Showing posts with label Jim Crow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jim Crow. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Friday, April 11, 2014
 |
| Hank Aaron |
By Larry Elder, Apr. 11, 2014
Michael Sam appears to be a fine young man. But, no, he
isn’t the first openly gay male U.S. athlete to play in a major sport. And
“brave”? Can we please dispense with the absurd Jackie Robinson comparisons?
Wake me when a black collegiate pro prospect “comes out” as a Republican.
A starting senior on the University of Missouri football
team, Sam looks like a mid-round draft pick in the NFL. He recently “came out”
to his teammates, many of whom said they already knew or suspected. Neither
teammates nor coaches had an issue. Most normal people ask, “Who cares?” or
“Can he play?”
Some, however, liken Sam’s “pioneering status” to that of
Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in the modern baseball major
leagues. “Michael Sam has the opportunity to be the Jackie Robinson of the
NFL,” said professor Orin Starn, chairman of Duke University’s cultural
anthropology department. “Michael Sam is a Jackie Robinson Moment For NFL,”
according to the editorial headline in the Boston Globe. And then there’s Fox
Sports analyst Brendon Ayanbadejo who said, “We were there to celebrate his
groundbreaking voyage that in many ways is similar to those of Jackie Robinson
and Rosa Parks.”
Where to begin?
First, Sam isn’t even the first openly gay male athlete to
play in a major American pro sport. That distinction goes to Glenn Burke, who
played with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics from 1976-1979.
He might well have played longer and been more successful had he not clashed
with management – not his teammates – over his sexual orientation.
Burke was “out” to teammates, management and sportswriters.
It is not Burke’s fault that both media and management preferred to say
nothing. Dodger management reportedly offered him money to go through a sham
marriage. Burke refused.
Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, whose son died of AIDS in
1991, allegedly helped engineer a trade of Burke to Oakland because of a
friendship between Lasorda’s son and Burke. The trade of the popular, outgoing
player stunned many Dodgers. Team captain Davey Lopes said, “No one cared about
his lifestyle.”
Traded during the 1978 season to the Oakland A’s, Burke
ended up managed by the openly homophobic Billy Martin. The volatile manager,
according to a documentary about Burke, “baited” him with gay slurs.
Frustrated, and never realizing his potential, Burke left baseball in 1980 and
became a drug addict. A former Oakland teammate, Shooty Babitt, said, “They ran
him straight out of the game.” Burke died of AIDS in 1995. He was 42.
Sam will encounter no Billy Martins. He enters an NFL with a
written policy against discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity and
sexual orientation.
Second, let’s discuss Jackie Robinson. Many of his own
teammates signed a petition stating they would not play with him. At least one
petitioner was traded.
Viciously taunted, and sometimes threatened by players, fans
and others, Robinson faced enormous pressure to not only play well, but to do
so while restraining the desire to punch somebody in the face. Had Robinson not
“succeeded,” the path for other black players would have become even more
difficult, about which the former UCLA student was quite aware.
The attention and pressure on Robinson makes Sam’s future
career look like a coronation. Robinson’s was a pre-television, pre-Internet,
Jim Crow America, where sports fans really paid keen attention to only three
sports – boxing, horse racing and America’s pastime, baseball. Most everybody
was watching, many hoping and expecting him to fail. Robinson played Major
League Baseball for 10 years and died early. His death certificate described
the official cause as a heart attack. But it might as well have said pressure
and stress killed him. He was 53.
Yes, Sam will have some challenges. But tell that to Hank
Aaron.
In his autobiography, “I Had A Hammer,” Aaron writes about
when he and others were the first black players to play the South Atlantic
League – a minor league affiliated with the majors – five years after Robinson
entered the major league. Southern newspapers, covering the “Sally League,”
refused to print pictures of the black players. Taxi drivers in places like
Florida refused to pick them up. Players, Aaron said, could be arrested simply
for being on the street at night.
