La Shawn Barber has a post on Christians in St. Louis opposing the distribution of Bibles in the public schools. This prompts me to put down (or put up, I guess) my thoughts and recollections on the whole "prayer in schools" area of things.
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The history of the United States, clear back to a number of the original colonies (most notably Plymouth, but also Maryland and Pennsylvania come to mind) is religious freedom. We haven't always practiced it; we discriminated against Jews, for instance, but it has been our ideal. I believe it has now become "freedom FROM religion", pushed by people and groups who are opposed to God and religion and want to get rid of it or at least marginalize it.
(Many have written about the historical facts concerning "separation of Church and State", e.g. that the phrase, "a wall of separation", was first used by Thomas Jefferson, one of the least "religious" of the framers of the Constitution, to assure the Governor of Connecticut that if that state wanted to establish a State Church (i.e. a formal link between the State and a particular church denomination/heirarchy), the Constitution prohibited the Federal Government from prohibiting it. I'll pass on that exact discussion.)
Instead, I want to move to more recent historical sociology. The claim is being made that the America of today is not unlike the America of the past, that "the Cleavers" never existed, that the past has been whitewashed.
Sorry, not true. Perhaps we never had a "Norman Rockwell setting", but I can tell you from personal experience that we used to allow religion in schools and our society, and both school and society was much better than today, much less: drugs, crime, hate (with notable exceptions), broken families, welfare, to name a few.
At age 14, I ran my father's gas station by myself 5-10 PM. I wasn't in a bulletproof booth, either. (In fact, the cash register was out in the open and required no key or password.) Try that today!
In school, the most difficult behavior problems had to do with talking in class, passing notes, or chewing gum. There were a few occasional truants. Even the roughest kids wouldn't have dreamed of talking back to the principal. (I'm talking high school here, but in recent years I've seen elementary students read the riot act to the principal [who was, btw, an ex-football player]!) (Also, if you got in trouble in school, you got in trouble again when you got home. Very rarely did the parent blame the school, as is too common today.)
In those pre-Murray v. Board of Education days, we prayed and pledged allegiance to the Flag every morning. In high school, Catholic kids were bussed (by the school) to the church every Thursday, eighth period, for religious instruction. Jewish kids were allowed absences on Jewish holidays. (Of course, it's true, too, that the only diversity we had was Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish.)
A further account: In 1942, my aunt recounted in a letter how on a trip to the shopping district, her friend's car was blocked in by a double-parker, and how she got into the blocking car and her friend pushed, and they moved it out of the way. Just as they finished, the owner came along. He got mad at them for putting his car in where theirs had been (because it could get blocked in--he calmed when reminded he had blocked theirs). Notice a few things here:
1. They felt free to move some stranger's car.
2. They were able to move the car. It was not locked or alarmed.
3. The owner was not mad at them for moving his car, but for where they put it.
Okay, so do I look at the freedom from crime that's obvious in a first-hand report from that time, or do I believe the people today who assert that things were the same then as now?
Another contemporary report, this one from much earlier: In his account of the America of the early 1800s, de Tocqueville noted that women were safe walking along the street without escort, a marvel to the Frenchman. Today, we hear reports all too often of women being raped on college campuses and other seemingly safe places and of child abductions and molestations. Then and now, the same or different?
Do I think that the changing view of the place of religion in the public sphere has had an effect on our American way of life? Is Bin Laden a Muslim?
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2008
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
How do we get fair?
La Shawn Barber has some good comments about the black firefighter who set up a phony racial hate incident. I'm so glad she said this stuff, because as a white male, I can't (not and be heard). But with her starting this, I'm going to jump on board with some random comments of my own. (See her comments, and those of her readers, including mine. Excellent reading!)
This incident has evoked a lot of heat and little light, as usual. One issue coming up again is the pressure on local fire protection agencies to hire more minorities, with the usual debate over "dumbing down" the tests. This has already long ago been settled in enlightened jurisdictions. I'm only going to address one sub-issue, "job-relatedness".
EEOC standards/guidelines/case law say that a test which yields an imbalance along racial lines must be "job-related" (and if the employer can establish that, the imbalance is permissible). (My view is that job-relatedness is important whether there's an imbalance issue or not.) The job-relatedness question is, using firefighters as an example, does the testing process for becoming a firefighter accurately predict who will perform satisfactorily as an actual firefighter?
