march 21, 2008

PJB: A Brief for Whitey - link

By Patrick J. Buchanan

How would he pull it off? I wondered.

How would Barack explain to his press groupies why he sat silent in a pew for 20 years as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered racist rants against white America for our maligning of Fidel and Gadhafi, and inventing AIDS to infect and kill black people?

How would he justify not walking out as Wright spewed his venom about “the U.S. of K.K.K. America,” and howled, “God damn America!”

My hunch was right. Barack would turn the tables.

Yes, Barack agreed, Wright’s statements were “controversial,” and “divisive,” and “racially charged,” reflecting a “distorted view of America.”

But we must understand the man in full and the black experience out of which the Rev. Wright came: 350 years of slavery and segregation.

Barack then listed black grievances and informed us what white America must do to close the racial divide and heal the country.

The “white community,” said Barack, must start “acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds … .”

And what deeds must we perform to heal ourselves and our country?

The “white community” must invest more money in black schools and communities, enforce civil rights laws, ensure fairness in the criminal justice system and provide this generation of blacks with “ladders of opportunity” that were “unavailable” to Barack’s and the Rev. Wright’s generations.

What is wrong with Barack’s prognosis and Barack’s cure?

Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, “everybody but the rioters themselves.”

Was “white racism” really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said — that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.

Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

” … the agitation for “diversity in philanthropy” isn’t about donating to causes that help minorities. It’s a jobs program for college-educated minorities who want to work in nonprofits.”

From “The Philanthropy Shakedown”

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Give to ‘minority-led’ charities, or else.

Dec 30, 2008 -

Wall Street Journal - link to original article

In 2006, Publix Supermarket Charities donated almost $30 million to causes that included Habitat for Humanity, the March of Dimes and United Way. But Al Piña isn’t satisfied. Mr. Piña, the chairman of the Florida Minority Community Reinvestment Coalition, believes Publix isn’t giving enough to people of color who donate to other people of color. Welcome to the latest trend in racial extortion.

According to a study that Mr. Piña commissioned from the California-based activist group Greenlining, Publix gave only 2.81% of its grants in 2006 to “minority-led organizations.” Minority-led is defined as groups whose staff and board of directors are 50% racial minority and whose mission and programs “are aimed predominantly towards communities of color.” Overall, Florida’s top 10 foundations (as measured by asset size) didn’t fare much better, giving on average 5.48% of their grants to minority-led outfits.

But who cares? Doesn’t it matter more what these groups accomplish rather than who runs them? Mr. Piña is outraged by the suggestion. “No one can convince me that United Way provides better service directly to minorities than a minority-led organization,” he told us recently. “We’re in the trenches. There is no way that [nonminorities] can connect and have more traction and effect than organizations with leaders who live in those communities day in and day out.”

Mr. Piña’s claim would seem, at the very least, in need of some statistical validation. But then Greenlining’s survey doesn’t ask where the leaders of “minority-led” organizations reside. We’d guess that plenty of them live comfortably outside of Florida’s worst neighborhoods. The Florida report, like the studies Greenlining has done in other states, makes clear that the agitation for “diversity in philanthropy” isn’t about donating to causes that help minorities. It’s a jobs program for college-educated minorities who want to work in nonprofits.

As for foundations that focus on nonminority causes, Mr. Piña says they need to rethink their priorities. “We need to create a leadership shift, to change how foundations view inner-city revitalization versus giving to the opera versus giving to protect the Everglades.” Philanthropies like the Turner Global Foundations, whose cash goes largely to environmental protection, had better get with the program. That means you, Ted.

To accomplish this redistribution of charity, Greenlining says Florida foundations “should track diversity information for grantee organizations, either voluntarily or through legislative mandates.” Last year, Greenlining almost succeeded in getting such legislation passed in California. It was stopped only when California’s largest foundations agreed to pay off California’s minority-led organizations. This month the foundations announced the details and cost of that plan — to the tune of about $30 million. Greenlining’s director, Orson Aguillar, told us “that’s a good start” but the money isn’t “a substitute for legislation.”

Mr. Piña worries that his own philanthropy shakedown won’t be as successful. He says the Florida legislature’s “extreme right-wing methodology” will make it difficult to force this issue into law. So Mr. Piña is heading to the U.S. Congress, and especially the Black, Hispanic and Asian Caucuses, to gin up support. It’s about time that leaders of the foundation world — those who care about results more than politics — stand up and call this the race-baiting money grab it is.

El cantautor dice tener esperanzas en el presidente Barack Obama: “que Estados Unidos haya tenido una ley de derechos civiles conquistada en los años sesenta y que ahora tenga un negro presidente, es más de lo que hemos logrado nosotros en Cuba, donde los negros aún no tienen ni poder real ni verdaderas oportunidades”.

From “Se estancó el socialismo cubano, dice Pablo Milanés”

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Study Finds Killings Rose More Than Five Times Overall Rate; Cuts in Law Enforcement, Youth Programs Are Cited as Factors

By GARY FIELDS

Link to original article in Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON — Murders of African-American teenagers have risen 39% since 2000 and 2001, according to a report due out Monday.

Homicides in which blacks ages 14 to 17 years old were the victims rose to 927 over the two-year period of 2006-07, the last years for which statistics are available, compared with 666 during 2000-01, according to the study by criminal-justice professors at Boston’s Northeastern University. The 39% increase is much greater than the rise in overall homicides, which jumped 7.4% from 2000-01 to 2006-07.

Murders rose among black teens in 2006 and 2007 as overall homicides dropped compared with the previous year. And the 2000-07 rate of increase among black teens was more than twice the rate of increase among white teens, the study found.

The authors explained that they compared two-year periods to try to limit a statistical skewing of the numbers that might have occurred if they had simply looked at differences in 2000 and 2007.

The data confirm a pattern identified earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal, which found that while most communities in the U.S. were seeing a decline in homicides, many African-American neighborhoods were continuing to see an increase. The Northeastern University research shows that the pattern is more pronounced among juveniles.

James Alan Fox, co-author of the study, attributed the numbers to a variety of issues, including cuts in funding for local law-enforcement programs that were credited with lowering the nation’s record murder rates in the 1990s. “It’s hard to pin down cause and effect,” Mr. Fox said.

An overwhelming proportion of the killings involve black-on-black crime. The reasons for high rates of violence in African-American communities have been the subject of debate among criminologists. Some attribute it to the migration of prison culture, with large numbers of incarcerated young men returning to their communities.

Mr. Fox said the cuts in law-enforcement programs and activities geared toward youth disproportionately affect African-Americans because they are more likely than their white counterparts to come from communities where there is inadequate adult supervision, high rates of single-parent homes, inferior schools and widespread gang activity.

“Cuts in support for youth have a much greater impact on black families who don’t have alternatives,” Mr. Fox said.

Write to Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com