Robin Roberts, the Hall of Fame Philadelphia Phillies
pitcher, broke into the major leagues the year after Robinson. Roberts recalled
a double-header in Philadelphia when Robinson tore the cover off the ball while
playing dazzling defense. The next day, Roberts’ manager, Ben Chapman,
approached Robinson. “Robinson,” he said, “you’re one hell of a ballplayer, but
you’re still a n–ger.” Robinson, according to Roberts, just smiled and walked
by. Chapman was fired not long after. Robinson is in the Hall of Fame.
To forget Burke wastes an opportunity to remind us of how
far we have come. To liken Sam’s challenges – and there will be some – to those
faced by Robinson diminishes the legacy of number 42.
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Sunday, March 30, 2014
Today, there is a “Northern Strategy.”
It’s the insidious accusation of racism in order keep blacks angry
and voting 95 percent-plus for the Democratic vote. Examples:
-- Voter ID: AG Eric Holder says the laws “are designed to depress
the vote of particular groups of people who are not supportive of the party
that is advancing these photo ID measures.” Recall that Holder,
sociologist-in-mid-season-form, once said "America,” when it comes to
race, has been “a nation of cowards.”
Cowards? Abolition movement; Civil War resulting in some 700,000 dead
(equivalent to a population-adjusted death toll of 7,000,000 -- and this
doesn’t included maimed and wounded); the pre- and modern civil rights
movement; LBJ’s war on poverty (ill-advised, notwithstanding); the appointment
of back-to-back black secretaries of State -- up to and including the election
of a black president, the first and only majority white society to do so -- represents,
in matters of “race,” a national “cowardice”?
What does that even mean? A “nation of cowards”?
How do you define it, quantify it? Or is it just another demagogic
design to, in some eerie horror film-like way, let the 95 percenters know that
The Man has only been held down temporarily by President Obama. He’s out in
2017. Then it’s back to the basement, planting mushrooms in the dark, awaiting
enlightenment.
-- Obamacare opposition: Jimmy Carter said the
"vociferous" opposition to Obamacare is because some people cannot
accept Obama's race.
-- DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz saying the GOP wants to
"return to the days of Jim Crow."
-- Hillary Clinton (who never served in the House): “When you look
at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a
plantation, and you know what I'm talking about."
-- Joe Biden: Republicans would “put y’all back in chains.”
-- Charlie Rangel saying about the GOP in the 1994 Republican-led
House: "It's not 'spic' or 'nigger' any more. They say, 'Let's cut
taxes.'"
It’s today’s “progressives” who seek Jim Crow-like mandates on
private conduct. Examples include the science-defying anti-e-cig laws;
Bloomberg’s nothing-larger-than-16oz Slurpee campaign; “commonsense gun
control” laws; requiring employers to supply contraceptives despite religious
objections; mandating that porn actors to wear a condom; and many, many others.
What these laws have in common with Jim Crow is that they tell
people how to behave with or on their own property -- as long as it's on the
government's terms.
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Saturday, March 29, 2014
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| President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 |
A big reason that blacks hate the GOP is that party’s alleged use
-- during the ‘60s and beyond -- of the so-called “Southern Strategy.”
That is, the GOP supposedly made -- and many say continues to make
-- both naked and subtle racial appeals to white racist voters: Vote for the
GOP and we’ll promote policies to oppress blacks. Never mind that as a
percentage of the party, more Republicans voted for the civil rights bill than
did Democrats.
The author of the term “Southern Strategy,” Pat Buchanan, then a
speechwriter for Richard Nixon, described his “strategy” very differently from
that way today’s critics characterize it:
"We would build
our Republican Party,” Buchanan said at the time, “on a foundation of states'
rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave
it to the ‘party of [Democratic Georgia Gov. Lester] Maddox, [1966 Democratic
challenger against Spiro Agnew for Maryland Gov. George] Mahoney and [Democratic
Alabama Gov. George] Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out
of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.’”
