Everything is racist?

The Betsy Ross flag is one of many flags made and used during the Revolutionary War. For me it has remained the one essential flag of our not-yet free nation.

Last month’s brouhaha, where a former NFL quarterback pressured Nike into dropping the flag on one of its overpriced shoes, has established the left’s desire to label anything and everything as racist.

Jonah Goldberg’s piece in the New York Post pretty much says it all:

if you search through enough old photos of Klan rallies and neo-Nazi pageants, you can spot a Betsy Ross flag from time to time.

Do you know what else you can probably spot if you look long and hard enough? Nike sneakers. Does that make Nikes symbols of white supremacy?

I myself have thought of white shoes as a symbol for my white privilege. Or something…

If the Betsy Ross flag, an instantly recognizable symbol of our liberty, is considered racist, then those who so consider it are ignorant of our history or simply hate America. Or both.

There be witches among us!

So it would seem that Virginia’s Democrats have found. Their latest witch isn’t Donald Trump and his latest tweets, but Democratic Governor Ralph Northam.

Northam is now being urged by a large number of Virginia Democrats (and Democrats from other states) to resign. Why? Because he is now a racist witch (or, more properly, warlock). How? A 35-year old photo in his yearbook that showed two clowns. One in blackface; the other in Klan regalia.

Now, if we’ve been keeping tabs on Northam’s mistakes, one huge one was his (apparent) position on third-trimester abortion, up to an including killing an otherwise viable newborn infant.

Northam’s morally indefensible arguments on third-trimester abortion were eclipsed by what the Left considers a much more grievous sin: a racist photo in Northam’s medical school yearbook. From 1984, but there is no statute of limitations on racism. So, naturally, it is lefties, especially the Democratic Party variety, who are howling for Northam to resign as governor of Virginia to atone for a 35-year old misdeed.

The furor on the left for Gov. Northam to resign over a 35-year old photo is merely deflection for so many Democrats who seem to have no moral qualms about ending a new-born person’s life. After a discussion between the mother and a doctor, of course, as if any discussion was grounds for murdering an otherwise viable infant.

Many Democrats may favor infanticide, but they are too clever to discuss this in public. Lest people get the idea that they don’t value newborn life.

Much, much better to signal their virtue and punish those who may have done some racist things in their past, however long ago.

White Man’s Burden

Even when Rudyard Kipling’s poem was first published in 1899, it was with laden with a heavy sense of self-loathing by an Englishman: Who are we to be ordering about native peoples around the globe?

And yet, the first paragraph aptly describes the reality:

Take up the White Man’s burden, Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

As an American, I grew up too readily accepting the liberal premise that we white folk had no business subjugating the darker-hued. Also, as an American, I naturally favored our Revolution against England’s tyranny. After all, we’d learned the essentials of government and liberty from the English and Scottish Enlightenment. We were civilized and no longer needed to be ruled from afar.

Two centuries on, starting in the 1940s, Britain divested itself of its Empire. And, with the exception of the Anglosphere democracies (Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand), post-colonial areas of the world in Africa and Asia are, to be blunt, festering sewers that lack prosperity and liberty. Places that were not quite civilized and truly needed adult supervision. And still do to this very day.

Three examples of what happens when the White Man leaves town? First, Sudan. Here’s a timeline of grief and misery since Britain granted it its Independence in 1956. After going on 60 years, they are back to being savages.

Then there are current events. Boko Haram in Nigeria, a long-festering sore on the largest nation in Africa has been in the Western news of late because of its long-standing practice of murder, rape, and selling hostage children into sex slavery. Yep, sure am glad they don’t have those Brutal Englishmen around anymore.

Finally, my greatest disappointment: Pakistan. From the Wall Street Journal, this lovely testament as to how little freedom exists there:

The 26-year-old Christian was convicted in March of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. He is one of four Pakistanis sentenced to death for the crime this year under the country’s draconian blasphemy laws, which increasingly target religious minorities in this predominantly Muslim country.

