Gavin Newsom and the Illogic of Liberalism

(CNN) March 13, 2019: 

After signing an executive order that will place a moratorium on the death penalty in California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom gave an emotional explanation of his decision Wednesday, saying he could not morally allow executions in the Golden State to go forward.

"It's a very emotional place that I stand in," he said, noting that the subject was once "an abstract question" for him, but now he is "the backstop" for any execution that takes place in California. "And so I am expressing this is not from (a) paradigm of politics. It's not a situational conversation for me. This is about who I am as a human being. ... To me this is the right thing to do."

Newsom noted that the only thing standing in the way of executions resuming in California is the judicial review of the state's lethal injection procedure, which could be completed soon. Citing a National Academy of Sciences report estimating that 1 out of every 25 people on death row is innocent, Newsom said he could not countenance the odds of putting an innocent person to death.

"If that's the case, that means if we move forward executing 737 people in California, we will have executed roughly 30 people that are innocent," Newsom said. "I don't know about you. I can't sign my name to that. I can't be party to that. I won't be able to sleep at night."

See the full article here.

“….the subject was once "an abstract question" for him,…”

There, in one off the cuff remark – the truth spoken accidentally - is the essence of what’s wrong with liberalism.  Nothing matters until it happens to me.  I find it stunning that a man of Newsom’s age and resume is only just now pondering the weighty question of wrongful conviction and the death penalty,  but I ought to be used to it by now.  How many of our laws, named for the predictable victims of predictable crimes, are born as a consequence of a liberal’s stunned discovery that they too can be a victim?  Too much thinking in the abstract and not enough putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, just like we see with the Left’s nonchalant attitude towards the victims of illegals.  That said, it’s no surprise to me whatsoever that, having had his epiphany about executing “innocent” people who are on death row, California’s Liberal-in-Chief still gets it wrong. 

If I were the governor of California, or any state for that matter, and if I believed reports that 1 out of every 25 people on death row is innocent, it might occur to me that there is something seriously wrong with our justice system that requires immediate investigation, because our multi-layered appeals system is supposed to be the fail-safe against wrongful convictions, right?  If everyone is doing their job appropriately and with integrity, there should be virtually NO innocent people sitting on death row after all appeals have been exhausted.  How is it possible that this isn’t the case?  If Gavin Newsom truly believes that 4% of the people on death row are innocent, then he must also believe that our appeals system is broken, and yet in his “emotional” proclamation against the death penalty he proposes to do nothing about it.  No help will be coming for the “1 in 25 innocent people” who are languishing in prison because Gavin Newsom thinks his job is done by sparing them from the death penalty.  This is the Left’s idea of what it means to be heroic.

So what could Newsom do?  As someone keenly interested in the subject of crime and punishment, I’ve seen dozens of cases where people have been wrongfully convicted, though how many are on death row is a separate question (more on that later).  In nearly every case the system failed due to either human error or corruption.  The correction for that is surprisingly simple and yet agonizingly absent.  It’s called “A-C-C-O-U-N-T-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y.”  Every case of wrongful conviction should be thoroughly studied to determine what went wrong, and if there were mistakes or wrongdoing those responsible should be held to account by losing their jobs, their licenses or by legal punishment if that’s appropriate.  But we don’t live in an age of consistent accountability.  Nowadays, when convictions are overturned due to mistakes and malfeasance, the victims are compensated by large payouts from other innocents:  the taxpayers; and all too often the inept and corrupt keep doing what they do.  Where is Gavin Newsom’s outrage about that?  He has no outrage because he’s a voluntary player in that very system.

Do I believe 1 in 25 people on death row are wrongfully convicted?  Actually, no – not on death row.  That’s because I believe prosecutors tend not to seek the death penalty unless they have a mountain of damning evidence and because the system is weighted in favor of the accused.  That doesn’t mean it never happens, but I believe that it’s exceptionally rare, especially in these days of modern science.  But what I believe is irrelevant to my criticism of Gavin Newsom, because his claim is that he believes 4% of people on death row are wrongfully convicted. 

