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July 9, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
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Black Profs Want Pay for ‘Invisible Work’
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the latest episode of Radio Renaissance.
Or, if you prefer, Renaissance Radio.
It works either way.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, which you can visit at amren.com.
And once again, Paul Kersey, who has been my usual co-host, is not with me today.
He is otherwise engaged.
We expect him back sometime soon, but these things are uncertain in these unsettled times.
As usual, it has been a very busy week, a very interesting week for those of us who pay attention to race-related matters, not only in the United States, but around the world.
One of the stories that I would like to start with would, I think, be put into the category, got his comeuppance.
We don't get too many of those stories, but occasionally we do, and in fact we have two of them this time.
Now, as far as the first comeuppance story is concerned, you would think that after all we've told about how viciously white supremacist, racist, prejudiced, and exploitative the United States is, there would be plenty of racism to go around.
As a matter of fact, though, racism is in such short supply The supply of racism, so far, does not meet the demand for racism, that racism has to be invented and manufactured.
And it takes the form of hate crime hoaxes.
People who wish they were racism.
People who are dying to blame something about themselves, or the world, or the country, on racism, but they just can't find it, so they gin some up.
And the latest case is that of Jonathan Lopez, a Hispanic.
He ran unsuccessfully for a primary, in the primary, for a seat on the Umatilla County Commission.
That was done in last May.
And Umatilla County is in, after he failed, he came in fourth in the primary, didn't do very well.
He reportedly got a letter in the mail.
And he posted a picture of the letter, which contained allegedly racist, misogynistic, and homophobic slurs.
Now, I've not seen the letter, so I can't quote from it literally, except for the fact that it allegedly said that Mexicans were not welcome here.
Well, he produced this letter.
He took pictures of it, put them up on Facebook, and there was an investigation.
Hermiston, That is the main city in Umatilla County, the police chief, Jason Edmiston.
He is now quoted as saying, from the outset, this incident has been thoroughly investigated.
And after having thoroughly investigated, he has reached conclusion.
Our investigation has shown that Mr. Lopez wrote the letter himself and made false statements to the police and on social media.
Well, and Police Chief Ed Miston has forwarded the false statements to the Umatilla County District Attorney's Office for review for initiating a false police report.
This is a Class A misdemeanor in Oregon, and I hope they throw the book at him.
Interestingly enough, now that he has been found out, Mr. Lopez says, oh, I didn't mean to deceive anyone.
I guess he successfully deceived himself, however.
Furthermore, the police chief of Hermiston, Mr. Edmiston has subsequently learned that Lopez, Mr. Lopez, despite the statement on his candidate's biography when he was running for the County Commission, despite the claim that he had served in the U.S.
Coast Guard, there was no evidence that he did so.
This appears to have been a false claim.
And if it is a false claim, it is a violation of the Stolen Valor Act of 2013.
He has been unable to provide authorities with any proof of the service that he claimed to have made.
So, Mr. Lopez appears to be in a bit of trouble, and he appears to be a bit of a specialist in falsehoods.
But there is one falsehood, well, I'm sorry, one claim he's been making that apparently is not false.
Everyone agrees that he is on Hermiston's Hispanic Advisory Committee.
So that's the one authentic thing we can say about him, in addition to the fact that he failed to win in the Democratic primary.
So, yes, he appears to be getting his comeuppance, and as I say, I hope that the punitive procedures go through as they should, and that he has a chance to reflect at some length, in some solitude, on the error of his ways.
Now, the other subject of comeuppance, the one who got her comeuppance, is a lady by the name of Clara Janover.
Judging from her photograph, she's clearly an Asian of some kind.
Well, she graduated in May from Harvard with a degree in government and psychology.
But she became known to the world at large after posting a short video clip in which she attacked anyone who had, quote, the nerve, the sheer entitled caucasity to say all lives matter.
Did you realize that it is an act of caucasity to say all lives matter?
She went on to say, I must stab you.
I'ma stab you, and while you're struggling and bleeding out, I'ma show you my paper cut and say, my cut matters too.
In other words, white people who say all lives matter are comparing a paper cut to a fatal stab wound delivered by Clara Janover herself, which would cause you to bleed out.
Well, she removed this original video, now claims that she was making what she calls an analogous joke.
I guess Harvard is full of analogous jokes.
I'd never heard of one before, but apparently they have them there, and that's what she said it was.
Well, now she has revealed the sad news that she has lost her job.
And in a more recent video she says, standing up for Black Lives Matter put me in a place online to be seen by millions of people.
This is a new video that came out just last Wednesday, a week ago, and it was a very teary-eyed, teary-eyed, full of lamentations video.
And she goes on to say, the job that I'd worked really hard to get and meant a lot to me has called me and fired me.
According to her LinkedIn account, she was to be a government and public business services analysis at Deloitte, a UK-based accounting firm.
She's very, very disappointed to have had her offer withdrawn.
And she complains that she's been axed, quote, even though they, that is to say Deloitte, claim to stand against systemic bias, racism, and unequal treatment.
Oh my gosh.
Here she was defending Black Lives Matter and saying that if you said all lives matter, you deserve to be stabbed to death.
