2:13
Sunday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said both President Donald Trump and his supporters believe they have a right to “ensure that blacks and people of color and others do not rise to any level of influence and power.”
Host Joy Reid said, “Roger Stone found guilty by a jury on seven federal criminal counts, no jail time. Kalief Browder, accused of stealing a backpack couldn’t post bail, spent three years at Rikers Island awaiting trial, ultimately committed suicide after release. We have two justice systems in our country. This is the reason that the Black Lives Matter movement has taken hold, that there are two systems of justice for the rich, the poor, the white, the Black. What do you make of those who are still to this day criticizing Black Lives Matter, such as Senator Kelly Loeffler? What do you make of that, that they are still doing that?”
Waters said, “I think you said it earlier today when you talked about this need for Trump and those who support him to want to, you know, have absolute power and to believe that it is their right and their responsibility to ensure that blacks and people of color and others do not rise to any level of influence and power, significant that would cause them not to be in total charge of the country.”
She continued, “So that young man is typical of so many young black men and women who have been sent to jail, who have been convicted, who have served long sentences. This justice system is broken. It has never really been in our favor, and it has basically been responsible for ensuring that we could never ever get beyond this suppression and this oppression that has been forced upon us for so many years. So those who criticize Black Lives Matter, they can continue to do that, but I want to tell you the time has come now where we are joined by so many others who really were not there for us in the past. You saw it in all of the protests where you had whites and blacks and Asians and old and young, all saying something is wrong with this country. Something is wrong with our criminal justice system. Something is wrong with our policing. It is racism.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Obama vs. African Americans
How the president deployed white education secretary Arne Duncan
to keep black students trapped in failing schools.
June 16, 2020
Lloyd Billingsley
“I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps’
boss, who was an alumnus.”
That may sound like some New York stockbroker’s son, just admitted
to the upscale Trinity or Horace Mann schools. It’s actually the author
of Dreams from My Father, formerly known as Barry
Soetoro, touting his admission to the prestigious Punahou School, founded by Christian missionaries in 1841 and by all accounts
the very best Hawaii had to offer.
Though not named in the account, “Gramps,” is Barry’s grandfather
Stanley Dunham. Stan and Madelyn Dunham raised Barry after his mother Ann
Dunham divorced Barry’s stepfather Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student she met
at the University of Hawaii. In Indonesia, where Soetoro moved the family in
1967, Barry attended Menteng 01, also known as the Besuki School, as Reuters noted, “in a posh, leafy
district of Jakarta, founded by Indonesia’s former colonial rulers as a school
for Europeans and the Indonesian nobility.”
For Barry, only the best would do, but when it came time for
college, Barry did not follow the footsteps of Kenyan student Barack Obama to
the University of Hawaii. Instead he chose highly regarded Occidental College
in Los Angeles. Then it was on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School.
At every step, choice was the key factor, but that was not the case when the
Punahou grad became president of the United States.
In the style of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the president sent
daughters Sasha and Malia to the prestigious Sidwell Friends School. By contrast, government K-12 schools in the capital region are
dysfunctional and dangerous, but the president did not want low-income African
American parents to exercise choice. Worse, he rolled back a popular program
that was already giving African Americans a better education.
The DC Opportunity
Scholarship Program provided vouchers of up to $7,500 for low-income students to
attend the independent schools of their choice. To roll back the program, the
president deployed his white Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former
boss of Chicago schools. As the Washington Post noted, Duncan opted “to rescind
scholarships awarded to 216 families for this upcoming school year.” And as
the Post said, “nine out of 10 students who
were shut out of the scholarship program this year are assigned to attend
failing public schools.”
Duncan played basketball at Harvard but instead of handing out
assists to blacks, he blocked them out, took their points off the board, and
shut down their opportunities. Like segregationist George Wallace, Duncan stood
in the schoolhouse door, only facing inward, blocking students from escaping
some of the worst schools in the nation.
