our understanding of race, ethnic tension and social justice.

The whole notion of “white privilege” raises red flags. It suggests that white students in the class will be hectored and badgered about their supposed “white privilege,” and told that they can only expiate the taint of their whiteness by adopting all the standard leftist policy positions. An examination of the syllabus and course schedule reinforces this idea.

The books listed have a uniform leftist bias, pounding on the notion of “white privilege,” and clearly implying (and often stating) that the problems of the black community are the fault of whites.

The books are:

• Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.
• James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
• Tim J. Wise, White Like Me.
• Jon Nilson, Hearing Past the Pain: Why White Catholic Theologians Need Black Theology

We have already blogged about some of these authors. Massingale, for example, opposes Church teaching on gay marriage, but favors every liberal program under the sun.

As Daniel Suhr summarized his policy prescriptions, as outlined in a paper called “Poverty and Racism: Overlapping Threats to the Common Good:”

[Massingale’s] paper’s public policy prescriptions are all big-government liberalism: More regulation of the mortgage and housing industries. More federal spending on housing programs. Increased regulation of pay-day lenders. More affirmative action. The section on education calls for more funding of public schools, but makes no mention of charter schools or school choice, even though the Catholic Church otherwise has been a primary proponent and beneficiary of choice. Tax-dollar funding for free or low-cost Internet access to poor communities. Comprehensive immigration reform and comprehensive criminal justice reform. More money spent on Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and other welfare programs.

Massingale attacked Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum for lamenting the high level of welfare dependency in the black community.

Tim Wise is even worse.

As we have previously noted, he’s anti-capitalist, anti-Catholic, calls the criminal justice system “racist,” has called Israel an “apartheid” state and favors reparations to blacks. Wise has claimed to see:

... the seeds of pure evil planted deep in every one of us [white people] by our culture. . . Better to blame the dark-skinned for our [whites’] hardship since we can take it for granted that they’re powerless to do anything about it. Whites, as it turns out, take most everything for granted in this country; which makes perfect sense, because dominant groups usually have that privilege.

So one “bridges the racial divide” by using racist language about white people? In the world of the politically correct, yes.

Then there is James Cone, a rather prominent force in “black theology.” To call him a racist would be close to an understatement. In 1970, he published a book titled A Black Theology of Liberation, in which he opined:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the Black community. If God is not for us and against White people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of Black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the Black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of Black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

In another book published a year earlier, he claimed:

The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people.... All white men are responsible for white oppression.... Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man “the devil.”

In the rarified world of politically correct academia, this is exactly the way to “bridge the racial divide.”

We’ll pass up the Jon Nilson volume, which mostly whines, moans and bitches about how white theologians don’t take black theologians seriously enough. If there are any worth taking seriously (and there probably are) they aren’t on Masson’s reading list.

One might wonder whether the professor, Robert Masson, is using these authors as a foil. Perhaps he wants to simply get the students thinking. Perhaps he welcomes students critically analyzing the readings and disagreeing with the authors.

But an examination of the Course Calendar provides no evidence that this is so.

Questions include items such as these (all quoted verbatim):

• Why does McIntosh call meritocracy a myth?
• The question “is God a nigger?” is a dramatic moment in the story. What difference or distinction does this question suggest
• How does Massingale understand racism as a culture? How distinguish between this notion of racism and the common sense notion? [Under the “common sense” notion of racism, very few Americans are racist. So we need a broader notion that will allow us to call people racist.]
• Which of Wise’s stories illustrate the common sense notion of racism and which the notion of racism as culture?
• Why does Massingale fault the Church’s teaching on racism?
• Why does Nilson accuse himself and Catholic theology of racism?
• Why connect the cross and the lynching tree?
• What would Feuerbach conclude about claims that God is black? [Since Feuerbach didn’t believe in God, he would think God could be any color you want.]
• Does Wise see any hope for redemption?

