Marquette Feminist Group: Don’t Call the Cops If You Are in Trouble

Marquette Empowerment, which posted this on their Facebook timeline, is the same group that vandalized an anti-abortion display on campus back in 2016.

In 2017, they demanded that conservative speaker Ben Shapiro be banned from campus.

They are, to be blunt, a rather nasty, intolerant bunch.

How Silly

But do they even begin to understand how silly this post is? Probably not. The meme claims “calling the police often leads to unnecessary escalation and may lead to the brutalizing and even killing of the victims themselves.”

So if somebody is trying to break into your house, the LGBTQ+ Resource Center are just the people to do something about it.

If you hear shots in your neighborhood, the Suicide Prevention Hotline absolutely needs to come out immediately.

Why Demonize the Police?

Which bring up the larger question: why does the left demonize the police?

They know perfectly well that crime is absurdly high in inner-city black neighborhoods. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Homicide Tracker tells the story:

Click on image to enlarge
Source: https://projects.jsonline.com/apps/Milwaukee-Homicide-Database/

So they are on the horns of a dilemma. Either they admit to a massive amount of dysfunction in the black community, or they pretend that the problem is all those racist cops.

Since they cannot and will not admit the former, they have to claim the cops are the problem.

Which means the real problems will not be addressed. Which they don’t particularly mind, since they care more about posing as social justice warriors than about black lives.

An Honest Conversation on Race: Politically Correct Edition

Click on Image to Enlarge

The Politically Incorrect Truth About Race and Policing

From Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal

The Full Truth About Race and Policing

Chicago has long been one of the nation’s most dangerous big cities, and it seems determined to keep that distinction.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that 18 people were killed on one Sunday, May 31, “making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades.” Over the full weekend, “25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire.” None of these deaths or shootings involved police, so there will be no massive protests over them, no tearful commentary on cable news and social media, no white politicians wrapped in Kente cloth taking a knee for photographers.

Sadly, the only thing remarkable about the episode is that it occurred in the middle of a national discussion about policing. The political left, with a great deal of assistance from the mainstream media, has convinced many Americans that George Floyd’s death in police custody is an everyday occurrence for black people in this country, and that racism permeates law enforcement. The reality is that the carnage we witness in Chicago is what’s typical, law enforcement has next to nothing to do with black homicides, and the number of interactions between police and low-income blacks is driven by crime rates, not bias. According to the Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in Chicago last year, and only three of them involved police.

So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies while making up only 13% of the population, and so long as almost all of their victims are their neighbors, these communities will draw the lion’s share of police attention. Defunding the police, or making it easier to prosecute officers, will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that most need protecting.

There’s nothing wrong with having a debate about better policing strategies, how to root out bad cops, the role of police unions and so forth. But that conversation needs perspective and context, and the press rarely provides it. People are protesting because the public has been led to believe that racist cops are gunning for blacks, yet the available evidence shows that police use of deadly force has plunged in recent decades, including in big cities with large populations of low-income minorities. In the early 1970s, New York City police officers shot more than 300 people a year. By 2019 that number had fallen to 34.

Part of the confusion stems from attempts to equate any racial disparities with racism, which is as mistaken as equating age and gender disparities with systemic discrimination. Young people are incarcerated at higher rates than older people, and men draw more police attention than women. Is something fishy going on here, or do such outcomes simply reflect the fact that young men are behind most violent crimes? When journalists break down police behavior by race but don’t do the same for criminal behavior, you’re not getting the whole story.

A recent New York Times report, for example, tells us that the racial makeup of Minneapolis is 20% black and 60% white, and that police there “used force against black people at a rate at least seven times that of white people during the past five years.” Left out of the story are the rates at which blacks and whites in Minneapolis commit crime in general and violent crime in particular. Nor are we told whether there is any evidence that white and black suspects of similar offenses are treated differently. Minneapolis may in fact have issues with police bias, but drawing conclusions about the extent of the problem or even whether one exists would be premature based on the information provided.

Reports about race and policing that omit relevant facts to push a predetermined narrative are not only misleading but harmful, especially to blacks. We know from decades of experience that when police pull back, criminals gain the advantage and black communities suffer, both physically and economically. A common assumption among liberals is that the movement of inner-city jobs to the suburbs in the late 1960s is what led to the higher rates of crime, violence and other social pathologies associated with ghetto life. But this gets the order wrong. The business flight took place after the rioting, not before. Will history repeat itself?

The Walmart and Target stores in Chicago that were looted last week are two of the city’s largest retailers. They employ a disproportionate number of low-skilled workers, and they haven’t decided whether to reopen. If they don’t, it could mean fewer jobs and higher prices for underserved minorities. Before we divert resources away from policing, maybe we should consider the effect it would have on the willingness and ability of businesses to operate in places where they’re most needed.