This is defending Trump supporters took my job away from me.
to stand against systemic bias, racism, and unequal treatment is being hypocritical by not offering her,
a Hispanic female, a job. And then she concludes with a rather interesting observation, seems to
me, she says, Trump supporters took my job away from me.
Trump supporters. Because she says they were the ones who ganged up on her and made her comments
known to the world.
She says, now my future is entirely compromised because Trump supporters have decided to come for my life.
Oh, the poor darling.
Well, as I so often say about these social justice warriors, they can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.
And I must say, I am quietly pleased that the fact that she wants to kill people who say white lives matter out of sheer caucasity, the fact that she wants to see them bleed to death and laugh at them, well, that was just an analogous joke.
So she deserves that job after all.
Now here's another story.
I'm not quite sure that it comes under the heading of God is comeuppance, but it has to do with Frederick Douglass.
In Rochester, New York, there was a statue.
It was actually just a bust, but a very handsome looking bust of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
And it was taken on Sunday from off its pedestal in Maplewood Park in Rochester, and it was pitched about 50 feet away just by the Genesee River.
There's a gorge there, and apparently it was not pitched all the way into the river, but there it was.
Now, as we all know, statues depicting Confederate leaders have been toppled and vandalized, but the destruction of a statue honoring a famous black abolitionist This has set off a very loud round of public mourning and lamentation.
You can see Robert E. Lee, Jeff Stewart and Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.
You can see them pull down and land on their noses.
But Frederick Douglass, boy oh boy, that is a very bad thing.
Now, I do wonder what the motivation was, who it was who took down the statue, and what he was thinking.
And I've seen photographs of this statue, and Frederick Douglass, in the case of this bronze, he looks really a little bit like Santa Claus in a tuxedo, with a nice beard.
And so it may be that someone was confused as to who it was.
However, if they catch the guy, be he black or be he white, I'm sure that he will be prosecuted.
Well, especially if he's white.
But why are the people who put on Confederate statues not prosecuted?
This is one of those great mysteries of the ages.
Now, you are probably aware, if you've been reading the news, that there has been an increase in, well, ghetto shootings.
Gun violence in the case of New York City.
Gun violence exploded after the NYPD disbanded an anti-crime unit of plain-clothed cops.
This took place on June 15th.
And oddly enough, Immediately after the disbandment of this unit, which was criticized for being, in effect, effective.
It was criticized for having gotten weapons out of the hands of people most likely to use them, but the people most likely to use them were our African American fellow citizens, and they were accused of racial profiling.
Well, In the two weeks after this unit was disbanded in June 15th, there's been a 205% rise in shootings.
105% rise in shootings.
That was from 38 shootings to 116 just in that two week period.
Now, a shooting is an incident in which a weapon is discharged and a bullet strikes someone.
You can shoot into the river or into the air or into the ground so long as it doesn't hurt or hit anybody.
It's not a shooting.
It's, uh, I guess that's just an overexcited form of fireworks.
Now, gunshot injuries themselves went from 47 during that period in 2019 to 157, which is a 334% increase.
to 157, which is a 334% increase.
And with a total of 205 shootings during the entire month, that's entire month of June,
it made the bloodiest June in 24 years.
You have to go all the way back to 1996.
And in 1996, the month of June, the NYPD counted 236 shootings.
So, we're getting there.
the NYPD counted 236 shootings. So we're getting there 205 rather than 236. Now
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, this is a lady police commissioner, she was
absolutely adamant that scrapping this plainclothes unit, which is a group of
600 officers, she said that had nothing to do with the rise.
She's quite sure that that's the case.
She said the group was a relic of the stop-and-frisk era and I suppose I'm putting words in her mouth.
I suppose she considered an embodiment of systemic racism and had to go.
So what is the NYPD blaming for this sudden increase in shootings and killings and woundings?
She herself said it's bail reform.
It's COVID.
It's emptying out prison.
And she's probably partially right.
The fact with bail reform means that ever since January 1st, you cannot charge cash bail for minor crimes.
And so, if somebody is impecunious and otherwise would have been unable to post bail and would be locked up pending trial, no, no.
These people are out.
They can get right back on the street because they've gotten rid of bail.
So, they can go right back to stealing cars, or in some cases holding up banks, doing the things that they know best.
So, it's emptying out the prisons, that was part of the problem too.
With COVID, they didn't want the poor darlings to be in prison, giving each other COVID-19, and so they let a lot of them out.
Now police officials, the New York Police Department Chief Terrence Monaghan said this week, all this means is with bail reform, emboldened criminals feel that the cops can't do anything anymore and no one likes the police, that they can get away with things and that it's safe to carry a gun out on the street.
Well yes, if that plainclothes unit whose job was to keep them from carrying illegal guns has been disbanded, Yes, indeed.
They might feel safe carrying a gun.
Some police unions, of course, say that officers just aren't doing their jobs because they might be charged with a crime.
They're afraid that doing their job will get them charged with a crime.
Now, I have no idea why police officers would think that.
Well, moving on.
Now, that's New York City for you.
Moving on.
In Chicago, last week, Uh, at last count, uh, last weekend, I beg your pardon, 89 people were shot in the city and 17 were killed.
