Free Republic

If you’ve followed this story at all then you know that there is a serious backlash to the spread of Critical Race Theory (CRT) into public and private schools around the country. And, not surprisingly, there is now a media backlash to that backlash which is arguing a couple of things. First it suggests that what parents and many conservatives are calling CRT isn’t actually CRT as understood by scholars. Marc Lamont Hill and Nikole Hannah Jones have both made that argument. For instance: Ida Bae Wells@nhannahjones · Jun 9, 2021 Replying to @nhannahjones Like, basic reporting would demand that...

I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid...

A professor recently claimed that the way President Donald Trump formulates his sentences raises concern that he may be unfit to fulfill his duties as president of the United States—all just months after he defended "Black English" as an "alternate form" of the language. John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, pointed out how Trump’s grammatical and spelling mistakes disqualify him from serving as commander-in-chief, in an op-ed for The Atlantic. McWhorter further stated that Trump’s informal style "betray[s] his lack of fitness for the presidency."

Suppose it’s true. Suppose that, at the end of the day, people of African descent have lower IQs on average than do other groups of humans, and that this gap is caused, at least in part, by genetic differences. Of late, since Charles Murray was all but physically assaulted when he tried to speak at Middlebury, the issue as to whether his claim (with Richard J. Herrnstein) in The Bell Curve that blacks on average have lower IQs, and that it’s “highly likely” that genes play a role, has entered the public discourse once again, in part through a podcast...

Here’s how African-Americans can and will play the same game everyone else is, even if the rules are stacked against them. Demanding new rules or a new game is unrealistic and demeaning. After the race-related events of the past few weeks and months, it’s clear that the people who speak for black America Have a Dream, in the wake of the one Dr. King so resonantly expressed. The idea is that the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s wasn’t enough, that a shoe still has yet to drop. Today’s Dream is that white America will somehow wake up and understand...

Here’s a look at the future, and probably not that far into it. People will learn two things: 1) That an officer was not indicted for murdering Eric Garner—black, 43, and detained simply for selling single cigarettes—despite the fact that the killing was recorded from start to finish for all of America to see. 2) That an officer was not indicted for killing Michael Brown after Brown had stolen from a store, refused the officer’s request to step aside and perhaps tried to grab his gun, with the officer shooting when Brown repeatedly lunged toward him for some reason, with...

For many, the main lesson of the Ferguson verdict is that Michael Brown would still be alive if he were white — that Darren Wilson’s gunshots were the spawn of the racism always just beneath the surface of the white American soul. However, in light of what we heard last night, I feel that the Ferguson incident is instructive to America in a larger sense. The key element in the Brown-Wilson encounter was not any specific action either man took — it was the preset hostility to the cops that Brown apparently harbored. And that hostility was key because it...

Research confirms that the “acting white” charge is a real problem that intimidates some black students. Our job is to confront it. As kids go back to school this week, when it comes to black ones, it’s time to do some myth-busting. This week’s topic: black teens calling their nerdy black peers “white” for liking school. It’s a problem, because too often, black kids who want to fit in end up letting their grades slip. The social scientists John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham first called attention to this phenomenon in the 1980s. But over the past 10 years, a myth...

You know our political discourse has lost its moorings when it’s the Republicans who play that famous race card in defending one of their own. The person in need of defense is Dr. Ben Carson, a renowned Johns Hopkins surgeon. Carson happens to be black, Yale-educated — and conservative. After his impassioned criticism of President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, many in the GOP thought they’d found their 2016 standard-bearer. But however brilliant, Carson has raised eyebrows since coming into the spotlight. Last week, he told Sean Hannity, “Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be...

(@ 4:05) I can't make sense out of it. It's been said in some places and no, not by me that obama actually, this has been said by people that maybe he's not very bright. The other night I actually wondered what's wrong with him. I don't think it's because he's afraid to be an angry black man to say the things you were talking about would not have looked angry, just intelligence. I suspect he's used to being riding on that charisma of his. I think he thought standing there and being his larger than life self would take...

To feel that something is tired in the idea of Black History Month isn’t, despite what one might hear from some quarters, racist. When Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926, he hoped that the need for such a celebration would gradually recede. For the week to morph into a month did not exactly bear out his wishes, and today, even black people brandish an array of objections to Black History Month. Actor Morgan Freeman wonders why the history of his people must be relegated to a single month. Others more recreationally inclined consider it suspicious that February...