All of this is just more evidence that people on the left fundamentally don’t care about the welfare of black people. They simply view them as a client group that serves their political purposes.

Oh, they have convinced themselves they care. But when push comes to shove, they side with (mostly white) teacher’s unions rather than black families that would benefit from school choice. When riots are tearing up neighborhoods, they side with the rioters, seeming not to have noticed that it’s mostly black neighborhoods being torn up.

On issues of policing, they see cops in black neighborhoods as an “occupying army” and call for “defunding the police,” implicitly, but clearly, siding with black criminals rather than law-abiding black citizens.

Who Are the Dividers?

Play “White Privilege” to be presented by Marquette Theatre

On a University announcements page:

MILWAUKEE —Marquette Theatre will present White Privilege at the Evan P. & Marion Helfaer Theatre Aug. 31–Sept. 2.

Marquette Theatre student Malaina Moore invites audiences of any and every race to join the nationwide conversation and consider how interactions with students, teachers, parents, friends, and even strangers are influenced by race and how the color of one’s skin can lead to a very different experience of the world.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, since white Marquette students tell me they are frequently berated about their “white privilege.”

In reality, far and away the most important form of “white privilege” is that most white kids have a daddy, and most black kids don’t. Is that whitey’s fault? Has racism made black males unable to be husbands and fathers? In 1955, 20.2 percent of black kids were born out of wedlock, and in 1920 is was 12.5 percent. How is it that black males could be husbands and fathers under Jim Crow, but can’t now.

The next most important form of white privilege is that whites tend to live in safe neighborhoods, and blacks in unsafe ones. Is this whitey’s fault? FBI homicide data show blacks, about 13 percent of the population, are almost half of all homicide victims. And who is killing all these black people? Other black people.

Of course a fair number of whites have some negative stereotypes about black people. A lot of them reflect the reality of the black community: out of wedlock births, crime, school dropouts, welfare dependency, and so on. Anybody who acts on these stereotypes (rather than judging people on their merit) is discriminatory. However popular measures of “implicit bias” are simply not correlated with behavior.

But then there is a huge amount of affirmative action discrimination against whites. So it’s ironic when black students, who got into selective colleges due to affirmative action, lecture white students about “white privilege.”

One source of racial hostility on the part of whites may be whites’ annoyance at race hustling blacks berating them about their “white privilege.”

The Point of the Accusation

The whole point of talk about “white privilege” is to guilt whites into supporting a standard leftist racial agenda. But if the guilting does not work, bullying soon follows.

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.

The Lie That Created the NFL Protests

The lie, of course, is that racist white cops are wantonly killing black men in large numbers. As Heather Mac Donald explains in City Journal:

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.

Be sure to read the entire article.

Black Lives Matter: Radical Hate Group

Liberals view Black Lives Matter as a benign organization, invited to the White House By Barack Obama and funded by major capitalist corporations.

But liberals have a long history of turning a blind eye to the real beliefs of extreme radical leftist organizations, and Black Lives Matter is no exception.

And it’s not as though Black Lives Matter tries to conceal their views. They advertise them right up front on their Twitter feed.

All of the following tweets have been taken from the national Black Lives Matter Twitter feed (@Blklivesmatter). Several appeared on the feeds of local BLM organizations and were retweeted by the national organization. Such retweeting, of course, constitutes an endorsement.

Hating Cops

Hating cops seems to be the bread and butter of BLM. For example, when violent leftists tried to disrupt a recent Free Speech Rally in Boston, the cops tried to protect the rally from the leftists. How did BLM Cambridge describe the situation? Fascists protecting fascists.

Fascists protecting fascists. #FightSupremacy #BostonResist pic.twitter.com/2kJHF1TqH5

— BLM Camb Official (@BLMCamb) August 19, 2017

Lauding Cop Killers

If calling cops fascists isn’t bad enough, how about lauding cop killers? BLM has done precisely that, multiple times. First, there is a tweet glorifying Assata Shakur, who killed a cop in New Jersey, escaped prison, and fled to Castro’s Cuba, where she remains under the protection of the Communist regime.

#NWI Sunday: #BlackAugust celebrating #SandraBland & #AssataShakur in #Gary #GaryIN https://t.co/cS0Qnn2fkn
Pls share @nwi_jsp @amyharvard_ pic.twitter.com/h1F2KTo5uv

— BLM NWI-Gary (@BLMGary) August 19, 2017

#Justice4Laquan: All out Aug 11 @ Van Dyke hearing w/ @NAARPR!#16Shots #StopPoliceCrimes #CPACNow https://t.co/CUez0hGett pic.twitter.com/DogDLj5l8V

— Danya | دانية (@RadicalArabiya) August 8, 2017

HAPPY 70th BIRTHDAY ASSATA!