More people have been convicted under the laws in the past seven years than in the first two decades since death penalty for blasphemy was enacted by conservative dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1986.

Is this inherent in the color of the skin of the former colonies’ populations? No, of course not. Consider India as a counterweight. Hardly perfect (which nation is?). But it does demonstrate that the Islamic-tribal culture of Pakistan overcame the English model for government and liberty, whereas the Hindi-tribal culture of India acclimated itself.

We in America have our problems. As do the Australians, Canadians, and most others (can’t think of what problems the placid Kiwis might have…). But the essential difference is that we resolve our problems under the rule of law, with freedom ensured by our institutions and enshrined in our founding documents.

Absent adult supervision, much of the former colonial world just does not seem up to this task.

Having it both ways

There is a great big double standard in our nation these days about diversity. Diversity, which is worshiped as a great and noble good of and by itself by our so-called progressives, is also used as a club against whites when it suits the Left.

The latest example? From a National Education Association worthy who bemoans the alleged lack of diversity among our nation’s teachers. From this Washington Times story, this is the (alleged) problem:

U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students.

Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite.

To which my reaction would be: who cares, so long as the teachers are actually teaching their students?

To think otherwise is to assume that minority students are so stupid and bigoted that they will simply not listen to any teacher who does not look just as they do. Which is apparently exactly what some in the NEA believe.

Actually, some in the NEA apparently believe two mutually exclusive things. As reported in the Washington Times,

Teachers are always pushing their students to excel, said Kevin Gilbert, coordinator of teacher leadership and special projects for the Clinton Public School District in Clinton, Mississippi.

It becomes easier for students to believe “when they can look and see someone who looks just like them, that they can relate to,” said Gilbert, a member of the NEA’s executive committee. “Nothing can help motivate our students more than to see success standing right in front of them.”

More than minority students would benefit from a more diverse teacher corps, said Ulrich Boser, the author of the center’s report.

“Even in a place like North Dakota, where the students aren’t particularly diverse relative to the rest of the country, it’s important for our social fabric, for our sense as a nation, that students are engaging with people who think, talk and act differently than them but can also be just as effective at raising student achievement in the classroom,” he said.

Huzzah! for our “social fabric.” Results don’t matter, apparently. And “social fabric” is a meaningless term, demonstrating too much formal education and not enough common sense. Let’s hire the best teachers and not spend any time worrying about the color of their skin.

The truth that dares not speak its name

Naomi Schaefer Riley, often found on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, has committed a mortal sin: she has told us that so-called black studies doctorates are not worth the effort.

In a controversial post (understatement; see below), she wrote a blog entry in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Among other things, she wrote

If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

Well, sadly, there’s a whole host of “disciplines” in which toilers in the vineyards of academia may be awarded degrees where the theses are “irrelevant.” In fact, while we used to joke about “basket-weaving 101,” today one may apparently get actual degrees in gender studies, black history (as opposed to actual history), puppetry, and a whole host of totally useless subjects swept under meaningless rubrics such as “American studies.”

What makes black studies so offensive is that it maintains a state of academic apartheid, in which blacks are treated as separate and apart from the larger society in which they live.

Look, we all understand about slavery and racism. Fine; study their effects and how to eliminate them. But black studies have now become untouchable and must not be criticized. As Riley found out when she was fired from her paying blog gig.

Riley, who happens to be married to a black man (Jason Riley, A WSJ editor who may often be seen as part of the the Journal Editorial Report on Fox), was the subject of a bile blitz from academics. She had dared to suggest a lack of academic rigor on the part of black studies.

She was accused of being a stone cold racist. Yes, there is racism here. It works full-tilt boogie against anyone, regardless of skin color (hey, it’s color blind!) who has the temerity to question anything done in the name of blacks. This racism works primarily against blacks deemed to have left the reservation such as Thomas Sowell or Alan West, but is clearly just as harshly applied to whites such as Riley who write about academia.