We see constant examples of real racism, largely against White people. The evidence is indisputable. Along with the racism comes a colossal double-standard, which should be enough to make your blood boil. In America today, anti-White racism is not only accepted but even fashionable!
Has there ever been a nation in history with more opportunities for Black people than the USA?
We hear a lot about Critical Race Theory and how America is a systemically racist country. Everything is all about skin color and which group — oppressor or oppressed — you belong to. I hesitate to write this article because to even broach the topic of race these days or to offer an honest critique runs the risk of being labeled a racist and being canceled.
We see constant examples of real racism, largely against White people. The evidence is indisputable. Along with the racism comes a colossal double-standard, which should be enough to make your blood boil. In America today, anti-White racism is not only accepted but even fashionable!
Take, for example, recent statements made by Jalen Rose, a Black former professional basketball player, about current NBA player Kevin Love, who is White, being included on the Olympic basketball team. Rose said, "Kevin Love is on the team because of tokenism."
Rose is upset that Love was the lone White player selected on an otherwise all-Black team. I thought liberals were all about "Inclusion!" Does Jalen Rose still have his commentator job? Yup.
Now just imagine for a moment that some retired White NHL player came out with the exact same comment about a Black hockey player being included on the Olympic hockey team. It would be utter chaos. He would be branded a racist for life and almost certainly lose his job with whatever sports network he worked for.
But that's only the tip of the racist iceberg! What about the recent story about a New York psychiatrist (POC) who told a Yale audience about her fantasies of killing White people and then doubled down on it when asked to clarify? How does she still have her job or credibility?
How about Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot's recent announcement that she was going to resume giving interviews to the press, but not to any White reporters? What if Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida came out and said he wouldn't give interviews to Black reporters? How long do you think it would take for him to be (rightfully) out of a job?
On a weekly basis, I see reports of attacks by young Black people against Whites and Asians, usually in Democrat-run utopias like New York City and Philadelphia. These attacks are intentional, targeted, and often accompanied by anti-White racist slurs. Where is the outrage?
If you want to identify real racism to fight, you need look no farther than the current resident of the United States. Joe Biden's history of blatantly racist comments is long and undeniable. Google Joe's classics, like his "racial jungle" or "poor kids are just as smart as White kids" remarks. Then imagine the reaction if President Trump had made any of those comments. Biden gets a pass because he's a leftist.
At least the old standard racist organizations — the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, the United Negro College Fund, BET, and Ebony Magazine How — could claim to be trying to help Black people in some way. (But just imagine if there were "White Entertainment TV" or "Ivory Magazine"!)
So we're to the point where White people are fair game, and our kids are being taught that they are racists simply because they were born White. Even if they are not consciously aware of their alleged racism, they are still racist because they are White. The solution to racism is...apparently...stronger and even more blatant racism? Gotcha.
Moving on, let's talk a little about how terrible it is in America today (and for the last several decades) to be Black. There are simply no opportunities for Black Americans; no jobs; no career paths; no ability to get an education. Nothing. I don't know how they get by! Oh, I guess you have to exclude the preferential treatment given to black applicants over Whites and Asians at nearly every major university in the country. How about the many government loan programs that are exclusively for Black-owned businesses? Or scholarships that exist exclusively for Black students? How about the fact that grading standards at many colleges have been lowered, which in and of itself is racist and does far more harm than good to those who are accepted? Lowering the bar does not raise anyone up; it only brings us all down.
Most decent people are all for equality of opportunity. They just don't buy into the equity of outcome nonsense. If a student or job applicant is qualified, most don't care what color he is. No one wins when the standards are ignored or lowered just to check off a box that says, "Yup, we've got some of those. We're woke!"
Nowhere on Earth or in history does there exist a place or a time where Black people have had more opportunities than they do right here and right now. The true outrage should be toward those people and policies that espouse the belief that Black people can't succeed without the help of others, that they can't achieve at the same level, that they're not good enough without help from Whites. Black people being fed a constant diet of victimhood and "Us versus Them" is what holds them back.
