Mr. Bookworm works for a very large corporation.  While we were in the car with the kids, the conversation turned to the exquisite sensitivity the corporation has to show when it’s faced with firing a minority employee. The process is arduous, requiring huge HR involvement, dozens of staff interviews and a lengthy paper trail.  

The reason for this labor intensive firing is the unfortunate fact that minorities tend to be less satisfactory employees. As Mr. Bookworm was at great pains to point out to the children (and correctly so), this is a group trend and has nothing to do with the merits of any individual minority employee. It’s just that, if you look at a bell curve of minority employees versus a bell curve of white employees, you’ll find more white employees than minority employees in the segment denoting “good worker.” No modern corporation, however, wants a reputation as a “firer of minorities.”

The above are facts. What fascinated me was the different spin Mr. Bookworm and I put on those facts. Mr. Bookworm sent twenty minutes explaining to the children that, to the extent blacks were poorer employees, it was because their culture made them incapable of working. (This was not meant as an insult. He was talking, of course, about the culture of poverty.). 

Mr. Bookworm painted a picture of a black child living in a ghetto, with a single mother who gave birth to him when she was 14, with several siblings from different fathers, with a terrible school, surrounded by illiterates, hungry all the time, etc.  No wonder, he said, that this child doesn’t bring to a corporation the same work ethic as a middle class white kid.

This creates big problems for corporations.  A modern corporation truly wants to hire minorities.  Once it’s hired them, though, according to my liberal husband, it ends up with workers who are incapable of functioning in a white collar, corporate environment. The corporation therefore finds itself forced to fire it’s minority hires more frequently than white or Asian employees, with the result that it’s accused of racism. Its response to that accusation is to proceed with excessive caution and extreme due diligence whenever a black employee fails at the job. 

I suggested to the children that something different than downtrodden black culture might be going on. Past generations of immigrants in America labored under the same handicap as the current generation of blacks (and, I guess, Hispanics).  Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians, Poles — no matter the label, you could spell out for them the same sorry tale Mr. Bookworm told about the hypothetical black kid, a story of poverty, parental illiteracy, poor schools, hunger, etc.

The difference, I told the kids, was that, back in the day, neither laws nor popular culture affirmatively protected these people. They were barred from the universities, banks, and law firms. Their response was to be better and work harder.  They carved out new industries (e.g., Hollywood.)  They made themselves more American than all the other Americans put together. They made their entrance into the mainstream a fait accompli.  

At this point, I interrupted myself to ask the kids a question:  You’re taking a class that you don’t really like, but you want to get an “A”.  Do you work as hard as you possibly can, or do you do the bare minimum to get by?  I got a resounding “Duh!” from both kids. “Of course you do the bare minimum.”

“Okay, then. Why don’t we give blacks credit for being smart, not helpless. Since they know that, once they’re through the door, it’s virtually impossible to fire them, why should they do more work than they have to?  Just as you wouldn’t work any harder for an ‘A’ than you need to in a class you don’t particularly like, why should they work any harder for job security in a job they don’t particularly like?  That’s not helpless thinking; that’s smart-allocation-of-personal-resources thinking.” 

And no, that doesn’t mean that all blacks are bad employees. There are a gazillion blacks out there who work hard because they want to, because they like to, or because it’s the right thing to do — which is precisely why whites work hard.  But there are clearly also a lot of blacks out there who neither like nor want to work hard, and they’ve figured out that a toxic combination of white guilt and fear of liability for workplace discrimination creates an out for them.  This doesn’t make blacks helpless and stupid. It makes them savvy marketplace consumers. 

The above discussion revealed another interesting difference in the way Mr. Bookworm and I look at the world. When I gave my Catholics, Jews, Irish, Italian, etc., example, Mr. Bookworm said that I was describing incrementalism, which has no validity today. 

What is “incrementalism”?  It’s the notion that success in Americ may be the work of several generations. This was the old pattern:  You, the immigrant, arrive at Ellis Island, illiterate, unable to speak English,  and a foreigner to the culture.  Unsurprisingly, you end up in a ghetto. Your children go to school.  They do not become CEOs, but they move into the working class — something that could never have happened in your own class-stratified, antisemitic or anti-Catholic or anti-Irish or anti-whatever home country. Your grandchildren thrn move into the lower middle class, or even the middle- or upper-middle class. In two or three, or maybe four, generations, your family has made it in America. 

