AG Sulzberger and his minions have achieved a tour-de-force: they’ve manufactured an agitprop enterprise so crude the American history guild in higher education cannot abide it. (The same guild will assemble a department of 30 professors, among whom the only Republican is some guy pushing 70 who hasn’t been on a hiring committee since 1985).
the contradiction between the self-image of the United States as a free and democratic country and the reality that it’s not.
It’s not? Compared to what? Can any agree on a more democratic, more free country? China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany? Switzerland?
The reality is that the USA, today, is both pretty free, and pretty democratic. But it’s not equal in results, because humans are not equal in gifts, luck, and behavior.
Any place, like California, can be pretty democratic, and become Dem Party controlled, and lose a lot of freedom.
The 1619 project is an attempt to shift responsibility for current day bad economic results of blacks, relative to whites. 70%+ of black kids are NOT growing up in homes with mothers married to fathers, the nuclear family.
All other family types are sub-optimal. Uncle Sam makes a lousy Dad. A large part of the problems of Black culture in America is the acceptance of these sub-optimal families, combined with a demand to reach optimal economic outcomes.
No system can give optimal final output with sub-optimal inputs.
It’s not racism that makes Blacks have kids without committing to marriage – but Dem PC racists want to claim it is.
We need to define the racism that should be abolished: treating similar people differently because of their race. As MLK said, we should judge people based on their own, individual character. The Dem PC racists want to judge folk based on their race. Similar to the Dem PC sexists who want to judge folk based on their sex.
How much freedom is Jeff Bezos willing to give up to be of Shaun King’s equal, the type of absolute equality Washington Post advocates. Must start to hold liberals accountable to the type of authoritarian equality they try to impose on everyone else.
It’s not? Compared to what? Can any agree on a more democratic, more free country? China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany? Switzerland?
The parochialism is grotesquely amusing. This guy is on the Stanford faculty. And, like a lot of faculty members, is in a bubble.
What’s amusing about this is that the peculiar problems of the black population haven’t a blessed thing to do with defects in the quantum of freedom or democracy. Expose all you like, professor, you’re still just another peddler of humbug.
This is a nice post for today. But I confess, I don’t quite understand why various socialist orgs. are hostile to the 1619 project. Have I overestimated their desire to destroy the Great Capitalist Satan? Or is there something else going on?
Art Deco — You need to read the whole interview:
“I think that’s the saddest part of this, that the response of the New York Times is simply to defend their project. Rather than to say, we welcome the critique, let’s work with you to see what we can do. Obviously, this would have been better done a year ago, two years ago, but it’s never too late.”
The passage quoted by Tom Grey was about how Frederick Douglass and MLK argued that the answer to black freedom was in the Constitution.
“The 1619 project is an attempt to shift responsibility for current day bad economic results of blacks, relative to whites. 70%+ of black kids are NOT growing up in homes with mothers married to fathers, the nuclear family.”
What puzzles me is why the Great Society had such a disparate impact on blacks. From what I understand, the black family was strong as of 1960, rates of children out of wedlock, divorce, etc. were not so much higher than for whites, adjusting for income and other demographics. But then came the War on Poverty, and all those pathologies just exploded among blacks, much more than for poor whites.
Jimmy:
You might want to look at this and at the video it also suggests.
This from WSJ. Don’t know if this link works. (I’m a real tyro at this.)
Dr. King, who sought full participation in America, would never have indulged today’s grievance-based identity politics, whose social-justice warriors use race as a battering ram against the country. In fact, in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” Dr. King explicitly warned against the type of groupthink that characterizes identity politics: “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
Yesterday’s values prepared blacks to walk through the doors of opportunity opened to them through civil rights. Family, faith, character and moral behavior were all crucial to their victories. Today’s social-justice warriors trade on the currency of oppression, deriding the concept of personal responsibility and always blaming external forces. I can think of no better way to instill hopelessness and fear in a young person than to tell him he is a victim, powerless to change his circumstance.