By the way, I am a proponent of the death penalty because it’s what some people deserve.  We shouldn’t have to indefinitely feed, clothe and house people who disregard the rights of others and kill for greed and pleasure.  They voluntarily forfeited their rights to live, in my humble opinion.  But I do believe that wrongful convictions do occur and are a blight on us as a society, and what people need to understand is that there’s no contradiction in supporting the death penalty if you also adhere to the principle that holding people accountable for their actions keeps the system working as it was intended so that “justice” really means justice.

~CW

Dear Joel Mathis: Liberalism, Not Nationalism, Killed Compassion in America

         Here is a photo of what the “free” press allows me to freely share when I search for images of the illegal immigrant caravan/invasion heading to America.

In his essay published in The Week magazine, self-described “liberal” Joel Mathis ponders the question, “Has nationalism killed compassion in America?”  The piece is an unintentional tribute to Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”  Follow along, and you’ll see what I mean.  My remarks are in red.

There's been some heavy lifting lately, in the non-Trumpist precincts of our politics, to rescue the idea of "nationalism" from the clutches of President Trump and his alt-right followers. Lest liberals and progressives be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we're reminded in books and essays that nationalism has its uses — forming the glue that provides us with social cohesion and a welfare state, among other goods.  These "nice-guy nationalists" make good points. There's just one problem: America's best-known nationalist is the president. And he's not much interested in social cohesion.

In the interest of time I’ll leave aside the bizarre claim that “a welfare state” is one of the benefits of nationalism in order to focus on the even stranger claim that it is Trump who isn’t interested in social cohesion.  Ever since Barack Obama emerged on the national political scene the Left has perfected the devious art of projecting their own sins on the opposition and then attacking them for it, and this notion that it is Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, who divide us is one of their most cynical projections.  Statistics show that race relations began their steep decline under Obama, the predictable consequence of Obama intentionally stoking racial tensions (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”)  Moreover, who could plausibly deny that the entirety of the Left’s political strategy is vested in the politics of division when Democrats are continually pitting minorities against whites, women against men, poor against rich, and when it’s become the Left’s norm to openly disparage “old, white men?”  While the Right promotes the melting pot, the Left promotes multiculturalism, yet  history proves that social cohesion fails when immigrants reject assimilation or embrace the Left’s tales of perpetual victimhood. 

"You know what I am? I'm a nationalist," Trump declared Monday night in Texas. "Okay? I'm a nationalist."

To get a sense of what this means in Trump's hands, it's good to take a look at the so-called "migrant caravan" currently marching north from Guatemala to the United States border. From the accounts of people on the ground, it appears this caravan is composed largely of people fleeing deprivation and violence in their home countries. It's the sort of thing you or I would do if our families were similarly endangered; ardent nationalists have decided to treat these fleeing families like an invading military.

"An assault!" Trump told told the Texas rally.

"Migrant hordes," writer Rod Dreher blogged at The American Conservative.

Even The Associated Press got in the act, calling the caravan a "ragtag army of the poor" in a tweet that was later deleted.

But the people forming the caravan are not an army. They aren't seeking collectively to capture land or dislodge governments. They are merely individuals seeking a better life and traveling in the direction they think most likely to help them find it.

"Treating this as an 'invasion' is a bad idea, and it's going to end horribly if it is treated such as that way," an independent voter said Monday on Fox News, and that's perhaps the most sensible statement made on any cable news network this year. 

Parents sometimes refer to medicine as “candy” to entice their children to take it, and this psychology is not lost on the sly Left when they try to manipulate their way past our natural defenses by insisting that we not call things what they really are.  Illegal aliens are “undocumented,” insists the liberals in the Orwellian speak that we’ve become accustomed to.  And now an invasion is not an invasion.  It’s just an innocent, happy parade of people wanting a better life.  I might prefer to live on the French Riviera but I don’t gather 13,999 of my friends and march on France.  The U.S. has a process for considering applications for asylum.  Purposefully ignoring that process in a calculated effort to take advantage of loopholes in our immigration system and create chaos at our border is what makes this an invasion, and Democrats – always the useful idiots - are cheering it on. 