Mr. Bookworm’s view is that this slow, upward trajectory is wrong. In today’s world, welfare, social policies and PC hiring practices should ensure that, not only is there a chicken in every pot, but every family should have a high level white collar worker just one generation out from poverty. I happen to believe that, while there will always be young people with drive and initiative who can make this leap, expecting it from the big part of the bell curve is ridiculous and impossible. Wrapping our educational, economic and social policies around this goal is a recipe for wasted money, ungainly government programs, personal failures, and class disappointment. In other words, it’s how we ended up with OWS. 

Horrified by the fact that the American people are not dancing in the streets now that Obama Care is the law of the land, the Left is doing what it does best:  tarring and feathering anyone who stands in its way.  The current libel is that people who oppose Obama Care are racist.  These foaming-at-the-mouth neo-Nazi KKK tea parties, say the Left, hate that Obama Care is the signature initiative of a black(ish) president, and they hate the fact that their money might be used to benefit black people in any way, shape or form.  The Lefties are pushing this meme aggressively, despite the absence of any evidence to show that it is true and despite the fact that the centerpiece of this libel looks to have been both a set-up and a fake.

Since we can’t seem to escape the term “racist,” I suggest that we embrace the term, and let other Americans understand what a conservative racist is:

I’m a racist because I believe that blacks are fully capable human beings who are perpetually demeaned by the liberal theory holding that blacks cannot function without handouts from condescending, rich white people.

I’m a racist because I believe that blacks are just as academically capable as any other people in America, but that they are having their abilities systematically squished when condescending, rich white people assure them that they can’t make it without assistance — a heinous approach predicated on the liberal’s implicit assumption that blacks are inherently stupid, ill-informed and ill-suited for intellectual effort.

I’m a racist because I believe that vigorous (but still constitutional) law enforcement benefits blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by other blacks.

I’m a racist because I believe that excusing harmful behaviors in the black community (whether academic failures, teen pregnancies, drug use or crime), on the ground that blacks cannot help themselves because whites have essentially ruined them, is the ultimate insult to blacks, reducing them to the level of animals without intelligence, self-discipline, moral fiber, ambition or ordinary human decency.

I’m a racist because I think liberals have sold blacks a bill of goods by convincing them that, because slavery was work, all work is slavery.

I’m a racist because I believe that a rising tide lifts all boats — which means that I believe that social programs that destroy the economy will not raise up minorities, but will ensure that everyone wallows in poverty.

I’m a racist because, in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, I saw non-English speaking Asians fresh from the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the prisons of Vietnam, and the horror of the Great Leap forward all arrive in America and immediately begin working and studying, so that their children could enjoy the American dream — and I believe that only liberal condescension and paralyzing social programs stand in the way of both blacks and Hispanics making the same strides.

I’m a racist because I believe that black men who have a deep commitment to their nuclear families are incredibly important for the health of the black community, but that the combination of government handouts and excuses for black crime erases black men from the picture, to everyone’s detriment.

I’m a racist because I hate the rap music that celebrates crime and demeans women — music that is disseminated by rich white Hollywood types who, vampire-like, feed off and encourage this “artistic” dysfunction, something that doesn’t harm those white music executives, but that perpetuates terrible stereotypes within the black community itself.

I’m a racist because it drives me bonkers that blacks continue to align themselves with the Democratic party, even though that party does not see blacks as sentient, moral, intelligent, self-directed human beings, but instead views them as helpless, immoral, vaguely animal-like creatures who can function only by and through a vast government enterprise that mires them in slums in exchange for their votes.

I’m a racist because, no matter what color Obama is, I’d hate his fierce drive to expand government into every area of our lives, his hostility to Israel, his appeasement approach to radical Islam, and his personal rudeness to his political foes.

I’m a racist because I welcome with open arms any person, black, white, yellow, brown, gay, straight, rich, poor, young, old, abled or disabled, who believes in the fundamental principles of American liberal liberty, principles that I think are set out very beautifully in the Mt. Vernon statement.  These principles do not distinguish human beings by any factors other than their commitment to limited government, freedom and self-determination.  In this, they are completely distinct from the articles of the Left, which routinely seek to slice and dice Americans into ever smaller groups of colors, abilities, races, and religions:

We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding. Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.