Of course, if students were being taught to engage in any sort of critical thinking, they might be asked questions like:

• In this era of affirmative action, does the concept “white privilege” have much meaning?
• Is it an  example of white privilege that over 70 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock?
• Is it the fault of white people so many black babies are born out of wedlock?
• If it is at least partly the fault of white people that so many black babies are born out of wedlock, which white people? Slave owners? People running media empires? Klansmen? Politicians who passed welfare programs?
• Is it an example of white privilege that blacks are much more likely to be victims of crime than white people?
• If so, who is at fault?
• Is it an example of white privilege that so many black teens drop out of school?
• If so, who is responsible for the high dropout rate?
• Is there a fixed quantity of good things (two parent families, good schools, well-paying jobs, safe neighborhoods) in the world, such that if whites have more than blacks, they took them from blacks?

How Do Students React?

Some students, of course, eat this stuff up. It’s a dandy way to feel self-righteous. If most everybody else is racist, or at least ignorant of the “culture of racism,” you can be among the enlightened elite. No reason to worry too much about the tough questions on the second list above.

A lot of other students just go along, repeating what they are supposed to repeat to get a decent grade, and move on.

But some students actively resent this sort of thing. One student brought this course to our attention, and rather resented the heavy-handed indoctrination is involved. The student offered the following comments:

• When speaking, Dr. Masson would further question me and other white students substantially more than he would students of a “minority” race
• He considered every “minority” opinion part of a greater revelation to white students i.e. minority students are the only students with something real to bring to the table
• I wrote on the same points as some of my minority peers (some of whom are my very good friends). Dr. Masson would always give those students “extra” credit (or pluses) for the same thoughts I’d come up with
• He always acted very smug around white students if they agreed with him
• If whites countered Massingale’s arguments, he would always shut it down. If example, if I as a white student claimed that one of my minority friends was happy at Marquette, he would attribute that to a corrupted culture: blacks are forced to act white. They can’t be themselves. If blacks don’t associate with whites, that’s bad too
• Middle class behavior is branded with whiteness
• Whites sometimes act like they are leading blacks out of oppression.
• He pointed out many interesting facts that Fr. Bryan Massingale touches on as well; I simply feel like anything whites do to touch on the issue, Massingale and Masson have a way of shutting it down (although I can guarantee that no students will support me on this because they fear being deemed racists).
• He is a very good man; the problem is that he clearly favors some students in pursuit of what he believes is an attempt to close racial disparities.
• When I pointed out, in response to the idea of the “black Christ,” what it was historically inaccurate, he got very arrogant with me.

Of course, not every student is happy with every professor, and we certainly have an occasional student who doesn’t like our classes. Further, as a professor, dealing with students with whom one disagrees can be a tough task. One has a right and an obligation to challenge students, but one has to be careful not to demean them.

It is the case, however, that Masson’s syllabus and Course Schedule suggest a one-sided smugness about certain issues.  He simply doesn’t view “white privilege” as a controversial concept to be critically analyzed and debated.  He views it as Truth, which students need to accept.

“White privilege” starts out as an attempt to guilt students into accepting a standard liberal and leftist policy agenda.  But it quickly becomes intimidation.  Accept the concept, or you are guilty of (at least) racial insensitivity, and probably out-and-out racism.

We know Masson a bit, and he is indeed a nice guy. But one does not bridge the racial divide by bashing white people. Accusing them of being bearers of “white privilege” is in fact just another way of bashing them. Saying they (while not consciously racist) are part of “a culture of racism” is also just another way of bashing them.

Professors, in the hothouse culture that is academia, can propound these ideas with little pushback. But in the real world, such notions only create resentment.

And they also provide an excuse to evade the real problems that afflict the black community. But addressing those real problems doesn’t leave liberals and leftists feeling so self-righteous.

Not a Real Conversation

A Conversation About Race: Really?

From Mona Charen in National Review:

Eric Holder dismissed America as a “nation of cowards” because we wouldn’t, he argued, have a “national conversation” about race. It’s a slander wrapped in a farce. We talk of race unremittingly. That’s the farce. The slander is hydra-headed.

No honest conversation about race is possible when accusations of racism replace reasoned arguments. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who mentioned high rates of crime among black males, was rewarded with the racist label within minutes by some of those (The Atlantic, Slate) who presumably agree with Holder that we are too timid when discussing race.

Many American liberals are achingly nostalgic for old-fashioned racism. It offered them a helium high of moral superiority. It was deserved ... in 1967. But by perpetuating the fiction that modern America has not changed, they’ve become more than ridiculous, more even than grossly unjust, they’ve become dangerous. Look around you. The violence and bitterness that have followed the Zimmerman verdict were virtually ordered up by convicted slanderer Al Sharpton and his many imitators.

