Joel Mathis

 NYT report on the death of Dijon Kizzee, who was shot to death by sheriff's deputies in LA: On Monday, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials said deputies tried to stop a Black man who was riding a bike in South Los Angeles. They said he was stopped for a code violation related to the bike, but wouldn’t elaborate on what the alleged violation was. The sheriff's office said Kizzee fled and then "made a motion" toward a dropped gun. I think we've learned by now that such accounts should be viewed as provisional, at best, and possibly false. But even if completely true, I'm trying to imagine a "code violation related to the bike" that was so worth enforcing that this outcome was worth it. We need laws for good order and civilization. But the libertarian side of me has come to believe that maybe we go overboard -- and that the result, sometimes, is a death sentence for selling loose cigarettes, or having a bike code violation. At the very least, it

At Persuasion, Matt Lutz argues that "asking people to be hyper-conscious of race is likely to aggravate, not fix, racial injustice."  Refusing to ascribe importance to something morally neutral is a virtue. And because colorblindness is a refusal to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, it remains the best remedy for old-fashioned racism that we have.  But:  The world is a much more peaceful place today than it was as recently as a century ago—largely because of attempts to emphasize our common humanity . If we focus on what unites us, our altruistic instincts take over and we become kinder and more trusting towards each other. But our tendency to favor the ingroup can never be completely eradicated. Perhaps the answer, then, isn't to embrace some unachievable notion of colorblindness, but A) to refuse to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, B) recognize that many people are discriminated against on the basis of their ski

A good question by Peter Weber. I had a conservative friend who disliked the poet Langston Hughes -- who did some of his growing up in the town where I live -- because he wasn't very patriotic. Her attitude stunned me as a failure of empathy and moral imagination. Black people have been patriotic throughout America's history, even if America hasn't always reciprocated the love. But why on earth would you expect a Black man who was living in Jim Crow America to be patriotic? Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote in 2003, about Hughes' testimony before Congress during the McCarthy era: In Lawrence, Hughes said, he attended a “nickelodeon” movie theater every afternoon. One day, Hughes said, “the woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said something, in effect, ‘Colored not admitted.’ “My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not,” he told the senators. “I could n

In Tablet , Zach Goldberg documents that major media outlets are using terms "racist" more often. Some initial thoughts about his article. He writes: One possible way of explaining these statistics, is that America experienced an explosion of racism over the past decade and white liberals are uniquely reflective of that change. But another possibility, perhaps more likely, is that ascendant progressive notions about race reflected in a steady drumbeat of reporting and editorializing on the subject from leading national media outlets, encouraged white liberals to label a larger number of behaviors and people as racist. In other words, while the world may have stayed more or less the same, elite liberal media and its readership—especially its white liberal readership—underwent a profound change. Let me offer a third possibility: That there is probably not that much more racism in America than there was 10 years ago, but that racists -- who empowered President Trump and were al

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it. Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw: “I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained. I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person. And honestly, who cares? Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasu

Just saw this posted by a prominent African American attorney in Philadelphia: And I get it. There's a history in this country of "Christians" using their religion to subdue black people. I'm reminded of this : On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves.  What's notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation.  "About 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing [and] 50 percent of the New Testament is missing," Schmidt says. "Put in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard protestant Bible. This Bible contains only 232." A religion that contorts itself to maintain the mastery of its adherents is bad religion. It is propaganda parading around in the garmen

I'm not sure how an effective reparations program would work, but I do know that this is probably about the worst argument against it:   The room grew raucous at times, with spectators hissing at Republican witnesses and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the subcommittee’s senior Republican, when he spoke against the measure. In a comment that rippled throughout the hearing, Mr. Johnson suggested that great black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington thought African-Americans should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  “Those great leaders encouraged people to take responsibility for their own lives, because that gives every human being a greater sense of meaning and satisfaction,” he said, adding that the bill “risks communicating the opposite message.”  It's the old "bootstraps for thee" argument, and it presumes that whites have achieved their greater wealth by dint of hard work and grit, so why can't African Americans do t

See here. For people of my generation, there was a narrative - not entirely spoken - that racism ended somewhere around 1968. That narrative, in turn, provided a foundation to the idea that attempts to correct for the effects of hundreds of years of racism were themselves racist — and, ironically, was allowed to suggest that problems that had their roots in racism were actually the results of the lesserness of other "cultures." The "end of racism" helped racism survive in dressed-up, yuppified form. One ironic blessing of the Trump Era: Lots of folks don't feel the need to dress it up anymore. It's as out there as it's been in my lifetime.