Milwaukee government schools were also bad, but a choice program
enacted in 1990 and upheld by the courts, empowered parents to choose any
independent school. A prime mover of the plan was state representative Annette “Polly” Williams, a liberal Jesse Jackson
supporter who worked with Republican governor Tommy Thompson to get the Milwaukee Parental Choice
Program up
and running. For the “Rosa Parks of school
choice” it
wasn’t just a local issue. As Williams used to say, “Bill and Hillary Clinton
shouldn’t be the only people who live in public housing who can send their kid
to private school.”
The government K-12 system remains a collective farm of
mediocrity, failure, and fathomless waste. Before reaching the classroom,
education dollars must trickle down through multiple layers of bureaucratic
sediment. That runs contrary to higher education, in which the dollar follows
the scholar.
On the G.I. Bill, students could choose UCLA, Southern Methodist,
Brigham Young, or Notre Dame. In similar style, a G.I. Bill for kids would
empower parents to choose the schools their children attend, government or
independent. The previous president’s family sent young Barry to the
prestigious Punahou School, and he chose Occidental and Columbia over the
University of Hawaii.
The “composite character,” so proclaimed by his official
biographer David Garrow in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,
set out to completely transform America. As we now understand, that meant
picking his successor and rigging the system in her favor. The transformation
meant deploying the FBI and DOJ against those the composite character did not
like. The transformation meant that mass murder by an Islamic terrorist was
only so much “workplace violence.”
As American parents now understand, the transformation also meant
turning back the clock to a time when low-income African Americans had fewer
educational opportunities. Those deprived of their scholarships certainly had
fewer opportunities than the president who sent his own children to Sidwell
Friends, the same school the Clintons chose for Chelsea.
Meanwhile, Polly Williams passed away in 2014 and no Democrat or
Republican has stepped up to take her place. If someone does have the courage,
the next occupant of the White House will have an opportunity to transform
America into a nation with school choice for all as a matter of basic civil
rights.
Zogby Poll: Joe Biden Underperforming Among Black Voters
3:01
A nationwide poll released on Monday indicates former Vice President Joe Biden is underperforming compared to prior Democrat nominees among black voters.
The poll, conducted by John Zogby Strategies and EMI Research Solutions, surveying 1,000 voters nationally, found only 77 percent of black voters are committed to voting for Biden in the general election. Meanwhile, according to the results, 14 percent of black voters plan to support President Donald Trump, with another nine percent still not having made up their mind.
If accurate, the numbers pose a major problem for Biden and his party moving into the general election. Most Democrat strategists point to a drop-off in black turnout between 2012 and 2016 as the primary reason for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost.
During that race, Clinton received 88 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls. Although impressive, the numbers were significantly lower than the 93 percent former President Barack Obama garnered on his way to reelection in 2012.
The drop-off was most significant in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—states that went narrowly for Trump in that election after having backed Democrats at the presidential level for nearly three decades. For example, data from the Michigan secretary of state’s office indicates Clinton received 75,000 fewer votes in Wayne County—where Detroit is located—than Obama did in 2012. Even though Clinton still won the country by a substantial margin, the decrease in support ensured Clinton lost the state to Trump, who made strong inroads with white working-class voters, by more than 10,000 votes.
Many believe that if black turnout was the same in 2016 as it was in 2012, Clinton would have won the presidency, despite Trump’s populist appeal to blue-collar whites. As such, Democrats are pushing Biden to do everything possible to hit the 2012 margins, starting with tapping a woman of color as his running mate.
The Zogby and ERI poll released on Monday is similar to an analysis published in late-May by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape. It found, upon analyzing weekly surveys going back to July 2019, that Biden is currently pulling less of the African American vote nationally than Obama and Clinton did in 2012 and 2016, respectively.
Biden’s weakened position, according to the data from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, stemmed from a lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy among younger black voters. Those surveys indicated that only 57 percent of black voters between the ages of 18 and 29 hold a favorable opinion of the former vice president. On the other hand, 88 percent of African Americans 65-years-of-age and older held a favorable view of Biden.