89 people shot.
In Father's Day weekend, 104 were shot.
So, as opposed to 89, that's more people got shot, but only 15, as opposed to 17, died.
So there was a lot more shooting, or considerably more shooting, but bad aim, or perhaps the people who might have died were saved by first-world medical efforts of the kind that whisked them to the hospital, and they probably had vicious, white supremacist, systemic racist hospital people White supremacist doctors working on them and save their lives.
Well, furthermore in Chicago, just since June 20th, nine children under the age of 18 have been shot.
I don't know how many were killed, but that was as of July 7th.
So, since June to July 7th, nine children under the age of 18 have been shot.
Now, the days have gone a little bit more, so maybe that tally is higher than it was.
But that seems quite a lot to me, nine children under the age of 18.
Moving on to Philadelphia.
As of June 11th, The city has seen 178 homicides this year, and that is a 25% increase compared to the same period of last year.
And as of June 7th, 712 people have been victims of gun violence.
In other words, 178 had died, but 712 were victims.
of gun violence. In other words, 178 died, but 712 were victims. That means the difference were hit by a bullet and
were saved by First World white supremacist medicine.
So this figure of people who are gun violence, that is 30% above the 2019 figure.
And so Philadelphia too is on its way to having a bumper crop of shootings and homicides.
Moving on to Washington DC.
So far this year, there have been 77 homicides.
And there have been, I know I beg your pardon, there have been 93 so far this year.
And that means that compared to the same point in 2019, we have 93, that's up 21%.
There had been 77 the year before, 93, that's up 21%.
And the total number of homicides in the district in 2019, that's last year, was already a 10-year high.
So it looks as though we're going to set a new record.
July, so far, has been a particularly violent month, including a triple homicide in southeast Washington and the murder of 11-year-old Davon McLean.
He was killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout after he had attended a peace cookout on the 4th of July.
This really is a very sad thing.
You often get these gatherings of blacks who have gotten together.
Someone will harangue them about how they must stop shooting each other.
And then, sure enough, a gun goes off all by itself, or maybe three or four guns go off all by themselves, and somebody stops a bullet.
Well, this was a peace cookout.
And after the peace cookout, poor 11-year-old Davon McLean was dead.
Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington D.C.
has submitted a letter on Tuesday to the D.C.
City Council expressing her worries about the D.C.
City Council's threat to cut the Metropolitan Police Department budget.
Muriel Bowser seems to understand that having a few police officers around is a good thing and this proposed cut of tens of millions of dollars Might just result in a higher homicide rate.
So, Muriel Bowser, she is one of our African-American fellow citizens, but she doesn't appear to be buying into this idea that police are the problem.
Maybe police under certain circumstances are the solution.
So, moving on to Atlanta.
In Atlanta, 31 people were shot over the weekend.
Five fatally.
Now, over the same week in 2019, just one year ago, Instead of 31 shootings, there were seven.
That's an increase of 342%.
So, Atlanta, too, is seeing this rise.
The rise seems to be pretty much universal in big cities with large African-American populations.
The AP wrote a story about this rise in crime, and it said, and I quote, the spike defies easy explanation, experts say.
Well, I think we know some of the reasons contributing to it.
And the New York Times has the answer.
In one of its articles about rising crime, it quoted Thomas Abt.
That's spelled A-B-T.
Thomas Abt.
He's a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, and he's the author of a national homicide study.
He says this.
People who have lost trust in the police are more prone to settle scores on their own.
The lack of trust, the lack of confidence in police, and the lack of willingness to use police I think is going to have a broader effect, Mr. Abt said.
Well, does that ring true to you?
Do you think these people who, uh, you step on my toe, on my shoe, and I will shoot you?
Or you steal my dope and I'll shoot you?
Or you put your lay hands on my girlfriend and I'll shoot you?
Do you think the only reason they're whipping out that gun and blazing away is because they're afraid that if they call the police that something unpleasant might happen because they've lost faith in the police?
This guy's supposed to be an expert.
And he's telling us that the problem is that they have lost faith in the police.
And that's why they take matters into their own hands and they whip out those illegal nine millimeters and go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
That's expertise for you these days.
Well, I'd like to talk about what I call the university follies.
Madness is sweeping American campuses.
And Princeton is just the latest.
On July 4th, Independence Day, a group of Princeton faculty, mostly black professors, No, they're not shy.
They really lay it on the line.
Now, I'm sure, as you can imagine, just as I can, that Princeton is riddled with anti-black racism.
It's awash with it.
It's entrenched.
Uh, maybe hard to pick out individually.
It's probably invisible and probably implicit and probably unconscious, but it is awash with anti-black racism.
They believe the Princeton community needs to be educated about the legacy of slavery and white supremacy and those legacies Unfortunately, are working their baleful influence even to this day.
One of the demands includes addressing Princeton's history with slavery and that is to be part of freshman orientation.
Every freshman coming in gets to be told how bad Princeton was and just how wicked it was to have anything whatsoever to do with slavery.
Now, and this is my favorite, one of the demands is that faculty of color be rewarded for invisible work.
Invisible work.
