A noble ruling

Juan Williams, for the Herald Tribune:

"Let us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision. With the Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown's time has passed.

...

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown's promise of equal educational opportunity.

...

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision?

...

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers.

He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools across much of America.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children - black, white, brown and every other hue - in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.

Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and "separate but equal" legal segregation was at the heart of the court's brave decision 53 years ago. With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child."

Um pé na Casa Grande

Às vezes você acha que o mundo não tem jeito. Só tragédia, conflitos, trabalho saindo pela orelha...

Mas aí aparecem textos como este. Uma pérola. Se eu pudesse colocaria essas partes aqui num quadro:

"Tinha muita esperança de ser 100% negro. Se fosse, eu ia pedir uma indenização muito pesada nesse país, mas sou filho dos culpados também"

"Miscigenação era barbárie. Não tinha isso de história de amor, era barbárie. Fico feliz em saber que parte da minha galera resistiu e compõe 85% dos meus genes"

"É uma pena eu ter tão pouco de índio"

Será que o cidadão ainda acha que "miscigenação é barbárie"? Afinal ele quer que os "brancos" (sera que existe alguém no Brasil 100% branco?) paguem para os 100% negros certo? E essa história de que ele queria ser parte índio? É porque eles são mais escurinhos? Quem é que explorava quem nessa relação???

Já imaginaram o piripaque que esse sujeito teria quando soubesse que negros africanos participavam ativamente no tráfico de escravos?

Quando eu era criança, naqueles remotos tempos aonde o politicamente incorreto ainda não era motivo de cadeia, brincavamos que os mais morenos da escola tinham um "pé na senzala". Quem diria, o tal "Seu Jorge" tem um pé na Casa Grande. E ficou bem mais bravo do que ficavam meus amigos moreninhos.

Mas claro que tudo isso é falta de compaixão minha. Como diziam meus amigos, sou somente um alemão branquelo. Será que estavam me chamando de nazista? Devia processar aqueles moleques. Ou então fazer um teste de DNA e mostrar que eu também sou um pouco africano!

É duro levar essa vida a sério.

More blacks in jail than in college?

I was cleaning up my old CDs today and found this (I know the lyrics are terrible but the music still rocks).

One of the songs says that “At this moment, there are more blacks in jail than in college”.

I thought that sounded odd, so I decided to Google it. Here is what I found:

There are more than twice as many blacks in college than in jail. Even more interesting, in the 16-44 age range, percent college enrollment for Blacks exceeds White non-Hispanics by 12.8% to 12.6%.

Ah, I also learned that Kerry used this same false argument in his 2004 campaign. Surprise, surprise.

Preferences vs discrimination

"One thing I have never had adequately explained to me by devotees of the anti-discrimination cult is whether paying customers should also be prevented from discriminating in their consumption preferences. Given that the relationship between an employer and an employee is simply a form of trade in services in return for money, it strikes me as rather peculiar that ALL forms of discrimination in trade are not outlawed consistently. For example, if I decline to purchase the services of a tradesman to fix my house (the exact same nature of transaction as if I were an "employer") because he happens to be Uzbek, should he have the right to legal redress against me as a "discriminating" customer?

Moreover, we also seem to be "discriminating" in the application of "anti-discrimination laws" in the workplace - employees are also parties to an agreement to trade services for money, so how come they are accorded no official opprobrium if they decline to sign a contract with, say, a Muslim employer? In short, anti-discrimination laws are an attempt to outlaw the motives of the purchasing party to an agreed trade, but only if they happen to own a shop!

The real principle that is being attacked here is "freedom of association" and private conscience. Consistently applied (i.e. in a non-discriminatory fashion), anti-discrimination laws have the effect of criminalising voluntary trade between consenting parties, while obliging them to trade with others on some arbitrary criteria, and even criminalising consumer preferences themselves. Forcing somebody to trade with someone else against their will is ethically indistinguishable from holding a knife to a tourist's throat in a crowded market and demanding they "pay" for your worthless merchandise (as is known to happen in some parts of SE Asia) - and it is long past due that the ideological hogwash known as "anti-discrimination" is struck from the statute books permanently.

So to conclude this short post, I most certainly do discriminate in my economic and social preferences, on all kinds of verboten grounds (including race, religion and sex), and there isn't a damn thing that any sanctimonious blowhard can do about it."

Mais aqui.