So:
Does a firefighter need to read and write well and take written tests well? Not all that much.
Does a firefighter need to be able to instantly comprehend and obey verbal orders? Yes.
Does a firefighter need to be able to climbing many flights of stairs while wearing 35 lbs of protective gear, breathing through a mask, and carrying a hosepack? Yes.
Okay, then the test should focus on these latter skills and others, not on paper testing. If the test is job-related, it's fair, and you get the best candidates.
Then, let the qualified get the jobs. (Mr. or Ms. Activist, if you're needing to be rescued from a burning building, do you want to see the best possible firefighters or a "correct" racial representation chosen by Affirmative Action?)
(Just a thought: Affirmative Action is racist in that it deprives the minority person of achieving on his own merit, of truly succeeding. If he makes it, he and everyone else gives the credit to AA.)
Second issue I have thoughts about: To the thinking employer, there are only two kinds of people in this world, good workers and unsatisfactory workers. Period. But there continues to be pressure to label people into groups. And there are, in various quarters, organizations of black ___ workers or hispanic ___ workers, etc. Does that mean I can start a group of white ___ workers? And can somebody please, PLEASE, explain to me how being black, white, "or periwinkle" has anything at all to do with your job [unless you're an actor playing, say, Kunta Kinte]?)
I am SO TIRED of "groups". I believe there is nothing more racist and segregating than "multiculturalism", which is taking us two giant steps backward, back to stereotyping, labeling by race, and dividing us into "us" and "them". I believe this is the root of rising racial incidents on the most "liberal' college campuses.
And BTW, I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a rising hatred of whites in the ghetto. You hear the rhetoric long enough (and have "issues" of your own, e.g. lack of skills, lack of responsibility, lack of respect for authority), you begin to believe that you have cause to hate.
(My daughter was in a classroom discussion in middle school wherein a black girl asserted, "All whites hate blacks." My daughter answered, "That's not true. I'm white and I don't hate blacks, so that proves not all whites hate blacks." That about sums it up.)
(BTW, my kids all went to public school where 80% of the students were non-white. They got pretty good educations and also learned how to relate with the people who are actually out there in the real world. They had friends "without regard to race, religion, or creed" [where'd that concept ever go to?], and still do. A pretty good education if you ask me.)
(See my separate post about Oprah and Obama, and politics of race generally.)
This incident has also generated more shouting about "hate crimes". I just can't comprehend "hate crimes" as a legal definition. If you murder someone, can you do it without hate? If you hate for reasons other than race is it not still hate? If you vandalize someone's (or "nobody's") property, is that not a product of hate of some kind? If you commit an armed robbery, is it a hate crime, or only if the victim is "a protected minority"? Where do we place gang conflict? Okay, Supreme Court, that's your assignment for the next decade--or century!
And finally, a word or three to the various "advocates": Ladies and gentlemen, PLEASE don't keep telling "your people" they have rights and entitlements when you got where you are by (weird but true) actually working for it. PLEASE don't keep telling "your people" that they're victims of discrimination when you know full well that you achieved despite REAL racism, the likes of which just don't exist anymore, not even in Jena (where back in your youth the black kids would have been strung up for merely going under the whites' tree and nothing would ever have been said about it). Ladies and gentlemen, you're not advocates, you're inciters.
An incident which makes this "then and now" clear: When I was volunteering at my son's elementary school, I was writing tardy slips one morning when this student came in even later than the bulk of the tardies. When I asked him his last name, he answered, "Robinson, just like Jackie Robinson." I sure didn't let that get by!
"No, you're nothing like Jackie Robinson! He didn't come to school late; he came on time or early, and he always worked hard. Back then there was discrimination--I mean real discrimination. Jackie Robinson had to work harder than all the whites to do as well. And he worked so hard and got to be so good that even though the major leagues didn't want blacks, he was so good that they had to have him. No, you're nothing like Jackie Robinson. But you can be like him. Start coming to school on time and doing your work. You won't have to fight discrimination like he did, but you WILL have to succeed by working for it."
How about it, advocates? How about telling it like that, telling it like it [really] is?