DanceDanceRevolution: #AssataTaughtMe
Tonight, 10PM-2AM
Starr Bar, BK

*Proceeds shared w/ Shakur family* pic.twitter.com/z8YIRBhbp6

— Kei Williams (SUN) (@BlackBoiKei) July 16, 2017

Another Cop Killer

Mumia Abu-Jamal was, like Shakur, a black militant who murdered a cop. He killed Philadelphia cop  Daniel Faulkner in 1981, and while being carried to the hospital for wounds he had received in the shoot-out, said “I shot the mother fucker, and I hope the mother fucker dies.” Another witness testified to having heard Abu-Jamal declare, at the hospital: “I’m glad. If you let me go, I will kill all you cops.” A cause célèbre among leftists, there is really little doubt he murdered the cop.

He is cited, with obvious approval, by BLM Nashville in a tweet retweeted by the national organization.

Join us this Saturday for Part 1 of our Books & Breakfast: Voices Inside the Cell Series. pic.twitter.com/TXRDcvL1qf

— BLM Nashville (@BLM_Nashville) July 19, 2017

Other Terrorists

Some terrorists are cop killers, and others kill innocent civilians.

One of the latter is Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian terrorists who killed two people in a supermarket bombing in 1969 in Jerusalem. This, to Black Lives Matter makes her a hero.

We need their revolutionary perspective in these fascists times! #Charlotesville #BlackLivesMatter .@Blklivesmatter #RasmeaOdeh #AngelaDavis pic.twitter.com/LTu6lCFD7M

— Kofi Ademola BLMCHI (@KofiAdemola) August 12, 2017

With her (above) is Angela Davis who, like lots of the heroes of BLM, was involved in a murderous plot. According to Wikepedia:

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, a heavily armed, 17-year-old African-American high-school student, gained control over a courtroom in Marin County, California. Once in the courtroom, Jackson armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages. As Jackson transported the hostages and two black convicts away from the courtroom, the police began shooting at the vehicle. The judge and the three black men were killed in the melee; one of the jurors and the prosecutor were injured. The firearms which Jackson used in the attack, including the shotgun used to kill Judge Haley, had been purchased by Davis two days prior and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawn off. Davis was found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.

In Boston, Black Lives Matter staged a “Meaning of Freedom” concert to honor Davis.

Another Terrorist

If black cop killers and Palestinian terrorists aren’t enough, how about a Puerto Rican terrorist? Yes, they have honored one of those too. The fellow in the top left photo below, beside Rasmea Odeh, is Oscar Lopez River. He was a leader in Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a group responsible for over 130 bombings in the U.S. between 1974 and 1983.

Her activism stretched beyond Palestine, so join us on August 12th to #HonorRasmea https://t.co/iLHAKekEqM pic.twitter.com/e7OTGpdHON

— SJP DePaul (@SJPDePaul) August 2, 2017

Condoning Violence

Given the clear implicit endorsement of violence by the choice of heroes of BLM, it’s no surprise to find the organization linking to an essay that is explicit in its approval of violence.

4 Ways We Need to Rethink Violence and Activism Today https://t.co/Qv98EJ0kOG

— BlackLivesMatter DC (@DMVBlackLives) August 14, 2017

You can easily click through and read the whole thing, but the last paragraph sums it up:

And while it might make us uncomfortable to acknowledge, violence is often a necessary tool of resistance. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can end oppression.

Blaming a Cop Who Was Innocent

Given their seeming belief that blacks who get cross-ways with the police must always be innocent, it’s not surprising that BLM is still attached to the notion that Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, was the innocent victim of a police shooting.

Join us for 4&1/2 minutes of silence to honor #MikeBrown and the freedom fighters of #ferguson. #blacklivesmatter pic.twitter.com/a2NEfO4AW0

— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) August 9, 2017

Even the liberal mainstream media has abandoned this narrative, and the definitive report on the shooting (coming, of all places, from the Eric Holder Justice Department) showed the shooting to be justified. Brown, ordered by the cop to move out of the street, attacked the cop in his SUV, trying to take the cop’s gun, which discharged. When Brown was shot, he was charging head down at the cop.

Hate Group

We, of course, have already blogged about BLM’s laudatory essay on Fidel Castro.

Lessons from Fidel: Black Lives Matter and the Transition of El Comandante https://t.co/CYTcy6ReIa

— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) November 27, 2016

Black Lives Matter is, quite simply, a hate group. They do not exist simply to protect innocent blacks from unjustified police shootings. They are leftist radicals claiming to be a civil rights group. A real black civil rights group would not laud cop killers. It would not celebrate Marxist dictators.

