It’s now a familiar phenomenon. Self-styled “conservatives” are so eager to find a Black person who champions their cause that they’ll latch on to anyone—anyone—who can pass the paper-bag test and who has recently uttered something mildly resembling a “traditional” or “free market” principle. Each month, Beltway operatives think they’ve discovered The One who will convince his racial brethren to "leave the plantation" and start voting Republican. The facts about each dark-skinned sage be damned.

The latest cause célèbre conservatives have rallied around is Kelley Williams-Bolar.

According to legend, Williams-Bolar of Akron, Ohio, was just trying to give her two daughters a better education in the Copley-Fairlawn school district, as she feared subjecting them to the utter hopelessness of her home district of Akron. Her effort was thwarted due to her being “economically disadvantaged.” She thus stands a martyr for “school choice.”

A little scratching of the surface, however, reveals quite a different and sordid story.

Williams-Bolar is a single mother who, along with her daughters, lives in a subsidized home courtesy of the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority at the 900 block of Hartford Avenue, and while many of the nearby gummit schoos are certainly abysmal for reasons regular readers of this website can readily surmise, she has stated she wanted them to attend Copley-Fairlawn schools because she was concerned for their safety, and not for academic reasons.  The safety issue did not involve any events that occurred at the schools within their district; rather, after her residence was burglarized, she did not want her daughters to be home alone after school, while she was working for Akron Public Schools as a substitute assistant for special-needs children.

A video of a racist beating perpetrated by five black savages has surfaced online (H/T: Auster and Chuck Ross):

Obviously, only anonymous online voices will disseminate information about this sickening incident and the evident motivations. The mainstream media will either ignore the story altogether or cast it as a racially neutral event, the criminals and the victims but mere coincidences. And if a sort of mainstream pundit like Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage dares speak the truth, they will be dismissed as incorrigible racists fabricating enmity not in the pursuit of truth, but rather as a means for fear-mongering.

But we already know this and it's one reason why this blog exists. Instead, I'd like to briefly consider a question raised over at GLPiggy: what percentage of blacks (and Hispanics) are capable of such savagery, or at the very least, incapable of existing in a civilized society?

As I've argued before, black (and Latino) criminality does not stem entirely from genetics; rather, the relative degree of criminality, not the absolute magnitude of pathology, derives from genetics. Thus, one can't even consider the above question without a grasp of the overarching social factors that motivate or excuse such behavior. In the linked post, I argued that:

[t]he Civil Rights movement didn't only legally condemn discrimination, but it also, through attendant social and cultural changes, unfettered black impetuousness and collectively exonerated them from any future wrong doings. Mainstream academia and media adopted a narrative that blamed black transgression on historical wrongs, and later, hoaxes like "institutional racism."

So assuming the extant social factors, how can one quantify the misbehaving subset of the respective racial groups? Of course, this is a somewhat amorphous characterization to begin with, further muddled by the difficulty of finding a viable metric. Perhaps, we should look for the metric first and extrapolate that particular behavior to connected pathology. Incarceration rates are a good place to start, though this isn't exactly what I want. I want not only violent individuals like that profiled, but I also want to include socially and culturally depressive individuals, the kind that make you roll your eyes at the post office or cause a scene at the supermarket.

To get that, I think the best metric is out of wedlock births and two-family homes. I found those numbers last summer: just over 80% of black births and about 35% of white births are out of wedlock. Of course, many black and Hispanic middle class people exhibit stereotypical behavior, like that Columbia professor, but let's ignore them. So I'd estimate about 80% of blacks, probably somewhere around 65% of Hispanics, and 35% of whites are contributing to our social and cultural depression. If anyone has a better metric, please provide it in the comments.

Finally, this question leads into the concept of genetic determinism. Maybe we needn't answer this particular question or obtain an accurate approximation in order to prognosticate on societal outcomes. Sure, this constitutes an interesting intellectual exercise, but in the end, we don't really need to pinpoint the number of morally diseased individuals shown in the video. And we really don't need an accurate assessment of the "Smart Fraction" either. For all the qualifications race realists repeat about the lack of black intellectual uniformity, the facts remain that societies function commensurate with their majority population. See this chart for all the evidence you'll need.