Image: Andy Witchger via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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Schooled in Hate
Teaching black kids in public schools to hate the police.
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Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.
When some 200 parents crowded into a highly charged, heated Loudoun County, Virginia school board hearing on June 22nd to air their displeasure with curricula and teaching in area schools, they were expressing the same discontent that parents across the country have more increasingly begun to feel as they witness the radical ideology that informs much of public-school education today. Though one teacher did give a powerful statement on how she disagreed with the hijacking of education by a core group of teachers with a leftist, extreme ideology, the school board, and presumably a majority of the district’s teachers, were obdurate in their defense of current practices in public school education.
At hand in this case was a debate about transgender policy proposals requiring Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. The use of artificial pronouns, randomly chosen by children or adults who arbitrarily decide to shift their gender, and the whole emphasis on transgender rights and how they impact decisions about school bathrooms, among other items, is part of the chronic indoctrination taking place in schools where woke teachers, captivated by paroxysms of tolerance, virtue signaling, and political correctness, have attempted to deflect parental opposition and tailor instruction so that students receive a highly-politicized, radical education—much of what passes for learning being little more than in-school training for activism and a new generation obsessed with race and their role as either oppressed or oppressor,
The scene at the Loudoun County meeting has been playing out with increasing frequency around the country, with parents expressing similar sentiment about their unhappiness with the content and ideology behind much of what passes today as pedagogy. Rather than being understanding of parents’ concerns, teachers and school boards are increasingly combative, pushing back against parental complaints, rejecting suggestions for more transparency with curricula and teaching materials, and expressing outright indignation at the notion that parents—the very taxpayers who pay the salaries for teachers and bloated school system bureaucracies—should push back against the practices of the Nanny State, a society in which the government, not the family, instructs on morality, culture, race, sexuality, and faith—much more than the reading, writing, and arithmetic that public school education was nominally created to teach.
More troubling is the fact that educators keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable content for curricula, widely incorporating, as one current problematic topic, critical race theory (CRT) into teaching so that black students are taught they are victims and oppressed by virtue of their blackness alone and white children taught that they are the privileged oppressors by virtue of the color of their skin.
CRT has gained traction by race-obsessed educators seeking “restorative justice” or racial equity, with the unproven assumption that making permanent victims out of minority students and guilt-tripping white kids because of their alleged privilege somehow ameliorates and transcends racism, but many are unconvinced that CRT is anything more than leftist ideology designed to shift power to marginalized groups by maligning and labeling the white majority as irredeemable racists.
The obsession with race in public school instruction gained even more oxygen with the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the renewed focus on racial injustices exposed by the death last year of George Floyd gave new urgency and justification to further indoctrinating children about racism, and, after several of the high-profile police shootings of black suspects, law enforcement’s interaction with black America.
As part of National Black Lives Matter at School Week, an ethnic studies “Identity Lesson” from the Seattle Public School system, for example, “Do Black Lives Matter in America?,” designed for use with 4th and 5th graders, had the obviously biased theme of “Police Violence” and was clearly designed to instill in young minds a mistrust of and contempt for police officers.
The lesson plan instructs that “Students will use current statistical data to determine whether black people are being treated fairly by American law enforcement” after they have been helpfully provided with a one-sided view of police-involved shootings on a website called Mapping Police Violence, in which police enforcing the law, of course, is characterized as “violence.” The elementary school children led to the inflammatory website discover in bold headlines that “Police have killed 482 people in 2021,” “Black people are most likely to be killed by police,” “Police violence is changing over time,” “Police killed Black people at higher rates than white people in 47 of the 50 largest US cities,” “There is no accountability” for police who shoot black suspects, and even if black criminals are committing crimes, so-called police violence is actually “not about crime” because “Levels of violent crime in US cities do not determine rates of police violence.”
Is this a productive and useful message to drill into young students’ minds: that police are predominantly racist murderers who randomly kill black young men without any justification? That there is an epidemic of so-called police violence in America’s urban centers that focuses almost exclusively on black suspects?