In reality, BLM is more in tune with white radicals than with rank and file black folks.  The latter do have some issues with the cops, but don’t celebrate cop killers, and often want cops around so that they can live their lives in peace.

Naima Lowe: Evergreen State College’s Incendiary Race Hustler

Race and School Discipline: The Leftist Fantasy

Now that Heather McDonald has received the honor of being shouted down and shut up by raving leftist campus bigots, it’s time to review another of her articles.

McDonald, one of our favorite scholars on criminal justice issues, is a “law and order” person. She believes that people who commit crimes should be punished. Since blacks commit proportionately many more crimes than whites, this makes her a racist in the eyes of the politically correct.

Remember, a key doctrine of the politically correct is that anything bad that happens to black people must be the result of white racism.

This past Christmas season, she noted the usual mall flash mobs, mostly consisting of black kids, and remarked on the connection to school discipline. Some key points from her essay:

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes.

Of course, while the media assiduously ignore the racial component of flash mob violence, they can’t resist showing the video. And that tells the story.

That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

. . .

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

. . .

Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths. Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register.

Read the entire article.

Of course, the real “school to prison pipeline” is what happens when schools teach kids they can engage in disruptive and even violent behavior with zero or trivial consequences. That is, unless it becomes the “school to getting yourself killed pipeline” for people like Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, who somehow thought they could attack an armed individual with impunity.

This whole business reveals the dirty little secret of the race hustlers and the social justice warriors. Deep down, they would rather articulate grievances than make things better for black kids. Of course, they won’t admit this (not even to themselves), but to face the issue squarely, they would have to admit that disorder in the black community creates these kinds of conditions in schools, and that white racism has virtually nothing to do with it.

And if they admit that, their whole world comes crashing down.

Taking Provost Myers to Task: Young Americans for Freedom

From The New Guard: An essay about Marquette Provost Dan Myers, whose bureaucrats have arranged an absurdly biased program of speakers on racial issues, and then hypocritically wrote an op-ed opposing the one conservative speaker who has been on campus this year:

Last week, the Young Americans for Freedom at Marquette held a wildly successful talk featuring Ben Shapiro. Two lecture halls were filled beyond capacity, even as Marquette staff attempted to sabotage the event behind the scenes.

The first time any Marquette administrator publicly addressed students about the Shapiro talk was in an editorial in the campus newspaper on February 14. Provost Dan Myers —who once carried a sign that labeled conservatives as homophobic, transphobic & biphobic—penned an op-ed pleading for “critical thinking” when considering conservative speakers like Shapiro.

His message was simple: the conservatives who came to hear from Ben Shapiro failed to think critically.

According to Myers, Shapiro’s visit “produced some controversy.” In reality, it was university staff that ginned up the controversy. Myers argues that campuses “should not avoid controversy.” Instead, he wants the campus to challenge “controversial” views. Myers, as the second in command at Marquette, has made it his duty to challenge exclusively conservative views the few times they are allowed to be heard on campus.

Interestingly, Myers did not even attend Shapiro’s lecture, but this did not prevent Myers from responding (presumably, he watched the video provided by YAF).

In his contradictions of Shapiro’s assertions, Myers leans heavily on fallacies. When Shapiro remarked that “institutional racism” is no longer the norm, Myers wrote that targeting “legacy” students is racist. He continued, asking whether the legacy advantage “replicate[s] that racism in the next generation.” That is, Myers believes recruiting students who are more likely to attend Marquette because of a prior family connection is racist. Surprisingly, Myers never mentions Marquette’s expressed desire to slant the admissions process in favor of Hispanic students, despite the fact that he himself supports a policy which would require Marquette’s racial demographic to reach at least 25% of all enrollments.

A quick recap of Myers logic reveals a troubling conclusion:

To recruit legacy students, those whose parent or sibling attended Marquette University before them (regardless of race), is institutional racism. But to set a goal of creating a Marquette where 25% of the population is Hispanic (potentially at the expense of other qualified minority students) in order to seek federal funds is not institutional racism.

That’s right Marquette alumni: The provost of your alma mater does not want to recruit your kid, younger sibling, or grandkid in the name of some warped version of Jesuit social justice.

Marquette’s desire to welcome more Hispanics is laudable – but not through this scheme. Skewing numbers to fleece the feds and pander to progressive pieties will throw off other diversity metrics, including socioeconomic status, religion, sex, and many more. Note that intellectual diversity is never part of any initiative promoting inclusion on the campus of Marquette University.