Why do those offended by the “Southern Strategy” give a pass to the
LBJ’s racist rationale for supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964? These
quotes are from “Inside The White House” by respected investigative journalist,
Ronald Kessler:
“I’ll have those niggers
voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” -- Lyndon B. Johnson to two
governors on Air Force One
And:
“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s
a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the
political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about
this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them
down, not enough to make a difference.” -- LBJ
Finally, Jim Crow could not have survived but for government-imposed
de jure segregation. If all the rednecks
wanted not to trade with blacks, why would there be a to need pass laws to make
these racists do what they are all supposedly doing anyway?
This is from Thomas Sowell’s book, “Preferential Policies, An
International Perspective”:
“Even after such Jim Crow laws were passed, the streetcar company
in Mobile initially refused to comply, and in Montgomery it was reported in the
early years that blacks simply continued to sit wherever they pleased. In Jacksonville,
the streetcar company delayed enforcing the segregation seating law of 1901
until 1905. Georgia’s state law of 1891 segregating the races was ignored by
the streetcar companies in Augusta until 1898, in Savannah until 1899, and in
the latter city was not fully enforced until 1906. In Mobile, the streetcar
company publicly refused to enforce the Jim Crow laws of 1902, until its
streetcar conductors began to be arrested and fined for non-compliance with the
law. In Tennessee, the streetcar company opposed the state legislation imposing
Jim Crow seating in 1903, delayed enforcement after the law was passed, and
eventually was able to get the state courts to declare it unconstitutional.”
Related: The Elder Statement: Civil Rights Movement -- ‘Southern Strategy’ vs. ‘Northern Strategy’ (Part 2)
Related: The Elder Statement: Civil Rights Movement -- ‘Southern Strategy’ vs. ‘Northern Strategy’ (Part 2)
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Friday, March 28, 2014
Dear Ebony,
I do not have high hopes, given the way Ebony treats black non-liberals, that you will review my new book, “Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives, Eight Hours.” It is, in the end, about the importance of fathers – and the damage done to a child who grows up without one.
Why do I know you will ignore my book despite its examination of the most important issue facing “black America”? Your magazine treats black conservatives as if they were the enemy, that they bring nothing valid to the discussion.
Ebony magazine, a monthly staple of American black life since 1945, publishes an annual list of the 100-plus (now 150) “Most Influential Blacks in America.” Why not rename it the “Most Influential Liberal Blacks in America”?
Each year, Ebony leaves out conservative, heavyweight black intellectuals like Walter Williams, a distinguished professor of economics and former department chairman at George Mason University. In addition to his 10 books on economics and race relations, Williams writes a popular weekly syndicated column carried in about 200 papers. If another black person ran the econ department at any other major, non-historically-black college or university, I don’t know whom that would be! Yet you ignore Williams – because you think his politics hurt black people.
What if they don’t?
Williams, for example, is a leading critic of the minimum wage, a policy he and many economists argue increases unemployment. The late Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize economics winner, called minimum wage law “one of the most, if not the most, anti-black law on the statute books.” Even if Ebony disagrees, 90 percent of all economists believe minimum wage laws increase unemployment among those with lower skills – the very people the laws purport to help.
At 14 percent black unemployment, versus 7.8 percent nationwide and 6.9 percent for whites, Williams calls this an outrage and blames left-wing policies. Even Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, admitted: “As the chair of the Black Caucus, I’ve got to tell you, we are always hesitant to criticize the president. With 14 percent (black) unemployment, if we had a white president, we’d be marching around the White House. … The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn’t to someone white.”
Each year, Ebony leaves out Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He has only written some 40 books about economics, politics and race relations. His column appears in more than 300 papers, making him one of the most widely read writers in the English language. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) called Sowell “our greatest contemporary philosopher.”
Sowell writes that government anti-poverty programs cause more poverty while inducing a self-defeating dependency on government. “Liberals,” he recently wrote, “try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.
“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.”
Sportscaster Bob Costas, in commenting on the murder-suicide of a black NFL player, called it a case of the “gun culture.” No, it’s the “fatherless culture.” That player, Jovan Belcher, like so many blacks, was raised without a father.
