Some Honesty About Race in America

The following article was written by Dr. Walter E Williams, professor of Economics at George Mason University. In the past Dr. Williams' work has often been featured here.

Readers of this blog are used to plain talk about sensitive subject matter and I know of no one better at addressing things in that manner than Williams.

It's a good thing Dr. Williams is black or he would called a racist for addressing this subject in such a straightforward manner. I'm white, so I risk be called a racist for republishing his essay. Oh well.

Many thanks to Dr. Williams for the express written permission to republish his essay here.


Honest Examination of Race

Dr. Walter E Williams

One definition given for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; it might also be a definition of stupidity. Let's look at some cities where large percentages of black Americans live under poor conditions.

Experiencing a violent crime rate of 2,137 per 100,000 of the population, Detroit is the nation's most dangerous city. Rounding out Forbes magazine's 2012 list of the 10 most dangerous cities are St Louis; Oakland, Calif.; Memphis, Tenn.; Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; Baltimore; Stockton, Calif.; Cleveland; and Buffalo, N.Y.

The most common characteristic of these predominantly black cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations. Some cities -- such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia -- haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. What's more is that in most of these cities, blacks have been mayors, chiefs of police, school superintendents and principals and have dominated city councils.

You might ask, "What's the point, Williams?" Let's be clear about it. I'm not stating that there's a causal relationship between crime, poverty and squalor on the one hand and, on the other, Democratic and black political control over a city. Nor am I saying that blacks ought to vote Republican.

What I am saying is that if one is strategizing on how to improve the lives of the poorest black people, he wants to leave off his to-do list election of Democrats and black politicians. Also to be left off the to-do list is a civil rights agenda. Racial discrimination has little to do with major problems confronting black people.

Today 72 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock. Being born and finding out that your mother is 17 years old, that your grandmother is 35 and that you don't know who or where your father is is not a good start on life. In fact, it's a near guarantee for school dropout, poverty and crime, but such a start in life has nothing to do with racial discrimination.

Law-abiding poor black people suffer the nation's highest rates of criminal victimization from assaults and homicide. More than 50 percent of homicide victims are black. Would anyone claim that this victimization is caused by racist groups preying on the black community? In addition to victimization, the level of lawlessness in many black communities has the full effect of a law banning economic growth. That's because the thugs are equal-opportunity thugs who will rip off a black-owned business just as they'd rip off a white-owned business.

Black education is a disaster, but who runs the violent, disruptive big-city schools, where education is all but impossible? For the most part, it's not white people. Go to a city such as Detroit and you'll find that blacks have been superintendents, principals and most of the teachers for years. Most black high-school students, in Detroit and other cities, can't read, write and compute as well as sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade white students, but is it because of racism?

What the elite teach is not only futile but counterproductive. For example, speaking standard English in an English-speaking country is critical for self-improvement. But that's not the lesson from the nation's multiculturalists, who call for the celebration of native languages and dialects. Sloppy-minded academics and assorted hustlers have taught that poor English, gangsta rap, men wearing pigtails and thug behavior should not be criticized but become a part of the celebration of diversity.

Black people could benefit from an honest examination of the bill of goods they've been sold. Such an examination would not come from black politicians, civil rights leaders or the black and white liberal elite. Those people have benefited politically and financially from keeping black Americans in a constant state of grievance based on alleged racial discrimination.

The long-term solution for the problems that many black Americans face begins with an absolute rejection of the self-serving agenda of hustlers and poverty pimps.

The original of this essay can be found here. Dr. Williams website can be found here.

Amnesty For the Rest of Us

Dr. Walter E Williams

Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to
              All Persons of European Descent

Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,

Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,

Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words, 

Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny.

But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,

I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.

Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.

Walter E. Williams, 

 Gracious and Generous Grantor

Eating Trayvon

Image courtesy of Craven's World

By Grant Davies

All the facts concerning the tragic shooting of a teenager in Florida by a neighborhood watch patrol member may not be known for quite a while. In fact, they may never be known if reporting what actually happened is left up to a media obsessed with inflaming such tragedies while ignoring the real stories that don't sell as well.

Most people who have already made up their mind about the event only know what they heard in the media, and they only heard what they wanted to hear. And as usual, they only heard it from whom they wanted to hear it from. So let's concentrate on what we do know.

We know that there are tragedies everyday in the world, but only certain tragedies grow into major stories. And the ones that grow best are the ones that are watered with copious amounts of potential profits.

We know that race pimps like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and U.S Representative Bobby Rush can smell fame and fortune from thousands of miles away as long the dead people are black and the people who killed them are not.

They don't seem to have a very good sense of smell for gunpowder in their own back yards. The streets of Chicago and other big cities are literally littered with the corpses of the black children who are being slaughtered by other black youngsters. The perpetrators are largely gang thugs who often times dress up in the hoodies and droopy pants that have become the uniforms of a whole generation of fatherless killers.

Rep. Rush dressed up in just such a costume and showed up on the floor of the U.S House because he thought it would show solidarity with the dead teen in Florida. Someone had the good sense to toss his imbecilic rear end out of that less than august assembly, for all the wrong reasons. The truth is he was showing solidarity with gangsters, not victims. The same gangsters that have murdered our black children in such horrifying numbers.

There doesn't seem to be much money, fame or power to be gained by exposing the causes of those murders. The perpetrators just don't have the right profile and the actual cause of the mayhem might be embarrassing to the race pimps.

A few years ago a famous black comedian had the guts to expose the real reasons for the multiple tragedies that befall the residents of the inner city. After the initial news blurbs about a prominent black man talking about the alarming number of children born out of wedlock and abandoned by the men who sired them without bothering to father them, all he got for his trouble was derision and scorn. Worse than that, he was ultimately ignored by a media who saw no profit potential in exposing their own complicity in promoting the policies that contributed so much to the problems.

So today we have a media feasting on the corpse of a kid named Trayvon, who died a tragic death, while the same buzzards don't dare to land anywhere near the real story of the horrors of growing up in the thug infested inner city where the pimps made their fortunes by blaming white people instead of power hungry politicians.