February 20, 2009

The Old Mulatto Elite


Eric Holder, the first black Attorney-General, wants us to stop being "a nation of cowards" and spend each February out of our "race-protected cocoons" having a National Dialogue on Race with each other.

So, let's talk about the Holder family's racial background, which is pretty interesting, although he forgot to mention it during his big Black History Month speech to his new charges in the Department of Justice.

I'm sure he won't mind us talking about his family's race, since he just insisted that we all talk about race all month.

Eric Holder is a Bajan-American.

His father was born in Barbados, as were his maternal grandparents. Barbados has the best educated, best behaved black population of the West Indies. Bajans generally look down upon other West Indians, much less African-Americans, as frightfully uncivilized.

Nation News of Barbados reported last summer:

A BRILLIANT LEGAL MIND who was raised in a "Barbadian home" in New York City will help United States Senator Barack Obama select his vice-presidential running mate...

[Eric] Holder, the son of Eric Sr and Miriam Holder, both Barbadians, served as the top federal prosecutor in Washington after a stint as a Superior Court judge in the nation's capital. ...

His late father, who was born in St Joseph, came to the United States when he was about 12 or 13 years old and later met and married his wife [the elderly lady on the left in the picture above] who was born in New Jersey of Bajan parents.

"I feel that I grew up partly in Barbados and partly in New York," said Holder, who was born in New York and was raised in what was essentially a West Indian enclave in Queens where Bajans, Jamaicans, St Lucians, Trinidadians, Guyanese and others were among the main homeowners.

Holder, who was recently in Barbados, has been visiting the island since the 1950s.

So, Holder grew up in one of those "race-protected cocoons," in a middle class "West Indian enclave" where he was kept away from African-American culture.

Here's is the Attorney-General's mother's description of his upbringing:

His mother traces the origins of those characteristics to his upbringing, his life growing up in Queens.

"He grew up, I guess you could say, in a West Indian home, and education was quite important," she said. "They knew they had to perform the way we wanted them to. Perhaps, I was a bit harder than I should have been. Education is always important.

"As Barbadians, you know that education has always been at the top of the list of their priorities, and that was the same in our home."

Religion was another key factor in their sons' moulding, worshipping at the Episcopal Church, a few blocks from their home in Queens. The two sons served as acolytes, attended Sunday School and were active in the church's youth group.

"The church was always very important to us," Ms Holder recalled.

In the home, the emphasis too was on the family and when it came time to sit around the table for a meal, typical West Indian dishes were on the menu.

So, how'd all that cocooning work out for Holder?

Pretty good, it appears.

Further, anybody familiar with the racial structure of the West Indies -- if you're not, Malcolm Gladwell's chapter in Outliers on his mother's family in Jamaica is a good introduction -- would recognize that Holder is from Barbado's mulatto middle class, rather than from its black agricultural masses. As Gladwell points out, West Indians who look like Holder (or Gladwell's mom) didn't get that way by accident. Generations of careful breeding requiring a fair degree of social segregation have typically have gone into keeping the mulatto elites of the West Indies from slipping into the black masses.

Mrs. Holder -- the lady on the right who looks rather like Meryl Streep -- is not a Bajan. She's a Harvard graduate obstetrician. Her older sister, Vivian Malone, was one of the two black students whom Alabama Gov. George Wallace notoriously "stood in the schoolroom door" to (unsuccessfully) prevent from integrating the U. of Alabama in 1963.

Judging from their three kids' looks, I wouldn't be surprised if careful breeding, involving "paper bag tests" and the like, went into Mrs. Holder's racial makeup as well.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

51 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's not what he meant. You were sposed to apologize for your inner racism and admit that you have a long way to go before we can have true equality.

Anonymous said...

Everyone on the internet is jumping to conclusions about what Holder meant. Stop and listen for once. Stop putting words in someone's mouth.

When Holder said we should be ready to accept criticism at times, who and what do you think he was talking about? Who thinks Holder as a West Indian who has done well for himself in life is very sympathetic to the American underclass philosophy of not trying, not using your head, not working, not building a family, not giving a fig?