The Zimmerman case was complicated. Any fair-minded person could see that it was difficult to conclude that Zimmerman was not acting in self-defense (however unwise his initial actions may have been). But the racial-grievance industrial complex doesn’t permit complexity. Racial enmity is their living. Stirring feelings of victimization and injustice among blacks and, to a lesser extent, among other designated minorities is their delight.

When you consider the steady agitprop churned out by the racial-grievance industrial complex, it’s amazing that race relations aren’t worse. The RGI has circulated falsehoods about black voter “disenfranchisement” in the 2000 presidential election, about a spate of “racially motivated” arsons at black churches, about George W. Bush’s “indifference” to the lynching of a black man in Texas, about voter ID laws being a conspiracy to suppress the black vote, about Republicans opposing the civil rights act of 1964 (MSNBC recently ran a picture of George Wallace that ID’d him as a Republican), about “racial profiling” by New Jersey state troopers and about “racist” killings of black immigrants by New York cops. Each of these is an outright falsehood. There was zero voter disenfranchisement in 2000, George W. Bush signed the death warrant of the killer in Texas, Republicans were more in favor of the Voting Rights Act than Democrats, the tragic shootings of two black men in New York were mistakes, and on and on.

This is not to suggest that racism has been expunged from the heart of every American. But while the RGI bravely fights the battles of 1954, African-Americans (and not only they) face new challenges that require serious attention, free of the cant and destructive incitement that characterize the grievance mongers.

The RGI propounds the myth that the criminal justice system is indelibly racist. Young black males, we are told, are far more likely than whites to be arrested and to serve time in prison. When it is observed that a disproportionate share of offenders are black; that significant numbers of most city police forces are black; and that most victims are also black, we are invited to consider the ultimate proof — the glaring disparity in the penalties for powder and crack cocaine.

The federal criminal penalties for crack, passed in the 1980s, were a response to the devastation crack was causing in black neighborhoods. The huge spike in crime during the 1980s — and the vast victimization of inner city blacks — was primarily attributable to crack addiction. If it was racist to impose these penalties, why were members of the Congressional Black Caucus the first to champion the legislation? Heather MacDonald noted in City Journal that the laws on crystal meth have a similarly “disparate impact” on whites. “In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants (nearly as many as the crack defendants) were 54 percent white, 39 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black.”

From 1976 to 2004, 65 percent of executions involved whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of murders. Evidence of anti-white bias in the system? You could make such a case, and it would have as much validity as the manufactured panic about anti-black bias in America.

America continues to muddle along. Black/white unions comprised 11 percent of marriages in 2008. Black married couple families had an average income of $63,566 in 2010. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 — which is evidence of poor judgment, but clearly not of the kind of racist cauldron the grievance industry eternally conjures.

Campus Speaker is Incendiary Race Hustler

We learn that Marquette is having an “anti-racism” speaker on campus, sponsored by all the politically correct leftist suspects: the Office of Student Development, MUSG, the Office of Residence Life, the Division of Student Affairs and the College of Education. We are told for “more information, contact Carla Cadet, assistant dean for multicultural affairs. . . .” So that office must be involved too. The speaker is a fellow named Tim Wise, and he claims to be “anti-racist,” although in reality he is, like all the politically correct crowd, an anti-white racist.

He’s also anti-capitalist, anti-Catholic, calls the criminal justice system “racist,” has called Israel an “apartheid” state and favors reparations to blacks. A good collection of his fulminations is found here. Let us just repeat a few. Wise alludes to:

“the seeds of pure evil planted deep in every one of us [white people] by our culture. . . Better to blame the dark-skinned for our [whites’] hardship since we can take it for granted that they’re powerless to do anything about it. Whites, as it turns out, take most everything for granted in this country; which makes perfect sense, because dominant groups usually have that privilege.”

One can easily imagine the response if anybody said that blacks have the “the seeds of pure evil” planted in them. But anti-white racist is acceptable, even applauded, in academia.

