From the monthly archives:

January 2009

firefighterLast month I mentioned that the fire department in New Haven, Connecticut, threw out test results and canceled promotions because too few black firefighters scored high enough to receive promotions. The department was concerned about promoting too many whites, a clear case of racial discrimination.

Firefighter Frank Ricci and others (one hispanic and more than a dozen whites) who scored high on the test sued the city, citing equal protection violations. After a district court judge dismissed the case, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court affirmed the dismissal. Conservative judges on the court sought to have it re-heard. Judge Jose Cabranes defined the issue this way:

“May a municipal employer disregard the results of a qualifying examination, which was carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality, on the ground that the results of that examination yielded too many qualified applicants of one race and not enough of another?”

The appeals court declined to hear the case by a vote of 7 to 6. Download the 72-page opinion (PDF).

Ricci petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, and last week, the court agreed to hear the case.

I’ve written about this issue before. A few years ago, I spent an hour on a conference call with three people at a consulting firm hired by the Denver Fire Department to water down the test so black applicants could pass it at higher rates. They told me, somewhat proudly, they’d been hired to create watered down tests for fire departments in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland, too. I asked them repeatedly what changing the test would entail: more pictures, fewer words, no math…what? I just got jargon. No straight answers. My request for a copy of a sample test was denied.

According to the firm’s web site, the new test would measure a “broader range of job related abilities than traditional written tests” to identify “well-rounded, motivated, and qualified” applicants. In other words, the goal was to play down what apparently made blacks look bad — abstract reasoning ability — and play up “interpersonal” skills.

I also blogged about a fire department that eliminated a swimming test because too many black applicants can’t swim. Can you believe it? Instead of eliminating non-swimming applicants or even doing the paternal thing – sending them to swimming lessons like dependent children – the department eliminates an important requirement for the job!

I wish blacks would protest in the streets and burn cars over this. How much more demeaning can you get? Lowering standards for black applicants? What happened to “We shall overcome” and being treated equally? And all that talk about being given a chance, the same chance as everyone else? Black America should be in an uproar over being perceived as stupid and incapable.

But, no. Government-wide lowered standards for blacks don’t raise anyone’s blood pressure but mine.

Ricci v. DeStefano is an important case. Even if the Supreme Court sides with Ricci and rules that throwing out the test results because too many whites would get promotions is unconstitutional, however, the practice won’t disappear altogether. In some form or another, the government will find a way, any way, to lower the bar for blacks and keep it raised high for everybody else.

Those who fought and died during the civil rights movement must be so proud.

Murder, Marriage, and Hamster Wheels

by La Shawn on January 7, 2009

in Cultural Decline

Heather Mac Donald hits another one out of the park with a parsing of a New York Times article about the “youth crisis” of rising murder rates among blacks. Nothing new. Young black men kill each other and will continue doing so, fueled by factors like fatherlessness and family instability.

Generally speaking, there’s no one around to teach them how to be decent men and take responsibility for themselves and offspring they produce. The women in the family can’t or apparently don’t want to socialize them with the expectation of getting married and making a home of their own for themselves and their wives and children. They don’t learn how to master their impulses or direct their natural aggression to productive pursuits. And on and on.

You know my views on the matter. If not, check the archives. Search “fatherless,” “fatherlessness,” and variations on the theme.

I wanted to point you to Mac Donald’s column. Her critiques are always devastating, from my perspective. Too bad she doesn’t pop up in mainstream publications more often. In her latest City Journal article, “The Times’s Crime Confusions Persist,” she advises President-elect Barack Obama to take a new approach to reducing crime rates. If your time is short today, don’t waste it reading this post. Go straight to the article.

Mac Donald points out something I’m sure a lot of people know: the disparity between white and black homicides (10-to-1) actually is greater than the numbers show. That’s because the government includes hispanics in the “white” crime perpetrator rate category. “Hispanic crime rates are between three and four times that of whites—meaning that if one excluded the Hispanic homicides from the white rate, the black-white differential would be even larger than ten to one,” she writes.