A disproportionate amount of crime comes from homes with an AWOL dad. Today, 72 percent of blacks, 53 percent of Hispanic and 36 percent of whites are born out of wedlock. Look at the murder stats from New York City, with its population of 44 percent whites, 25 percent blacks and 29 percent Hispanics. Yet in 2011, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 91 percent of the homicide suspects. Unless we are prepared to say that blacks and Hispanics are genetically predisposed to commit crime, it is only sensible to ask what the devil is going on here!
And each year, Ebony leaves out Clarence Thomas, who is one of only nine sitting Supreme Court justices. You leave him out, as you do Williams and Sowell, because you don’t like their politics.
How dare you discount these men? Liberal policies of the last 50 years bear no responsibility for causing the nation’s black out-of-wedlock birth rate to go from 25 percent in 1965 to 72 percent today? However you feel about “black conservatives,” their viewpoint deserves airing.
Ebony does the black community a disservice by ignoring it.
I once interviewed Kweisi Mfume, then the head of the NAACP. I asked this question: “As between the presence of white racism and the absence of blacks fathers, which poses the bigger threat to the black community?” Without hesitation, Mfume said, “The absence of black fathers.”
Sincerely yours,
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Thursday, March 27, 2014
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| Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. |
The latest attempt by liberals to help black people is underway in our K-12 urban public schools.
These do-gooders are now defining down socially acceptable behavior for black students in school. Bad behavior is being excused and attempts to hold black kids accountable by enforcing codes of conduct are called racist.
Having a sense of discipline has always been considered a virtue, a redeeming quality, but now its roots are claimed to lie in racism.
White liberal elites have chimed in about school codes of conduct.
The Capital Times newspaper of Madison, Wis., recently chronicled bad behavior by black students in its public schools. In the story, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that racial discrimination in school discipline codes “is a real problem today.”
The white superintendent of the Madison public schools believes that “we need to address head-on our racial bias and the assumptions we make of students who are in the classroom.”
Really? Where I come from, bad behavior has always been unacceptable and is codified not by race but by societal norms to keep chaos from reigning.
These watered-down student codes of conduct sweeping across urban public school systems will not help black parents, kids or communities. Like every other display of liberal empathy, they will have a reverse effect, and it will not be positive.
All anti-social behavior and social pathology is normalized, and to disagree is racial stereotyping.
What these race provocateurs do not want to admit is the reason we are seeing more disruptive behavior in schools is because of poor and ineffective parenting, manifested by liberal policies.
There is a government program today for everything in the black community that used to be the responsibility of the individual, such as parenting. Because of this system, many parents have abdicated what is their most important responsibility and turned it over to the government.
Uncle Sam is now raising their kids.
We take kids out of the home with early childhood education programs, and the government feeds them breakfast, lunch and dinner, and provides after-school programs.
Who needs parents in the black community anymore?
It is a sad reality that more and more parents have turned over their duty to raise their kids to federal and state government programs.
As a result, large numbers of black kids arrive ill-prepared for a social setting such as a school. They simply do not enter a classroom in a state of readiness to learn.
These kids suffer from a lot of emotional baggage spawned by ineffective parenting, which is worsened by white bleeding-heart liberals who use these troubled kids for their liberal agenda. Social liberalism is a sadistic ideology.
White liberal social policies have become the new racism in America.
According to liberal orthodoxy, no one is accountable anymore — except for conservatives, of course. Conservatives get blamed for all the failed liberal initiatives that were designed to help black folks.
Notice how Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin received the dreaded R-word clubbing by the left when he pointed out in his 50-year review report how the failed anti-poverty initiatives started by liberals to help blacks have instead made their lives worse.
Every attempt liberals have made to help black people, with their reliance on government-centered public-policy ideas, has worsened their lot in life.
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Monday, March 24, 2014
"GOP 'Racist' because of 'Southern Strategy'? The UNTAUGHT True Racial History of Democrats and GOP"
 |
| Ku Klux Klan parade, Washington D.C., 1925 |
By "The Real Democratic Party", May 15, 2008
Our nation’s top historians
reveal that the Democratic Party gave us the Ku Klux Klan, Black Codes, Jim
Crow Laws and other repressive legislation which resulted in the multitude of
murders, lynchings, mutilations, and intimidations (of thousands of black and
white Republicans). On the issue of slavery: historians say the Democrats gave
their lives to expand it, the Republicans gave their lives to ban it.