Now, tell me, what do you think invisible work is?
Well, reading between the lines and well, through the lines, invisible work means just being there and being non-white and shedding the light of melanin over the melanin-deprived colleagues.
That's the invisible work.
Invisible work just means being there and countering racism by your mere presence.
So, they want to get paid for invisible work in terms of summer salaries, and they also want course relief.
They want their course load to be lightened because of this vital invisible work they do simply because of their race and skin color.
And this is their conclusion.
What we offer here are principled steps which, if implemented with care, And in consultation with all affected parties could immediately and powerfully move the dial forward toward justice for this campus and given Princeton's influence for the world.
They're going to change the world through their invisible work.
Well, there you go.
And moving on to University of Chicago, more part of the university follies.
Stephen Douglas was a U.S.
Senator from Illinois.
He's probably best known for his debates with Abraham Lincoln, the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the 1858 race for Senate, which Stephen Douglas won, by the way.
Well, he helped found the University of Chicago.
And at once upon a time, up until just a few days ago, there was a bronze plaque with an image of him as well as a stone from the original building which has now been demolished.
Now, why has this happened?
Why is Stephen Douglas in the doghouse?
Well, University President Robert J. Zimmer wrote in an email message to all students that Douglas does not deserve to be honored on our campus.
Makes no difference if he was a great Illinois statesman, senator, and helped found the university.
He says that because he had something to do with slavery, he was just not the man he should have been when it came to race, These items, the stone which has been chiseled out of the wall, which was built into the wall, you see the stone from the original building which had been taken down because he helped found the University of Chicago, that's been chiseled out of the wall and the plaque has been removed and now they are part of the University's library in the Special Collections.
Well, you know what that means, Special Collections.
Those are rare books which must not be touched more than once a decade and you wear white gloves when you look at them.
Well, maybe it's not as bad as that.
The point is special collections are off-limits, so they are essentially out of sight.
Not to be seen by anyone.
Now, Stephen Douglas has a grave site in Chicago as well.
It's quite an attractive park with a beautiful memorial.
It's a long pillar with a statue of Stephen Douglas at the top.
I wonder if they'll go for that too.
You never know.
Well, continuing with the university follies.
We'll move on to Washington Lee University.
It's been known as Washington Lee for 150 years.
It started off as Washington University, and then after the war, Robert E. Lee was made the president, and he contributed greatly to its flourishing.
He really gave it an enormous amount of prestige, attracted funding, and high-quality professors and students.
Well, Washington Lee University faculty has passed a motion to remove Robert E. Lee's name from the Liberal Arts College in Lexington.
Now, this is the first time the faculty has made such a recommendation.
It will be sent to the Board of Trustees for a final decision, because the faculty itself does not have the power to change the name.
More than 260 faculty members voted in this, and 79% of them voted for the motion to get rid of General Lee.
I wonder who that 20%, that 20% were, who dared say, no, no, no, we need to keep the General.
Well, as those of you who have visited the campus, which is in the lovely little town of Lexington, Virginia, generally is buried in the chapel.
It's a very, very pretty little memorial to him.
He is shown lying down in repose, a marble statue, and the room, this crypt, as you might call it, used to be draped with Confederate flags, but they took them down some years ago.
They did not remove the statue, or they didn't knock his nose off, the way people did in ancient Egypt when the dynasties changed.
So, the general is still there in repose, but they plan to remove his name.
Or at least they're proposing to remove his name.
Now, there were three permanent black faculty members of the Washington Lee Law School.
They said, we mustn't stop with Robert E. Lee.
We need to get rid of Washington's name too.
And of course, their logic is impeccable.
If Lee was a white supremacist traitor to the union, George Washington was a white supremacist traitor to the crown.
Now, I am gratified to see that there is an alumni group called Generals Redoubt that opposes the name change.
The Richmond Times Dispatch who discussed this did not say how many people are involved and how big a stink they're making, but they're opposed to a group of 2,000 alumni who have joined in the call to get rid of Robert E. Lee.
So we have two battling alumni groups.
So what's going to happen?
As I say, it's going to be up to the trustees.
Well, sure enough, Washington Lee University's Board of Trustees have formed a committee.
It promises to review the school's name.
Seems to me, once you promise, you are probably going to do something.
They did not outright say, nope, nope, nope, we're keeping it as it is.
Once you start studying these things, chances are you're on the slippery slope and someone will talk you into getting rid of Washington and Lee.
So maybe they'll call it Laurel and Hardy University.
Who knows?
Maybe Ying Yang University.
We'll see.
But my suspicion is that certainly Lee is out to lunch and Washington may follow him soon.
Now this is not on the score of university filings.
This is high school filings.
Some of you may be aware of a network of public charter schools called KIPP Academy.
It's the largest network of public charter schools in the country.
There are 242 of them.
They were started about 25 years ago, I believe, and they really work hard.
They have been moderately successful in taking Ghetto children, mostly Hispanic and Black, and actually getting a fair amount of work out of them.
More than 95% of their students are African American or Latino Hispanic, and more than 88% are eligible for federally subsidized meals.
So that means they are not top flight Andover types.
And they are accepted regardless of prior academic record.