Do you or do you not agree that Americans are afraid to speak truths about race in this country? Is that not a recurring theme of iSteve?

Don't you know that successful blacks can be some of the harshest critics and most aware of failings in their "own" community? Everybody is ready to jump to conclusions about Holder, and this time they might be wrong.

By the way, don't you also think that maybe our President is very very aware of these types of issues to the max? I bet Obama is more aware than an observant white person, because jealous blacks have shoved it in his face every step of the way, everything from his studiousness to his appearance.

Anonymous said...

There seems to no picture of Holder in a merry mood. Does the guy ever smile?

Anonymous said...

Of course, you and I know how this dialogue will be framed:evil whitey oppressor of people of color atone for your sins open the borders and tolerate your racial dispossession.

Anonymous said...

The tough thing for white folks is that the mulatto elite is committed to ruling the black underclass while remaining conspicuously separate from them. It is the same as the Mexican "mestizaje" scam in which privileged folks claim to be mixed in order to stay on top of the racial pyramid.

Mulattos have their special "light,bright, almost white" groups like Jack and Jill that do nothing for poor black folks except provide cover for ignorant black trash as "victims" while making sure their children socialize together and avoid ghetto trash.

The benefit is that they get the high level affirmative action jobs. This can only continue as long as "black" follows the "one drop rule".

No matter how light you are, no matter if you can "pass" as white (and in fact DO pass for white in many cases), as long as you can put down "black" for race on a college application form in America, you get to run out guilt trips on white folks at the same time you reap all the bennies of AA.

It is not that way all over, however. In South Africa, blacks are smarter and know that the hi yalla exploit black folks.

South African blacks call them "colored". They constitute a separate caste that is getting screwed as much as white folks are in SA. This is one reason why they laugh their butts off whenever a high yella colored from America comes to visit and calls himself "black" seeking some kind of racial solidarity. Africans know better.

Most reasonable black folks in America also know the scam, hence their nickname for the NAACP: "National Association for the Advancement of CERTAIN People". They will never bring it up among white folks, however, since that would breach the Black Wall of Silence.

The last person I would take schooling from on race relations is Holder. Frankly, he and his family are so assimilated and embedded in the power structure they should be considered "colored" -- not black -- in America and get no more AA benefits. If anyone ought to benefit from AA, it is black folks in America -- REAL black folks.

I have no sympathy (and certainly feel no guilt for) hi yalla "coloreds" like Obama and Holder. They will run their guilt scams to keep on top of the black and Mexicans masses in America while simultaneously and scrupulously keeping their sons and daughters away from ghetto trash.

Anonymous said...

you know, reading this, I get such a longing for Booker T. Washington. He was an unabashed "race man", a booster of everything black.

Yet he respected the same impulse in white folks. For Washington white folks were entitled to be race men as well.

He did not ask for equality of results, but equality of opportunity.

He knew black folks in America were halfway between the jungle and civilization and that Europe was the carrier of civilization.

He was race-loyal, too. In his famous "cast down your buckets" speech he challenged white industrialists to hire black folks and not import alien workers from Europe.

Great guy.

If Holder wants to be as "honest" as Washington, I would meet him halfway. But I know Holder doesn't.

As a member of the hi yalla intelligentsia, Holder is going to gut immigration enforcement, further screwing poor black and white citizens.

The trends are already clear. Just like South Africa, black folks at the bottom are going to be worse off under black rule than they were under white rule.

Anonymous said...

I get the strange feeling Steve is tired of being harangued and guilt-tripped. Myself, I never tire of it. Groveling is great exercise. You racists should try it.

Anonymous said...

So who is the highest ranking member of Obama's inner circle that grew up in a normal black home? Are there any?

Anonymous said...

Most African-Americans have some identifiable white ancestry. Holder doesn't look particularly mulatto, and both he and his mother are just to the right on the darker scale of the spectrum. His wife is very light, as his children, but once agin not seeing the mulatto, just your run of the mill black person, with some obvious white ancestors somewhere in the background, like most black people.

I was waiting for an article from you about Mike Tomlin, the youngest coach to win the Super Bowl, and a graduate of William and Mary. Definitely not light-skinned. Somehow sucessful. Go figure.

