Category Archives: Race and race relations

The New African Migration

Posted on August 22, 2019 by | 15 comments

Image source: Pew Research Center

by James A. Bacon

While the United States indulges in an orgy of introspection over the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans arriving on the shores of Virginia, it might be worthwhile reminding ourselves that that was then, and this is now. It may have escaped the notice of the New York Times, but the country has changed.

Africans are coming voluntarily to the United States by the tens of thousands every year. And, in an irony of ironies according to a 2017 Pew Research Center report, African immigrants are most likely to live in the South — 39% reside in the former center of slavery compared to 25% in the Northeast, and much smaller percentages in the Midwest and West. Virginia, by the way is one of seven states with African-born populations of more than 100,000.

Historians estimate that 400,000 enslaved Africans came to North America during the 200-year period in which the trans-Atlantic slave trade was practiced in the English colonies and the newly independent United States. Pew estimates that 2 million Africans (the vast majority of whom are from sub-Saharan countries) have emigrated to the U.S. since 1990. Americans need to be honest about the nation’s past of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination. But we also need to be honest about the nation that we have become. America is a land of opportunity for all people of all races and ethnicities.

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Posted in Culture wars, Demographics, Race and race relations

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Do “White People” Suppress Black History?

Posted on August 22, 2019 by | 49 comments

Christy Coleman

by James A. Bacon

Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond and an African-American, professes to know how white people think. Here’s what she said yesterday at a Richmond forum that, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was organized “to dispel racism against African Americans.”

White people want to feel good about their history, and that means everyone else has to forget about theirs. Well, I’m not in that business.

Wow.

First point: I’m such a dinosaur I can remember what it was like growing up in the 1960s when I was taught that it was wrong to make sweeping generalities about the people of other races and cultures. That was called “stereotyping.” When applied to blacks and minorities, stereotyping was considered a form of racism. Now, apparently, it is deemed acceptable to make sweeping derogatory generalities about “white people.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Race and race relations

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From Oppression Narrative to Opportunity Narrative

Posted on August 18, 2019 by | 21 comments

by James A. Bacon

I have fallen into a trap — a snare of my own making. Day after day, Americans are subjected to a barrage of commentary and “news” on the topic of racial/gender-driven victimhood and grievance, the most recent example being today’s New York Times‘ 16019 Project, which reinterprets American history through the lens of slavery and racism as if they were the sole defining attributes of the American experience. And I react to this stuff. When the issues hit home at a state/local level, I devote article after article detailing the falsehoods, unfounded assumptions, and sins of omission. Because there is a never-ending supply of victimhood-and-grievance stories, a never-ending rounds of rebuttals is called for. As a result, I spend far more time writing about what I’m against than what I’m for.

Today I shall devote myself today to outlining in broad brush strokes a positive vision for Virginia going forward. In the long run, parsing the  flaws of the Victimhood and Grievance Narrative will take us only so far. If those espousing conservative/libertarian principles wish to win converts, they need to formulate an alternative narrative — what I’ll call the Opportunity Narrative — that appeals to all peoples and creeds.

The Victimhood and Grievance Narrative is inherently backward looking, dwelling on past injustices to stoke the resentments of racial/ethnic groups. (It is important to note that some on the Right have adopted the rhetoric and logic of group-based grievance and victimhood, making them guilty of sins similar to those of the Left.) The forward-looking Opportunity Narrative asks, how do we empower individuals, regardless of racial/ethnic/gender identity, to improve their lives? Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Race and race relations

Unintended Consequences and SOLs

Posted on August 14, 2019 by | 8 comments

It has been fascinating to observe the reaction to the disappointing news that Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores for reading and writing for Virginia’s major racial/ethnic groups declined in the 2018-19 school year, and that, despite strenuous efforts of school administrators to address racial inequities, the gap between blacks and whites grew wider.

The Washington Post, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the (Charlottesville) Daily Progress all duly noted the erosion of black and Hispanic educational attainment. In none of the articles, however, did state education officials proffer an explanation for the regression. Certainly no one suggested that Virginia Department of Education’s relentless implementation of “restorative justice” disciplinary policies, designed to reduce the disparity in suspensions between black and white students, might have had unintended consequences.