Doubling down on his accusations, Myers argues that Ben’s promotion of the Brookings Institution’s Three Simple Rules to Join the Middle Class is also racist: Graduate from high school, avoid early pregnancy, and get a job. Myers says not all races have equal opportunities to finish high school, get into college, or, evidently, avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Myers offers no solutions to address this broad institutional charge of racism. For decades, conservatives have advocated school choice that would benefit minority students. Yet progressives dramatically opposed Betsy DeVos for the Department of Education, despite her plan to expand to expand choice for impoverished children.

Milwaukee Public Schools (serving the residents who live around Marquette) have been run into the ground by progressive unions for decades. Perhaps left wing unions are the example of institutional racism Myers was seeking?

Myers writes, “Healthy skepticism is at the very foundation of active learning.” If Myers is genuinely interested in interaction with active learning, perhaps the Young Americans for Freedom might bring Shapiro back for a debate.

In fact, Young America’s Foundation has a strong reputation of supporting dialogue on Marquette’s campus. The Foundation has sponsored Attorney General John Ashcroft, Speaker Newt Gingrich, John Stossel, Michelle Malkin, S.E. Cupp, Allen West, Steve Forbes, Herman Cain, Christopher Horner, and many more.

Additionally, the Foundation has sponsored two debates at Marquette. Marquette’s own liberal theologian Dan Maguire backed out of a debate on pro-life issues with conservative Mike Adams.

The Foundation also paid for Liz Cheney to debate Howard Dean prior to the 2012 election. Marquette was one of only a handful of campuses to host such a debate. The Foundation paid for both speakers.

Non-progressives are left to wonder if Myers is planning to write a similarly scathing op-ed after Shaun King appeared on campus this week, or well-known domestic terrorist Angela Davis appears next month. We won’t hold our breath. As Myers pointed out in his op-ed, a “variety of speakers” were on campus last week. Myers singled out the conservative.

What does it say that, on the Marquette campus, it is usually conservatives who arrange debates, but the Marquette administration arranges only one-sided programs? It must mean that, deep down, the people running Marquette sense that they would be at a disadvantage in an open, balanced debate.

If they were confident of their views, they would welcome having those views be shown to be superior in head-to-head competition.

No doubt they are confident of their moral righteousness. But somewhere deep down they know that there are things they don’t want aired, else people start having doubts about the “social justice” agenda.

[Update from YAF]

YAF-Marquette chairman and adviser reached out to Provost Myers for a meeting. Through his chief of staff, Myers denied the request because he was too busy. Myers’ office said they could direct the YAF chapter to another person on campus. At this point, Myers is unwilling to defend his actions directly to conservative students.

We can’t imagine Myers refusing to meet with representatives of any politically correct victim group. But he refuses dialogue with conservative students. That’s the Marquette version of “inclusion.”

Marquette Provost Touts “Critical Thinking,” Then Repeats Politically Correct Clichés

That Marquette’s administration is dominated by politically correct leftists is shown by the fact that Provost Dan Myers took to the Marquette Tribune to argue against conservative speaker Ben Shapiro, who appeared on campus last week.

Myers claims to be making a plea for “critical thinking,” but in fact simply demands that people not critically examine politically correct shibboleths. He focusses on the notion of “institutional racism,” a notion that Shapiro challenged.

There is a lot to address there, but let’s focus on three critical questions before we express agreement. First, has the institutionalized racism of yesteryear really disappeared? Take one instance in our own world of higher education. It is widely accepted that back in the bad ol’ days, universities had racist recruitment and admissions practices that severely disadvantaged African Americans. That disadvantage is gone in our new enlightened era, Shapiro says.

But is it? Consider this: Almost all universities have long had recruitment and admissions practices that target legacy students (the children and relatives of its alumni). If the parents or grandparents were admitted using a racist standard, then doesn’t the legacy advantage replicate that racism in the next generation? Haven’t these legacy practices built racism into the access to higher education? Maybe it’s possible that racial advantages still exist more than we think.

Does Marquette target legacy students? If so, Dan Myers, you are the Provost, why don’t you stop it?

But of course, targeting legacy students is not racial discrimination, even if it has a differential racial impact. Universities target good athletes too, and (at least in “revenue sports”) this benefits blacks. But that’s not racial discrimination either.

Then there is the huge advantage racial minorities have with affirmative action. It typically is (as Shapiro reported) in the range of 250 SAT points (Verbal plus Quantitative).

School Choir

Myers then offers an example of a bad person: a choir director who systematically excluded black students from a highly desirable program.

Myers seems not to understand that this simply isn’t “institutional racism.” There was nothing about the “institution” of the choir that discriminated against blacks, but rather one bad person who did.