Behavioral problems or socioeconomic status but they are admitted through a lottery system and then there is a home visit that's set up with a teacher or the principal of the school.
He goes to the family and talks to the students and discusses all of the expectations of the teachers and the parents and the students themselves and they are all required to sign a KIPP Commitment of excellence.
Agreeing to fulfill specific responsibilities.
Promising they will do everything in their power to help the students succeed and go on to college.
And these are unlike your normal public school.
The students wear uniforms every day.
And KIPP also has extended school days, and they require attendance every other Saturday.
They have extracurricular activities, and in effect, they spend up to 50% more time in class than traditional public schools.
So now, as I say, they've done pretty well, and as of 2017-2018 school year, KIPP's national college completion rate for its alumni is 35 percent.
Not all of them get through college, but that is about three times the national average for students from low-income families.
Mostly if you're, excuse me, from low-income family, Only about 11% make it through college.
If you're a KIPP alumnus, then 35%.
So they're doing pretty well.
Well, ever since their founding, their slogan has been, work hard, be nice.
Well, they're retiring the slogan.
Why, you ask?
Well, in a press release, they said that they decided to get rid of that slogan because it, quote, diminishes the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism.
Now, maybe it does, but still, what's wrong with the slogan?
I'll read that again.
It diminishes the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism.
The press release wanted to say, the slogan places value on being compliant.
Good grief.
What's going on here?
work hard and supports the illusion of meritocracy and does not align with our vision of students
being free to create the future they want.
Good grief, what's going on here?
Dave Levin is one of the co-founders of KIPP and he sent a letter to all the alumni
in which he went on to explain, as a white man, I did not do enough as we built KIPP
to fully understand how systemic and interpersonal racism, and specifically anti-blackness,
impacts you and your families.
Gosh he's been doing this for 25 years and it's finally dawned on him after a quarter of a century that he did not do enough to fight systemic racism.
Now he goes on to explain, the most common example of this is discipline practices that center on compliance and control, and have not consistently and constructively affirmed, uplifted, and celebrated your identities.
Yes, they do have discipline.
They wear uniforms.
They stay in class.
They behave.
They do what they're told.
They do their homework.
And in order to get this done, there have to be discipline practices.
But apparently, all low these 25 years, they have not been Doing discipline in a way that affirmed and uplifted the identities of blacks and Hispanics.
This is astonishing to me, but there you go.
I'm sure that having abandoned their work hard, be nice slogan, that they're going to just do so much better than they ever did before.
Now, KIPP, that's the name of the school, the name of the network, that stands for knowledge is power program.
Kind of an unusual name, but it seems to me they're gonna have to abolish that name.
They have to change that because knowledge is power.
Well, not in an inveterately white supremacist society.
Black people, people of color, can have all the knowledge they need.
They still won't have power, right?
So we better change that name.
Change it in a hurry.
Now moving on to Britain.
You will be dismayed to learn that a new form of slavery has been discovered.
It's been announced by the BBC.
As it turns out, there is a species of monkey known as the pig-tailed macaque, which in Thailand has been trained to pick coconuts.
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, These pigtailed macaques have been trained to pick up to 1,000 coconuts a day.
That seems like an awful lot of coconut picking for a monkey.
But apparently PETA knows that the pigtailed macaques are miserable, that this is a horrible thing to do to them, that this is really a form of slavery, and so British companies that have been involved in purveying coconut products And they have names such as Waitrose, Ocado, Co-op, and Boots.
Not household names in the United States, but well known in Britain.
They have vowed to stop selling these goods made by the labor of exploited monkeys.
In a statement, Waitrose says, as part of our animal welfare policy, we have committed to never knowingly sell any products sourced from monkey labor.
Co-op went on to say, as an ethical retailer, we do not permit the use of monkey labor to source ingredients for our products.
Well, that's rather high and mighty of them.
I wonder if they're aware of the fact that Amish and Mennonite farmers still use animal power to grow some of their crops.
They plow the field of horses, for example.
Would they stick their noses in the air and say, no, we are certainly not going to sell a cucumber that benefited from animal power.
Well, these days, of course, everyone is very concerned about slavery of any kind, historical, present, and this new form of animal slavery is one that makes those products absolutely unacceptable for the British public.
Now, moving back to the United States, the New York Times has a long article on a new acronym That is used to describe people who are not white.
It's BIPOC.
B-I-P-O-C.
That stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
I thought that's a little bit redundant to me if a person of color that would include black and if you're indigenous to North America you're certainly not a European we're not talking about indigenous Europeans here so black indigenous and people of color sounds like just people of color to me but that's just not good enough for the people of color and now they're going to be black indigenous and people of color or at least some of them do as we'll see The New York Times found the first reference to BIPOC in 2013, but the phrase people of color, that has a much longer and distinguished history that goes back centuries.
It was first cited in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1796.
And of course, it's often abbreviated as POC.
That is the one that I'm familiar with.
Well, Cynthia Frisby, a professor of strategic communication at the Missouri School of Journalism, explains the reason why we need a new term.
She says, the black and indigenous was added to kind of make sure that it was inclusive.