I have warned that the emphasis on therapeutic interventions over suspensions and other traditional disciplinary policies was contributing to the erosion of classroom discipline, particularly in predominantly black schools. As far as I know, I am the only member of Virginia’s chattering class to stick out his neck and predict that black students, whose educations were disproportionately disrupted by this social engineering, would suffer the most. The proof, I suggested, would be seen in lower SOL scores for black students.

Well, the results are in. While all racial/ethic groups lost ground in reading and writing — the two disciplines in which apples-to-apples comparisons are possible this year — blacks and Hispanics backtracked the most. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Race and race relations

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VCU Study Jumps to Unsubstantiated Conclusions

Posted on August 8, 2019 by | 10 comments

Richmond-area schools suspend black students at four times the rate of white students, a gap that exceeds the national average, a study by the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education has found. The findings have been duly reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

One in five black students in the region received an out-of-school suspension during the 2015-16 year compared to 5% of white students. Nationally, the numbers are closer to 15% and 5%, according to a study by the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC), a research arm of the VCU educational school that gives special emphasis to “social justice, equity and diversity.”

“This is a long-standing problem with deeply rooted causes, and it’s going to take dedicated leadership and policy to resolve it,” the RTD quoted Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a VCU education professor and one of the study’s authors, as saying.

To drive home the point, the RTD also quoted Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras: “We have a moral obligation to end racial inequity in school discipline — particularly here in the Richmond region given our history as the former capital of the Confederacy. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Race and race relations

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Magnifying Partisan Research with a Partisan Spin

Posted on July 20, 2019 by | 10 comments

Photo credit: Washington Post

Social scientific studies are increasingly infected by ideological bias and a crisis of unreplicable results. Compound that with the ideological bias of the mass media, which spin findings to advance their own partisan narratives, and you get articles like this one from the Washington Post: “Trump’s presidency may be making Latinos sick.”

Trump’s presidency may be making some people sick, a growing number of studies suggest. Researchers have begun to identify correlations between Trump’s election and worsening cardiovascular health, sleep problems, anxiety and stress, especially among Latinos in the United States. A study published Friday using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the risk of premature birth was higher than expected among Latina women following Trump’s election.

This is the same kind of junk reporting of tendentious science that we see increasingly in Virginia, where newspapers report on “studies” showing “correlations” that supposedly demonstrate the existence of systemic institutional racism. It’s not impossible that some of the studies are valid. But they need to be subjected to much closer scrutiny before being accepted and propagated widely, as they invariably are. Continue reading →

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Posted in Health Care, Race and race relations

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2018 Hate Crimes Down

Posted on July 6, 2019 by | 5 comments

Looks like Attorney General Mark Herring will have to come up with a new campaign theme in his run for governor.  It’s bad enough that he got caught up in the blackface scandal. Now the central premise of his campaign launch — that the nation was in the grip of a surge of white supremacist violence — rings more hollow than ever.

The Virginia State Police has issued its 2018 Crime in Virginia report, and sadly for Herring (but good for the rest of us), the number of reported hate crimes was only 161 — down from 202 the previous year. The number of anti-black hate crimes fell to 62 from 68 the previous year.

The 2017 hate crime surge hyped by Herring turned out to be a blip in a long-term decline. The fact is, despite the best effort of politicians to stir up racial grievances, Americans and Virginians get along pretty well with one another.

Update: I updated some of these numbers when I returned from vacation and re-gained access to a PC.

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Posted in Crime and corrections, Race and race relations, Uncategorized

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Now Private-School Tax Credits Are Racist

Posted on July 3, 2019 by | 20 comments

Chris Duncombe

The Left continues to racialize everything, absolutely everything. It makes me sick to the stomach to write about race on this blog so often, but the “progressive” assault on a post-racial society in Virginia is an unrelenting, 24/7 activity, and if I don’t call the Left to account, it appears that no one else will.

Chris Duncombe, policy director of the center-left Commonwealth Institute think tank, opines favorably upon a new Internal Revenue Service rule that prevents people from “double dipping” when making charitable donations to scholarships provided by private or religious schools. My concern here is not the merits of the IRS ruling, which may be valid, but the reasons Duncombe expresses for disliking the special tax credit crafted to encourage donations to private-school scholarships:

People claiming these credits are more likely to be white than Black or Latinx, due to Virginia’s long history of racial discrimination and the under-representation of Black and Latinx filers in the state’s highest income brackets.

So… it’s now a bad thing for wealthy white people to make donations to provide scholarships that overwhelmingly benefit poor minorities. Continue reading →

20 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Race and race relations

Racial Disparities in Maternal Deaths: Another SJW Fraud

Posted on July 2, 2019 by | 22 comments

Dr. Jennifer Lee, director of the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services.