Why would a Black man be complaining about the insertion of fictional Black characters into movies and television programs that are intended to enhance the image of Blacks to the general public? Isn't this the kind of social engineering that should be applauded?

Well, No, says Erik Rush in his syndicated column, “Are TV dramas pimping Obama propaganda?” Rush claims that he has been, since the 1970s, a careful observer of the "machinations of film and television producers" with respect to the race issue. In fact, he is author of the book, Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal—America's Racial Obsession, in which he takes to task almost all the contentious topics surrounding race.

Although he realizes that attempts to intrude more positive depictions of Blacks have prevailed for some time among a coterie of White entertainment executives, Rush claims that something unique is now underway.  He believes that much of the goal of today's Hollywood producers is to "directly influence public opinion as regards President Obama."  Though he accepts the facts of earlier moves towards more sympathetic characterizations, he associates the current trend to the mainstream media's desire to aggrandize a political ally, namely, the first colored President.

As a self-identified conservative, Rush finds no reason to support a Black man who, according to him, prior to election, clearly suffered from "glaring deficiencies" in terms of experience. Needless to say, he disdains Obama's politics, and like many Americans, he believes that Obama's presidency is due only to the fact of his race. He thinks it won't be long before this inept President is viewed as a "blemish on the legacy of black Americans."

The latest, heart-warming, yuletide news from the city of Charles Dickens’s Xmas Carol concerns the slashing of a policeman’s throat in broad daylight in front of Xmas shoppers. I say “heart-warming” because once again the establishment is showing its usual charity to the criminal underclass by refusing to mention or even hint at the race, appearance, or even general demeanour of the attacker. We do get age (30) and gender (male).

Of course, we can fully understand their logic as it would be a heartbreaking tragedy if London’s cowed and jittery population were to be given this information and then take evasive action on seeing people who resembled the killer. My, what would that do for race relations in this throbbing, vibrant, Olympian Cosmopolis? Yes, the myth of racial harmony and the non-ethnic nature of crime must be enforced at all costs, and make no mistake about it, the editors of papers like the Daily Mail, where I first saw this story, have had their orders about such “sensitive topics.”

But, aren’t I assuming too much? Possibly. But then there is little alternative when there are glaring omissions from many crime stories.

For my entire lifetime, the figure of Richard Milhous Nixon has been an almost cartoonish Left-liberal hate object (second only to Adolf Hitler in this regard.)

Predictably, the Left hates Tricky Dick for all the wrong reasons.

Nixon’s presidency was certainly a failure (if not a disaster), but this was hardly due to the botched caper at the Watergate hotel or his fabled “enemies list” of Beltway pundits. In his five years plus in office, Nixon added whole new departments to the welfare state, ended the gold standard, and implemented forced busing and Affirmative Action in the name of racial integration. He was the last president to openly call himself a “Keynesian.”  (Liberals might, indeed, want to rethink their antipathy towards Nixon, much as they have reason to embrace the social reforms of George W. Bush.)

In the foreign realm, however, Nixon’s policies were quite admirable: he eased tensions with the Soviet Union and, most brilliantly, shattered the Cold War paradigm by opening diplomatic relations with China.

With “Watergate” fading in memory, one might think that Nixon would begin to be looked back upon fondly as a hard-nosed statesman and peacemaker. Unfortunately, the 265 hours of Oval Office recordings released this week by the Nixon Library—which include the president’s disparaging comments about Blacks, Jews, and American “ethnics”—will, no doubt, cement his status as a bête noire.

For me at least, the offending remarks have raised my own estimation of the man.

Nixon believed that peoples have inherited traits. And he voiced “stereotypes” about Jews and Blacks that men around the world have held for centuries in one form or another. (Briefly, Nixon thought that Jews can be pushy and obnoxious and African-Americans are incapable of civilization, save their complete genetic absorption into the White population.¹)

The tapes also reveal that Nixon, bolstered by his chief advisor Henry Kissinger, was perhaps the last president to view foriegn policy as matter of competing interests and not as a means of social work and world improvement. The most telling lines in this regard come in an exchange between Nixon and Kissinger in 1973 over regarding Jewish migration to Israel out of the Soviet Union.

Kissinger: The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

Nixon: I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.