Anonymous said...

Puerile, amateurish; that's how I would describe the impression made so far by the Obama administration.

Anonymous said...

From Holder's statement:

"And outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.

This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle, it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated."

His observation is correct, but to assert that it is "truly sad" and "hard to accept" requires a willful ignorance of human nature and the naive and dangerous belief that it can and should be changed. The right of the people to peaceably assemble is there for a purpose.

Anonymous said...

This is finally getting into the heart of things. Is it possible that fundamentals, which we blacks have understood for so long, might finally find their way into mainstream consciousness?

In the 1970s, Thomas Sowell wrote an article (I think for the Times magazine section; it was entitled "Blacker Than Thou"), in which he pilloried this mulatto elite that has never had the welfare of the race in mind, but had the power to guide "liberation" for their own personal gain. Sowell cited families like those of Andrew Young, Julian Bond and others, but he could have chronicled thousands of these families, whose greatest pride was citing their light-colored skin and white ancestry. These are the families who, by the 1960s, had sent their children to college for generations, who resented often having as much money as whites, but not being able to break the social barrier.

Sowell said that when it became profitable and even fashionable for this elite to join the "black is beautiful" gang, they then strove to take over leadership even of this movement. Of course, they were fought. Always, there were other blacks working against the goals of this elite, since they understood what the elites really meant by "integration," and what their true intentions were. The non-elites would have been perfectly satisfied to have followed the slow development models as promoted by people like Booker T. Washington, who acknowledged that the poor masses, indeed, needed to be "uplifted" and neither they, nor society, would benefit from immediate integration.
-- Victoria

Matt Parrott said...

And eventually, after several generations of selective breeding for the most intelligent males and most fair and attractive females, they'll be as fair and attractive as the population which they share an only fractional admixture. Probably moreso.

We folks who are White now weren't the first. We migrated from Africa and pulled the same stunt on the Europeans before us: Neanderthals.

Anonymous said...

there may be a little too much emphasis on the mulatto elite theory; medium to darker carribean blacks sometimes have very high, Yale without preferences-level IQs, part of the overall "carribean effect". My view is that black people should be judged on the architecture of their brains, not the color of their skin (character content factors in as well--minus pts. for firing the uzi, plus pts for firing without shaking).

also, with respect to music, prince and slash and similar may have pop culture mulatto cache, but are not remotely in the same league as "straight black" blues guitarists, let alone jimi hendrix. among other things, the white heritage seems to limit capacity for the natural, free-form flexibility of players like Bobby Watson, or any number of black jazz guitar players, where slash, ridiculed by Kurt Cobain even, was always harnessed to the beat, and Prince never really escaped it either.

Bertrand Russell observed that most Brits were cast in gloom of their own making, but blacks could occasionally be seen having genuine good fun. Once you no longer aspire to live in a tasteful residential community-- nodding to circumspect 50ish neighbors through tinted Mercedes window glass--black naturalness suddenly is bid up to a premium and SWPL and its owners become the grey goo. Even less pretentious achieving whites become a mere category, to be taken in doses.

Anonymous said...

Add these puerile, pedantic, annoying lectures to the list of reasons why this administration will soon wear on just about everyone's nerves. And there will be no Bill Clinton-style post-1994 correction - his leftism is too deeply ingrained.

Anonymous said...

So who is the highest ranking member of Obama's inner circle that grew up in a normal black home? Are there any?

His wife. Also Bill Clinton.

Anonymous said...

Rumor has it Holder was smiling when he recommended a pardon for Puerto Rican terrorists. Unfortunately no picture was taken on the happy occasion.

Truth said...

"So who is the highest ranking member of Obama's inner circle that grew up in a normal black home? Are there any?"

What exactly, in your opinion, constitutes "a normal black home."

Anonymous said...

If it ain't the white man, it's the light brown man. Give me a break, Victoria.

Anonymous said...

…Another line of evidence comes from genetics. Advances in technology have enabled scientists to study small regions of DNA from Neanderthal and ancient human bones. In particular, researchers have been concentrating on a small region of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that is particularly informative in comparisons and is relatively easy to amplify. They have found that Neanderthal DNA in this region is significantly different from either modern human DNA or DNA obtained from ancient human remains.