Curiously, hispanic victims of crime are broken out into a separate category. This tactic masks the real horror (substitute sadness, atrocity, whatever works for you) of violent crime among blacks (and hispanics). That’s the point, I suspect.

American boysMac Donald also gets to the root of the problem, one so many people tend to ignore or downplay: marriage. A stabilizing and civilizing influence on men and boys and the conduit through which values and valuable life/family lessons are passed down, marriage is a rarity among young blacks with children. They don’t even expect to be married. They have sex, make babies and excuses, and pass this sorry and disrespectful behavior on to their children.

But talking about it won’t change anything, It makes for interesting conversation, though. It’s like looking at a train about to wreck. Terrible. Awful. But what can you do to stop it? It’s going too fast, and it’s a lot bigger than you are.

Mac Donald writes:

“Liberal policymakers and pundits have spilled buckets of ink over the years promoting social-service programs as the solution to crime, yet—like the Times’s recent editorial—those opinion-setters cannot squeeze out one word about the most effective anticrime (and antipoverty) strategy: marriage. The marriage imperative civilizes boys. By contrast, in a world where it is unusual for a man to marry the mother of his children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility: you are responsible for your children. Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits. In 2005, the national black illegitimacy rate was 70 percent, and it approached 90 percent in many inner cities (compared with a white illegitimacy rate of 25 percent, and as low as 6 percent in some urban areas, like the District of Columbia). The disappearance of marriage from the black community is a social cataclysm.

“Some highly structured, values-based youth programs, like the Boy Scouts, can provide boys a surrogate for the paternal authority that they lack at home; society is right to support these lifelines. But they cannot possibly bring crime down significantly among blacks in the absence of a cultural shift toward marriage. True, no one knows yet how to revive marriage in the black community. But given the imperative of doing so, you would think that somewhere in the flood of recommendations for more useless government social programs, a little space could be reserved for promoting the idea of a marriage movement.”

Mac Donald has and isn’t afraid to use common sense and put her thoughts down on paper for public consumption. Obviously, being called a racist doesn’t intimidate her in the least. Courageous and honest people are needed in a crisis, people, and but too many of us are faint-hearted.

The standard liberal solution to society’s problems in general and social pathology among blacks in particular strays far away from confronting the individual. Well-intentioned but ultimately useless social programs funded by taxpayers make liberals feel like they’re doing something. The truth is, we’re just spinning our wheels like hamsters. The character of individuals, not so much the dynamics of the group, must change.

P.S.: Instead of sending “dissenting” e-mail to me or Heather Mac Donald, send it to the men doing the killing and the men and women dooming black babies to fatherless childhoods. They deserve your scorn. We don’t.

How much do people really care that in California, illegal aliens are not only not kicked out of the country, but they receive in-state tuition to tax-supported colleges and universities? At the very least, it’s something to blog about. :?

As you may know, illegal aliens are in the U.S. illegally. That is, they’ve broken the law to get here and their continued presence is a violation of that law. In 2001, the California legislature passed a law that allowed in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens who attend a California high school for at least three years and graduate. American citizens who live outside the state and wish to attend school here must pay out-of-state tuition.

A group has sued, calling the law unconstitutional on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates against out-of-state students. The California Supreme Court will hear the case. (Source)

Nicholas Espiritu, a lawyer for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said these illegal alien students “have earned the right to be there” because they come from “very low-income areas and underperforming schools” but they’ve found ways “to really achieve and succeed in education despite almost every roadblock imaginable being put in their path.”

Comments like that would have sent me over the edge a couple of years ago (the right to be there?) Today, I can’t generate much ire. In the scheme of things, is it worth getting upset over? After I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil after my three score and ten, who’ll remember or even care about my views on the country’s illegal immigration mess? Why raise my blood pressure about something over which I have no control?

In March, the same court will hear arguments on Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional. Now that’s something to get worked up over. Isn’t it? What would happen if the court rules the law unconstitutional, allowing homosexual “marriage” in California? Will the sky fall? No. Such a decision would represent a mere cog in the wheel of degradation. God isn’t preserving his judgment until a certain point in the future. It’s happening now. Be prepared, and don’t forget about what’s really important.