These principles define us as a country and inspire us as a people. They are responsible for a prosperous, just nation unlike any other in the world. They are our highest achievements, serving not only as powerful beacons to all who strive for freedom and seek self-government, but as warnings to tyrants and despots everywhere.

Each one of these founding ideas is presently under sustained attack. In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?

The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles. At this important time, we need a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.

The conservatism of the Constitution limits government’s powers but ensures that government performs its proper job effectively. It refines popular will through the filter of representation. It provides checks and balances through the several branches of government and a federal republic.

A Constitutional conservatism unites all conservatives through the natural fusion provided by American principles. It reminds economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership role in the world.

A Constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

* It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
* It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
* It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
* It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
* It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

If we are to succeed in the critical political and policy battles ahead, we must be certain of our purpose.

We must begin by retaking and resolutely defending the high ground of America’s founding principles.

Damn, but I like being a racist! It feels good when I do it on my terms.

UPDATE:  I just want to throw in here that words can change meaning.  Racist used to mean that one thought other races were inferior.  Now it means one thinks Obama is a bad president.  One day, I hope it means that we believe all races can achieve their full human potential.

I always remind myself that the word “beldam” (old hag) started life out as “belle dam” (beautiful or grand woman, which then became grandmother, which then became old hag).  Language is not static.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

Okay, folks, I’m going to admit to racism here, by which I mean that I’m advancing a position based on racial considerations.  I just learned through The Corner that there is an online conservative journal on the scene called Freedom’s Journal Magazine.

Aside from the fact that it has one of the coolest online interfaces I’ve seen (a cross between Adobe and a high end web page), it also has the distinction of being a voice for black conservatives.  And yes, I think it’s really cool that black conservatives have a voice, because my impression is that they get shouted down a whole lot by both blacks and whites on the other side of the aisle.  Not only do their ideas get shut down, something all conservatives experience, but they are also subjected to particularly demeaning insults as a way of ensuring that other blacks with inquiring minds are scared even to touch upon the notions of free markets, individualism, personal responsibility, etc.  (Here’s a perfect example of the unusual opprobrium and violence directed at conservative blacks.)

Because I think the black community is profoundly damaged by a liberal mindset that perpetually infantilizes American blacks by convincing them that they cannot function without government aid and oversight, I want a magazine like this to do very well.  I want American blacks to find their strength in family, faith, hard work and personal responsibility because I think they deserve the dignity of those freedoms.  So, check the magazine out and, if you feel up to it and interested, subscribe.

I just returned from seeing Disney’s latest release, The Princess and the Frog. Looked at purely from an entertainment standpoint, the movie is a delight.  The hand drawn animation is imaginative and, at times, exquisitely beautiful.  When the Bayou lights up at sunset with fireflies, every little girl in the audience emits a rapturous “oooooh.”  The music, which Randy Newman composed, is a high energy blend of New Orleans jazz, Cajun zydeco and friendly pop.  You won’t leave the movie theater being able to sing any of the songs (those types of songs seem to have been banished from movies forever), but your brain will definitely be happy with the melodies that zip around, lighting up various synapses.

As for the storyline, that’s where the real magic lies.   But to explain just how magical it is, I need to back up a little bit.  In pre-1960s America, the black community was sorely beaten down.  I don’t need to recite here the insults, indignities and limitations that came with Jim Crow.  Even outside of the South, black opportunities for economic advancement were limited, and blacks were routinely subjected to demeaning treatment.  Unsurprisingly, in the first half of the 20th century, American blacks beat out white Americans in every negative indicator:  compared to whites, black communities had more crime, more illegitimacy, more illiteracy and much, much more poverty.

Despite these severe, externally imposed limitations on the American black community, throughout the early 20th century the story of American blacks was one that showed an upward trajectory.  (Although, thinking about it, maybe that resilience isn’t a surprise.  Just as the body strengthens only when it is exposed to resistance, it may be true that a community often finds strength if it must push back against hardship.)  The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Chicago Renaissance in the 1950s revealed a black community that had a ferocious pride and intellectualism.