Nationalism may provide us with social cohesion — and that's good — but it is also a garment best worn lightly. That's a tricky, perhaps impossible, expectation: In many cases, nationalism asks us to disregard our own moral sense in favor of group loyalty.

Morality tells us that when people are hungry, we offer them food.

Morality tells us that when people flee violence, we offer them protection.

Morality tells us that all humans are worthy of moral consideration, no matter their origins or circumstances.

First, morality tells us that when you are hungry or need protection you don’t break down the door and help yourself to what others have worked hard for.  You knock on the door and politely ask for help, at which time it is the homeowner’s right to determine whether your need is genuine and whether you are an innocent victim or just looking for an easier way at someone else’s expense.  In America we call that respecting the rights of others, and that is the moral thing to do.  Another moral tradition we once had in America was to reject the evil temptation to falsely impugn – for political gain -  peoples’ motives by coyly suggesting that ethnicity or financial status is the reason for their objection to thousands of people marching on our border.  Never mind that this charge is rich coming from people who’ve popularized the denouncement of “old, white men;” it is the rejection of U.S. sovereignty and U.S. law that’s inspired Trump and conservatives to condemn the “caravan,” and it is Mathis himself who stoops to immorality by using the group’s shared ethnicity as an excuse to pull the tired, old race card.  By the way, wouldn’t you love to know how many poor, uneducated, non-English-speaking immigrants are included among Mr. Mathis’ close circle of friends? 

Nationalism often — not always, but often — asks us to disregard those moral considerations, or at least to quiet them a little bit, to place a higher importance on defending the integrity of arbitrarily drawn borders than we do the lives of people trying to escape inhumane situations. Nationalism tends to divide humans into "us" and "them" and tells us "they" are worth less. Frequently — and Trump has based his entire political persona on this idea — it tells us that "they" are probably bad people. Why? Mostly because they're not us. How do you get to be us? Well, it's all kind of an accident of birth, really. At best, it's absurd. In many cases, nationalism is simply racist.

There it is again of course – the race card.  The truth is, Trump has based his political persona on the concept of putting America first.  Not white America.  Not black America.  Not male or female America.  Just America.  You can see it.  You can feel it.  It’s palpable, and his focus on treating the country as a whole, rather than dividing us into subgroups as the Left always does, flies in the face of these trite accusations of racism.  Is he nationalistic according to its real definition?  Yes, in the sense that he wants to promote our interests and our culture.  There’s nothing wrong with that unless you’re a leftist mired in the standard creed of loathing America.  As for “arbitrarily drawn borders,” one could say that the borders of Mr. Mathis’ property are just as arbitrarily drawn, yet that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t fight for them if necessary. 

The nice-guy nationalists advocate a rather bloodless view of nationalism's benefits, but the history of the last century, with its wars and genocides, provides plenty of evidence that nationalism can turn very bloody, indeed. Still, it probably is utopian to think we poor humans can get very far without organizing along national lines. And "Morality Is Complex and Transcends National Lines!" is a poor riposte, politically, to the pithiness of "America First!" This column isn't going to win any elections.

The caravan keeps advancing north. So what to do? How do we balance the benefits of nationalism — and the legitimate obligation to protect our citizens and their well-being — against the need to look out for our neighbors beyond our borders?

In the short term, you can treat the caravan like what it is — a collection of needy, dispossessed humans fleeing dire circumstances — instead of as an invading army to be met with force. Instead of cutting off aid to the caravaners' countries of origin, let's figure out how to help them, now, where they are, before they get to our border. Difficult? Sure. Worth it? Probably.

In the long term, the United States can consider how its policies may actually create the refugees it so desperately wants to reject. U.S. policies, for example, helped create the circumstances that allowed the MS-13 street gang to flourish in Central America. Maybe we should do less of that kind of thing?

In the same vein, perhaps Trump — who needs to serve American interests — might come to understand he does not best serve an "America First" vision with his preferred "we-win-you-lose" deals with our allies and rivals. America's security and prosperity can best be enhanced by assisting the security and prosperity of people around the world. It's that vision, not some utopian altruism, that has guided much of the postwar world order that Trump seems ready to undo.