Update: Reader Matthew J. e-mails: “California has a lot of military personnel who have kids who attend California public schools for three years. Unless that military member changes his/her residency to California (which some don’t want to do for say, tax reasons), their child—a legal child—must pay out of state tuition if they attend a California university.”

Ultrasound Before the Slaughter

by La Shawn on January 2, 2009

in Child Killing

3D ultrasoundWhen I was a younger woman, I fled my home state of South Carolina like a bat out of hell. But the older I get, the more I like it. Especially after reading this.

There’s a law in SC that requires child killing “providers” to give women the option of seeing an ultrasound of their unborn babies before the slaughter. (SC isn’t the only state with this requirement.)

SC lawmakers now want to make sure women have in hand a list of clinics that provide free ultrasounds (including the cool new four-dimensional ones?). They’ve “prefiled” a bill.

I’m sure it’s much more difficult to be casual about killing the baby once the woman sees the little life inside her. Technology has illuminated what once was covered in darkness. The “clump of cells” and “blob of tissue” are revealed to be recognizable human beings. I’m grateful for it. Women who don’t want their babies surely can endure nine months of gestation to bless a couple who desperately wants a child. Exercise that choice.

Update: Wow. Somebody posted this link on Stumble Upon. I didn’t know kids were living like that. Mad traffic. Thanks to whoever (whomever? whatever!). ;)

Rest easy this weekend, everybody.

Young Stars Read the New Testament

by La Shawn on January 2, 2009

in Faith, Pop Culture

Next Generation New Testament

Looks like major Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson is hitching a ride on the powerful Disney-esque marketing machine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I just think it’s…wild, weird, and smart!

Young stars like “American Idol” winner Jordin Sparks, Sean Astin of “Lord of the Rings,” (Astin’s only a few years younger than I am – does that mean I’m young, too?) curly-haired cutie Corbin Bleu of Disney’s “High School Musical,” and Emily Osment and Cody Linley of Disney’s “Hannah Montana” (which my 10-year-old niece can’t get enough of) read the New Testament in the recording “The Word of Promise: Next Generation – New Testament.”

What TN’s doing certainly isn’t new. Dramatic readings of the Bible, especially by well-known celebrities, must be hot sellers. If this product encourages more young people to “read” the Bible, I’m all for it. No doubt some of the audio Bible’s participants are Christians, though I won’t assume all are what we Bible thumpers call “born again.”

Included in the set of 20 CDs is a 75-minute “behind the scenes” DVD with interviews.

Speaking of Jordin Sparks, she earned major kudos from me after she defended “purity” rings on the Video Music Awards show. Some Brit joked about the Jonas Brothers wearing them, and Sparks (who wears one herself) reportedly said, “I just have one thing to say about promise rings. It’s not bad to wear a promise ring…because not everybody – guy or girl – wants to be a slut.” Some in the audience cheered.

Can You Imagine If…

by La Shawn on January 2, 2009

in Liberals

just another thugI noticed the muted responses from homosexual and feminist bloggers to the gang-rape of a lesbian. I wondered why they weren’t up in arms, ravenously ready to hurl stinging yet passionate words dripping with anger, denouncing this brutal and senseless act of violence against one of their own.

Then it dawned on me. The races of the gang-raping thugs: three hispanic and one black. I’d venture a guess that the victim is white.

At this point in my blogging “career” (five years and counting), it’s sort of tedious to do this, but I’ll do it anyway. Can you imagine the national…no forget that…the international outrage over this gang-rape if the perpetrators had been fair-haired and white? (That it’s national news at all is surprising.) Throw in a pair or two of blue eyes for good measure. Man, that’s all we’d be reading and hearing for the next several months. (How fast can you say Duke Lacrosse?) Diatribes against the white racist patriarchy, white supremacists, how California’s Proposition 8 is to blame for the “backlash” against homosexuals, and on and on.

But the reactions I’ve read so far in the media and on blogs are stunningly restrained. The facts, and hardly any emotion. By next week, nobody will be talking or writing about this story.

Human nature never ceases to amaze me. Even though it’s mind-numbingly predictable, I’m always amazed that I know it so well.