Economic opportunities were also opening up.  For example, a job as a Pullman Porter provided an economic pathway to the middle class for those black man able to make the sacrifice of being on the road all the time.  Between decent (for blacks) salaries and good tips, the men who held those jobs could provide for their families.  The same job allowed blacks, formerly blinkered by geographic limitations, to see larger possibilities, both social and economic, in the world around them.  Blacks were also leaving an indelible musical mark on American culture, one that elevated their status amongst young whites, who were the up-and-coming generation.

Looking at the strides blacks were making, in education, in employment, and in culture, it is obvious that the Civil Rights movement didn’t appear out of nowhere.  It was the logical trajectory for an increasingly educated, empowered, sophisticated American black community.

One of the bizarre legacies of the Civil Rights movement, however, wasn’t the continued economic and social ascendancy of American blacks.  Instead, the Civil Rights signaled the reverse, which was the destruction of many sectors of the African American community.  I don’t say this to denigrate the important rights the movement affirmed belong to all Americans or the benefits that flowed to all of America from the recognition of black civil rights.  American law now properly ensures that blacks (and all races) have equal access to every available opportunity America has to offer.  Blacks, rightly, cannot be denied food, shelter, education or employment because of their skin color.  The same movement, however, that affirmed that all men are indeed created equal, also cheated blacks in ways no one anticipated back in 1964.

In the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, well-meaning liberals fanned out throughout black communities and told black people that, rather than working, they should take government handouts.  As they explained it to blacks who had clawed their way up the first few rungs of the economic ladder by relying on self-reliance and community pride, these government funds weren’t really handouts at all.  Instead, they were an appropriate form of retribution for the free labor blacks provided in America for hundreds of years.  By making this pitch to blacks to give up self-reliance and become dependent on the government, blacks were first introduced to, and then embraced, the notion that, since slavery was work, all work is slavery.  Work was no longer the measure of a man’s (or a woman’s) worth.  It was a symbol of oppression, and therefore to be avoided.

The same held true in the world of education.  In an effort to jumpstart the black community on the path to professionalism, the guilt-ridden white middle class skipped the obvious, which was to focus its efforts on family, culture and early childhood education.  Instead, it decided that the best thing to do was to give adult blacks a free-ish path to the best educational institutions in America.  In the short run, it seemed like a brilliant idea, since we all know that a Harvard degree opens doors.  In the long run, it was a disaster.  As I wrote in my post about Barack Obama’s affirmative action presidency:

[I]f you set the standards lower for one racial group than for others, three things will happen:  First, the race that has the lower hurdles will stop trying as hard.  After all, humans are rational creatures, and people working toward a goal are wise to work only as hard as they need, and no harder.  Why expend energy unnecessarily?

Second, those members of the race who are fully capable of competing without a handicap will also behave rationally and conserve their energy, because it’s the smart thing to do.  This means that the lower hurdles will deprive them of the psychological opportunity to stretch and prove themselves.

Third, a lot of people who would not normally have been in the race at all will bob up to the top, thanks to that handicap.  Worse, if there is a critical mass of mediocrity floating along on this tide of affirmative action, those mediocre people will inevitably, through sheer numbers, become representative of the racial group.  In other words, if you give enough mediocre people in a specific racial group a head start so that they win, it looks as if all the winners from that particular racial group are mediocre.

The above realities mean that you end up with two dire situations for the racial group that affirmative action is infantilizing:  First, an enormous number of useless people become very poor representatives of their race.  And second, people who are genuinely good and deserving of recognition end up being thrown in the hopper of useless beneficiaries who achieved high status without ability or effort.

So, in a generation, American blacks went from being a community that was forced at whip’s end to give away its labor for free, to one that was assured that there was true virtue in getting money for nothing. Likewise, the American black community that was for so long denied the opportunity to educate itself, learned that it could now get the degrees without bothering with the education.  Inevitably, America ended up with a black community that, at the thickest part of the bell curve, is averse to expending any effort to make money or learn.  Why bother, after all?  Common sense tells American blacks that money and meaningless degrees will come their way regardless of effort.