I think the major purpose of that was for including voices that hadn't originally been heard, that they wanted to include in their narrative.
Darker skin, blacks and indigenous groups, so that they could make sure that all the skin shades are being represented.
Well, it seems to me that once you say person of color, you have included all possible skin shades.
But that wasn't enough.
Now, also you have to be very careful because on social media a lot of people assumed that BIPOC meant something that it does not mean.
After all, bi is often an abbreviation for bisexual.
And so people thought BIPOC meant bisexual people of color.
But no, no, no.
Do not make that terrible mistake.
That would be considered not just a microaggression but probably a macroaggression.
Now, Black people aren't necessarily pleased with this new BIPOC term.
They are reportedly open to giving space to the plight of Native Americans.
In other words, they are allowed to have their share of the victimization's sweepstakes, but they're a little frustrated with this BIPOC business.
Sylvia O'Bell, who hosts a Netflix podcast called OK, Now Listen, sounds a little aggressive to me, She says, it's lazy to lump us all together as if we all face the same problems.
She says, when you blend us all together like this, it's erasure.
It allows people to get away with not knowing people of color and our separate set of issues that we all face.
It allows people to play it safe and not leave anyone out.
And it also allows you not to have to do the work.
Well, Sylvia O'Bell is a black BIPOC, or I guess, well, maybe that is redundant.
In any case, she is a person of color who happens to be black.
And she says, this lets you get, if you just say BIPOC and just lump them all together, you get away with not knowing the people of color on our separate issues.
So, what you're saying, hey, you white people out there, you need to bone up.
Bone up on black people.
Bone up on Asians.
Bone up on Eskimos.
Bone up on Indians.
Bone up on all of us.
Now, do they have to bone up on us, on white people?
No!
They know all there is to know about us, namely that we are all hopelessly racist.
They don't have to do any boning up.
But then also, let's go on to what she says about it allows, this term allows people to play it safe and not leave anybody out.
Boy, wouldn't want to be left out.
Ooh, that would be bad.
And it also allows you not to have to do the work.
Do the work.
That's what's meant by insisting that white people go out of the way to bend themselves into pretzels to make sure that they do the right thing and think the right thing and say the right thing when they're around BIPOCs, people of color.
Do the work.
Remember the invisible work that the professors at Princeton were talking about?
They do invisible work just by being alive and breathing the air and spreading the loveliness of melanin wherever they go.
We have to do the work of learning how to accept the loveliness of melanin.
Now here is another comment by Chelsea Lugar.
She is with something called the Native Wellness Institute, and she's an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a tribal nation in North Dakota.
She says that the attempt to represent so many different identities in a single term, BIPOC, is a product of colonialism.
Well, gosh, I thought it was just a way to sort of distinguish one group of people from another, but no, it's colonialism.
Then she goes on to say that the indigenous community, at least in Canada, critiques the designations of Native American and First Nations as Canada because their diversity is not recognized in those terms.
In other words, no, you just can't call us indigenous.
You have to know about the Chippewa.
You have to know about the Algonquin.
You have to know about the Iroquois.
Boy, oh boy, you have to know about the Hunk Papa.
You have to know about the Lakota Sioux.
You have to know about everybody.
You can't just call them Indians again.
No, in other words, you know, you can't call black people Negroes the way you used to.
Can't call them colored people.
Oh, no, no, that'd be bad.
Can't call them Afro-American.
These days, you probably can't even call them black.
Gotta call them African-American, although that's a real jaw-breaking and a mouthful.
Why he just can't get it right, can he?
He just can't get it right.
And when POC is not good enough, BIPOC isn't good enough.
You can't make them all happy.
So we might as well just shut up and not talk about them at all, wouldn't you say?
But moving on to the latest research on COVID.
As you know, there have been substantial differences in the rates at which different groups contract the disease and go to the hospital.
The latest info is that American Indians and Alaska Natives, they get hospitalized at approximately five times the rate of white people.
Black people also about five times the rate of white people.
And Hispanics at maybe four times the rate of white people.
So, they're hospitalized, get the disease bad enough to get hospitalized at a considerably higher rate than white people.
Asians are hospitalized at almost exactly the same rate as whites.
Now, what happens once they are hospitalized?
Interestingly enough, once they're hospitalized, they seem to come through.
They survive better than whites.
So, despite being hospitalized at five times the white rates, blacks are dying at 3.8 times the white rate.
In other words, they are hospitalized at a higher rate, but they're dying at a lower rate.
Indigenous people at only three times the white rate, despite being hospitalized at five times rate.
And now Asians, interestingly enough, they are hospitalized at almost exactly the same rate as whites, but they are dying at one and a half times the rate.
So, interestingly enough, they are getting the disease badly enough to be hospitalized, the same rate as whites, but once they're hospitalized, they're 50% more likely to die.
Hispanics, on the other hand, although they are four times as likely to be hospitalized, They survive once they're in the hospital, so that they are only two and a half times as likely to die.
It's interesting.
They're more likely to get the disease, but then once they've got the disease, more likely to survive.
So, which is better?
Which is worse?
Don't know.
But these are some of the intriguing aspects of this novel coronavirus.
