Race
In an article about the ways in which Democrats’ preferred policies hurt black Americans, Kevin Williamson emphasizes union racism and especially the minimum wage: THE first answer many economists will give to that question is: the minimum wage. Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who spent much of his career showing how government programs reliably end…
Watching the tears of joy streaming down the faces of black attendees at the Rhode Island Democrats’ election-night gathering in Providence, in 2008, knowing candidate Obama’s centrist rhetoric to be completely contrary to his life history and political record, and believing that his likely policies would be an unmitigated disaster, I worried what effect it…
There’s certainly room for derision against the attitude that Abigail Thernstrom highlights here: In 1996, [current Attorney General Eric] Holder told the Washington Post that he always carried a favorite quotation in his wallet. A black man’s “race defines him more particularly than anything else,” it ran. Said Holder: “I am not the tall U.S.…
Annalee Newitz finds a cultural thread in the plot of Avatar: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into…
Bill Sammon recalls a day, back in 2002: When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting “Bush is a terrorist!”, the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis. One protester even brandished a…
You didn’t really believe all that stuff about “moving past” race, did you? No, no. You misunderstood: We’re only a “post-racial” society when it benefits preferred minorities and the white liberals who crowd surf among them. By no means does that negate the right of race hucksters to continue capitalizing on their “narrative.” Of course,…
I hesitate to help stir the pot of manufactured racial strife, but the prominent black academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard has illustrated too perfectly why racial division will persist until such “leaders” of minority communities as him begin arguing, by example, for mutual empathy. Gates returned from a research trip to find that…
Brian Wilder conveys an interesting and timely history lesson on slavery in Rhode Island, but he ends with a peculiar conclusion: Today it is strange, and perhaps convenient, how little most of us know about the extent of Rhode Island’s involvement in slavery. The least we can do is to dump a word that lost…
Keith Stokes adds some welcome historical perspective to the manufactured controversy about the last word in the state’s official name — Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: The historic use of the word plantation does not simply refer to early farms or settlements. It was specifically crafted and applied by our founding settlers as a means…
Race is not purely a matter of hue. Evidence from sports aptitude to facial bone structure proves it to be so, and denying that fact in the name of racial harmony makes it more difficult to solidify the cultural holding that the differences don’t matter in a philosophical or legal context. It may also make…