Vox : A study for the Black Youth Project, which analyzed 2012 voting data for people ages 18 to 29, found 72.9 percent of young black voters and 60.8 percent of young Hispanic voters were asked for IDs to vote, compared with 50.8 percent of young white voters. FYI

An article at Carolina Journal suggests Barack Obama could've offered more racial healing to the U.S. if he'd identified as bi-racial instead of black: Much of the Left imposes racial conformity — especially on those it considers its own. You need solid attachment to a demographic group, and not consider yourself different, an individual or, perhaps even worse, part of America’s old-fashioned melting pot. To lead that group there are expectations about what you should think, the language you should use, and how you should characterize others. It’s hardly the stuff of national unity. Oh how I hate this piece. For a very simple reason. It decries "the left's" tendency to force people to attach themselves to an ethnic group, rather than America,without mentioning or grappling with the historic reality and cultural (nevermind legal) power of the " one-drop rule ." Obama's decision to present himself as anything but a black man probably wasn't,

Interesting : Nate Cohn of the New York Times estimates that when every vote is tallied, some 63.4 million Americans will have voted for Clinton and 61.2 million for Trump. That means Clinton will have turned out more supporters than any presidential candidate in history except for Obama in 2008 and 2012. And as David Wasserman of Cook Political Report notes , the total vote count—including third party votes—has already crossed 127 million, and will “easily beat” the 129 million total from 2012. The idea that voters stayed home in 2016 because they hated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is a myth. We already know the Electoral College can produce undemocratic results, but what we don't know is why — aside from how it serves entrenched interests — it benefits the American people to have their preference for national executive overturned because of archaic rules designed, in part, to protect the institution of slavery.  A form of choosing the national leader that — as has happe

1. Be a nearly all-white state. 2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive. 3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players. 4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in! * Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

This picture: George W. Bush was, to my mind, the biggest failure as president in postwar history — more than Jimmy Carter, more than Richard Nixon. His choices were uniformly wrong. Budget surplus? Let's fritter it away. Terror warning? Ignored. Terror attack? Respond with attack on Iraq. Devastating hurricane? Heckuva job, Brownie. And, finally, he left us with the Great Recession. But now, we see, that list doesn't even encompass the worst of his legacy. For all his faults, you see, Bush doesn't strike me as a bad man . And more than any major Republican before him — at least in the post-Civil Rights Era — Bush seemed to want to treat African Americans as part of America: No Child Left Behind, despite its problems, as aimed at improving educational outcomes for blacks. His RNC chairman acknowledged and refuted the GOP's long-running "Southern strategy." And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, he helped get funding for the national museum of African

I'm a bit disturbed by this post at Vox , about a woman whose daughter married a black man — causing the woman to recognize, then work to overcome her racism. The article she then wrote has become the target of ridicule, enough that she's had it removed from the website where it appeared. Vox: You can see why this post, which the author almost certainly thought was a message about tolerance, was read differently by people who were irked by the idea that accepting a person of a different race would be a major feat requiring point-by-point instructions and a mandate from God.   I shudder to think of how she would have treated this person if she hadn’t found a biblical angle that mandated seeing him as human, or if she embraced a different interpretation of scripture. I mean: This is just liberal snootiness. And I say this as a snooty liberal! I don't like racism. I hate it. I'm sorry that this woman's racism was so ingrained that it created issues within and

The latest non-Trump scandal du jour among conservatives is the reported effort by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to consider whether the display of a Gadsden Flag in the workplace amounts to racial harassment. It was first reported by Eugene Volokh here . Here's National Review's take on the topic: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that displaying the Gadsden Flag in the workplace — the yellow flag with the words Don’t Tread on Me below a coiled rattlesnake — may be punishable racial harassment.    In case you’re wondering: That’s it. That’s the extent of the offense. There were no racist statements. No slurs. No threatening looks. A dude wore a cap.    Ah, but: Complainant maintains that the Gadsden Flag is a “historical indicator of white resentment against blacks stemming largely from the Tea Party.”   As Hillary Clinton would say: Sigh . There is no evidence that the Tea Party as a movement was motivated by racial animus (even som

I came to this book after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" , which a number of reviews suggested followed in Baldwin's footsteps. It's true there are similarities — both relatively short, yet incisive, essays on what it's like to live as a black man in America — but there are differences: Baldwin's book is written when (in 1963) it seems like white supremacy in America might be undone; perhaps as a result, it's a more hopeful book than what Coates delivered. Which is an odd thing to say about a book that remains bracing, angry, and uncompromising after all these years. A few quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussions. These are all taken from the second part of the book, ""Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind":

My friend Steve Hayward is put out with The Chronicle of Higher Education for not including non-white-guy voices in its recent “Trump 101” syllabus: Where to begin. First, let’s note that Trump has caught on precisely because he speaks to “marginalized groups” that the fashionable, race-obsessed academic left (and much of the GOP establishment—ahem) disdains. So the identity politics set gets a failing grade here for low self-awareness. Second, it is embarrassing but necessary to point out that when inquiring about any subject, any serious list will want to include only the best work that bears on the subject. When Ta Nahesi Coates writes something sensible about Trump, someone will include it on a recommended reading list. So let’s talk about the “identity politics” involved here.

This post from John Hinderaker is a doozy, oozing wistfulness for a time when white folks decided how the country was run: One thing is worth pointing out, however: even in this outlier poll, Trump holds a ten-point lead among white voters, 50%-40% (down from 57%-33% in May!). It is remarkable that even at his low ebb, Trump wins by a near landslide margin among white voters, a majority of the electorate. Not many years ago, that would have assured him of victory. This is why Democrats stir up racial resentment, he says: This is why Democrats are so anxious to “fundamentally transform” the United States through mass immigration from Third World countries. Only by building up the minority population do they have a chance to stay competitive. But that still wouldn’t be enough, even if the Democrats got most of the votes cast by minorities, if minorities voted in anything like a normal pattern. In order to win, the Democrats need to roll up ridiculous margins, like the 90%-8% lea