“I just think that part of the problem of this whole project is that they did not really approach this as a collaborative activity involving historians, educators, and journalists. It seems quite obvious that the number of people involved in the actual process was quite limited.” – prominent black scholar at the PowerLine link
Well, yeah.
A collaborative activity with people who knew the subject would have ruined the narrative.
ommyJay on January 20, 2020 at 8:24 pm said:
This is a nice post for today. But I confess, I don’t quite understand why various socialist orgs. are hostile to the 1619 project. Have I overestimated their desire to destroy the Great Capitalist Satan? Or is there something else going on?
* * *
I have wondered the same thing, and don’t have a clue.
Dr. King, who sought full participation in America, would never have indulged today’s grievance-based identity politics,
If you say so. Now scrounge around King’s circle and locate a figure who explicitly eschewed it (or a figure who dissented from certain prevailing currents within black politics). Do that as well in regard to the senior figures in a half-dozen other protest organizations. Find a black elected official who has explicitly eschewed it. The one person I can think of in King’s circle is Bayard Rustin. Well, Mr. Rustin landed a job on the research staff of the AFL-CIO in 1965 or thereabouts and was never again an influential figure in black politics. In his last years, he was associated with a letterhead organization that had been founded by Max Schactman from the membership of the old Socialist Party. I think Ralph David Abernathy had his misgivings about the course of black politics after 1968. He wasn’t an influential figure after 1977, when the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ejected him from his position as staff director of the organization. (I think the reason for that had to do with general incompetence rather than policy disputes). I believe James Farmer (the founder of CORE) had his misgivings as well. Farmer after decades as an organizational functionary was determined to earn a living doing something else. He landed a teaching position at a black college in 1973 and worked there until he retired 25 years later. There are some accomplished black elected officials (Anthony Williams, Robert Bowers), but they’ve not been particularly honored in the public life of the black population.
In constructing a counter-factual, I’m not going to build a model which has it that King would have been a complete outlier among the black political leadership after 1968.
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AG Sulzberger and his minions have achieved a tour-de-force: they’ve manufactured an agitprop enterprise so crude the American history guild in higher education cannot abide it. (The same guild will assemble a department of 30 professors, among whom the only Republican is some guy pushing 70 who hasn’t been on a hiring committee since 1985).
the contradiction between the self-image of the United States as a free and democratic country and the reality that it’s not.
It’s not? Compared to what? Can any agree on a more democratic, more free country? China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany? Switzerland?
The reality is that the USA, today, is both pretty free, and pretty democratic. But it’s not equal in results, because humans are not equal in gifts, luck, and behavior.
Any place, like California, can be pretty democratic, and become Dem Party controlled, and lose a lot of freedom.
The 1619 project is an attempt to shift responsibility for current day bad economic results of blacks, relative to whites. 70%+ of black kids are NOT growing up in homes with mothers married to fathers, the nuclear family.
All other family types are sub-optimal. Uncle Sam makes a lousy Dad. A large part of the problems of Black culture in America is the acceptance of these sub-optimal families, combined with a demand to reach optimal economic outcomes.
No system can give optimal final output with sub-optimal inputs.
It’s not racism that makes Blacks have kids without committing to marriage – but Dem PC racists want to claim it is.
We need to define the racism that should be abolished: treating similar people differently because of their race. As MLK said, we should judge people based on their own, individual character. The Dem PC racists want to judge folk based on their race. Similar to the Dem PC sexists who want to judge folk based on their sex.
How much freedom is Jeff Bezos willing to give up to be of Shaun King’s equal, the type of absolute equality Washington Post advocates. Must start to hold liberals accountable to the type of authoritarian equality they try to impose on everyone else.
It’s not? Compared to what? Can any agree on a more democratic, more free country? China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany? Switzerland?
The parochialism is grotesquely amusing. This guy is on the Stanford faculty. And, like a lot of faculty members, is in a bubble.
What’s amusing about this is that the peculiar problems of the black population haven’t a blessed thing to do with defects in the quantum of freedom or democracy. Expose all you like, professor, you’re still just another peddler of humbug.