Is mistrust of law enforcement a positive message for any students, and especially for black students in inner-city neighborhoods where their interaction with police officers is statistically more likely? Will not these preconceived, ill-advised, and factually incorrect attitudes about police behavior be likely to make black adolescents disrespect law enforcement? Might it subtly encourage them to resist arrest in the event they are stopped and questioned? Make them more apt to believe that criminal behavior is justifiable if the law enforcement establishment is itself immoral, murderous, dangerous to minorities, and acts in illegal ways on a regular basis?
In fact, the narrative that white police officers are killing unarmed, innocent young black men at a rate that is excessive and based on racism is a complete inversion of the truth. There are approximately 10 million arrests annually and out of that number only 1000 suspects are shot and killed by police; a Washington Post database indicated that actually, since 2015, ninety-one percent of black men killed in police shootings were armed and that only 2% of the victims of police shootings were unarmed black men.
The Washington Post’s database also revealed that, far from there being an epidemic of killings by police of unarmed black people, as the media and BLM movement have been widely and loudly claiming, in 2019, there were actually only 14 unarmed black victims (compared to 25 unarmed white victims). And those 14 black victims, while being unarmed, may well have been resisting arrest, assaulting the police officer, going for a weapon, or about to harm either himself or others. That they were unarmed did not mean they were not engaged in, or had previously been engaged in, criminal behavior.
Apparently, the conclusion that teachers wish children to come to, revealed by the Seattle lesson plan as one example, is that there is widespread, blatant racism in the behavior of white police officers that compels them to use disproportionate deadly force against black people in an unjust, illegal, immoral way.
There is, of course, an alternate interpretation of those facts, one which is actually the truthful conclusion that one would come to when honestly reviewing that data. Black people, it is true, are only 13% of the U.S. population, but they also make up 60% of prison populations. Are those high numbers the result of racism on the part of the entire criminal justice system, including police officers, or could it be something else? Could it be that black men are killed in interactions with law enforcement because they are more likely to be involved in criminal activity? That would also explain why they are over-represented in prison populations, as well. But this has nothing to do with the racism of white police officers and everything to do with the behavior of black men.
So, instead of having an elaborate graph indicating the national locations of police shootings where a black person was shot, educators’ way of driving home this misleading and false narrative of police racism toward black people, it might have been just as instructive, for instance, to have a graph indicating the frequency and location of shootings where black people were killed, not by police, but by other black people. Unlike the minuscule percentage of instances where white police killed black men, the percentage of black people killed by other black people, according to the FBI's Universal Crime Report, is a staggering 90%.
Instead of instilling fear in impressionable children about murderous police officers looking for black victims, they may be better served by understanding that black-on-black crime is a far more grievous and prevalent problem than the rare, though still unfortunate, instances when unarmed suspects are shot by the police. In Cook County, home to Chicago, for example, out of the 875 victims who died from gun violence last year, 78% were black, even though only slightly more than 26% of Cook County’s residents are black. A 2019 report by the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute noted that while the number of adolescents killed by a firearm in Chicago in 2016 was approximately three times the national rate, for Chicago’s young black men between the ages of 15 and 19, that rate was nearly 50 times the national rate between 2013 and 2017.
Perhaps some of these young black men, who frequently grow up in fatherless homes (estimated to include over 57% of black children) and join gangs as part of their adolescent development, would be less likely to enter that life and embrace criminal behavior if they were taught personal responsibility, morality, a striving for academic and professional success, and a desire to become a productive member of society instead of being indoctrinated in classrooms by counter-factual information about an endemically racist, murderous law enforcement system which is not to be trusted and which has malign intentions whenever it interacts with the black community.