The migrant caravan is still hundreds of miles from the American border, but it's not too late to seek constructive solutions. Right now, though, it's the regular nationalists — not the nice-guy kind — who are running the show.

What intrigued me most about this piece was the headline asking if nationalism has killed compassion in America because I see things quite differently.  I think it is liberalism, not nationalism, that’s killing compassion in this country.  Liberals tell us that instead of teaching a man to fish so that he becomes self-sufficient that we must fish for him whether we want to or not.  We get no say in determining whether the man is capable of fishing for himself.  If he has no fish, that alone, we are told, is proof that he is entitled to our fish.  And if we have the nerve to point out that perhaps the man was napping rather than fishing or that he refuses to learn to fish, well then we are racists who should not be allowed to speak. We are told that our borders are “arbitrary,” that the people who come here by the millions to use our schools, our hospitals, our roads, our police, our courts and who – by virtue of evading the system – sometimes bring crime and disease, just want a better life.  Our own desires for a better life are of no consequence.  Conservatives’ accounting for the hundreds of billions of dollars illegal immigration costs us as Americans are rejected as “lies” by the Left, while they refuse to engage in any truthful accounting themselves.  The actions of the Left with respect to illegal immigration engender feelings of powerlessness in those of us who believe that we are entitled to have a say in the immigration policies of our nation, and who believe all our laws should be enforced, not just those that are convenient to the Left.  To whatever extent compassion is dead in this nation, THIS – this political game-playing with our laws and immigration policy – THIS is what has killed it.  Turn the mirror around, Mr. Mathis, and take a good, long look.  This is what you and your leftist friends have wrought.

One last question for Mr. Mathis and any liberals who happen to read this: 

Have you considered the moral implications of what happens now to the people truly in need of asylum after you’ve made such a mockery of our generosity?  No?  I thought not.

~CW

P.S. 

Links in Mr. Mathis' original piece did not come through when pasted here.  Follow the link in the first paragraph to see those, if you want to be extra bored.

If you want to leave a comment on this post please visit  The Pesky Truth, where it is re-posted.  I am unable to respond to comments on Blogger.

Tales of Liberalism’s Destructiveness Hidden In WaPo Stories

I don’t typically read The Washington Post because I prefer my news without the annoying taint of liberal bias, but a while back I came across two unrelated WaPo stories by chance, and in the process of reading I found myself repeatedly struck by the glossed-over details that tell an important story of their own.  Those details demonstrate how the Left’s influence leads to destructive life choices and government policies that set the stage for needless tragedy which – just taking a wild guess here – might be the reason that the dedicated journalists at the WaPo choose to dig only so deep.

The first article, dated June 19, 2017, tells the story of a young Virginia man who, according to police, used his car to harass and attempt to run down a group of Muslim teenagers as they were on their way back from a 3 a.m. outing to MacDonald’s:

“Killing of Muslim teen near Va. mosque stemmed from road rage, police say”

From the article it is unclear what led up to the altercation between Darwin Martinez Torres, 22, and the group of teenagers who were either walking or on bicycles, but readers are told that an altercation took place and that eventually Martinez Torres got out of his car and attacked 17-year old Nabra Hassanen with a baseball bat.  He then forced her into his car and took off.  Later that afternoon her body was found in a pond near Martinez Torres’ home.  She had been beaten to death.

Per the WaPo, the girl’s distraught father “said that he feels sure his daughter was killed because of her religion.”  Police, however, seem to have information indicating that the attack was motivated by road rage.  From the article:

“Martinez Torres spoke through a Spanish translator to answer a judge’s questions. He was appointed a public defender…  U.S. immigration officials requested that a “detainer” be placed on him at the county jail, meaning they are interested in possible future deportation proceedings.  Family members said the man worked in construction. He is Salvadoran and has a 4-year-old son and a girlfriend. He attended school briefly in the United States.”