The result of post-Civil Rights liberal meddling is 40+ years of learned helplessness in the black community, and the profound sense of inferiority that goes along with that kind of helplessness.  Blacks can talk about “Black pride,” and celebrate Black History month, but the savvy ones know it’s a sham.  Their wings have been clipped.  Pride comes from effort and achievement, not from largesse handed out by guilty white liberals.  (Incidentally, if anyone is getting the wrong idea at about this point, I am not arguing that blacks are inferior.  I believe that blacks are in every respect equal to whites, or any other race.  I am arguing that the legacy of the American Civil Rights movement is a black community that has been trained to be helpless and that therefore views itself as inferior.)

And that’s where The Princess and the Frog comes in.  Early Disney fairy tales assured young girls that if they were very meek and worked hard to serve others, they would succeed.  (Snow White and Cinderella, for example.)  At least one movie emphasized sleep as a useful virtue (that would be Sleeping Beauty).  In recent years, girls have been encouraged to be feisty and to rebel against whatever it is their life happens to be.  (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and Mulan spring to mind.)

While the more recent movies have a much less passive message than the old ones (and I’m not knocking the old ones; I love them), they still don’t offer much in the way of life advice.  Rebellion, pretty much for the sake of rebellion, is not a useful tool.  This is especially true for the black community, which has locked itself in a victim mentality that routinely sees its members cutting off their noses to spite their faces, just to make the point that the white establishment can boss them around.  The relentless push for ebonics education, a sure way to keep blacks mired in the ghetto and out of the money jobs, is a perfect illustration of this reactive, rather than proactive, tendency.

The Princess and the Frog, however, offers an entirely new message:  Find your talent, pick a goal, and work really, really hard.  Oh, and find support in your family values and your community.  And also . . . don’t rely on other people.  You are responsible for your own success.  If obstacles stand in your way, don’t give up.  Keep going . . . and going . . . and going.

It’s rather embarrassing that this obvious life lesson — find a goal, work hard, and stay focused — had to come from a paternalistic white corporation.  Regardless of the source, however, the lesson is an important one for all people.  And, sadly, it’s an especially important one for youngsters in the black community, all of whom have been told for more than forty years that they way to get ahead is to be first in line at the government hand-out center.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

When I was a very little girl, back in the hard drinking 1960s, an expression I frequently heard was that someone or something needed a bit of “the hair of the dog that bit you.”  I used to think that actually meant people would consume dog hair to cure their ills.  It was only later that I learned that one of the best — and, of course, worst — remedies for a hangover is more alcohol.  Even as it cures the original hangover, it sets the drinker up for the next hangover.  It appears to be a cure, but is merely part of the problem.

I think that exactly the same can be said of affirmative action.  Ostensibly meant to provide minorities (read:  African Americans) with a necessary leg up in a fundamentally discriminatory culture, it actually creates a situation in which blacks never have to achieve, and therefore never do achieve.

The problem extends beyond the education world, which sees colleges and universities happy to play this nasty little game to assuage their collective white, liberal consciences.  For many years, it has been creating actual unemployment in the real world, where businesses that are tied to the bottom line cannot afford to play the same affirmative action game that colleges play so effortlessly.  Business, after all, don’t get the government help (read:  taxpayer money) that flows to our institutions of higher education.

I mention this now because of two articles that appeared with two days of each other in two bastions of liberal thinking, the Washington Post and the New York Times.  The WaPo reports on a study showing that minorities continue to fall behind when it comes to American higher education.  First, the problem:

A new report, billed as one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how low-income and minority students fare in college, shows a wide gap in graduation rates at public four-year colleges nationwide and “alarming” disparities in success at community colleges.

The analysis, released Thursday, found that about 45 percent of low-income and underrepresented minority students entering as freshmen in 1999 had received bachelor’s degrees six years later at the colleges studied, compared with 57 percent of other students.

Fewer than one-third of all freshmen entering two-year institutions nationwide attained completion — either through a certificate, an associate’s degree or transfer to a four-year college — within four years, according to the research. The success rate was lower, 24 percent, for underrepresented minorities, identified as blacks, Latinos and Native Americans; it was higher, 38 percent, for other students.

Only 7 percent of minority students who entered community colleges received bachelor’s degrees within 10 years.