Obviously, police brutality, and especially if it is inspired by racism, is something that should be universally denounced, just as it generally is—including by law enforcement itself which does not wish for its ranks to be tarnished by the misbehavior of a very few bad actors. But an elementary school curriculum that portrays all law enforcement as being capriciously violent; that asserts white police officers target and disfavor black suspects in the enforcement of justice; that suggests that police officers unnecessarily use deadly, dangerous tactics against suspects during arrests, particularly with black suspects; that promotes the notion that incarcerated minorities are in prison without justification and as a result of their skin color; that lends credibility to the naïve and dangerous idea that “restorative justice” requires defunding police departments and substituting them with some kinder, gentler form of social protection; and that convinces black children to never trust law enforcement and the justice system because it is irredeemably racist and will never treat them fairly—all of these ideas, clearly articulated in the Seattle school system example, serve absolutely no purpose in helping minority children prepare for roles as citizens in what should be a color-blind society.
When did it become the appropriate role of public school teachers to be social activists who promote a left-wing, radical view of law enforcement to impressionable children? Why are these biased, toxic views of police being taught at all to grammar school-aged children, particularly when so much of the content is either lacking context, contorted, or counter-factual? Why the obsessive focus on black interaction, and only black interaction, with law enforcement and the one-sided approach which vilifies and condemns white officers?
If teachers want to assume the responsibility for teaching morals and tolerance, they might better concentrate on building a child’s self-esteem in a way that, instead of labeling them as a perennial victim in a racist society controlled by white privilege, encourages the development of productive individuals with the ability to embrace opportunity in a color-blind society in which they can prosper and co-exist with their non-minority peers.
Hammer-thrower Gwen Berry's tweets about 'retarded' white people and rape resurface after protesting national anthem
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The U.S. hammer-thrower who turned away from the American flag during the national anthem at an Olympic trial wrote about drunk "white people" being "sooo retarded" and made light of rape in her early 20s.
Gwen Berry, 31, used the word “retarded” in a derogatory way, made a crude remark about rape, and referenced Mexican and Chinese people.
"White people are sooo retarded when they are drunk," she said in 2011, when she was 22.
"This lil white boy being bad as hell!! I would smack his ass then stomp him!! Smh #whitepplKids hella disrespectful," she wrote in a tweet as a 21-year-old.
"I'm about to rape my lunch," Berry, 23 at the time, said.
Berry’s behavior during "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the June 26 Olympic qualifier garnered attention nationwide.
During the anthem, first-place finisher DeAnna Price and second-place finisher Brooke Anderson stood with their hands over their hearts while facing the flag. Berry, however, shifted to face the crowd, held her ceremonial flowers by her side, and covered her head with a T-shirt that read, “Activist Athlete.”
The playing of the anthem at that moment was a "set-up" done "on purpose," Berry said, claiming she was told it would be played before or after they stood on the podium. She reiterated this point Monday, though USA Track & Field spokeswoman Susan Hazzard denied the allegation.
The “history” of the anthem is why Berry doesn’t support it, she said.
"If you know your history, you know the full song of the national anthem, the third paragraphs speaks to slaves in America, our blood being slain and piltered all over the floor," she said. "It's disrespectful, and it does not speak for black Americans. It's obvious. There's no question.”
Berry, who previously protested during the anthem, referenced the third verse in the extended version of "The Star-Spangled Banner": “No refuge could save the hireling and slave | From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave."
While Republicans, including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, called for Berry to be replaced on the Olympic team, the White House defended her right to protest during the anthem.
"[President Joe Biden] would also say, of course, that part of that pride in our country is recognizing there are moments where we, as a country, haven't lived up to our highest ideals," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki during Monday's briefing. "And it means respecting the right of people granted to them in the Constitution to peacefully protest."
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"I never said that I didn’t want to go to the Olympic games," Berry said Monday. "That’s why I competed and got third and made the team. I never said I hated the country. Never said that. All I said was I respect my people enough to not stand or acknowledge something that disrespects them."
She didn't directly answer whether she planned on protesting during the anthem at the Olympics.
“We’ll see,” Berry said Thursday. “It just depends on how I’m feeling and what I want to do in that moment.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Berry and a USA Track and Field spokesperson for comment.
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