“Indeed, persons of color know well that they will likely have to work twice as hard to get half as far or be considered half as good as whites; and they have known that since long before affirmative action came around. But at least with affirmative action they get the chance to work twice as hard and demonstrate their capabilities.”

Wise says that whites must work:

“individually and collectively to overcome that which is always beneath the surface; to overcome the tendency to cash in the chips which represent the perquisites of whiteness; to traffic in privileges — not the least of which is the privilege of feeling superior to others — not because of what or who they are, but rather because of what you’re not: in this case, not a nigger. . . . Fact is nigger is still the first word on most white people’s mind when they see a black man being taken off to jail on the evening news. The first thing we think when we see Mike Tyson, Louis Farrakhan, or O.J. Simpson (as in ‘that murdering nigger’).”

Of course, people like Wise prate about “institutional racism:”

“I view the U.S. as a nation in which racism has been interwoven from the beginning, and in which it continues to operate. But this racism is not principally the individual racism of ‘evil’ white people, let alone those out to ambush people of color due to some kind of boiling hatred, but rather the more impersonal racism of institutions, whose actors perpetrate unequal treatment often without deliberate intent to harm. If anything, it is my argument that white people are far less individually culpable than the institutions in which we find ourselves dominant, the policies and procedures of which continue to advantage whites to the detriment of people of color.”

These, of course, are the same institutions that (like Marquette) discriminate against whites (it’s called affirmative action) and provide massive social welfare support to the poor, who are disproportionately black. Indeed, the institutions that seem to do the most harm to blacks (the public schools) are the pets of unions, Democrats and the left.

On the Catholic Church:

“Finally, it appears as though the official Catholic Church has lost its mind. First, a Bishop in Colorado announces (and is followed by several others around the country) that the sacrament of the eucharist should be denied to any Catholic who supports reproductive freedom for women (i.e. is pro-choice). Then, the dottering pontiff himself (through his spokespersons) announces that the Church is moving to beatify some hallucinatory nun named Emmerich, who, in the 18th century and early 19th century, claims to have ‘experienced’ in visions the crucifixion of Jesus. She then proceeded, in her writings, to add to the already contradictory Gospels, her own spin on the Passion narrative, replete with a devil figure encouraging the ‘evil’ Jews (of course) to kill Christ, and the ‘evil’ Jews gladly doing just that. Emmerich was, as it turns out, the source of most all of Mel Gibson’s most controversial parts of his latest film — not the Bible, but a crazed nun, who had apparently ingested too much acid, or whatever they were taking at the convent back in those days. Then today, there is this. Apparently, Gays and Lesbians in Chicago who make clear their opposition to institutional Catholic and Christian heterosexism are now to be denied the eucharist as well. One wonders when Catholic churches will also begin denying communion to members of their flock who support war, support the death penalty, or who are insufficiently committed to ending poverty. . . . On the positive side, 5 dozen Catholic churches in the Boston area have been forced to close. Not enough money. Pity. Maybe if the Pope would sell some of his art in the Vatican, they could take care of that little problem...ah, priorities.”

We have long said that there is nothing wrong with extremist speakers on college campuses. We wouldn’t terribly mind having a Klansman speak on campus. Students might learn something, although it would probably be something about political pathology and not anything useful about public policy.

But what if various University officials brought the Klansman to campus with the clear implication that he had something worthwhile to say about race relations in America? And what if the University paid him a lot of money?

Wise, in fact, is no better than a Klansman. He simply believes nasty racist things that are fashionable in academia, rather than nasty racist things that are unpopular in academia.

And he hates capitalism and the Catholic Church to boot.

Barack Obama: A Racial Chip on His Shoulder, or Just Pandering?

Still Another Campus Racial Hoax

These keep popping up.

LITTLE FALLS — Two Montclair State University students who reported racist graffiti written on their dorm room door are facing charges after campus police determined they were actually responsible for the message, authorities said.

Olivia McCrae and Tanasia Linton, both 19 and from Newark, were arrested on campus Tuesday afternoon and charged with making false reports, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, according to the university.

The arrests came a week after the roommates reported a hateful message aimed at African-Americans and women scrawled in marker on their door at the Heights residence complex Feb. 7.

As we have said before, if the hothouse liberal atmosphere of college campuses did not promise such large rewards for racial (and gay, and Hispanic) grievances, these sorts of things would be much less common.