How Affirmative Action
Screwed Up Michelle Obama
By Jack Cashill
In
1985, Michelle Obama presented her senior thesis in
the sociology department of Princeton University. Although Michelle
drew no such conclusion, the thesis is a stunning indictment of affirmative
action. Those who benefited from it, Michelle most notably, may
never recover from its sting.
Her
thesis reads like a cry for help. "I have found that at
Princeton no matter how matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white
professors and classmates try to be toward me," she writes, "I
sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as I really don't belong."
She
didn't. Michelle should never have been admitted to
Princeton. Thanks to the "numerous opportunities"
presented by affirmative action, however, Princeton is where she found herself. "Told
by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren't good enough for an Ivy
League school," writes biographer Christopher Andersen, "Michelle
applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway." Sympathetic
biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern
reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She
did not write well, either. She even typed badly. Mundy
charitably describes the thesis as "dense and turgid." The
less charitable Christopher Hitchens observed, "To describe [the thesis]
as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the
strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any
known language."
Hitchens
exaggerates only a little. The following summary statement by
Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most
of logic:
The study inquires about the respondents' motivations to
benefit him/herself, and the following social groups: the family, the Black
community, the White community, God and church, The U.S. society, the non-White
races of the world, and the human species as a whole.
The
design of the thesis is a disaster, but the idea behind it is not a bad
one. Michelle wanted to gauge the attitudes of black Princeton
alumni on a range of variables. She sent her survey to 400 alumni;
89 responded, 60 percent of whom were male, 80 percent of whom were between the
ages of 25 and 34.
The
survey is a stark exercise in black and white. Michelle never uses
the phrase "African-American." It had apparently not yet
entered the lexicon. Nor does she retreat to phrases like
"people of color" or "minority groups." In
her world, there are only black people and white people.
White
people intimidate her, as they appear to do to many of the
alumni. Although most of the survey results are either impossible to
decipher or irrelevant, one set of data is worth attention. The
alumni were asked whether they felt comfortable around whites.
On the
question of social comfort, 17 percent of the respondents claimed to have been
comfortable with whites before Princeton, 6 percent while at Princeton, and 2
percent post-Princeton.
On the
question of intellectual comfort, 24 percent of the respondents claimed to have
been comfortable with whites before Princeton, 8 percent while at Princeton,
and 8 percent post-Princeton. As Michelle notes, black students were
forced "to compete intellectually with whites." For those
like herself who didn't test well, the competition had to deliver a body blow
to the old self-esteem.
"Blacks
may be more comfortable with Whites," Michelle hypothesizes, "as a
result of a greater amount of exposure to whites in an academic setting while
at Princeton." This was standard academic cant
then. It still is today. In fact, the exact opposite
happened. On the question of general comfort, 13 percent of the
respondents claimed to have been comfortable with whites before Princeton, 4
percent while at Princeton, and only 1
percent post-Princeton. Michelle had stumbled upon a
seriously inconvenient truth.
Michelle
was not among the one percent. As a senior at Princeton, for
instance, she imagines herself going forward "on the periphery of society;
never becoming a full participant." In a sense, she never let
herself.
Having
learned little from her Princeton experience, Michelle applied to Harvard Law
and was admitted for the same reason her husband would later be — not the
content of her character, but the color of her skin. The obvious
gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her
as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.
One
almost feels sorry for her. She had to have been as anxious as Bart
Simpson at Genius School, but Bart at least knew he was in over his head, and
he understood why: he had cheated on his I.Q. test. "It doesn't
take a Bart Simpson to figure out that something's wrong," he tells the
principal and demands out.
If
there is a "white privilege," Bart nailed it: when "something's
wrong," he has to look within. He can't blame the white man for
his problems.
@jackcashill's forthcoming book, Unmasking Obama: The
Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is available for pre-order at
https://amzn.to/2VHOnS8.
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