CapitalistImperialistPig

The extent to which Nazi racial theories derived from US law and literature was not mentioned in my high school history courses, nor does it come up much in polite conversation.  Hitler, though, was quite open about the extent to which his racial laws and practice were borrowed from Jim Crow laws in the US.  There are clear parallels between the so-called Nuremberg Laws and the laws that were systematically used to restrict Negro voting, property ownership, employment and education.  He also liked US immigration laws designed to restrict non-Nordics from entering the US, sterilization laws for those deemed unfit, and the US genocide of the American Indians. It wasn't just laws.  The first half of the Twentieth Century was the high water mark of so-called scientific racism, and the US was its epicenter.  Two books in particular got a special place on Hitler's bookshelf: Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, and Henry H. Goddard's The Kallikaks . The...

In response to the latest gun violence, racist murders in Charleston, South Carolina, several states, including South Carolina have begun at least token efforts to remove the Stars and Bars from their Capitols, flags, and licence plates. I support all these efforts. Also, Amazon, WalMart and others have removed Confederate memorabilia from their shelves. I'm less enthusiastic about these. It's true, of course, that these items have served as badges, slogans and rallying points for racism, but they aren't the cause of racism, and making them slightly harder to obtain is hardly going to cure it. It might well have the opposite effect. Removing implicit or explicit official sanction of racist badges is one thing, but half-hearted attempts to suppress them in private use is quite another. There is a somewhat silly debate going on about whether Dylann Roof's murder rampage was terrorism, racism, or just the actions of a troubled and deranged individual. The answer, o...

The admissions policies of our nations most elite universities are cloaked in an obscurity that hides everything except the obvious: that obscurity was devised for purposes of exclusion and continues to be used for it. The SAT exam was devised to allow those top universities to attract to talent but quickly revealed that a huge proportion of the top talent so judged was Jewish. Clearly it wouldn't do for Harvard to become Jew U, so "racial balance" (not too many Jews) became a cardinal principle. Today the same tools are used to defend against the Asian flood. Canny students now know enough not to identify themselves as Asian on their admissions applications if they can reasonably help it. Alex Tabarrok quotes the USA Today story : USA Today: Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead ...

(A response to Arun) Most of us try to avoid a lot of behaviors that aren't illegal. Many of those behaviors were acceptable in what passed for polite society a generation or three ago. I'm talking here about behaviors related to what we might call "political correctness." The most common examples are from everyday speech. Use of demeaning racial, sexual, and religious language was not long ago routine, even in the press and other media. These terms were insulting, but they were also part of a pattern of discrimination and intimidation. Burning crosses escalated into voter intimidation and lynching. These behaviors are much less common today, and I would like to think that's because we have become better people, but the fact is that to a large extent we have been "bullied into political correctness", mostly by the disapproval of our fellows. There are at least two kinds of reasons for avoiding an offensive behavior - first, common decency and resp...

One of the topics on today's Sunday talk was the Shirley Sherrod affair, accusations of Tea Party racism, and race in America. David Brooks slithered out with the usual lamotronic responses in defense: everybody does it and I even saw Tea Partiers and actual Black People talking amicably on the mall. Not only that, but Sherrod was being racist when she said Andrew Breitbart wanted black people to be slaves again. Let's take up the last point first, and start by reviewing the facts, which no one on the panel challenged: Andrew Breitbart posted a dishonestly edited video which made Sherrod look like a racist, getting her fired and exposed to public opprobrium in the national press. I say that she's entitled to be angry and entitled to a few intemperate words in characterising the SOB. Now it happens that I doubt her diagnosis of his motivation. I think that it was equally sinister but more pragmatic: he wanted to inflame racial fears and hatreds in order to embarrass the gove...

...Seems to be alive and well in Jena, Louisiana. Of course racism is hardly a purely Southern phenomenon, but I find it hard to imagine the events in Jena transpiring in any town I've ever lived in. One version of the story is told by Amy Goodman: Last week in Detroit, the NAACP held a mock funeral for the N-word. But a chilling case in Louisiana shows us how far we have to go to bury racism. This story begins in the small central Louisiana town of Jena. Last September, a black high school student requested the school’s permission to sit beneath a broad, leafy tree in the hot schoolyard. Until then, only white students sat there. The next morning, three nooses were hanging from the tree. The black students responded en masse. Justin Purvis, the kid who first sat under the tree, told filmmaker Jacquie Soohen: “They [other black students] said, ‘Y’all want to go stand under the tree?’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘If you go, I’ll go. If you go, I’ll go.’ One person went, the next...