This incident has evoked a lot of heat and little light, as usual. One issue coming up again is the pressure on local fire protection agencies to hire more minorities, with the usual debate over "dumbing down" the tests. This has already long ago been settled in enlightened jurisdictions. I'm only going to address one sub-issue, "job-relatedness".
EEOC standards/guidelines/case law say that a test which yields an imbalance along racial lines must be "job-related" (and if the employer can establish that, the imbalance is permissible). (My view is that job-relatedness is important whether there's an imbalance issue or not.) The job-relatedness question is, using firefighters as an example, does the testing process for becoming a firefighter accurately predict who will perform satisfactorily as an actual firefighter?
So:
Does a firefighter need to read and write well and take written tests well? Not all that much.
Does a firefighter need to be able to instantly comprehend and obey verbal orders? Yes.
Does a firefighter need to be able to climbing many flights of stairs while wearing 35 lbs of protective gear, breathing through a mask, and carrying a hosepack? Yes.
Okay, then the test should focus on these latter skills and others, not on paper testing. If the test is job-related, it's fair, and you get the best candidates.
Then, let the qualified get the jobs. (Mr. or Ms. Activist, if you're needing to be rescued from a burning building, do you want to see the best possible firefighters or a "correct" racial representation chosen by Affirmative Action?)
(Just a thought: Affirmative Action is racist in that it deprives the minority person of achieving on his own merit, of truly succeeding. If he makes it, he and everyone else gives the credit to AA.)
Second issue I have thoughts about: To the thinking employer, there are only two kinds of people in this world, good workers and unsatisfactory workers. Period. But there continues to be pressure to label people into groups. And there are, in various quarters, organizations of black ___ workers or hispanic ___ workers, etc. Does that mean I can start a group of white ___ workers? And can somebody please, PLEASE, explain to me how being black, white, "or periwinkle" has anything at all to do with your job [unless you're an actor playing, say, Kunta Kinte]?)
I am SO TIRED of "groups". I believe there is nothing more racist and segregating than "multiculturalism", which is taking us two giant steps backward, back to stereotyping, labeling by race, and dividing us into "us" and "them". I believe this is the root of rising racial incidents on the most "liberal' college campuses.
And BTW, I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a rising hatred of whites in the ghetto. You hear the rhetoric long enough (and have "issues" of your own, e.g. lack of skills, lack of responsibility, lack of respect for authority), you begin to believe that you have cause to hate.
(My daughter was in a classroom discussion in middle school wherein a black girl asserted, "All whites hate blacks." My daughter answered, "That's not true. I'm white and I don't hate blacks, so that proves not all whites hate blacks." That about sums it up.)
(BTW, my kids all went to public school where 80% of the students were non-white. They got pretty good educations and also learned how to relate with the people who are actually out there in the real world. They had friends "without regard to race, religion, or creed" [where'd that concept ever go to?], and still do. A pretty good education if you ask me.)
(See my separate post about Oprah and Obama, and politics of race generally.)
This incident has also generated more shouting about "hate crimes". I just can't comprehend "hate crimes" as a legal definition. If you murder someone, can you do it without hate? If you hate for reasons other than race is it not still hate? If you vandalize someone's (or "nobody's") property, is that not a product of hate of some kind? If you commit an armed robbery, is it a hate crime, or only if the victim is "a protected minority"? Where do we place gang conflict? Okay, Supreme Court, that's your assignment for the next decade--or century!
And finally, a word or three to the various "advocates": Ladies and gentlemen, PLEASE don't keep telling "your people" they have rights and entitlements when you got where you are by (weird but true) actually working for it. PLEASE don't keep telling "your people" that they're victims of discrimination when you know full well that you achieved despite REAL racism, the likes of which just don't exist anymore, not even in Jena (where back in your youth the black kids would have been strung up for merely going under the whites' tree and nothing would ever have been said about it). Ladies and gentlemen, you're not advocates, you're inciters.
An incident which makes this "then and now" clear: When I was volunteering at my son's elementary school, I was writing tardy slips one morning when this student came in even later than the bulk of the tardies. When I asked him his last name, he answered, "Robinson, just like Jackie Robinson." I sure didn't let that get by!