And Myers admits he is now dead. So much for this as any sort of example of contemporary racism, institutional or otherwise.

Individual Agency

Myers continues:

By denying institutional racism, Shapiro can boil racial differences down to individual agency: if Black people just tried harder and made better choices, they’d do just as well as Whites. Simply finish high school, avoid early pregnancy and get a job. If you do, you’ll be OK. Seems reasonable, but let’s pause again. Does everyone (regardless of race, income, where they live and family circumstances) have the same chance to finish high school? Does every high school produce the same results (learning, skills and chances of getting into college)? Does everyone have the same chance of getting a job? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” we must rethink whether individual agency is the only thing that matters.

Myers is oblivious to the fact that he is demeaning black people. They are, he seems to be saying, so beaten down that they are unable to make good decisions. For example, today about 72% of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Poor beaten down black folks can’t make good decisions about sex, birth control and marriage, according to Myers.

But in 1955, only 20% of black babies were born out of wedlock. Why could blacks make good decisions in the 1950s, before the civil rights legislation of the 60s, but can’t now? The generation of blacks that had kids in wedlock in the 50s was the generation that marched with Martin Luther King. What has happened in the black community? It hasn’t been the rise of “institutional racism.”

That blacks are, on average, in poorer schools than whites is certainly true. But it is leftists like Myers that are the staunch defenders of poorly performing public school monopolies in central cities, and the opponents of charter schools and vouchers schools.

It is, in other words, the people who whine about “institutional racism” who are defenders of the clearest form of institutional racism that harms black kids: the inner city public school monopoly.

Unemployment

Myers goes on to talk about unemployment, and claims that if the “jobs were there” black people would take them. He points to the fact that the black unemployment rate is consistently higher than the white unemployment rate.

But is this “institutional racism?”

In the first place, because blacks tend to have less human capital than whites (because of poorer education), they are at a disadvantage.

Secondly, because blacks tend to have less human capital, they are more likely to be lured into dependency on government programs, which compete too well with actual employment. (The same thing happens with poorly educated whites, but it is less noticed.)

Here are the data on dependency on means-tested programs, by race.

Here are the data on dependency and family structure. Married couple families are quite unlikely to be dependent on government programs.

One of the many things that politically correct types won’t talk about is the fact that the black/white gap in unemployment was, in an era where “institutional racism” was undeniable, nonexistent. This chart, from the linked article, tells the story:

Hypocrisy on Critical Thinking

But the most blatant, bizarre thing about Myers and his bureaucrats is that, instead of promoting critical thinking, they have promoted one-sided political correctness.

Critical thinking involves confronting diverse, often conflicting ideas. But the programming coming out of Myers office (and offices under his control) this year has consisted of nothing but leftist indoctrination.

And Myers, uncomfortable with Shapiro challenging his one-sided programming, goes to the Tribune to try to debunk Shapiro.

Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

A highly provocative fellow, who uses the “f-word” a lot, but also speaks with real passion and logic on race in America, and names the race hustlers who have poisoned the racial environment.

[Link to Video]

In order to see the face of fascism, watch the first few minutes, where leftist students demonstrate against Milo.

To see more academic fascism, check out the petition demanding that Milo be banned from the UWM campus. The people who have signed have, in effect, brazenly proclaimed their own intolerance.

Marquette Backs Away from Language About Student “Resistance” to Indoctrination

This started when a Marquette official sent out a notice about a campus speaker. The title of his speech was listed as “Freedom Dreams Now: Black Lives, Brown Lives, Native Lives: All Lives Matter!” Since “All Lives Matter” is politically incorrect, she quickly sent out, less than an hour later, a “correction” and “apology” that changed “All Lives Matter” to “Whose Lives Matter.” Here is the first e-mail, and here is the abject apology.

But there was something else in both versions of the e-mail that we found objectionable. Quoting the e-mail:

The goals of this interdisciplinary all-campus faculty day are to:

• Provide a framework to discuss the social movements around African American, Latinx, and Native American lives
• Explore strategies for responding to student resistance to learning about the protest strategies of these groups
• Engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation with faculty and students about the impact of these movements at Marquette and the Milwaukee community

Keynote by Joseph Brown, S.J.,
Director of the Africana Studies Department,
Southern Illinois University.

We observed:

Particularly arrogant is the language about “strategies for responding to student resistance to learning about the protest strategies of these groups.” Translation: students might resist being indoctrinated with a Black Lives Matter agenda, and so such “resistance” must be overcome. For these folks, there is no legitimate disagreement with their agenda.