Apparently, one is supposed to find these words extremely offensive. And Nixon’s unwillingness to jeopardize the lives of hundreds of millions in response to a potential “Second Holocaust” is yet more evidence of his “anti-Semitism”—or, according to Slate, “something worse than anti-Semitism.”

Putting aside the Israel issue, one might want to speculate whether Nixon’s HBD realism (so to speak) was intimately connected with his foreign-policy realism—and whether the two might reinforce one another.

In the egalitarian mind, the notion that “All Men Are Created Equal”—that any perceived difference between or within races must be the result of irrational prejudice or yet-to-be vanquished tradition—is partnered with the view that all men deserve the same egalitarian form of government. (Whether it’s called “socialism” or “democracy” is immaterial; both are imaged a bringing about equality and “true freedom.”) In this view, a nation that has deviated from the One True Political Way is not simply a rival or potential enemy but an outright foe that must be liberated and transformed … or else annihilated.²

Those of us who believe that there are profound differences between the human subspecies are usually depicted, by our liberal or egalitarian Christian opponents alike, as crazed fascist who, if given the chance, would promptly pursue genocidal policies around the globe.

In reality, our foreign-policy program is fairly laid back. (In contrast to those of the neocons and humanitarian interventionist, it’s quite pacific.)

I don’t think that, say, the Chinese or the Iraqis have the same innate expectations and predilections as Europeans; it thus doesn’t surprise me that they’d arrive at political arrangements other than Anglo-Saxon republicanism. I don’t hate them for it, nor do I want to bomb or invade them until they love America, duly elect public officials, and ensure that all women receive an undergraduate education. To the contrary, the racial and foreign-policy realist seeks to find ways to get along with other civilizations—much as Nixon did with Beijing—and not blow up the world in the name of some “humanitarian” cause.

The egalitarian creationism of David Frum, John Hagee, and Richard Holbrooke, on the one hand, and their commitment to endless wars for democracy, on the other, are not unrelated. Such a righteous cause as “equality” can justify almost any means.

Notes:

1. The tapes also add credence to the view that Nixon supported Affirmative Action as a cynical gambit, or as a way of securing Blacks a small slice of the diminishing economic pie, and not as a means of acheiving a "color blind" society.
2. In his book Crisis and Critique, German historian and theorist Reinhart Kosseleck viewed Soviet Communism and American “democracy” as equally messiahnic and totalizing forces; the Cold War itself was in danger of reviving the all-or-nothing bloodshed of the Wars of Religion.)

The Pigford case, which will grant direct government payments to 500 percent of America's "Black farmers," is back in the news. As Andrew Breitbart reports, the judges who've presided over this matter have explicitly understood it as representing reparations by another name.  

Here, for instance, is the decision by a one Judge Paul Friedman, who ruled on the case a decade ago.   

On April 14. 1999, Judge Paul Friedman signed a Consent Decree in the class action law suit PIGFORD, BREWINGTON v GLICKMAN and the US Department of Agriculture.

Following is a portion of the opinion written by Judge Friedman:

Forty acres and a mule. As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land. Some African Americans took advantage of these programs and either bought or leased parcels of land. During Reconstruction, however, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to enlarge the powers and activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he reversed many of the policies of the Bureau. Much of the promised land that had been leased to African American farmers was taken away and returned to Confederate loyalists. For most African Americans, the promise of forty acres and a mule was never kept. Despite the government’s failure to live up to its promise, African American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920, there were 925,000 African American farms in the United States.

…

Most fundamentally, these objections result from a well-founded and deep-seated mistrust of the USDA. A mistrust borne of a long history of racial discrimination. A mistrust that is well-deserved. As Mr. Chestnut put it, these objections reflect “fear which reaches all the way back to slavery. . . . That objection, you heard it from many today, it really asks you to retain jurisdiction, over this case in perpetuity. Otherwise they say USDA will default, ignore the lawful mandates of this Court, and in time march home scot-free while blacks are left holding the empty bag again.” Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999 at 172, The Court cannot guarantee class members that they will never experience discrimination at the hands of the USDA again, and the Consent Decree does not purport to make such a guarantee. But the Consent Decree and the Court do provide certain assurances.