That’s the story, but here are the between-the-lines parts of the story that stuck out to me:

1.  Martinez Torres is an ILLEGAL ALIEN according to coverage  of the story in The New York Times the next day, surprise, surprise. One would think that with the fierce debate currently taking place on the relationship between crime and illegal immigration in this country, that newsworthy tidbit would warrant mention in a news article, but apparently it is too much of a leap for WaPo to assume  that a man who needs a Spanish interpreter and has an immigration office detainer attached to him is an ILLEGAL ALIEN who all but certainly strolled across our borders during the Obama administration and was immediately and conveniently forgotten by Obama’s immigration enforcement.  Even the leftwing NYT found that part of the story newsworthy, but being a liberal-run propaganda arm of the Democrat Party they naturally used the Left’s politically-cleansed term, “undocumented immigrant,” to describe this person who entered the U.S. illegally and now appears to be responsible for a girl’s abduction and brutal death (eight days after this article was posted Daily News reported that Martinez Torres had been previously accused in a sex assault case and had ties to the MS-13 gang).  Surprised?  Me neither.

2.  The double last name, Martinez Torres, suggests to me that this man is likely the product of an unmarried couple, as so many troublesome young men turn out to be thanks to the influence of liberalism on attitudes about marriage. Similar background details emerge in story after story of violent young adults, yet liberal journalists are strangely lacking in curiosity about the coincidental connection between violence and the disappearance of the traditional family.

3.  Martinez Torres has a 4-year old son “with a girlfriend.” That’s just great isn’t it?  Hope they started teaching him his letters early on, because he has quite a long name to learn, but that’s the least of this poor child’s problems.  As the product of yet another non-traditional union that liberals will tell us there’s nothing wrong with, he already had one big strike against him, and now his father may be on his way to prison.

4.  There were approximately 15 Muslim teens walking and biking to McDonald’s at 3:40 a.m. on the morning of the altercation/abduction. According to reporters Justin Jouvenal and Julie Zauzmer, this is what all teenagers do.  Apparently Jouvenal and Zauzmer grew up in very permissive households, because I wasn’t allowed to roam the streets with my friends at 3:00 a.m when I was a teen, nor did I allow my two sons to do so because it sounds like an invitation for trouble.   I understand their outing had to do with the observance of Ramadan in preparation of the coming fast that morning, but I also understand that parents anticipating hungry teens can make food available so that there’s no need for a large group of teens to wander the streets unsupervised at 3 a.m.  If that sounds a bit like blaming the victim please be aware that I am not one of these people who subscribes to the belief that all victims are to be held 100% blameless for their fate.  My heart goes out to this girl and her family and what happened was indisputably undeserved, but it does us no good to pretend that a bit of common sense and parental supervision might not have made the difference that day.

5.  Without citing specific reasons the police labeled this a road rage incident, which leads me to wonder if the teens were blocking the road or were slow or uncooperative about moving out of the road when Martinez Torres came upon them. That’s just speculation on my part, but I’m guessing that this fairly large group of 15 teens wasn’t walking single file on the sidewalk.  They may not have anticipated any cars to be on the road at that time.  Police said there was a verbal altercation that did not involve racial or religious slurs, so it’s hard to imagine what else these strangers would be arguing about if not some dispute over the road.  My thought:  don’t block the roads and whether you’re in a car or on foot, respect the right of way.

In sum, here is how I, as a conservative, wrote this story in my head:

An (most likely) unmarried girl/woman gives birth to a male child in El Salvador, because marriage is old fashioned and fathers are unnecessary.  He grows up in poverty without a male role model in the home and probably surrounded by violence, and he becomes the “angry young man” that Elvis sang about in his haunting song, “In the Ghetto,” likely to inflict violence and/or die by violence.  This young male, with all his baggage and two last names, is encouraged to make his way to the U.S. where he can simply walk across the border because liberals believe a border wall is ugly and mean-spirited, and besides they would rather spend that money nurturing the sheep’s addiction to the welfare state (Oops – did I say that out loud?).  Once inside he can disappear into the country without fear of being hassled if he keeps his nose clean, because liberals in the U.S. believe that it is better to subject American citizens to whatever violence, diseases or poverty the illegals bring with them than to commit the obscene offense of allowing police to identify illegals by – gasp – profiling.  God forbid any citizen should ever be pulled over and asked to show their drivers’ license and then sent on their way, because this would be a horrendous experience that might require years of psychological counseling.  As far as keeping his nose clean, that didn’t happen with Martinez.   Just a week prior to allegedly killing Miss Hassanen, Martinez Torres was accused of sexually assaulting another woman as well as punching and choking her in front of her child.   According to the CPS report the woman said she didn’t want to press any charges against Martinez Torres, telling authorities in the hospital that she feared her attacker, “…who was in the MS-13 gang.”

Why do you suppose police did not detain this violent, dangerous illegal alien?  Why not notify ICE and get him off the streets?  What kinds of policies and influences might have led to such flawed decisions and abdication of duty?  Instead Martinez Torres was left to continue his trespassing upon this country and to beat and murder a 17-year old girl who should have been safely tucked away in her home at 3:00 a.m. that fateful morning.  And based upon the surviving teens’ claims that Martinez Torres attempted to run them down with his car, the scope of the crime – ultimately committed by Martinez Torres but with every step of the way paved by “well-meaning” liberals – could have been far, far worse.

Reporters Jouvenal and Zauzmer never mentioned the liberal policies and influences that brought Darwin Torres and Nabra Hassanen together that fateful day.  They preferred to cover the was-it-road-rage-or-anti-Muslim-bigotry angle.   This is why some terrible crimes that are avoidable will inevitably go on to happen, nonetheless; and it’s why you don’t read the Washington Post if you want real news.

I think we’ll leave that second story for another day.

~CW

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White Privilege or Black Self-Destructiveness…..?

What do you do when you’ve built a lucrative cottage industry around a product but you’ve saturated the market and your product has not lived up to its hype?  Well, when you’re a liberal and the product you’re selling is indignation over phony racism, you repackage your phony racism as a new and improved product and you call it, “White privilege.”

A handout in a Wisconsin school’s “American Diversity” course defined white privilege as follows:

In critical race theory, white privilege is a set of advantages that are believed to be enjoyed by white people beyond those commonly experienced by non-white people in the same social, political, and economic spaces (nation, community, workplace, income, etc.). Theorists differentiate it from racism or prejudice because, they say, a person who may benefit from white privilege is not necessarily racist or prejudiced and may be unaware of having any privileges reserved only for whites.

“Critical race theory.”  Boy that sounds very intellectual, doesn’t it?  You’re supposed to be impressed.

As charming as it is that “theorists” are attempting to differentiate “white privilege” from plain old fashioned racism it’s clearly just double-talk.  If the theory is that whites benefit from privilege strictly on the basis of skin color alone (see the definition above), that’s racism – period.  So why are we changing “racism” to “white privilege?”  Maybe it’s because you can stop being racist but you can never stop being white.  Maybe it’s because blacks can be racists, but they can’t have “white privilege.”  Maybe it’s because the “racism” claim has lost its luster thanks to the race hustlers who have gratuitously invoked it as an excuse for each and every black failure, and enough whites have finally caught on so as to weaken its effectiveness for extorting sympathy and public money.  Not ready to give up their golden goose, the hustlers have re-packaged it as “white privilege,” secure in the knowledge that the liberal sheep can be counted on to buy their revamped product.  As long as there’s money in it and as long as liberals abound to act as enablers we can look forward to a new variation of this same old game for as long as we live.  So let’s talk about “white privilege,” shall we?

If there’s one thing I don’t understand about the concept of “white privilege” it’s the success of people of color in fields like sports or entertainment.  I love football, and it’s been my observation that the vast majority of teams at the college level and in the pros consist largely of black players despite the smaller number of blacks in the general population.  But how can this be, I wonder, if whites are the ones with the privilege?  These are high-paying gigs, after all, and can set people up for a lifetime of great earning potential.  Why don’t whites want these jobs if they are entitled, via their privilege, to have them?  Ditto the same question for basketball.  And how did Will Smith and Oprah Winfrey become so rich and influential in a world where only whites are entitled to such privilege?  How did Dwayne Johnson overcome “white privilege” to become the highest paid actor in the world in 2016?