If it were up to me, the solution would be to demand that minorities who enter American educational institutions have met the same standards as whites and Asians in those same institutions.  Only a head-in-the-clouds academic (read:  liberal) would think that it is reasonable or fair to tell African Americans that they don’t need to do well in order to enter colleges and universities, only to be surprised that, while actually attending those institutions, these conned minority students continue to do badly.  And only a head-in-the-clouds liberal would think that these same students would be able to, or even want to, stick it out at some fou-fou university, when they are pathetically scraping along at the bottom of the class.  In the real world, people have to hunger to achieve, they have to work hard, and then they get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.  Liberals deny that to blacks, and then they’re surprised when these same blacks neither want to nor are able to perform.

Sadly, the government and our educational institutions are run by these head-in-the-cloud liberal academics, so they’re determining the solutions — and, naturally, the solutions they endorse are the hair of the same dog that has been biting African-American students for the past 30 plus years:  more affirmative action, which is a disincentive to learning and achieving.  The WaPo article, admittedly, is rather coy about the affirmative action solution, but it’s implied between the lines:

The Access to Success Initiative, announced in 2007, predates President Obama’s American Graduation Initiative announced this year, which calls for the United States to regain the global lead in college degrees by 2020. Any progress charted by the 24 college and university systems, which include the University System of Maryland and state university systems in California and New York, will dovetail “very neatly” with the president’s goal, said Haycock, whose organization advocates for disadvantaged students.

[snip]

One bright spot in the research was the Pell Grant, the federal program to help low-income students through college. The study found that Pell recipients at community colleges completed their studies at a rate of 32 percent, the same as other students. Pell students who transferred to four-year colleges also graduated at the same rate, 60 percent, as other students.

A bill pending in Congress would strengthen the Pell program by raising the maximum grant and tying the program to inflation for the first time.

You got that, right?  The solution is to throw more money at institutions that take minorities, not to demand that minorities compete going into the schools, so that they can stick around, and then compete when they come out again.

We Americans have seen for thirty years that more money enriches the politicos and the administration and the unions, without making much difference in the student outcomes.  I figured that out back in the late 1980s, when I learned that the Sausalito school district, which is just north of San Francisco, was both the best funded and the worst performing district in California.  I don’t know if either of those facts still holds true for Sausalito in 2009, but it was an object lesson to me at that time that there comes a point where a system is so dysfunctional that money becomes irrelevant.

As long as public schools have no accountability to anybody (a situation that would change dramatically if we switched to a voucher system), and as long as the educational and political classes are committed to affirmative action, nothing is going to change at the college and university level.  Just as the drunk needs more alcohol to provide the appearance of a temporary cure for a deeper problem, so too do our educational institutions and our poor, deluded African American population demand more money as the solution to a problem that has little to do with money, and everything to do with the subtle racism of low expectations.

Things are different in the business world, and will continue to be so until Barack Obama has successfully “bailed out” the entire capital system, turning the U.S. into a giant, politically correct, bankrupt morass.  In the interim, as the New York Times reports, businesses don’t want blacks, even educated ones.  The Times report, of course, implies racism, with evil white capitalists anxious to depress “uppity blacks.”

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

[snip]

That race remains a serious obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama’s election.

But there is ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.

[snip]

The discrimination is rarely overt, according to interviews with more than two dozen college-educated black job seekers around the country, many of them out of work for months. Instead, those interviewed told subtler stories, referring to surprised looks and offhand comments, interviews that fell apart almost as soon as they began, and the sudden loss of interest from companies after meetings.

As for me, I reject the Times’ implication that white owned American businesses are trying to sneak Jim Crow in through the back door.  Instead, the problem young, educated blacks have in the employment market arises because businesses have figured out that, because blacks aren’t required to have many skills going into universities, they’re equally unlikely to have when they emerge clutching a degree with the politically correct, affirmative action stamp of approval appended to the bottom.  In other words, affirmative action has so badly corrupted the “brand name” of the college educated black person, even a person who is intelligent and skilled is tainted by that corruption.