First, under the terms of this Consent Decree, the USDA is obligated to pay billions of dollars to African American farmers who have suffered discrimination. Those billions of dollars will serve as a reminder to the Department of Agriculture that its actions were unacceptable and should serve to deter it from engaging in the same conduct in the future.

Second, the USDA is not above the law. Like many of the objectors, the Court was surprised and disappointed by the government’s response to the Court’s modest proposal that the Consent Decree include a simple sentence that in the future the USDA shall exert “best efforts to ensure compliance with all applicable statutes and regulations prohibiting discrimination.” Letter from the Court to Counsel, dated March 5, 1999; see Response Letter from the Parties to the Court, dated March 19, 1999. Whether or not the government explicitly states it in this Consent Decree, however, the Constitution and laws of the United States continue to forbid discrimination on the basis of race. see. eg., U.S. CONST. amend, V; 15 U.S.C. § 1691; 42 U.S.C. § 2000d, as do the regulations of the USDA. See 7 C.F.R. § § 15.1, 15.51. The actions of the USDA from now into the future will be scrutinized closely — by class members, by their now organized and vocal allies, by Congress and by the Court. If the USDA or members of the county committees are operating on the misapprehension that they ever again can repeat the events that led to this lawsuit, those forces will disabuse them of any such notion.

Most importantly, the farmers who have been a part of this lawsuit have demonstrated their power to bring about fundamental change to the Department of Agriculture, albeit more slowly than some would have wanted. Each individual farmer may feel powerless, but as a group they have planted seeds that are changing the landscape of the USDA. As a group, they spurred Secretary Glickman in 1996 to look inward at the practices of the USDA and to examine African American farmers’ allegations that the discrimination of the USDA was leading them to the point of financial ruin. As a group, they led Secretary Glickman to create the Civil Rights Action Team, a team that recommended sweeping changes to the USDA and to the county committee system. Indeed, in February 1997, the USDA Civil Rights Action Team itself recommended that the county committee system be revised by converting all county non-federal positions, including the county executive directors, to federal status, that the committee selection process by changed, that voting members of underrepresented groups be appointed to state and county committees, and that county committees be removed from any farm loan determinations. CRAT Report at 64-65.

As a group, the farmers mobilized a broad coalition within Congress to rake the unprecedented action of tolling the statute of limitations. As a group, they brought Secretary Glickman to the negotiating table in this case and achieved the largest civil rights settlement in history. And as a group, they have made implementation of the recommendations of the CRAT Report a priority within the USDA. See Statement of February 9, 1999, by Secretary Dan Glickman, before the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, and Related Agencies Committee on Appropriations, United Stares Senate (“I also want to emphasize the importance that the President and I have placed on USDA civil rights issues; this priority is reflected in the [FY 2000] budget The President’s budget provides the necessary funding to continue to carry out the recommendations of the Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) as well as the recommendations of the National Commission an Small Farms which supports our civil rights agenda’). While the USDA landscape has remained resistant to change for many seasons, the labors of these farmers finally are beginning to bear fruit. This settlement represents one significant harvest. It is up to the Secretary of Agriculture and other responsible officials at the USDA to fulfill its promises, to ensure that this shameful period is never repeated and to bring the USDA into the twenty-first century.

V. CONCLUSION

Forty acres and a mule, The government broke that promise to African American farmers. Over one hundred years later, the USDA broke its promise to Mr. James Beverly. It promised him a loan to build farrowing houses so that he could breed hogs. Because he was African American, he never received that loan. He lost his farm because of the loan that never was. Nothing can completely undo the discrimination of the past or restore lost land or lost opportunities to Mr. Beverly or to all of the other African American farmers whose representatives came before this Court. Historical discrimination cannot be undone.

But the Consent Decree represents a significant first step, A first step that has been a long time earning, but a first step of immeasurable value. As Mr. Chestnut put it, “Who really knows the true value, if there is one, for returning a small army of poor black farmers to the business of farming by the year 2000 who otherwise would never make it back? I am not wise enough to put a dollar value on that and I don’t think anybody on this planet is wise enough to reduce that to dollars and cents.” Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999 at 171. The Consent Decree is a fair, adequate and reasonable settlement of the claims brought in this case.