Today

Earlier today, we got another reminder of the event, and the list of “goals” was a bit different:

• Provide a framework to discuss the social movements around African American, Latinx, Native American, Muslim lives and others on the margins
• Explore strategies for responding to student responses to learning about the protest strategies of these groups [emphasis added]
• Engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and conversation with faculty and students about the impact of these movements at Marquette and the Milwaukee community

Marquette, it seems, does not want to admit that students might resist indoctrination. Or even that it is indoctrination.

Joseph Brown, S.J.

But indoctrination it certainly is. Brown, it seems, is an extreme leftist. An observer of a talk he gave at Boston College described his comments:

Fr. Brown, head of the Black American Studies Program at Southern Illinois University, urged fellow Catholics and educators to remember King’s legacy by meeting their obligation to love the less fortunate. He also challenged Boston College to institute a “humanities core for the 21st century” that would require students to take two courses apiece in black studies, women’s studies and Hispanic studies, as well as courses in Native American, Asian and other multicultural topics.

Right. Who needs courses in math, science, philosophy or anything else when you can get 30 semester hours or so learning how straight, white, cisgender males have always oppressed everybody else.

He goes on:

In the course of his remarks, Fr. Brown sharply criticized what he described as the injustice inherent in the American capitalist system, and compared the current political era with the 1890s, when post-Civil War civil rights laws were rolled back and Jim Crow became entrenched.

“There is a profit to be made from inequality. That’s the American way of life,” said Fr. Brown. He maintained that those on welfare are not there as a result of “moral failure,” but are kept there by the forces of capital as a labor reserve to keep the employed in check. “You’ve got to keep the mob as a threat to control those who work for you,” he said.

He also cited several large American corporations that he claimed profit by keeping young black men in jail, and suggested that college graduates who go to work for such corporations are complicit in an economic system that is the modern-day moral equivalent of slavery.

Fr. Brown added that King’s most oft-quoted phrase has been reduced to meaninglessness.

. . .

“He didn’t get killed because he said, ‘I have a dream,’” Fr. Brown said of King. “He got killed because he said we have to restructure the economy of America.”

The writer goes on to say that Brown’s “strident and sometimes tongue-in-cheek delivery drew an enthusiastic response from the audience.”

It would get an enthusiastic response at Marquette too, but only because leftist students will be the vast majority of those who attend. So instead of staging a program that might present alternative views, and engage the interest of a broad range of students, Marquette has opted for extreme leftists such as Brown, Angela Davis, documentaries about how it is evil to lock up black criminals, and a “Mission Week” that is equally propagandistic.

Brown, by the way, is a supporter of the gay agenda within the Catholic Church. More his his thoughts (unfortunately in verbose and pretentious prose) can be found on his blog.

Conclusion

The use of the word “resistance” was a Freudian slip by Marquette bureaucrats. They know that many students (if they are unfortunate enough to even be exposed to these speakers) will resent the extreme leftist indoctrination. And a vigorous airing of alternative viewpoints would undermine the entire project. So the students must be made to conform. If they resist one-sided persuasion, the guilting and bullying will begin. Resistance to “social justice” must be expunged.

Angela Davis to Speak at Marquette

It came as a bit of a surprise, but should not have: an e-mail from the Marquette Provost that Angela Davis is coming to Marquette to speak as a part of a series of Marquette Forum events called Freedom Dreams Now.

Angela Davis is a Communist. It’s not that she has opinions that other people call communist, it’s that she had loudly proclaimed “I have always been a communist.” In 2014 she sent “greetings” to the National Convention of the Communist Party USA (although Wikipedia says she left the party in 1991).

In 1970, Davis was a party to a murderous plot to allow some of her Black Panther cohorts to escape from custody in California. According to Wikipedia:

Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates accused of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison.

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, a heavily armed, 17-year-old African-American high-school student, gained control over a courtroom in Marin County, California. Once in the courtroom, Jackson armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages. As Jackson transported the hostages and two black convicts away from the courtroom, the police began shooting at the vehicle. The judge and the three black men were killed in the melee; one of the jurors and the prosecutor were injured. The firearms which Jackson used in the attack, including the shotgun used to kill Judge Haley, had been purchased by Davis two days prior and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawn off. Davis was found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.

As California considers “all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense ... principals in any crime so committed,” Marin County Superior Judge Peter Allen Smith charged Davis with “aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley” and issued a warrant for her arrest.

Is There Anything Wrong With This?

We have long said that there is nothing wrong with a Klansman speaking on a college campus. So why not a communist?