The people who are wringing their hands about this, of course, their first argument is that all of these higher rates of hospitalization and death are due to the wickedness of whites, past, present, and future, ad infinitum, into eternity.
But they also do point out that these people of color, or perhaps should we call them BIPOCs, they tend to live in more crowded housing, they are less able to practice social distancing, and often they work in service jobs, You can't stay at home and do your mergers and acquisitions over the telephone.
I mean, you can do that, but you can't sell groceries and drive a truck over the telephone, so they're more likely to be out and about getting the parts.
But don't forget, the main thing is the viciousness of whites.
Let's see, moving right along.
We had a section on comeuppance.
I think we need a new section now.
We could call it treason or traitorous behavior.
And let us begin with Stonewall Jackson.
As the Stonewall Jackson came down in Richmond from Monument Avenue, his great, great grandson, William Jackson Christian, who is a lecturer in the English department at the University of North Texas, said, I'm very much cheering from afar.
I think removing racist imagery and symbols, whether it's statues or a confederate flag or school names, is a first step towards addressing a racist past and hopefully enacting a more just future.
He and his brother, at the time of the Unite the Right rally in 2017, wrote to the mayor of Richmond, LeVar Stoney, asking at that time that the monument be taken down, but his wish was not granted.
Now, William Jackson Christian does concede that Stonewall Jackson was not all evil.
And guess what he produces as an example of a relatively good thing that Stonewall Jackson did?
He educated enslaved people, says he.
That's the one thing you could think of as to why somebody might admire Stonewall Jackson, believe it or not.
Well, yes, Stonewall Jackson, of course, was also a deep and believing Christian.
He thought that blacks had immortal souls that deserved salvation just as much as whites.
And in his will, he set aside money to educate slaves in Christianity.
But as for the statute, William Jackson Christian, great-great-grandson, he says, I'd be happy with the statue being locked away and not displayed anywhere.
None of this stuff about putting it in a museum so people can look at it and learn about how racist it all was.
No, he doesn't want it anywhere.
I don't know.
It seems to me you could use the medal for something.
Maybe melt it down and cast the medal into medallions commemorating George Floyd.
No, he wants it gone and forgotten.
Now the other in the treason department is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
That would be Lucian K. Truscott IV.
He is the sixth generation great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, and he proposes a change to the memorial that was erected in Washington on the Mall to his illustrious ancestor.
He says, we can leave the building.
And I've always liked the building very much.
It's this white marble building with a lovely dome and columns.
He says he can leave the building alone.
But instead of a 19-foot tall statue of Thomas Jefferson, he proposes someone else.
He suggests that a founding mother be put in the place of Thomas Jefferson.
And not just any old founding mother.
He thinks Harriet Tubman should be in the Jefferson Memorial because, as he put it, she was a slave and also a patriot.
And in place of a white man who enslaved hundreds of men and women, this isn't erasing history.
Putting up Harriet Tubman is telling the real history of America.
Thomas Jefferson, that's not the real history.
We want the real history.
Harriet Tubman.
Well, perhaps his wish will be granted someday in this period of insanity that's sweeping the country.
From Washington, let us move to San Jose, California, where we find that Cisco Systems Incorporated is being sued for discrimination.
Cisco Systems is one of those suppliers of computer networking equipment that makes the internet work.
And it's very important, large, fancy company.
Well, the regulators in California have discovered that an engineer faced discrimination in its Silicon Valley headquarters in San Jose.
The victim of this discrimination is a Dalit.
A Dalit, that is a member of the lowest caste in India.
The people that we used to call the Untouchables.
Well, who is persecuting this Untouchable?
Not white people.
No.
Instead, this Dalit engineer worked on a team with other Indians.
Indians from India.
All of them immigrated to the United States as adults, but these other Indians were higher class.
They were fancy Indians.
And apparently these higher class Indians by the name of Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompela are named for harassing and discriminating against the Dalit.
The lawsuit also says that Cisco investigated, and Cisco did not substantiate any caste-based or related discrimination or retaliation against employees.
This was too subtle a form of discrimination, I suppose, for Cisco itself to find out.
They couldn't sniff it out and get to the bottom of it, so they are guilty too.
So these are yet more of the joys of diversity that we have brought to the United States.
So not only do we have racial discrimination, we have caste discrimination.
Now, you know, the caste system was one of the most successful and elaborate forms of Jim Crowism or segregation or apartheid that has ever existed in the history of the world.
It lasted for well over a thousand years, more like two thousand years, no longer than that.
And the word for caste in Sanskrit, varna, literally means color.
And the idea was to separate people by color, and there certainly was not to be intermarriage across color lines.
The professions were segregated by caste.
It was an extremely elaborate system, but you don't hear people criticizing Indians about that because, after all, most Indians are not considered white, so their practices were not nearly ever as bad as anything that white people ever did.
Now, I believe this will be our final item for this podcast.
It is from Mother Jones, and the Mother Jones headline of an article that I wish to call to your attention is called, White People Own 98% of Rural Land.
Young Black Farmers Want to Reclaim Their Share.
Well, I wonder what their share is.
I guess it's more than whatever they've got.