Supposed hate incidents should be cause for criminal investigation, not a lot of rhetoric and questionable “initiatives.”

Another Campus Racial Hoax

From the Racine Journal-Times:

SOMERS — Kenosha County sheriff’s officials are recommending charges be filed against a Kentucky woman who allegedly created a “hit list” of students — including herself — before posting it in a residence hall at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, according to the sheriff’s department.

Detectives are requesting that the Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office file charges against Khalilah N. Ford, 21, of Louisville, after detectives said evidence implicated her amid an investigation into a series of reportedly racially motivated incidents on campus last week, which included two purported nooses and the alleged “hit list.” Ford’s name was released Monday afternoon as the person who created this list of targeted students.

The incidents coincided with the beginning of Black History Month.

If approved, Ford could be charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing an officer, the sheriff’s department stated.

Efforts were made to reach Ford on Monday for comment, but she couldn’t be reached.

A student on Wednesday found a noose-like contraption made from rubber bands and plastic string in the Pike River Suites residence hall, which sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Beth said was “hanging near the trash chute in the middle of the hallway.”

After reporting it, the student — senior Aubriana Banks, 22, of Beloit — said she found a second noose and a threatening note on her door Thursday, according to investigators and Banks. Later that night, fliers containing racial slurs were found listing several black students and Ford by name and stated they were going to die in two days.

Beth on Monday said Ford did not make the nooses.

“The first one was string and rubber bands hanging in the hallway. I guess it was interpreted as a noose by Khalilah and Aubrey,” Beth said. “That’s how they perceived it. But we haven’t heard an explanation” for why nooses would be hung at those locations.

“There was some heated discussion (recently) in a class along racial (lines). I don’t know if that’s related to this,” Beth said.

Ford and Banks are friends, he added.

Investigators don’t know who hung the nooses, Beth said. And they are not even sure whether the contraptions are nooses, he added.

Ford, a junior at Parkside, reportedly confessed Friday evening to making the list after being confronted with evidence pointing to her involvement in this incident, according to the sheriff’s department. However, because of the ongoing investigations, detectives wouldn’t release details about this evidence.

Ford told them she created the “hit list” to draw more attention to the issue, according to investigators. They, in turn, told students the threats were a hoax.

“We’re very confident there’s no threat to anyone’s safety,” Beth said.

If prosecutors agree to charge her, Ford would be sent a notice through the mail informing her to appear in court. No court date has been set.

Unfortunately, hoaxes like this from racial and other victim groups have become increasingly common. Here is one case at the University of Virginia. Gay students can get in on the scam. And here is a compilation from the Los Angeles Times.

There are certainly cases where this or that black student (or gay student) has been harassed or even attacked. But the politically correct atmosphere of most college campuses (and the imperative that administrators act politically correct, whatever their real opinions should be) creates an incentive for these hoaxes on behalf of victim groups.

The University of Wisconsin-Parkside is certainly a campus with this sort of politically correct administrative ethos.

“Hate crime” incidents do not result merely in the investigation of the incident, and the punishment of whomever was guilty.

Rather, they are the excuse for escalated demands from the victim group. To combat “hate” it is demanded that a university institute sensitivity training, start an African American studies program (if one does not already exist) or a Queer Studies program (if the purported victim is gay). There are demands for the hiring of more “diverse” faculty, the setting up of committees on “inclusion” and the hiring of campus bureaucrats to cater to this or that politically correct group.

One incident, in other words, can be parlayed into a cornucopia of goodies (or if the goodies don’t come, a cornucopia of grievances).

Thus universities themselves bear much of the blame for these hoaxes, having created a climate where there is a large premium on having a racial (or gay, or Hispanic) grievance.

Playing the Race Card on a College Campus: Another Fake Hate Crime

From Inside Higher Ed:

Many campuses experience bigoted incidents of various types, but for many years now, hoaxes have emerged as well. Typically these cases involve undergraduates who make charges and — after some period of time — are found to have faked whatever it is they said happened to them. The fake hate crimes tend to frustrate just about everybody on campus. Minority students worry that truthful complaints in the future will be doubted. College officials bemoan wasted time and money investigating a fake report, and damage done to the reputation of the institution or individuals.

