Frederick Douglass’s Strong Critique, and Defense, of America

Frederick Douglass’s lengthy 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” is blistering in its critique of American immorality and hypocrisy on the issue of slavery:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? . . .

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

In the tradition of Christian martyrs, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., lost his life but won the war.  In the years after his assassination, his call for America to live up to her founding principles, his vision of all people treating all people as fellow human beings regardless of color, became the national consensus.

Racism Down, Interracial Marriage Up

I was listening to a podcast, and one of my favorite political and cultural commentators, Jonah Goldberg, happened to mention rates of interracial marriage as one possible measure of levels of racism in America over the years.  I was curious; so I looked them up.

According to the Pew Research Center, between 1980 and 2017, intermarriage rates roughly tripled:

Share of black Americans marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity in 1980 — 5%
In 2015 — 18%

Share of white Americans marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity in 1980 — 4%
In 2015 — 11%

Why People Should Stop Calling Trump Racist

An idiosyncratic and highly metacognitive blogger offers this fascinating, lengthy, thorough, thoughtful piece: “You Are Still Crying Wolf”.

He makes a lot of great points.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but I do think our national discourse would be healthier if more people seriously considered several of his arguments.

For whatever it’s worth, note that the author is not a conservative, and definitely not a Trump supporter (source: this same piece); in the recent election, he endorsed everyone but Trump.  (He is apparently sometimes very tongue-in-cheek—and hilarious—but this piece pretty clearly seems to be in earnest.)

Racism Still a Problem in America, Brought to You by—the Left

So a white supremacist or “white nationalist” (wants a constitutional amendment making America white-only, banning all people except “non-Hispanic whites of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood”) briefly became an official delegate of the Trump campaign.

If racism is going to start becoming more popular or mainstream now, I gotta get this off my chest:

‘The arc of history is long, and it bends where God wills it.’

Beautiful, just beautiful.  NRO’s David French:

This month, Ta-Nehisi Coates published Between the World and Me, a powerful collection of essays written in the form of letters to his teenage son. The book is a sensation on the left, and it is full of rage and even hate. Rather than write a conventional review of the book, I thought I’d respond with my own letter, written to my seven-year-old African-American daughter.

Dearest Naomi . . .

Politically Correct Double Standard

Reflecting further on how difficult it must be to relax and make offhand jokes if your world is a minefield of ever-changing PC taboos, I’m reminded of one of Jonah Goldberg’s newsletters.  He remarks that an offhand remark someone made about Indians was “utterly harmless” (true) but would risk the opprobrium of the humorless enforcers if made in their company.  He also makes an interesting point about the double standard involved in accusations of “micro-aggression”:

Real Live Individuals Flip the Bird to the Race-obsessed?

I thought this was interesting:  You’ve heard people (not to say gleeful liberals) say that white people are on their way to being a minority of the population in the U. S., and that that is likely to correlate with increasing electoral difficulty for Republicans.  In the course of responding to this narrative, Josh Kraushaar also happens to note,

By the time Texas has enough registered Hispanic voters to make a political difference, it’s possible that many second-generation Latinos will be assimilated and less reliably Democratic than their parents. Already, researchers are finding that a sizable number of Hispanics later self-identify as white, dampening the trajectory of steady Hispanic growth into the future.

Things You Hear on NPR: Conservatism Is Racist

Last fall, partly as a show of good faith, I promised to listen to NPR every other day (on odd-numbered days).  (Of course I think you should make sure to get a balanced diet including at least some conservative media as well, lest you unwittingly allow yourself to sit in a self-reinforcing bubble of liberal prejudices.)

I have done so.  I don’t have much time to listen to NPR (any more than I do to listen to conservative and Christian talk radio), but I now get a significant part of my news from NPR (and the BBC, and Public Radio International, and American Public Media, and whatever else comes across the local NPR station), as I did in high school.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Reflecting on the Democratic convention last week, National Review editor Rich Lowry remarked,

When Democrats say “We’re all in it together,” what they mean is that the Office of Extramural Research, Education, and Priority Populations in the Department of Health and Human Services needs twice as much funding.

I assumed his example was a joke, but no:  Our vast, sprawling government does indeed include an “Office of Extramural Research, Education, and Priority Populations”.  Its parent organization, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is supposed to be “for all Americans”, but people of some races are apparently more equal than others.

But then, I guess that’s not news.

Makes a Most Careful Count

(Summary for if you don’t have time to read this whole post:  I am angry but you should still fill out your Census form.)

You may have heard the recent ads on the radio or elsewhere trying to persuade you to fill out the 2010 Census form.  The one I heard most often said something like (coudn’t find a transcript online, going from memory here), “Imagine that our town has a hundred children.  We need about five teachers to teach them and two school buses to pick them up for school.  But what if our town grows and now we have hundreds of children?  Without the Census, we wouldn’t know how much we’ve grown.