Very interesting and very civil discussion about race, Obama, Eric Holder, and the ape cartoon called: "Abominations, Cartoons, and Cowards" Detail: Glenn calls John’s NAACP piece an abomination (03:52) John’s ideas for reforming the NAACP (07:02) Glenn’s memories of attending the Million Man March (02:28) Was that NY Post cartoon racist? (07:45) Prince Harry and the policing of discourse (03:06) Are we really “a nation of cowards” on race? (08:41) ~~~~ John McWhorter, professor, best selling author and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the more conservative. He earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and...

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press, 624 pp., $37.50) If you were a black Harlemite in the late nineteen-teens, your favorite black leader was likely a short, coal-black West Indian famous for blazingly eloquent orations on street corners and in meeting halls. Before radio and television, soapbox oratory amounted to much more than the small-change affair it usually is today; speaking didactically at great length in the open air was how one got his message out. And as a young Henry Miller recalled, “there was no one in those days who...

A solution for the reading gap between black and white children was discovered four decades ago. So, why aren't we taking advantage of it?One does not expect to see New York's school Chancellor Joel Klein on the same stage as Reverend Al Sharpton. Klein is infamous for his emphasis on test scores and shutting down schools that fail to measure up. Not so long ago, Sharpton was in the barricades with Russell Simmons protesting mayor Michael Bloomberg and Klein's plan to cut New York City's education budget. Yet these days the two are teaming up for the Education Equality Project,...

If Barack Obama is the most admired black man in America right now, it may be no exaggeration to say that John McWhorter is a candidate for the unpopularity prize. Which is an odd thing to say about a courteous academic from the arcane realm of linguistics. Yet by venturing onto the mean streets of hiphop with a dispassionate critique of a multimillion-dollar industry, he risks becoming a target of drive-by shootings by enraged academics, book reviewers and bloggers. McWhorter is not all that surprised that critics have given him a pummelling. He lets out a sigh of resignation: “By...

Black Liberation theology actually encourages a victim mentality among blacks. John McWhorters' book Losing the Race, will be helpful here. Victimology, says McWhorter, is the adoption of victimhood as the core of one's identity--for example, like one who suffers through living in "a country and who lived in a culture controlled by rich white people." It is a subconscious, culturally inherited affirmation that life for Blacks in America has been in the past and will be in the future a life of being victimized by the oppression of Whites. In today's terms, it is the conviction that, forty years after...

John McWhorter is scheduled to be the guest author on C-Span2's "In Depth" Sunday afternoon from noon to 3:00 EST. McWhorter, a linguistics professor, has written a number of books including the best-seller "Losing the Race", which detailed the ways in which many blacks engage in self-defeating activities keeping them from advancing both culturally and economically. The program will include an interview regarding his books and Q&A's from viewers......

The black senator who could challenge Hillary By Alex Massie in Washington (Filed: 06/10/2006) A black senator with only two years in office has emerged as the outstanding star of the Democrats' campaign for next month's mid-term elections. Senator Barack Obama is bringing hope to Democrats Kenyan-born Barack Obama, 45, is already being touted as a challenger to Hillary Clinton for the party's presidential nomination. Another scenario sees him as Mrs Clinton's running mate, raising the possibility of a first female president and first black vice-president in one fell swoop in 2008. Mr Obama is disproving the adage that Washington...

The current issue of Time magazine has a dubious article on "Learning While Black." The teaser reads: "You've heard of racial profiling on the roads and in the skies. But are minority kids also being unfairly singled out for discipline in schools?" The article is not completely one-sided, but the unmistakable gist of it is that the answer to the question posed is, "Probably so." But neither the anecdotal evidence nor the statistics cited are at all persuasive. The story begins and ends with the story of a student for whom we are supposed to feel some sympathy, but...

Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, by Bruce Bartlett (Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pp., $26.95) Two years ago, on his Daily Kos website, Markos Moulitsas asked: “Is it any wonder the GOP is the party of racists?” While Moulitsas conceded that “not every Republican is a racist,” he maintained that “the opposite—every racist is a Republican—is just about right.” Such sentiments typify a common view that racism is the soul of the Republican Party, and that black Republicans are traitors to their race, or at least peculiar. Bruce Bartlett sets the record straight in Wrong on Race: The Democratic...