It therefore will be approved and entered.

More than 1 in 3 South African men say they've committed rape, new survey says

Associated Press

By Nastasya Tay 

November 26, 2010

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A new survey says more than one in three South African men admit to having committed rape.

A 2010 study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province, home to South Africa's most populous city of Johannesburg, more than 37 percent of men said they had raped a woman. Nearly 7 percent of the 487 men surveyed said they had participated in a gang rape.

More than 51 percent of the 511 women interviewed said they'd experienced violence from men, and 78 percent of men said they'd committed violence against women.

A quarter of the women interviewed said they'd been raped, but the study says only one in 25 rapes are reported to police.

A survey by the same organization in 2008 found that 28 percent of men in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces said they had raped a woman or girl. Of the men who had committed rape, one third did not feel guilty, said Rachel Jewkes, a lead researcher on both studies.

Two-thirds of the men surveyed in that study said they raped because of a sense of sexual entitlement. Other popular motivating factors included a desire to punish women who rejected or angered them, and raping out of boredom, Jewkes said.

"Rape is completely trivialized by a great number of men. It is seen as a legitimate activity," she said.

Jewkes believes South Africa's history of racial division and associated trauma is part of the reason of the high incidence of sexual violence in the country.

"Apartheid has contributed to culture of impunity surrounding rape in South Africa," said Jewkes. Men who were abused or experienced trauma during their childhood are much more likely to rape, she said, adding that apartheid destroyed family life, fostering violence and anti-social behavior.

The apartheid period also saw very little enforcement of common law, which has contributed to a culture of impunity, said Jewkes.

"We need to start interventions in childhood, focusing on building a more empowering childhood environment in South Africa, especially for boys," she said, "and we need to make it worth their while for women to report sexual violence."

Apparently, the most prosperous and ordered country in Sub-Saharan Africa--one in which poor Blacks from across the continent were trying to immigrate into--represents a great "trauma" for Black South Africans, social pain they seek to dispel by raping their own women and those of the remaining Johannesburg Whites. One wonders: Is there any limit to sociologists' willingness to explain away--and quasi-justify--Black behavior?  

One of my great joys in life is watching the next clueless meme pop up and spread like wildfire.  The latest is that education reform is going to solve this country’s problems.  Newsweek hopes that “imposing standardized test-based accountability for schools and teachers and fostering competition among schools” will be the one area where Republicans will work with the Obama administration.  The villains in this narrative are the teachers’ unions.  Tom Friedman tells us that “countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class.”  More interesting is a recent Atlantic piece which points out America can’t use “the diversity excuse” to explain away our country’s failures.

These days, the theory Hanushek hears most often is what we might call the diversity excuse. When he runs into his neighbors at Palo Alto coffee shops, they lament the condition of public schools overall, but are quick to exempt the schools their own kids attend. “In the litany of excuses, one explanation is always, ‘We’re a very heterogeneous society—all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine,’” Hanushek says. This latest study was designed, in part, to test the diversity excuse.

Actually, the diversity excuse mostly applies to blacks, who are twelve percent of the population and the worst performers on standardized tests, and who have been speaking English (or something that resembles it) for three hundred years. Never mind that though...

So Hanushek and his co-authors sliced the data more thinly still. They couldn’t control for income, since students don’t report their parents’ salaries when they take these tests; but they could use reliable proxies. How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?

As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Parents in Palo Alto will always insist that their kids are the exception, of course. And researchers cannot compare small cities and towns around the globe—not yet, anyway. But Hanushek thinks the study significantly undercuts the diversity excuse. “People will find it quite shocking,” he says, “that even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive.”

The closest thing America has to a bright spot is Massachusetts.

Is it because Massachusetts is so white? Or so immigrant-free? Or so rich? Not quite. Massachusetts is indeed slightly whiter and slightly better-off than the U.S. average. But in the late 1990s, it nonetheless lagged behind similar states—such as Connecticut and Maine—in nationwide tests of fourth- and eighth-graders. It was only after a decade of educational reforms that Massachusetts began to rank first in the nation.