In the first place, Marquette has put Davis on a program that claims to be a serious discussion of racial issues in America. Given that Marquette has not lined up a group of speakers with competing views, inviting her looks like an endorsement. Indeed, unwilling to tell the truth about Davis, Marquette puts a highly-sanitized blurb on its website:

Dr. Angela Davis, a living witness to history and important struggles of our contemporary era, will deliver a distinguished lecture. Davis is a scholar, activist, and sought-after speaker, presenting at dozens of universities including Dartmouth, Stanford, University of Northern Iowa, Lawrence College and Seattle University, a sister Catholic, Jesuit university. She has written eight books; taught at UCLA, UCSC, Vassar and Stanford; and focuses on social justice issues like racism, oppression and prison abolition. Davis has spoken in every state in America. Additional details and registration coming soon.

In the second place, we can’t imagine any university inviting a Klansman who had been involved in a criminal plot that got civil rights workers killed.

Finally, one agency lists her “Minimum Fee - U.S. Dates” as $25,000-$39,999. Yes, parents of Marquette students, this is where the tuition you pay is going.

A Program of Propaganda

Having an extreme leftist speak as part of a program of competing views would be fine, but the Marquette Forum is essentially nothing but leftist propaganda. It is described as follows:

Marquette University is launching a yearlong series of inclusive conversations, bringing experts of national renown together with those from the Marquette and Milwaukee communities.

Inspired by visions of inclusion and a better world emerging from Black freedom struggles, we hope to look with new eyes at the challenges that inequality presents at the national level and within Milwaukee. As a Catholic, Jesuit university committed to social justice, we seek to energize our campus and engage all Milwaukee’s communities by asking, “What is your freedom dream now?”

The only other listed forthcoming program is described as follows:

Join us for an open screening of the documentary Milwaukee 53206, which explores issues of incarceration and racial justice in a neighborhood on the north side of Milwaukee and the ripple effects of incarceration of men of color on their families and the greater community.

That’s right. This is a program about how it’s bad to lock up black criminals. But in the rarefied world of the politically correct, blacks don’t commit crime at a greater rate than whites. Rather, a racist criminal justice system locks up blacks at a greater rate just because it hates blacks.

It’s ironic that what is described as an “inclusive conversation” excludes any views other than the politically correct. There is no discussion of the fact that 72% of black kids are born out of wedlock, and the disastrous effects of that. Catholic teaching about sexual morality might be relevant there. But you are not going to see that mentioned at Marquette (except perhaps among this or that small group of conservatives.)

There is no discussion of black on black crime, and the fact that over 90% of homicides of blacks are committed by other blacks.

While Angela Davis is invited to campus (and paid a huge fee) we can’t imagine black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams being invited by Marquette. If they ever come, it will be because some conservative student organization invites them.

Marquette, instead of a free market of ideas, is committed to politically correct indoctrination.

White Liberals Think Black People are Stupid and Ignorant

Hillary, Crime, Race and Policing

From Heather MacDonald at City Journal, written the day after the presidential debate: a fine grained debunking of the standard liberal cant on crime, race and policing. Some selected points (but read the whole thing):

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with “systemic racism.” Race “determines” how people are “treated in the criminal justice system,” she said. Blacks are “more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated” for “doing the same thing.” Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.” No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department’s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal, had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal. Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn’t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin’s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. Whites are 34 percent of the city’s population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run—meaning that someone has been shot—they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.

Homicides and shootings in New York City rose 20 percent in the first half of 2015, thanks to the Scheindlin-induced drop in pedestrian stops. Then-police commissioner William Bratton responded with a massive deployment of overtime manpower to high-crime corners; officers used “command presence”—i.e., their mere presence on the street—to deter criminal behavior. This roll-out of manpower resources quelled the shooting spike and New York City ended 2015 with a 6 percent homicide increase. Other departments do not have the personnel available to them to make up for a drop in proactive policing.

Donald Trump is right to warn about depolicing and what I have called the Ferguson Effect. “Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything,” he said. The result is a massive loss of black lives in places like Chicago and Baltimore. Law and order are breaking down in inner cities; officers are surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they get out of their squad cars to conduct an investigation. Resistance to arrest is up, increasing the chances of an officer’s own use of force. And race riots are returning to American cities. The current mendacious narrative about policing and race has to change or we can expect to see further violent-crime increases and further racial violence. It is clear, however, that Hillary Clinton will continue to enflame racial tensions through a set of lies about the criminal-justice system.

What Real Allies of Black People Would Look Like

Race Riots, Journalists and Academics

From a syndicated column by Walter Williams:

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character, and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don’t bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let’s look at it.

“A Clash of Police Policies,” a column written by Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics:

Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice [Earl] Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today’s crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit’s deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts.

In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it’s close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today, over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the “legacy of slavery” argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing.

Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support “a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.”

It’s easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.

In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, “One thing for thee and another for me.”

And Riots Accomplish What?