The types of differences found in Neanderthal DNA have not been identified in thousands and thousands of samples from modern humans. Most scientists believe that this indicates Neanderthals could not have made a significant contribution to our genetic makeup. However, most researchers also believe that our present data do not allow us to rule out some inbreeding between Neanderthals and H. sapiens in the past.

A recent study used information from archeological and anthropological studies to simulate the arrival of H. Sapiens into Neanderthal-occupied Europe under various conditions. Its conclusion was that even very tiny amounts of inbreeding would have resulted in Neanderthals’ leaving a significant signature in the modern human genome. Since we do not observe Neanderthal mtDNA signatures in modern samples, these researchers believe that their results rule out the possibility of any but the most infrequent inbreeding.

Other scientists, using different models, have capped the level of genetic contribution that Neanderthals could have made at higher levels, such as 25 percent, a quite sizeable proportion. The small number of Neanderthals from whom we have data creates problems, as does the fact that we have information from only one gene.

These problems are not easily solved, because very few Neanderthal specimens exist and most will not yield DNA that can be studied. Meanwhile, we may only be able to amplify short regions of the easily amplified mtDNA from the remains that are capable of yielding intact molecules. It is not even known whether Neanderthals had the same number of chromosomes that we do, a necessary condition for producing fertile offspring.

Although the present state of research seems to argue against a significant level of breeding between Neanderthals and H. sapiens, the question of whether they should be considered a separate species or something more akin to a subspecies (with biologically different characteristics from modern humans but still capable of interbreeding) remains open and may never be resolved.
In the absence of compelling data one way or the other, it is interesting to speculate about the interactions between Neanderthals and H. sapiens. What was it like when a Neanderthal and an H. sapiens met at the riverbank? Was it like a human meeting a chimpanzee in the forest or something quite different? If inbreeding were biologically possible, would cultural taboos have prevented intimacy between the two groups? On the one hand, evidence suggests the sharing, or at least adoption, of technologies between the two groups, indicating that there was a level of communication between them. But some scientists have speculated that differences in the nasal area would have prevented Neanderthals from making the same range of sounds as we do. Would such differences have prevented our ancestors from communicating and mating with them? These are intriguing questions to which we may never know the answers.


http://www.askascientist.org/askascientist/answers/are_neanderthals_and_ihomo_sapiens_sapiensi_genetically_compatible_can_they_interbreed_i_ask.html

Anonymous said...

'There seems to no picture of Holder in a merry mood. Does the guy ever smile?'

Maybe Holder is Roubini with a fake moustache?

AG calling for an 'open discussion' within his department is not unlike Fidel Castro planting rumors from time to time that he's thinking about 'retirement', to see who are 'the ambitious ones'.

Anonymous said...

Once you no longer aspire to live in a tasteful residential community-

Does the guy who wrote that aspire to live in a tacky prison community? Tawdry industrial community? A kitschy community of homeless persons? These all seem to be opposites of "tasteful" and "residential".

Maybe he imagines that criminals and homeless people somehow feel themselves to be superior to those who live in "tasteful residential communities". Actually, they don't. Polo Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Bentlies, Rolls-Royces, are all very popular among trashy people who've struck it rich. If they could create and maintain such communities, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Since they can't create or maintain such communities, meaningless symbols like polo shirts have to substitute for the real thing.

Also, contrary to what that guy implies, Jimi Hendrix was significantly lighter than the average African American.

Anonymous said...

...medium to darker carribean blacks sometimes have very high, Yale without preferences-level IQs, part of the overall "carribean effect".

The Yale stuff is nonsense, of course.

However, it is true that here in NYC (the epicenter of Black Caribbean immigration into the US) Caribbean Blacks outperform traditional US Blacks economically. It is also true that Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua, etc. are hellholes. At home they underperform in comparison with US Blacks. Barbados is a small exception to that rule. The Lynn and Vanhanen figure for Jamaica is 72. For Barbados it is 78.