What did Massachusetts do? Well, nothing that many countries (and industries) didn’t do a long time ago. For example, Massachusetts made it harder to become a teacher, requiring newcomers to pass a basic literacy test before entering the classroom. (In the first year, more than a third of the new teachers failed the test.) The state also required students to pass a test before graduating from high school—a notion so heretical that it led to protests in which students burned state superintendent David Driscoll in effigy.

Standards for teachers!  Why didn’t anybody think of this before?  Actually, many people have, it’s just that objective tests for educators have been criticized for being racist. From the first edition of The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 155-156.

...in the early 1980s, the three main American newsmagazines devoted cover stories to the scandalous performance of American teachers and prospective students on qualifying tests, thus recognizing that it was a vital national concern.  However, their stories hid from their readers that the cause was affirmative action university admissions and graduation.

Newsweek did not mention race at all.

Time’s article quoted ungrammatical, barely intelligible sentences written by American teachers and documented their terrible performance on qualifying tests.  It offered several explanations, one of which came close to the true one: “In Oregon, a kindergarten teacher who had been given As and Bs at Portland State University was recently found to be functionally illiterate.”  At one point, it carelessly included a parenthesis that disclosed how that could happen.  Pinellas County Florida, “required teacher candidates to read at an advanced tenth-grade level and solve math problems at an eighth-grade level.  Though all had their BA in hand, about one-third of applicants (25 percent of whites, 79 percent of blacks) flunked Pinellas’ test.”

U.S. News and World Report printed a selection of questions from the National Teacher Examination to show how risby easy they were.  It constantly blamed the problem on inadequate funding, and its cover showed a white teacher wearing a dunce cap.  But in two sentences in the last column on the last page, it mentioned, “In Florida, 84 percent of all those who took the exam last October passed.  However, only 37 percent of black students in education passed, which has raised concerns about worsening an already serious decline in the number of black teachers.”  Of course, it is exactly this concern that has prevented the use of legitimate qualifying tests.

Steve Sailer has pointed out before that quotas would be preferable to the kind of affirmative action we have in America because you could at least get the most qualified of each race.  But if liberals ever get their education reform and find that any test used will reveal the need to fire 80% of black teachers, the exam will be thrown out and even the white incompetents, of whom there are more than there are unqualified blacks in absolute terms, will get a pass.

Unlike most liberal shibboleths, perhaps the teachers matter idea has some truth to it (not as much truth as human biodiversity of course, but you have to start somewhere).  On the LSAT, used for law school admissions, and the GRE, taken by prospective graduate students, those who majored in education are consistently among the worst performers.  It’s not surprising that a profession dominated by unions attracts the least ambitious and capable people.

Whether liberals ever beat the teachers’ unions remains to be seen.  The opening shot in the war going on was this year’s mayoral race in Washington, D.C., where the main issue was school chancellor Michelle Rhee.  The Swipples were excited about school reform and thought they knew what was best for blacks, who themselves more sensibly understood that having the public education system as a jobs program was in their best interests.  If we’ve learned anything over the past forty years, it’s that our highly intelligent elite can usually get its way against the more numerous but passive and dimmer masses.  It’s just that on the issues of school prayer, immigration, affirmative action, etc. the Left had their secret weapon of moral certainty, due to the fact that the enemy was the wrong kind of white people.  We’ll see how quickly they lose their zeal when it’s their favorite victims who are standing in the way of their goals.  

Have you ever gotten the feeling that African-Americans have an inflated sense of entitlement?

Curtis Got Slapped: Mother claims teacher slapped son, writes 40 crazed pages of demands

The Pitch

Nov. 11 2010

By Mandy Oaklander

When a child named Curtis Bowen was slapped by his teacher at Martin Luther King Jr., Elementary School, no one really heard about it. Except for President Obama, Vice President Biden, their wives, three senators, and more than 20 other officials.

They all were CC'ed on the whopping 40-page letter that Curtis' mother, Lisa Henry Bowen, sent to school district superintendent John Covington. In it, Bowen makes mind-boggling demands for reparations. One recipient called the letter "one of the craziest things I've ever seen" and leaked it to the Internet. And Lisa Henry Bowen even created her own web site for the occasion: www.CurtisGotSlapped.com.