Virginia’s Medicaid program is targeting an alleged racial disparity in maternal deaths. African-American mothers have “consistently” died at more than twice the rate of white mothers during and after pregnancy, and they are more likely to die of natural causes, the Richmond Times-Dispatch informs us. (Black women are three times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death, according to The Virginia Mercury.)

“Maternal and infant deaths remain a troubling reality in our commonwealth and our nation,” said Dr. Jennifer Lee, director of the Department of Medical Assistance Services. “There remain stark racial disparities for African American mothers and their babies rooted in generations of racism and historical barriers to quality health care for people of color.”

This is the kind of rhetoric fostered by Governor Ralph Northam as he seeks atonement for dressing in blackface as Michael Jackson 35 years ago. “We have really tried to refocus our administration on a lot of inequities that exist in our society today,” he said yesterday. “One of the inequities that I really believe is quite glaring is the inequities of mothers of color and the mortality rate that not only they face but also that their children face. … This is unacceptable.”

So, how, precisely, will the Northam administration address inequities stemming from generations of racism? Aside from administrative changes designed to generate better data and enroll more women into the program, news accounts allude to two health-related initiatives: curbing tobacco use and connecting pregnant women with substance abuse treatment. If you are having trouble connecting the dots between “historical barriers to quality health care” and the decision of pregnant women to smoke, drink and take drugs, you’re not alone.

The data supporting the “generations of racism” argument are shockingly thin. Continue reading →

22 Comments

Posted in Health Care, Race and race relations

Blackface Mystery Solved: Ralph Northam as Michael Jackson

Posted on June 24, 2019 by | 2 comments

Published in the Roanoke Times today, a concise synthesize of my blog posts about Ralph Northam costumed as Michael Jackson:

Ralph Northam’s racism controversy has tumbled down the memory hole. The governor has struck with the story that the photograph appearing in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook of a man in blackface was not of him, and a McGuire Woods inquiry failed to find any evidence to prove otherwise. Critics who once called for his resignation have fallen silent as the governor pivoted left on social justice issues. And the media, which normally loves a good scandal, apparently has concluded that there is little left to be discovered.

But politicians and reporters are overlooking the obvious identity of the man in the yearbook photo — it is of Ralph Northam dressed in Michael Jackson costume. Continue reading →

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Posted in Politics, Race and race relations, Scandals, Uncategorized

War Wounds, Lost Income and the Reparations Debate

Posted on June 19, 2019 by | 28 comments

Benjamin Franklin, Civil War amputee. Source: Pinterest

As the reparations issue heats up across the country — Congressional Democrats are considering forming a commission on reparations, reports the New York Times — it’s just a matter of time before the divisive debate comes to Virginia. The Old Dominion, after all, was a slave state and a segregationist state. We have a history of racism and discrimination to grapple with that, say, Minnesota or New Hampshire do not.

Personally, I find the idea of holding individuals accountable for long-ago sins committed by members of the same race to be a moral obscenity. But as an amateur historian, I find the debate fascinating. The controversy should dredge up loads of intriguing material as Americans trace the impact of slavery and segregation and the efforts to ameliorate that impact.

Here is a study that you won’t hear cited by the reparations brigade: “The Impact of a Wartime Health Shock on the Postwar Socioeconomic Status and Mortality of Union Army Veterans and their Children.” The authors did not research the paper with reparations in mind. Rather, they were tracing the impact of disability on earnings and wealth in an economy dominated by farming and manual labor. But the findings bear upon the reparations debate. In any moral reckoning over the legacy of slavery, one must consider that 620,000 soldiers died from combat, disease and other causes in the Civil War. Even if we assign zero value to the deaths of Confederate soldiers in the war to end slavery, surely we must take into account the loss of 360,000 Union soldiers (who were, for purposes of the reparations debate, overwhelmingly white). Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Race and race relations

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Arlington Schools’ Non-Solution for English Learners

Posted on June 6, 2019 by | 6 comments

Arlington County, which has one of the most politically “progressive” school systems in Virginia, has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to bolster support for students learning English, reports the Washington Post.

The column described systemic problems in the school system. English-as-a-Second-Language students are often taught below their grade level and grow frustrated and bored. As a specific example of dysfunctional education, columnist Theresa Vargas cites a 15-year-old girl who had spent three years in the school system but still didn’t know how to use an English-Spanish dictionary correctly.