When history books are written, affirmative action is going to be recognized for what it is:  a terrible scourge, destroying the upwardly mobile black middle class.  As I said in my post accusing Obama of being the quintessential example of affirmative action, in that he is all college papers and no substance, affirmative action tells blacks that they don’t have to work to succeed.  That’s a powerful and corrupting message.  Even the best and brightest will economize their mental energies and do the bare minimum necessary to get into and get out of colleges and universities.  But as the system passes through more and more blacks who are either unable to achieve from the get-go, or unwilling to achieve because they’ve been assured of a free pass regardless, the black brand is going to be associated, as it was in the Jim Crow era, with people who are unintelligent, ineffective and lazy.  That this is not true for many graduates, or for many who don’t go to school, is irrelevant.  It is enough that the visible blacks have been corrupted by the system for all of them to bear that stigma.

Once again, liberalism, while parading as the blacks’ true friend, is proving itself to be their mortal enemy, destroying them by denying them the incentive and opportunity to be all that they can be.

UPDATE:  This seemed the perfect place to add a video of Congressional candidate Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, because he is the wonderful, marvelous antithesis of our affirmative action president:

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the things that this election most vividly illustrated is that the lockstep political beliefs Democrats envision don’t really exist within their own party:  Blacks and Hispanics turned out in droves to help power Obama into the White House, but they were the same demographic that, in California, helped Proposition 8 (the anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment) win.  In other words, while they loved the idea of a minority president, Blacks and Hispanics proved that they are still social conservatives.

We know that’s true in one other major area, too.  Blacks and Hispanics do not have the love affair with abortion that white liberals do.  Again, they are more conservative.

Blacks and Hispanics are also the ones who should be most interested in a fluid capitalist system.  America’s history shows that, absent specific discriminatory laws, American-style capitalism has consistently allowed new immigrants to ascend to the working and middle class within one or two generations — and that was true despite strong social discrimination.  (“No Irish need apply.”  “Jews not welcome.”)  In a fluid system, Irish and Jews and all other immigrant groups simply made their own success and then had the other groups eventually begging to join in.

Likewise, we know from the miserably failed Great Society experiment that a welfare state destroys blacks, as well as other minority and immigrant groups that buy into it.  It’s a true opiate, keeping them in a poverty stricken haze supported by small checks.  It saps ambition and initiative.  It’s like cocaine — a cheap high with the first hit/check, followed by dependence and degradation.

The problem for conservatives isn’t that we don’t have a good message for Hispanics and Blacks.  It’s that they won’t listen to us. Everything conservatives say is deflected, twisted and denied.  Point out that blacks make greater strides in the Bush administration than they did in the Clinton administration, and you’re told that those blacks weren’t real blacks, they were just Uncle Toms.  Point out that blacks made economic gains after welfare reform, and you’re told that systemic racism is still destroying them.  Point out that black on black crime, or Hispanic on Hispanic crime, is a scourge, and can best be dealt with by a strong police presence in ailing communities, and you’re told that you’re racist for trying to sic the cops on minorities.

We have so many good messages to give to minorities, but they refuse to hear them.

Funnily enough, C.S. Lewis best described the frustration conservatives feel when trying to communicate to minorities the benefits the conservative political system has for them. As you may know, The Last Battle, which is the last book in the Narnia series, envisions a Narnian Armageddon.  During the eponymous last battle, which pitches the forces of good and evil against each other, the dwarfs peel off and form their own coalition:  “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

For many Narnians during this last battle, death comes to them when they are pitched through the door of a dark, dank stable.  When the good characters are pitched through that door, they find themselves in a rich, beautiful pastoral environment.  The dwarfs, however, when pitched through that door find, not the fires of hell, but simply a dark, dank stable — and nothing anyone does can convince them otherwise:

They [the Dwarfs] had a very odd look.  They weren’t strolling about or enjoying themselves (although the cords with which they had been tied seemed to have vanished) nor were they lying down and having a rest.  They were sitting very close together in a little circle facing one another.  They never looked round or took anynotice of the humans till Lucy and Tirian were almost near enough to touch them.  Then the Dwarfs all cocked their heads as if they couldn’t see anyone but were listening hard and trying to guess by the sound what was happening.

“Look out!” said one of them in a surly voice.  “Mind whwere you’re going.  Don’t walk into our faces!”

“All right!”  said Eustace indignantly.  “We’re not blind.  We’ve got eyes in our heads.”

“They must be darn good ones if you can see in here,” said the same Dwarf whose name was Diggle.