This leads one to assume that Caribbean Black immigration to the US works more like East Indian and Cuban immigrations (the elites are the ones who come here) than like Mexican immigration (the peasants come here, while the elites stay). I don't know for certain why the Black Caribbean elite and middle class behave differently from the Mexican elite and middle class as far as emigration is concerned, but I can make some guesses.

Anonymous said...

IQ isn't everything. Caribbean black have much better attitudes than black Americans. They aren't so adverse to hard work or being polite. The same goes for African blacks.

Anonymous said...

IQ isn't everything. Caribbean black have much better attitudes than black Americans. They aren't so adverse to hard work or being polite. The same goes for African blacks.

But can they maintain that into the next generation?

For many years in Britain Caribbean doctors and nurses were held up as models of immigrant success, that is they arrived already trained. But I get the impression that their offspring rarely perform as well.

Anonymous said...

What exactly, in your opinion, constitutes "a normal black home."

The vast majority of African Americans trace most of their descent from plantation slaves and are very conscious of that fact. If one thinks of African Americans as a nation, then one can say that their national identity is tightly bound up with this unfortunate fact of history.

Barack Obama traces none of his descent from plantation slaves and some of his descent from White plantation owners. The part of his descent that goes back to Africa goes back to the opposite side of that continent from the one where African Americans originated. These two opposite sides of Africa differ from each other racially, culturally and in other significant ways. They are often found to be at war with each other, as for example, in Ruanda and Congo. If Barack Obama ever intervenes in Kenya's violent struggles for power (a real possibility), he will do it on the side of the people (the Luo) who look like his father and against the people (the Kikuyu) who look like African Americans. If that's not ironic, I don't know what is.

To top it all off, he's a SWPLer. His occasional attempts to behave like a Black man are comically self-conscious.

Let me tell you folks, I've never ever posed myself the question of whether or not I was White enough. Does Michael Jordan ever ask himself or anyone else if he's Black enough for anything?

This was all a long way of saying the obvious: Barack Obama does not come from a normal African American home.

Anonymous said...

Normal black home: One where all the residents are born in this country, can trace their black great-great-great-great grandparents and beyond, on both sides (even if a white one slipped in along the way), to people born and bred on American soil. Members of a normal black family know nothing of Africa, except what they learn from Hollywood movies and the education system. Although the father might engage in serial polygamy, the mother is not white.
-- Victoria

Anonymous said...

Steve Sailer is a brilliant journalist. I learn something new just about every time I stop by. That being said, I'm amazed at the poor quality of the folks who regularly comment here. I've read post after post concerning the low IQ of black Americans—from people who can't compose a proper sentence.

An interesting thing about English is that because of its many grammar rules, it functions as a kind of IQ test. One short sentence is enough to tell you all you need to know about a writer's ability to handle complexity. I'm always pleasantly surprised—stunned actually, to read a comment here that's written in coherent, correct English.

Anonymous said...

Magellan,

Not a good sampling. For instance, I omitted a lot from the first sentence of this post in the interest of expediency. This means I'm in a hurry, not that I'm ignorant of basic grammar. u not 2 smart

--Senor Doug

Anonymous said...

Barack Obama traces none of his descent from plantation slaves and some of his descent from White plantation owners.

The irony of it being that I, as an American of mostly British descent, am perhaps genetically more closely related to Obama than your average African American. Obama is mostly British on his mother's side, from whom he inherits 51-52% of his DNA. On his father's side he is mostly East African, while most AAs African ancestry is from the opposite side of Africant (though about 15-20% of their DNA is from white, mostly British, sources).

Anonymous said...

I'm always pleasantly surprised—stunned actually, to read a comment here that's written in coherent, correct English.

The first comma in the above sentences should have been a dash.


An interesting thing about English is that because of its many grammar rules, it functions as a kind of IQ test.

In reality one of the interesting things about English is how simple its grammar is in comparison with those of other major languages. English grammar is so simple, it's almost analytic. The person who wrote the above has probably never tackled a typical inflexional or agglutinative grammar.

Anonymous said...

Barack Obama and Eric Holder, two black male "firsts" with NO ancestral connection to black America. Same with Colin Powell, another black first.