The other sub-headline is, Innovations by Black Farmers Remain at the Core of Sustainable Agriculture Today.
I bet you didn't know that.
Well, you probably didn't know that because it's probably not true.
Now, this article is all based on an interview with someone by the name of Leah Penniman.
She is the co-director of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York.
She's also the author of Farming While Black.
I feel as though I don't even have to read that book to get some sort of pretty clear inkling as to what she's on about.
But in any case, she says this.
Black people have largely been expelled from the U.S.
agricultural landscape.
In 1920, there were nearly a million black farmers and they worked 41.4 million acres of land.
They were one-seventh of farmers.
But today, instead of a million black farmers, there are only 49,000.
And they make up only 1.4% of the nation's farm owners, and they are tending only 4.7 million acres, a nearly 90% loss.
Now, according to Leah Penwin, this didn't happen by accident.
They were doing fine up until 1920.
From emancipation, 1865 up to 1920, they were just farming like crazy, but Lo and behold, what happened in the 1920s?
The Ku Klux Klan came around.
The Ku Klux Klan?
They were a swift and severe backlash and they drove black farmers off the land.
Hadn't heard about that, had you?
Well, I hadn't heard about that either.
In any case, they pushed the Klan, pushed the blacks off the land and offered it to grateful white people.
Now, Soul Fire Farm is also one of the leading participants in something called the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, which calls on good-hearted, good-minded people to donate land, which will then be farmed by people of color.
I wonder if it'll be farmed by BIPOCs, or just people of color, or maybe BIS, or maybe just POCs, or maybe just black people.
I'm not sure.
She said the trust has several hundred acres in the New York and New England area, all queued up for transfer over the next decade, and my suspicion is that the good-hearted and good-minded people who donated the land are very badly melanin-deprived.
In any case, one of the points that she likes to make is that black farmers' innovative methods that remain at the core of today's sustainable agriculture.
She calls attention in particular to George Washington Carver, who was a professor at Tuskegee University in Alabama and whom she calls a towering figure who should be known for much more than his mastery of the peanut.
She says that he developed a system for disseminating his university's research in such a way that was so efficient that it would later take form nationwide as the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Extension Program.
He hadn't heard that.
He hadn't heard it because it's not true.
There is a very interesting article about George Washington Carver at the American Renaissance website.
It's called, I believe it's called, The Artificial Glory of George Washington Carver or The Manufactured Fame of George Washington Carver.
Something along those lines.
I should have got that straight before I started this podcast.
It goes on to point out that George Washington Carver is credited with a huge number of inventions based on the peanut, and the total is close to around 300.
There were 300 different products that George Austin Carver claimed to have made by using the lowly peanut.
But he turned his genius to other things as well.
He is said to have found over 150 uses for the sweet potato.
How many of those uses are still in use?
I don't know.
He reportedly made synthetic marble from wood shavings and paint from cow dung.
The Carver Museum at the Tuskegee Institute lists no fewer than 287 peanut products, but there's a certain amount of duplication.
Included in those 287 are bar candy, chocolate-coated peanuts, peanut chocolate fudge, and those are separate items, as are face cream, face lotion, and all-purpose cream.
No fewer than 66 of the 287 separate items are dyes, 30 for dyeing cloth and 19 for leather and 17 for wood.
Now, George Washington Carver in 1923 announced that he discovered peanut nitroglycerin.
The peculiar thing about all of these products that were invented or discovered by George Washington Carver is he never saved any formulas for any of them.
He never told anybody else how to make them.
He just claimed that he made them and he didn't write any of this stuff down.
One of his products known as a face bleach or tan remover.
You know, when I've been out in the sun, I wish I had a tan remover I could use.
You can't, you can't test it.
You can't evaluate it because he didn't tell you how to make it.
He just claimed he made it.
He did get one patent.
He did get a patent for a cosmetic containing peanut oil, but none of his other miraculous discoveries and inventions were ever patented.
So how did he get this remarkable reputation?
As it turns out, he was a black man in the age of segregation that white people could love.
He was unmarried, he was celibate, he was utterly apolitical, and always deferential.
After he became famous, George Washington Carver never tried to cross the color bar, and he even declined invitations to eat with white people.
So he was the kind of black man, sort of the shuffling, shambling sort of black man that white people are perfectly comfortable puffing up into larger dimensions than he really deserved.
And I will close with this quotation from a Department of Agriculture reply in 1937 to a request for confirmation of some of George Washington Carver's achievements.
Dr. Carver was without doubt done some very interesting things, things that were new to some of the people with whom he was associated, but a great many of them, if I'm correctly informed, were not new to other people.
I am unable to determine just what profitable application has been made of any of his so-called discoveries.
I'm writing this to you confidentially and would not wish to be quoted on the subject.
So that was the view of the Department of Agriculture in 1937.
So it's interesting to realize that even then, White society was sort of puffing up certain blacks as heroes for blacks, but I must say George Washington Carver was a vastly superior hero compared to the ones that are being puffed up today.
Such people as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and now the sainted George Floyd.
In any case, I've come to the end of our time for this podcast, and thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward very much to speaking with you next week, and I hope that you're looking forward almost as much to listening to what I have to say.
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