Lisa Henry Bowen, who copyrights her name and her son's name throughout the letter, kicks it off by identifying herself as the "intellectual property owner" of fourth grader Curtis Bowen (C). She alleges that Curtis was caught horse playing and was slapped by a teacher named Ms. Curry. Lisa Henry tried to report the teacher to social services for child abuse, but was denied as Curtis' skin wasn't broken.

That sent Lisa Henry into a spiral of outrage. She calls Ms. Curry "one audacious white bitch with 'balls'", and then conducts some informal gonad comparisons. "I happen to have some big 'balls' too. And I ain't afraid to use them." (All emphasis hers, throughout.)

Mrs. Bowen uses her balls-to-the-wall logic to devise a way for the school district to repay her. She claims that Curry slapped 1/4 of Curtis' "million dollar face." Therefore, Lisa Henry encloses a homemade bill for a quarter of a million dollars. The $250K bill is issued to five educational entities, so she's really demanding more than $1 million.

And that's just page eight!

The weird part about Lisa Henry's list of reparations is that most of them have nothing to do with her child being slapped. Sure, she makes a few perfunctory demands to improve the school district, including the introduction of a "We Don't Hit Kids Here" campaign throughout Kansas City and a revocation of Ms. Curry's teaching license. But she reserves the real meat of reparations for Curtis and herself.

Curtis shall receive, among many other things: $13,500 worth of Wal-Mart gift cards, a free college education, two trips to Disney World, nine years of private tennis lessons on the Plaza, season tickets to the opera, theater, and ballet, almost a decade's worth of psychological counseling by "the best black child psychologist in the country," a whole orchestra's worth of new musical instruments, a three-week trip to Africa at a five-star hotel, and a personal audience with President Obama.

Lisa Henry's demands are just as WTF-worthy. She demands the full payment of her mortgage, a new car, home remodeling, free psychological, dental, and medical care for the next nine years, and the cherry on the sundae:

Independent consulting contract position with the Kansas City Missouri School district, for the next nine years. My consulting fee begins at $15,000 per month, minimum 6 months contract.

Because nothing screams "hire me" like a maniacal 40-page threat.

The mother ironically rants to President Obama and Dr. Covington about how the educational system doesn't "give a damn about black children." She almost loses it at the end:

"There was a time, in THIS AMERICA, when a white woman could get away with slapping black children around. There was a time, in THIS AMERICA, when a black woman had no choice, but to accept her children being slapped, whipped, rapped [sic, we think], abused, molested and psychologically tortured by this white supremacist society...There WAS a time. I AIN'T THAT BLACK MOTHER, THIS AIN'T THAT TIME!!!!!! THIS AIN'T THAT AMERICA!!!!!!!!  

"A message to the haters: Lisa Henry Bowen (C) invites anyone who thinks she's gone a little overboard to "KISS MY ENTIRE BLACK ASS!!!!!! I HAVEN'T BEGUN TO GO FAR ENOUGH!!!!!!!" 

Should any of the recipients of the letter wish to meet with Curtis or Lisa Henry ... well, they couldn't afford it. Lisa Henry's personal appearance fee is $3,000 for 45 minutes, and she will not appear without her husband (an additional $3,000.) Don't even think about getting an audience with Lisa Henry's property, Curtis. He costs $11,000 for 30 minutes.

Put yourself, for a moment, in the position where Bishop Eddie Long -- that sharp-dressing, jewelry-flashing, Rolls-driving Servant of de Lawd who presides over New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, an Atlanta, Georgia Black megachurch -- claims to find himself.

You're a pastor of a church body with a massive congregation, one very influential in your community. You are respected, admired, even in many cases idolized, as a true man of God. But you did not enter your life's calling for the adulation; you are in fact completely sincere in your piety. The last thing you'd ever want to do is cause scandal for your flock. If any indiscretion on your part were discovered, the resultant damage to your own reputation would concern you significantly less than the disillusionment it might create among your parishioners.

Now imagine that several troubled teenage boys, to whom you had been giving counsel, have suddenly accused you of sexual improprieties. The claims are totally fabricated, part of a malicious plot cooked up against you by your enemies. You know you are innocent, but then clearing your own name is of far less import to you than ensuring that no Christian is led away from his faith by these scurrilous charges.

So, you show up and immediately and forthrightly DENY the charges, right?