That leaves Condi and Michelle to represent the ancestors.

Anonymous said...

I'm always pleasantly surprised—stunned actually, to read a comment here that's written in coherent, correct English.

This is a stupid comment. There are plenty of smart people commenting here and most of the comments are well-written. Your comment isn't better written than the majority of the comments here, you arrogant prig.

Anonymous said...

Human Nature said

When Holder said we should be ready to accept criticism at times, who and what do you think he was talking about?

Whitey. How much you wanna bet?

This ain't our first rodeo, kid.

Anonymous said...

I'm amazed at the poor quality of the folks who regularly comment here

I'm amazed at your seemingly-psychic abilities. Do you read palms too?

Could you point us to a forum that has a similarly open comment policy (i.e., no one like you censoring posts) and lives up to your standards of grammar? If not, does that mean you're full of crap?

Anonymous said...

English grammar is so simple, it's almost analytic.

Maybe he was confusing grammar with idiom?

Fernandinande said...

"The person who wrote the above has probably never tackled a typical inflexional or agglutinative grammar."

Wow, look who's trying to sound impressive!

According to the Cambridge and Webster's dictionaries, "inflexional" isn't even a word, and "agglutinative" pertains to forming words, not to grammar.

Please insert $.25 and try again!

Insightful said...

There is actually a considerable 17th and 18th century American slave connection to Barbados and the Caribbean. Take for example the 'colony of South Carolina'

The English successfully settled the colony with the assistance of the English Barbadians that came as part of the earlier contingents. These English West Indians had already known the defeats and successes of such a task, and brought with them those "lessons learned" on the island of Barbadoes and instituted them in colonial South Carolina. It was these settlers who brought along plantation management and African ancestored slaves. Initially, many of the slaves came from the West Indies, mostly from Barbados when they came with their owners.

Alexander Hamilton, one of America's founding fathers was born on the West Indian island of Nevis

Many of Louisiana's slaves came from Africa VIA Haiti, or were born in the latter.

And let us not forget that many Virginia slaves were apparently imported from the Caribbean islands, rather than shipped directly from Africa. According to the acting governor in Virginia in 1680, "what negoes were brought to Virginia were imported generally from Barbados for it was very rare to have a negro ship come to this Country directly from Africa." quote from: Croghan, Laura A., "'The Negroes to Serve Forever': The Evolution of Blacks's Life and Labor in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Masters Thesis, William and Mary, 1994, p. 22

Anonymous said...

"According to the Cambridge and Webster's dictionaries, "inflexional" isn't even a word, and "agglutinative" pertains to forming words, not to grammar."

Some dictionaries skip over the adjective forms of words, especially if those words are themselves nominalizations of verbs that aren't particularly common to be begin with. Most people use "inflect" to mean a variation in tone of voice, and that is obviously not the linguistic sense the person intended here.

I wouldn't use the term inflexional myself, but it doesn't sound too bad to me ... "connexion" used to be an acceptable alternate spelling for "connection", etc.

Inflected and agglutinative languages do have distinct grammars. The previous poster was merely offering her/his opinion that English has fairly simple grammar. (I have no opinion on this matter.)

Agglutinative languages distinguish between grammar and word formation much less than English does; a word in an agglutinative language can convey as much information as a long phrase does in English. Said phrase necessarily involves grammar - it stands to reason that in an agglutinative language, a word could be grammatically incorrect.

Markku said...

I learned English as a foreign language. For me, the main difficulty in learning the language was that it has a lot of words and idioms. The fundamentals of grammar are relatively simple (as are those of the other two Germanic languages I learned as foreign languages). But there are some tricky aspects to English grammar once you delve into it a little deeper.

My native language is Finnish. Finnish is agglutinative and has a complex system of inflection of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and even particles. For example, even the word no can be inflected in several ways. Obviously, I'm blind to the difficulty of Finnish as a foreign language.

(Note that I prefer the notion of foreign instead of second language. This is because English is a language of aliens to me, not something I'm forced to know to be able to integrate into society.)

Anonymous said...

