Steve Burton

Under the title "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," Senator James Webb (D., Va.) says what no mainstream Republican politician would ever dare to say:

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived...

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy./The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that 'fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery...'

In 1938...[o]f the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white)...

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white...

Wow.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't quote so much while commenting so little - but, hey? what could I possibly add?

Needless to say, the PC brigades are out to get him.

The invaluable Daily Mail reports:

Although he had not long since had an affair with Madonna and had slept with an estimated 12,000 women -- everyone from Julie Christie to Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Janice Dickinson to Cher -- he said at the time that he was deeply fulfilled to be a father.

But it seems that Warren Beatty's first (legitimate) born daughter, Kathlyn, now 18, even though she's not obviously all that unattractive, and even though she's sexually attracted to men, has decided to become a "boy." She wants everybody to call her "Stephen," and is prepping for "gender reassignment surgery." So that she can sorta kinda pretend to be a gay man, I guess.

Hey -- it's the new black! Or the old new black! Or something like that. Anyway, she gets to play at being a "victim," instead of a pampered scion of zillionaires, for fifteen minutes or so.

One gathers that Kathlyn/Stephen's mother, Annette Bening, is "utterly thrilled" with this interesting development, but that father Warren is "glum...tense, grey, and old" -- even "crushed."

"Warren knows he can't stop her from following her dream, but it's breaking his heart."

Well. What what can one say, but this:

Warren -- dude! 12,000 women? That's a (different) woman every day, every week, every month, every year, for more than thirty years! Just think of the vast army of your bastards, now growing up! From a Darwinian point of view, you're competing in the same league with Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, and possibly even Bill Clinton!

So Kathlyn/Stephen won't be disseminating your genes any further.

Cry me a river.

The Seattle Times reports:

The father of a 16-year-old West Seattle boy who said he was attacked by two men who made racially charged statements wonders why there have been no arrests even though police have identified two possible suspects.

It's been nearly three weeks since 16-year-old Shane McClellan showed up at an emergency room beaten, his father said, almost beyond recognition and almost one week since the teen was called into the police precinct to identify photos of suspects.

"We just can't understand why there haven't been any arrests," said Shane's father, Tim McClellan. "It doesn't seem right. I mean, the guys had my son's blood on their hands."

Further details:

Shane McClellan said he was walking home around 2 a.m. on May 25 when two men, one black and one Filipino, asked him for a light..

They then robbed him and beat him for four hours, whipping him with his own belt while saying things like, '"How do you like it, white boy?" and "This is for enslaving our people"...

McClellan...said the two men also poured Four Loko energy beer on him, burned him with a lit cigarette and urinated on him...

OK, I know what you're thinking -- we've only got the boy's word to go on, and how likely is it that the sort of thugs he describes would be literate enough to say anything like "this is for enslaving our people," in between burning him with cigarettes and pissing on him?

But the story goes on:

The officer who took the report went to the scene of the beating [where he] found blood, discarded...Loko cans and fresh cigarette butts...

A short time later, while returning to the precinct, Blake saw a black man and a Filipino man who appeared to be trying to conceal an open can...

"When he stopped to talk to the two men, he noted they had dried blood on their hands, were drinking the same brand of energy beer and smoking the same brand of cigarettes he'd found earlier.

So, being the frightful racist that we all know that all American policemen are, he then beat them both to within an inch of their lives, knowing that his higher-ups would cover for him. Right?

Wrong: "After [the officer] talked with his supervisor, it was decided that he should get good contact information on the two but not take them into custody." (The Seattle Police are, after all, justly proud of their "long history of diversity.")

But never fear: we are assured that "the assault is being investigated as a possible hate crime." Ain't that special?

I don't suppose there's much point observing that, were the races reversed, this incident would be national news, by now, with the very reverend Jesse Jackson & the equally reverend Al Sharpton and the even more reverend New York Times falling all over each other to publicize and to condemn the limitless iniquity of the White Man, world without end, Amen. So let's just take that as read. But might one be allowed to wonder, in the context of incidents like this, whether it's such a great idea for the American educationist establishment to go on, year after year, (a) further pumping up the already weirdly high levels of self-esteem among black students and (b) instilling in those same students the historically absurd belief that slavery is a crime for which all whites, as such, owe all blacks, as such?

At the website of the National Association of Scholars, an anonymous victim of the educationist racket explains much of what you need to know about why Johnny can't read, write, or calculate (without a calculator). Briefly, it's because teacher's training today is totally controlled by mad folk.

His remarks are "based on a public lecture that the author presented to students interested in issues of campus free speech":

"First, you have to understand that educational policy is consumed by the achievement gap, which is the disparity between groups of students on most educational measures...I don't just mean that this is the number one priority. It's the only priority...Nothing else matters. No Child Left Behind was entirely about the achievement gap and measuring schools to see if they'd closed it. Obama's Race to the Top is just another take...again, focusing on testing and this time holding teachers responsible if they can't get low-performing students to improve."

And, second, you have to understand that, in ed-school, there's only one permissible take on "the achievement gap, its cause and solution" - i.e., "the progressive view...which holds that social injustice, institutionalized racism, white prejudice, and other societal ills cause the achievement gap." Express any doubt on that point - even to the rather timid extent of suggesting, along with those horrid right-wing extremists, the Thernstroms, that differing cultural values may play some role here - and the sociopaths who run the place will do everything in their power to destroy you. Fortunately, in the author's case, they didn't quite succeed (though they did frighten him into anonymity).

So what do our progressive educational overlords really want? They "want to fix the achievement gap by moving underachieving students closer to high-achieving students...who will model desirable behavior..." I.e., for these people, unless your child is an underperforming member of one of the officially approved minorities, they really couldn't care less about what's best for him. So far as they're concerned, his only use is to sit next to the previously mentioned under-achievers in class and to "model desirable behavior" for them. And if, instead, it's the bad habits of the underachievers that end up rubbing off on the better students? No problem. There's more than one way to reduce an achievement gap.

Steve Sailer has an even more than usually insightful piece up at VDare on "That Texas Schoolbook Massacre" -- you know, the Texas Board of Education's recent "challenge to the Left's post-1960s dominion over the past" -- in which he takes a close look at one prominent example of the sort of high school "history" text that the "Texas Taliban" wants to replace.

The whole article is so good that one hates to single out just one thing, but I was particularly struck by Sailer's point that, over the past century, "heroes of suffering" have replaced "heroes of accomplishment" in the American imagination -- a point that he attributes to the formidable Gregory Cochran.

So the likes of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Claude Shannon, James Watson, Francis Crick, Raymond Spruance, Clarence Wade McClusky, Max Leslie, Clifton Sprague, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and even the Wright brothers, fade into obscurity, while the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony crowd to the front of the educationist bus. Would it be mischievous for me to suggest that this interesting phenomenon represents the ultimate triumph of the Christian aspect of our Western cultural inheritance over both the Greco-Roman and the Germanic aspects? So far as I can determine, neither the Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the Germanic tribes ever regarded the victims of history with anything but contempt. They were champions of achievement -- especially military achievement. If any of them ever lost any sleep over the sufferings of the losers, I have yet to hear about it. But the deification of the victim -- God on the Cross -- lies at the very heart of Christianity.

Vicisti, Galilaee.