When a fake report is filed with the police, it is also can be a violation of the law. A gay student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was charged last month with filing a false police report after authorities determined that he had made up his story of being attacked for being gay — a story that generated considerable concern on the campus.

Another hoax was uncovered last week at the University of Virginia — and in this case, the university is being criticized for opting not to press charges against the black law student who made up a story about police harassment in the form of apparent racial profiling. The student — Johnathan Perkins — is scheduled to receive his degree May 22.

Perkins made his allegations in a letter to the editor of the U.Va. law school’s student newspaper, Virginia Law Weekly. He sent a copy to the university’s police department, which treated the essay as a formal complaint. Perkins described walking home from a bar review session and being stopped by the flashing lights of a University of Virginia police car. Two white officers, he said, questioned him, told him that he “fit the description of someone we’re looking for,” made fun of him as a law student, frisked and searched him, refused to give their names and badge numbers, and then followed him home after saying he was free to leave.

Invoking the names of victims of police brutality, such as Abner Louima, Perkins wrote that he knew he could not resist. “I knew that there would be no remedy for the indignity that I suffered at the hands of two of the University of Virginia’s ‘finest.’” he wrote. “As I stood there, humiliated, with my hands on the police car, my only thought was: ‘There is nothing I can do to right this wrong. I have absolutely no recourse.’ I hope that sharing this experience will provide this community with some much needed awareness of the lives that many of their black classmates are forced to lead.”

As soon as the letter was published, the university’s police department began an investigation, bringing in some outside experts to assist. Perkins gave several interviews to local reporters, and many students said that they were outraged by the way he said he had been treated.

On Friday, however, the university released a statement announcing that the investigation found that Perkins had made up the story. The university’s statement (not available on the university’s website, but posted on the Virginia Law Weekly’s Facebook page) quoted Perkins (without naming him) as saying that he fabricated the story. “I wrote the article to bring attention to the topic of police misconduct,” he said in a written statement. “The events in the article did not occur.”

The university said that its investigation included a review of all relevant dispatch records, personnel rosters, police radio tapes, surveillance video from the university’s cameras and those of businesses near where the incident was alleged to have taken place, and interviews with Perkins. The university said that Perkins cooperated in interviews and admitted the fabrication as the “facts of his story came into question.”

The part of the statement that has attracted the most discussion was a quote from Michael A. Gibson, the chief of police at Virginia, who announced that he would not press criminal or other charges.

“I recognize that police misconduct does occur,” he said. “Pressing charges in this case might inhibit another individual who experiences real police misconduct from coming forward with a complaint. I want to send the message just how seriously we take such charges and that we will always investigate them with care and diligence.”

Of course, the message is also that playing the race card, even to the point about lying about an incident to the police, is excused if a politically correct minority does it.

None of this is new.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Several researchers say the liberal atmosphere at many of the nation’s colleges creates an environment ripe for deception.

“There’s the preconception that if a charge is made, it’s true,” said John Perazzo, author of “The Myths that Divide Us.”

“One common thread running through many such incidents is the accuser’s sense of victimhood.”

One can file this, of course, under “the corruptions of political correctness.”

Of course, bogus claims of victimization poison academia as much as genuine victimization would. Genuine victimization of minorities is everywhere met with condemnation — no excuses allowed. That’s the morally healthy response.

Hysteria Over the Tea Party

Racial Sleaze in Dallas

We don’t frequently read Dallas publications, but we happened across one just today, and it contained an article about greedy black politicians playing the race card, all the while trying to line their pockets.

It was really a racial protection racket.

And the Dallas Morning News went along with it, siding with the race hustlers.

Does any of this sound familiar to Milwaukeeans?

Eric Holder: Race Hustling

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Attorney General Eric Holder may get the dialogue on race that he called for Wednesday in a speech marking African American History Month. But the terms he offered are likely to promote division more than unity.

Holder’s speech demonstrated the contradictions that doom these dialogues before they start. The most quoted - and dumbest - line from his speech is, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

If Americans don’t talk enough about race, it’s because they’ve learned from long experience that such efforts are often futile. If no action is ever enough, how could words help? At the end of almost any dialogue, Americans know the refrain will remain: We still have a long way to go.