I think the grammar cop was really objecting to the content of comments. He thought "what a bunch of stupid racists" - and then (since he couldn't find anything he could argue about) "proved" our stupidity by criticizing grammar (but without pointing to any grammatical mistakes!).

That's all the left has. Pathetic.

And if he truly thinks our grammar is bad, he should stay in more - and read more than two or three blogs. The grammar and spelling on the BET boards, for example, would put his knickers in a knot (assuming it's a he, and wears knickers).

I hope Steve will revisit Holder occasionally. "Latest Holder Absurdity" or "National Dialogue on Race Update" could stand as the title to every such entry.

Anonymous said...

Oh child. The attitudes of commenters to the BET blogs put my knickers in a knot.

COME ON CHRIS ..THEY TRYING TO MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE A FOOL…ITS ALWAYS 2 PARTS TO A STORY! WHAT DID SHE DO?
EVERYBODY BLAMING IT ON HIM! WHAT ABOUT HER?


This of course refers to a male R&B singer who beat his R&B singer girlfriend quite badly. (Photos at the link I gave, if your feelings aren't easily hurt.) There are many commenters wondering what it was that she did to "make" her boyfriend think she was a punching bag. (To be sure, several people expressed sympathy Rihanna as well. How could you not? I don't know her from Adam but it does indeed hurt to look at what he did.) I seriously get a sense that it's a common view that women can bring physical abuse upon themselves by misbehaving.

Bad grammar a la "Chriz deh pon fukery nuttin can be dat atagnizing 2 beat any 1 dat bod yo di boy hav fi gah a jail" really pales by comparison. Inductivist has some stats on black college students beating down their classmates (earning him the typical misquote-and-insult response by the left).

Anonymous said...

I have a black coworker who loves blaring his radio to the max, so unfortunately I do know who Rihanna and Chris Brown are. They are very, very big stars in that world. This whole thing is a very big deal to a pretty large portion of the population. By the way, she's a Barbadian mulatto, so this isn't even off-topic for this thread. From what I understand, he didn't just beat her up, he bit her in a few places as well.

Even though both of them have a mostly female audience (this is R&B, not rap), that audience is to a large extent siding with him. She must have done something to deserve it, etc.

I'm putting the probability of them getting back together at some point at about 90%.

Anonymous said...

DYork compared Barack Obama to Colin Powell.

I'm fascinated that the comparison continues right to being acolytes in the Episcopalian Church - about as Anglo an experience as you could desire.

Truth said...

"I have a black coworker who loves blaring his radio to the max,"

"To the Max"?

1983 just e-mailed me, it wants it's slang back.

Anonymous said...

This is so true. Elites from third world nations who look down upon (and probably ill-treat) the masses of their own nation are the first to cry racism when they come to a White nation. I personally know so many upper caste Hindus who see racism in every action of the Goras (Whites) but back home would not even share utensils with a person of the lower castes.

Anonymous said...

(bowlderized for Steve take 1)

And the policy for the first 200 years of American history was the opposite, so what?

Nor did my great-grandmother's kids to white folks, again, so what?

Lol.

I reject the premise of your question, but I'll play along for a moment.
The "evil whites" in question are LONG DEAD. You expect "good whites" to pay for their sins. This is collective punishment. Are you responsible for black crime?

The white kids being disenfranchised by AA are living victims. The crimes are ongoing. And you justify it with "two wrongs make a right"?

Now, back to your false premise. You claim that today's blacks have been done wrong by the transatlantic trade, and whites must pay for that sin. Wrong. Blacks today are fantastically wealthy by sub-Saharan African standards. SSA has such low standards that when I tried to find stats, I could only come up with a few kinda-sorta proxies a few years ago. But, the ratio is something like 50:1.

Thank goodness for collective justice; now I can present a bill to blacks for all the good my ancestors did them.

My kids are paying for the sins of whites long since dead.

And whites long since dead benefited from their sins against black people, life is hard.

Wow, there's the stance of a real moral paragon. What's next? Go kick a white guy in the teeth and tell the cops his ancestor kicked your ancestor in the teeth?

Newsflash, an ancient crime against one's ancestors isn't a license to steal.