Now for some context missing from the column… The problem is not a lack of money. Arlington County spent $19,323 per pupil in Fiscal 2017 compared to an average of $11,745 per pupil spent statewide that year, according to Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) data.

Neither is the problem a lack of commitment to “diversity and inclusion.” The Arlington County school system has an Office of Equity and Excellence, which… Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Race and race relations

Special VPI Graduation Ceremonies for Everyone (Except for Straight White Christians)

Posted on June 4, 2019 by | 19 comments

I don’t know what was considered deficient with the main Virginia Tech commencement ceremony — too white? too heteronormative? insufficiently diverse? — but the university this year provided ten supplementary graduation programs for African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and other groups.

Apparently, the administration deemed it inadequate for some students to revel in what they shared in common as Hokies, graduates of one of America’s more prestigious universities, or as young people embarking upon their life journeys as adults, or even, dare I say, as Americans. They needed an opportunity to celebrate their cultural identities. Well, some of them did. If they were of English, German, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Italian, or Polish descent, or if they were Catholic, Protestant or some other denomination of Christianity, there were no special Cultural Achievement ceremonies to attend.

But if students were of African-American descent, they could participate in the university-sponsored Donning of the Kente ceremony. If they were of Hispanic-Latino background, there was the Gesta Latina. There was a ceremony for American Indians & indigenous people, and another one for Asians. There was a special ceremony for Jews and one for Muslims. There was a ceremony for international students, and a ceremony for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally community. Oh, and there was even one for students in recovery and one for veterans.

According to a Virginia Tech feature story, the special ceremonies advance the university’s mission to ensure the success of all students, particularly those from underrepresented and historically marginalized populations. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (higher ed), Race and race relations

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Cranky Strikes Again, Shows Rampant Cheating in Richmond Schools

Posted on May 29, 2019 by | 7 comments

I have been chronicling the administrative-cheating scandals in the Richmond Public School system, noting with each post that the situation is even worse than it appeared the previous time I wrote. Now it appears that administrative cheating is even more systemic than even I had suspected. In a statistical tour de force, John Butcher, writing in Cranky’s Blog, leaves readers with the impression that the graduation criteria have been so thoroughly corrupted that the numbers are meaningless.

Butcher starts with the common-sense (and incontestable) observation that economically advantaged (referred to as Non-Economically Disadvantaged, or Not ED) students pass the SOLs at higher rates and graduate from high school at higher rates on average than Economically Disadvantaged (ED) students. No one disputes this generality. Indeed, the statement is a truism. The disparity in outcomes is routinely cited in the debate about the inequity in racial outcomes.

Incredibly, the pattern doesn’t apply at Richmond’s five mainstream high schools. At four high schools, economically disadvantaged students graduate at higher rates than their Not ED counterparts. The only exception to the pattern is Armstrong High School, where the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) conducted a course schedule audit in 2016, bringing attention to the administrative-cheating scandal that has been brewing ever since. The ensuing crackdown at Armstrong, Butcher argues, had a “salutary effect” there but had no impact on the other four high schools. Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Poverty & income gap, Race and race relations

Counseling, Jail Time, and the Cycle of Violence

Posted on May 29, 2019 by | 4 comments

Prayer vigil at Carter Jones Park

Families in south Richmond have long held community cookouts at the Carter Jones Park. Last Sunday evening, an altercation broke around at a basketball/skateboard facility nearby. Gunshots were fired. Nine-year-old Markiya Simone Dickson and an unnamed 11-year-old boy were struck by bullets. Markiya died.

Community members and city leaders gathered at a vigil yesterday to protest the violence. One of the city officials in attendance, Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras, addressed the impact of trauma upon school children.

Dozens of children in the park witnessed the tragedy, said Kamras, as reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “They will carry that trauma into their lives, and certainly into their classrooms. Sadly, this is all too common for many of the young people in Richmond Public Schools.”

As Richmonders held their vigil, First Lady Pamela Northam was addressing Southwest Virginia’s Rural Summit for Childhood Success across the state in Abingdon. Shootings that kill random by-standers are rare in that part of Virginia, but child abuse and child neglect are far from uncommon. According to the Washington County News, Northam said: Continue reading →

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Posted in Crime and corrections, Poverty & income gap, Race and race relations

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