Read the Full story: www.realdemocrathistory.wordpress.com
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Monday, March 10, 2014
By Larry Elder
Michael Sam appears to be a fine young man.
But, no, he isn't the first openly gay male U.S. athlete to play in a major
sport. And "brave"? Can we please dispense with the absurd Jackie
Robinson comparisons? Wake me when a black collegiate pro prospect "comes
out" as a Republican.
A starting senior on
the University of Missouri football team, Sam looks like a mid-round
draft pick in the NFL. He recently "came out" to his teammates, many
of whom said they already knew or suspected. Neither teammates nor coaches had
an issue. Most normal people ask, "Who cares?" or "Can he
play?"
Some, however, liken Sam's "pioneering
status" to that of Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in the
modern baseball major leagues. "Michael Sam has the opportunity to be the
Jackie Robinson of the NFL," said professor Orin Starn, chairman of Duke
University's cultural anthropology department. "Michael Sam is a Jackie
Robinson Moment For NFL," according to the editorial headline in the
Boston Globe. And then there's Fox Sports analyst Brendon Ayanbadejo who said,
"We were there to celebrate his groundbreaking voyage that in many ways is
similar to those of Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks."
Where to begin?
First, Sam isn't even the first openly gay
male athlete to play in a major American pro sport. That distinction goes to
Glenn Burke, who played with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics
from 1976-1979. He might well have played longer and been more successful had
he not clashed with management — not his teammates — over his sexual
orientation.
Burke was "out" to teammates,
management and sportswriters. It is not Burke's fault that both media and
management preferred to say nothing. Dodger management reportedly offered him
money to go through a sham marriage. Burke refused.
Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, whose son died
of AIDS in 1991, allegedly helped engineer a trade of Burke to Oakland because
of a friendship between Lasorda's son and Burke. The trade of the popular,
outgoing player stunned many Dodgers. Team captain Davey Lopes said, "No
one cared about his lifestyle."
Traded during the 1978 season to the Oakland
A's, Burke ended up managed by the openly homophobic Billy Martin. The volatile
manager, according to a documentary about Burke, "baited" him with
gay slurs. Frustrated, and never realizing his potential, Burke left baseball
in 1980 and became a drug addict. A former Oakland teammate, Shooty Babitt,
said, "They ran him straight out of the game." Burke died of AIDS in
1995. He was 42.
Sam will encounter no Billy Martins. He
enters an NFL with a written policy against discrimination based on race,
religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Second, let's discuss Jackie Robinson. Many
of his own teammates signed a petition stating they would not play with him. At
least one petitioner was traded.
Viciously taunted, and sometimes threatened
by players, fans and others, Robinson faced enormous pressure to not only play
well, but to do so while restraining the desire to punch somebody in the face.
Had Robinson not "succeeded," the path for other black players would
have become even more difficult, about which the former UCLA student was quite
aware.
The attention and pressure on Robinson makes
Sam's future career look like a coronation. Robinson's was a pre-television,
pre-Internet, Jim Crow America, where sports fans really paid keen attention to
only three sports — boxing, horseracing and America's pastime, baseball. Most
everybody was watching, many hoping and expecting him to fail. Robinson played
Major League Baseball for 10 years and died early. His death certificate
described the official cause as a heart attack. But it might as well have said
pressure and stress killed him. He was 53.
Yes, Sam will have some challenges. But tell
that to Hank Aaron.
In his autobiography, "I Had A Hammer," Aaron
writes about when he and others were the first black players to play the South
Atlantic League — a minor league affiliated with the majors — five years after
Robinson entered the major league. Southern newspapers, covering the
"Sally League," refused to print pictures of the black players. Taxi
drivers in places like Florida refused to pick them up. Players, Aaron said,
could be arrested simply for being on the street at night.
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