"Life is hard." Now we're approaching honesty, finally, from "Truth." He doesn't have or want any rationale. He just supports AA 'cause it's good for him. Don't like it? "Life is hard."

I guess no good deed (manumission) goes unpunished (AA? "Life is hard"). What a stand up guy. Good thing for you, most of my ancestors didn't resort to "life is hard." If they had, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and there'd certainly be no AA.

"We didn't have to institute these policies."

"You" didn't have to buy people, take them halfway across the world in deplorable conditions and make it illegal for the to learn to read and write either, now did you?

I was just reading recently that most black slaves in America came here by way of the Caribbean markets. Which aren't halfway across the world, in case you didn't know. Dunno how true it is, but food for thought.

You're right though, we didn't have to buy slaves. In fact, WE didn't. I don't know how hard that point will be for you to grasp. Think hard. Think 'til it hurts.

But, the proper restitution would have been to put them back where we got them. Right? I mean, if transporting someone in slavery halfway 'round the world is the sin, isn't returning them halfway 'round the world the proper restitution? Isn't that all blacks in America have a right to demand?

But you couldn't drag them kicking and screaming back to the fabled motherland. You couldn't pay them to go back.

How about the sub-Saharan Africans who sold the slaves? Do they bear any responsibility? Or does responsibility stand for "has money" in your moral universe?

"AA is a white creation."

Nor really, in African slavery, it was a couple of years of hard work followed by being gifted some land and given a wife, why was that not the policy here?

And you know this how? Ye olde oral tradition? You probably think African slavery is (note the tense) okay because it's Africans doing the enslaving, right? (that's a rhetorical question, you've already provided an answer)

There is no such thing in this world as "generosity". You give a dollar to a bum because it makes you feel good, not because it makes him feel good.

LOL. Which is a nice way of saying "I never have to say thanks."

But it's an illustrative quote. Earlier, "Truth" said:

I wouldn't use "generosity" in this sentence.

First, he debates whether x is generosity, then later he obviates the very word "generosity." So much for intellectual rigor. Why bother debating whether something's generosity, when there's no such thing as generosity? I'll tell you why - when words mean nothing, when you have no character at all, you'll say anything.

"Meritocracy would be color blindness."

I agree, but only from day one, not 200 years later.

Obviously, the context here is that "Truth" thinks whites harmed blacks economically, which is an inversion of the truth. Tens, if not hundreds of millions of sub-Saharan Africans would trade places with a black in America, ANY black in America, in a heartbeat.

Once again, every whiteman on Isteve.blogspot.com invented electricity, but none owned slaves.

Again, I need you to try to think REALLY, REALLY hard: declaring that whites are the golden goose of history is in no way tantamount to declaring group responsibility for good or ill, or advocacy of collective judgment. Eat some fish, take your vitamins, and think REALLY, REALLY HARD.

Can we afford wars in desserts overseas and welfare to rich bankers?

No. This is your idea of an argument?

Trust me "Truth," you're doing black men no favors by posting here.

I repeat: "Truth" is a reverse nickname, like a fat guy named "Tiny."

P.S., as a further illustration of "Truth's" allergy to intellectual honesty, observe how I respond to him comprehensively, and how he cherry-picks his responses.

Anonymous said...

"And eventually, after several generations of selective breeding for the most intelligent males and most fair and attractive females, they'll be as fair and attractive as the population which they share an only fractional admixture. Probably moreso.

We folks who are White now weren't the first. We migrated from Africa and pulled the same stunt on the Europeans before us: Neanderthals."


Nice theory. However recent findings about Neanderthals, ones in Europe atleast...show that they had fair skin and red hair.

Victoria said...

"Judging from their three kids' looks, I wouldn't be surprised if careful breeding, involving "paper bag tests" and the like, went into Mrs. Holder's racial makeup as well."

Really? I wouldn't be surprised if so-called careful breeding and paper bag tests had nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs. Holder's "racial makeup". Hmm. Next time I see a blond haired white family, I shouldn't be surprised if they practiced some "careful breeding" of their own.

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Anonymous said...

We'll err!! Steve still isn't aware that 25% of all black Harvard graduates are of Nigerian origin.