This is a nice post for today. But I confess, I don’t quite understand why various socialist orgs. are hostile to the 1619 project. Have I overestimated their desire to destroy the Great Capitalist Satan? Or is there something else going on?
Art Deco — You need to read the whole interview:
“I think that’s the saddest part of this, that the response of the New York Times is simply to defend their project. Rather than to say, we welcome the critique, let’s work with you to see what we can do. Obviously, this would have been better done a year ago, two years ago, but it’s never too late.”
The passage quoted by Tom Grey was about how Frederick Douglass and MLK argued that the answer to black freedom was in the Constitution.
“The 1619 project is an attempt to shift responsibility for current day bad economic results of blacks, relative to whites. 70%+ of black kids are NOT growing up in homes with mothers married to fathers, the nuclear family.”
What puzzles me is why the Great Society had such a disparate impact on blacks. From what I understand, the black family was strong as of 1960, rates of children out of wedlock, divorce, etc. were not so much higher than for whites, adjusting for income and other demographics. But then came the War on Poverty, and all those pathologies just exploded among blacks, much more than for poor whites.
Jimmy:
You might want to look at this and at the video it also suggests.
This from WSJ. Don’t know if this link works. (I’m a real tyro at this.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-left-forgets-what-martin-luther-king-stood-for-11579304166?mod=opinion_major_pos5
A clip:
Dr. King, who sought full participation in America, would never have indulged today’s grievance-based identity politics, whose social-justice warriors use race as a battering ram against the country. In fact, in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” Dr. King explicitly warned against the type of groupthink that characterizes identity politics: “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
Yesterday’s values prepared blacks to walk through the doors of opportunity opened to them through civil rights. Family, faith, character and moral behavior were all crucial to their victories. Today’s social-justice warriors trade on the currency of oppression, deriding the concept of personal responsibility and always blaming external forces. I can think of no better way to instill hopelessness and fear in a young person than to tell him he is a victim, powerless to change his circumstance.
“I just think that part of the problem of this whole project is that they did not really approach this as a collaborative activity involving historians, educators, and journalists. It seems quite obvious that the number of people involved in the actual process was quite limited.” – prominent black scholar at the PowerLine link
Well, yeah.
A collaborative activity with people who knew the subject would have ruined the narrative.
ommyJay on January 20, 2020 at 8:24 pm said:
This is a nice post for today. But I confess, I don’t quite understand why various socialist orgs. are hostile to the 1619 project. Have I overestimated their desire to destroy the Great Capitalist Satan? Or is there something else going on?
* * *
I have wondered the same thing, and don’t have a clue.
Dr. King, who sought full participation in America, would never have indulged today’s grievance-based identity politics,
If you say so. Now scrounge around King’s circle and locate a figure who explicitly eschewed it (or a figure who dissented from certain prevailing currents within black politics). Do that as well in regard to the senior figures in a half-dozen other protest organizations. Find a black elected official who has explicitly eschewed it. The one person I can think of in King’s circle is Bayard Rustin. Well, Mr. Rustin landed a job on the research staff of the AFL-CIO in 1965 or thereabouts and was never again an influential figure in black politics. In his last years, he was associated with a letterhead organization that had been founded by Max Schactman from the membership of the old Socialist Party. I think Ralph David Abernathy had his misgivings about the course of black politics after 1968. He wasn’t an influential figure after 1977, when the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ejected him from his position as staff director of the organization. (I think the reason for that had to do with general incompetence rather than policy disputes). I believe James Farmer (the founder of CORE) had his misgivings as well. Farmer after decades as an organizational functionary was determined to earn a living doing something else. He landed a teaching position at a black college in 1973 and worked there until he retired 25 years later. There are some accomplished black elected officials (Anthony Williams, Robert Bowers), but they’ve not been particularly honored in the public life of the black population.
In constructing a counter-factual, I’m not going to build a model which has it that King would have been a complete outlier among the black political leadership after 1968.