“In where?” asked Edmund.

“Why you bone-head, in here fo course,” said Diggle.  “In this pitch-black, poky, smelly little hole of a stable.”

“Are you all blind?” said Tirian.

“Ain’t we all blind in the dark!” said Diggle.

“But it isn’t dark, you poor stupid Dwarfs,” said Lucy.  “Can’t you see the sky and the trees and the flowers?  Can’t you see me?”

“How in the name of all Humbug can I see what ain’t there?  Andhow can I see you any more than you can see me in this pitch darkness?”

“But I can see you,” said Lucy.  “I’ll prove I can see you.  You’ve got a pipe in your mouth.”

“Anyone that knows the smell of baccy could tell that,” said Diggle.

“Oh the poor things!  This is dreadful,” said Lucy.  Then she had an idea.  She stopped and picked some wild violets.  “Listen, Dwarf,” she said.  “Even if your eyes are wrong, perhaps your nose is all right:  can you smell that?”  She leaned acorss and held the fresh, damp flowers to Diggle’s ugly nose.  But she had to jump back quickly in order to avoid a blow from his hard little fist.

“None of that!” he shouted.  “How dare you!  What do you mean by shoving a lot of filthy stable-litter in my face?  There was a thistle in it too.  It’s like your sauce!  And who are you, anyway?”

And so it goes as the good characters try desperately to make the Dwarfs realize that they are surrounded by beauty and plenty, while the Dwarfs can see only darkness and despair.  That scene so strongly reminds me of the way in which communications between the two groups are stymied by preconceived notions and prejudice, not about race, but about ideas.

The big challenge in the next few years is to shape conservative communications so that they break through these barriers, and show Blacks and Hispanics that they’re not living in a dank, poverty-stricken Marxist stable, but in a large, bountiful America, in which middle Americans share their conservative social values, and want them to share the nation’s capitalist bounty.

It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Where Obama got it wrong was that he focused on the wrong bitter people.  Down in Los Angeles, in the gun-ridden, crime-ridden, gang-ridden communities that taught that sprawling City, people are indeed getting increasingly bitter, although it’s a liberal government’s refusal to enforce the law that’s raising their ire:

When Jamiel Shaw Sr. stood up last week to call for a change in Special Order 40, it touched an already raw nerve in the black community. Shaw’s son, 17-year-old star football player Jamiel Shaw II, was gunned down within shouting distance of his house. The suspect, 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza, is an alleged gang member and an illegal immigrant. Special Order 40 has prevented law enforcement from probing the immigration status of some suspects and deporting criminals with dispatch. Even if Special Order 40 were modified, there’s no guarantee that Jamiel would still be alive, but to a community convinced that Latino-on-black racial violence is on the upswing, it’s still a matter of simple justice.

And that’s true despite the statistics Police Chief William Bratton (seconded by the Los Angeles Times) piled on the public table in recent weeks, numbers that back up the claim that, with the exception of young Shaw and a handful of other cases, the majority of the killings of blacks are by other blacks, not Latinos. That won’t ease black fears that some Latino gangs are bent on wiping them out.

The author of the above op-ed goes on to say that African-Americans are right to feel that this is all a racist thing, with the Hispanics trying to kill them because they’re black and the City government ignoring them because they’re black.  As to the first point, when one considers that gang warfare has been a fixture of American urban life practically since there were American urbs, I doubt that’s the case.  That is, the Hispanic gang members are gunning blacks down, not because they’re black, but simply because they’re the other gang, and this is a pure turf battle.

I also doubt that there is racism in the City’s response.  Instead, I suspect the City’s unwillingness to acknowledge black concerns this has more to do with a City wedded to a stupid liberal policy that makes it a haven for illegal immigrants (because liberals know that “no person is illegal.”)  To me, this snotty liberal attitude is evidenced by the fact that Bratton assured blacks that the policy is not a problem, since blacks are killing each other faster than Hispanics can.  In other words, what you’re seeing here isn’t racism run amok; it’s liberal politics and identity politics run amok.

In any event, I think the African-Americans in LA have the perfect right to be bitter that the City of Los Angeles does nothing about an influx of criminals into their communities, criminals who should be deported instantly before they get guns in their hands and victims in their sights.