These realities alone dispel the whole “white privilege” theory as far as I’m concerned, because it represents concrete evidence that businesses will embrace the people who can best help them succeed regardless of race or gender.  Therefore, if there are other industries where blacks are underrepresented, there must logically be other explanations besides “white privilege.”  Here are a few facts to consider when reflecting on what some of those reasons might be:

·         Blacks graduate from high school at significantly lower rates than white (75% vs. 88%) or Asian students (90%).¹

·         According to the latest government census report, 46.9% of whites had an associate’s degree or more compared to just 32.4% of blacks.²

·         In 2015 66% of black children lived in single-parent households while just 25% of white children lived in single-parent households.³

·         As of 2014 the teen birth rate for blacks was 34.9 per 1,000, or double that of whites (17.3 per 1,000).⁴

Is “white privilege” to blame for the high incidence of teen pregnancy and fatherless households in the black community?  Is “white privilege” to blame for the lower graduation rate among black high school students?  Consider the top reasons cited by blacks for dropping out:

1. Becoming a parent
2. Being suspended or expelled even once
3. Having several friends drop out
4. Feeling academically unprepared for school
5. Experiencing a significant mental health problem
6. Homelessness, and moving to a new home.

From Black Enterprise, September 2015

You have to stretch pretty hard to assign blame for this to “white privilege.”  Bad choices and poor patterns of behavior are the reasons blacks fall behind academically, and this ultimately manifests itself in lower college graduation rates and, of course, reduced representation in areas of employment that require a higher level of education.  Employers in those fields then have fewer positive experiences to draw upon when evaluating black job candidates and they instinctively go with what’s familiar and what’s brought them the most success in the past.  Is that bias?  Perhaps; but it’s not bias based on malice or “privilege.”   It’s bias based on experience, history and observation.  Most importantly, the ONLY way to cure it is to change experience, history and observation, and this is something only blacks have the power to do.  Let me reiterate:

“White privilege” can only be cured by positive self-change in the black community.

This is why, whenever I read the usual drivel on “white privilege,” I think:  “So what?”  “Privilege,” if that’s the word the race hustlers want to use, is around us all the time and it’s not reserved to race, though if it was we would have to shift our focus to privilege among the Asian race since they kick everyone’s butt when it comes to success as measured by education and earnings.  If we’re going to obsess over “privilege” why aren’t we also talking about the privileges that come from being taller, smarter, better looking, more talented, luckier, more creative, healthier or happier, etc.?  And who is more “privileged,” the white child born to wealthy but abusive parents or the black child born to poor but nurturing parents?  These questions take our thinking where the race hustlers don’t want us to go, because only race – or to be more specific, whiteness – lends itself easily to the prospect of wealth transfer and that, not equality, is the hustler’s ultimate objective. 

I want to close with an appeal to those who’ve bought into the message of “white privilege,” for they know not what they do.  The peddlers of “white privilege” have only two goals in mind: 

1.  To take something from you;

2.  To make you an enabler for taking from others, including your children.

That’s it.  And the question is:  Are you so desperate for a cause that you’ll allow it?  Will you be an enabler to a scam that rewards the industry of victimhood when it threatens the future of not just your own children but also the black children who are being robbed of life’s critical lessons and the chance for self-driven success?  No one in this world, white or black, is born with an automatic pass for anything, as evidenced by those born to one form of privilege or another who nevertheless end up experiencing poverty, hardship or injustice, or those born without any privilege who nevertheless come to experience great wealth or success.  Life is what you choose to make it.  Let that be the message you share in this life.

~CW

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¹ https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp

² https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf

3 http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by#detailed/1/any/false/573,869,36,868,867/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/432,431

4 http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/28/476017134/teen-births-rate-plummet-for-hispanic-and-black-girls