"No, you're nothing like Jackie Robinson! He didn't come to school late; he came on time or early, and he always worked hard. Back then there was discrimination--I mean real discrimination. Jackie Robinson had to work harder than all the whites to do as well. And he worked so hard and got to be so good that even though the major leagues didn't want blacks, he was so good that they had to have him. No, you're nothing like Jackie Robinson. But you can be like him. Start coming to school on time and doing your work. You won't have to fight discrimination like he did, but you WILL have to succeed by working for it."
How about it, advocates? How about telling it like that, telling it like it [really] is?
"Can't we all just get along?"
Big news last weekend was Oprah's big deal for Obama. I'm afraid I'm not enthused. People, isn't it time we got away from this racism? Here was Oprah saying, essentially, that she's supporting Obama because he's black. And there's much being said about Hillary being a woman.
I'm not impressed by either of them. If they were white Protestant males, I wouldn't be impressed with them. (I am not now nor have I ever been impressed with Jimmy Carter.) I don't like their views, I don't trust Hillary as a person. I don't want either one or anyone like them to be our President. (For the record, I wouldn't object at all to either Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice as President.)
But that's not what this rant--er, post--is about. Should Mayor Giuliani be boosted by Italian-Americans? Should Senator McCain be touted as the candidate of the white male population? NO!!!!!! RACIST!!!!!!!
But where are the cries of racism following Oprah's blatant statements?
My favorite story about ethnic politicking: LaGuardia was running against a candidate who was Jewish, and who told the Jewish voters that LaGuardia couldn't represent them. LaGuardia challenged the Jew to a public debate--on the condition it be held in Yiddish. He knew something his opponent didn't: LaGuardia, the non-Jew, spoke fluent Yiddish; the Jewish opponent didn't.
The point I like most about this story is that LaGuardia shot down the appeal to racism. Can we PLEASE see racism shot down more often, in politics and out?
Meanwhile, I predict that Oprah's racist support will hurt or kill Obama's campaign. People who have been trying to see him as an individual and evaluate him as candidate without regard to race are going to see him now as black. That is, as a black person being black and running as the representative of the black population, i.e. as a racist candidate.
And Oprah is in jeopardy too. People have now seen a different Oprah, one who appeals to race, who supports a candidate because he's black, and touts him as the candidate of the black population.
Can you say "backlash"?
And one other point: Oprah is only the most recent and highest-profile I've heard cite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and then act totally opposite of what he dreamed: "...that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That is NOT what Oprah is proclaiming!
Let's start looking at the "content of their character"! Are you hearing me, Oprah? Are you hearing me, Michael Vick? Are you hearing me, all you rappers? Are you hearing me, Hillary?
I'm not impressed by either of them. If they were white Protestant males, I wouldn't be impressed with them. (I am not now nor have I ever been impressed with Jimmy Carter.) I don't like their views, I don't trust Hillary as a person. I don't want either one or anyone like them to be our President. (For the record, I wouldn't object at all to either Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice as President.)
But that's not what this rant--er, post--is about. Should Mayor Giuliani be boosted by Italian-Americans? Should Senator McCain be touted as the candidate of the white male population? NO!!!!!! RACIST!!!!!!!
But where are the cries of racism following Oprah's blatant statements?
My favorite story about ethnic politicking: LaGuardia was running against a candidate who was Jewish, and who told the Jewish voters that LaGuardia couldn't represent them. LaGuardia challenged the Jew to a public debate--on the condition it be held in Yiddish. He knew something his opponent didn't: LaGuardia, the non-Jew, spoke fluent Yiddish; the Jewish opponent didn't.
The point I like most about this story is that LaGuardia shot down the appeal to racism. Can we PLEASE see racism shot down more often, in politics and out?
Meanwhile, I predict that Oprah's racist support will hurt or kill Obama's campaign. People who have been trying to see him as an individual and evaluate him as candidate without regard to race are going to see him now as black. That is, as a black person being black and running as the representative of the black population, i.e. as a racist candidate.
And Oprah is in jeopardy too. People have now seen a different Oprah, one who appeals to race, who supports a candidate because he's black, and touts him as the candidate of the black population.
Can you say "backlash"?
And one other point: Oprah is only the most recent and highest-profile I've heard cite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and then act totally opposite of what he dreamed: "...that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That is NOT what Oprah is proclaiming!
Let's start looking at the "content of their character"! Are you hearing me, Oprah? Are you hearing me, Michael Vick? Are you hearing me, all you rappers? Are you hearing me, Hillary?
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