The implication is that we still have widespread, deep-seated racial hatred in this country. Not so. Actually, our remaining differences on race have little to do with legal barriers to equality or opportunity. The debate today is about the means of achieving racial parity, not the end itself.

Holder addressed one of those means, affirmative action, in his speech. He said there can be “very legitimate debate” on the issue - “nuanced, principled, and spirited.” But too often, he said, the conversation is “simplistic and left to those on the extremes.”

I’m guessing that the “extremes” include people who oppose race-based policies such as affirmative action. That was the view of the Clinton administration, which made much of its national dialogue on race, but whose distinguished commission included no one who had fundamental disagreements with the use of racial preferences.

In other words, let’s have an “honest and open” dialogue on race, but don’t bring up certain views, or you will be labeled an extremist - i.e., racist. This is about the convener’s photo-op, not your concerns.

Holder takes this model further. Now, if you fail to join the chat under the stated preconditions, you’re a coward, too.

The simple fact is that an “honest and open” discussion of race is something that liberals don’t want.

Such an honest and open discussion would raise issues they don’t want discussed. It might involve discussing the decline of family structure in the black community. It might involve discussing high levels of crime committed by blacks.

Liberals will do their best to silence discussion of these issues, as some Marquette students have learned when they tried to raise such issues in classes.

Simple fact: an open and honest discussion would put liberals on the defensive. That’s why it’s the last thing in the world they want.

Michelle Obama at Princeton: Huge Racial Chip on Her Shoulder

We didn’t see this when it first broke, but better late than never.

From Politico.com, an account of Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton.

Michelle Obama’s senior year thesis at Princeton University, obtained from the campaign by Politico, shows a document written by a young woman grappling with a society in which a black Princeton alumnus might only be allowed to remain “on the periphery.” Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. “I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”

Of course, on a campus that practices rather rigorous affirmative action, it’s hard for white students to forget that you are on campus because you are black, not because (like the white students) you met all the qualifications.

Even if a particular black student was as good, academically, as white applicants who got in, white students will not know this about the particular student, and thus the stigma applies.

But just who is to blame if somebody like Michelle Obama is viewed as “black first and a student second.” Consider the following:

The 1985 thesis provides a trove of Michelle Obama’s thoughts as a young woman, with many of the paper’s statements describing the student’s world as seen through a race-based prism.

“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community,” the Princeton student wrote, “I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.” Other thesis statements specifically pointed to what was seen by the future Mrs. Obama as racially insensitive practices in a university system populated with mostly Caucasian educators and students: “Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”

To illustrate the latter statement, she pointed out that Princeton (at the time) had only five black tenured professors on its faculty, and its “Afro-American studies” program “is one of the smallest and most understaffed departments in the university.” In addition, she said only one major university-recognized group on campus was “designed specifically for the intellectual and social interests of blacks and other third world students.” (Her findings also stressed that Princeton was “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.”)

In short, she is constantly playing the race card, constantly pleading victimization and constantly attacking Princeton for having too few black professors and a too-small Afro-American studies program.

Of course blacks who do that are going to be viewed as “black first and a student second.”

Can anybody possibly view Jesse Jackson as “a man first and a black second?”

The notion that the Princeton curriculum slighted “the intellectual and social interests of blacks and other third world students” is, in fact, condescending.

Generations of affluent, academically outstanding white students -- destined for success in later life -- have majored in math, history, English, political science, physics or one or another foreign language. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that most of these disciplines have been tripping over themselves to include more “multi-cultural” and “diverse” (read politically correct) material, are blacks somehow not intellectually capable of handling the courses that white students have?

Actually, given the prevalence of affirmative action, that’s too often true. But ghettoizing black students into inferior victim studies courses -- courses that are widely recognized as inferior, even if few people are sufficiently politically incorrect to say so -- is not a way of respecting and intellectually nurturing them.

It’s a way of pandering to politically correct elements on campus and getting them off your back.

Of course, Michelle’s attitudes are not necessarily the same as her husband’s.

But when we look for any evidence that Barack, before his very recent strategy of appearing to be “post racial” in order to appeal to white voters, was anything other than the standard race hustler, we come up with essentially nothing.

So we have to ask the obvious question: is Obama just Jesse Jackson with a shrewder plan for getting white votes?