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POPSState Report: Philadelphia swim club discriminated against black children Earlier this summer, a dispute between an affluent, white-dominated suburban private swim club and a camp serving minority children caught the attention of the national news. The camp accused the club of refusing to serve the kids because of members' racial bias. A state report just released bears out the club's claims. In e-mails complaining about the camp's visit, members expressed "racial animus" and "racially coded comments".
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POPSMatthew Yglesias: Conservatives Against Being Against Racism And it’s not just a quirk of Beck’s. This attitude goes deep in the DNA of the modern conservative movement. National Review’s position on Civil Rights was that segregation was bad, but the cure of the civil rights movement was worse than the disease of white supremacy. Barry Goldwater campaigned for president on the proposition that Jim Crow might be bad, but not nearly so bad as the Civil Rights Act. As the policy status quo shifted, the precise nature of the conservative position changed with it so that now affirmative action is worse than discrimination against minorities and “political correctness” is worse than racism, but the basic spirit is the same.
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POPSUri Avnery: Israel Officially Declares War on the Palestinian People Until 2002, Palestinians who married Israeli Arabs (which was very common, because the 1948 borders of Israel cut across Arab villages and clans) became Israeli citizens. Then the Knesset passed a law preventing Israeli Arabs from bringing their spouses with them into Israel. Jewish and Arab petitioners challenged the law in the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Ministry of Justice lawyers defending the law blatantly asserted that Israel is at war with the Palestinian people. Via Philip Weiss
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POPSThe true heart of the conservative movement Of course as tends to be the case with Helms' most repugnantly racist bile, he said that a good ways back in the past. But even at that time, most Americans managed not to be repugnant racists. But not Helms. And unlike a lot of people who did take the white supremacist line in the 1950s and 60s, Helms never apologized and, indeed, never backed down doing things like mounting a filibuster against making Martin Luther King Day into a federal holiday. Remarkably, mainstream American conservatives are eager to tell us that this man is their hero. Even more remarkably, you sometimes hear conservatives talk about reaching out to black voters.
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POPSRacial inequalities in the criminal justice system Kevin Drum channels Harvard Law professor Bill Stuntz on racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Stuntz takes a crack at explaining this state of affairs and says "two points are key — and neither of them flows from white racism." Here's point #1: policing in urban neighborhoods is underfunded. And point #2: these same neighborhoods have lost the local control they used to have. "On every front, the power of poor city neighborhoods has declined, and the power of middle- and upper-class suburbs has risen."
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POPSObama on white people So, he first compares his grandmother to his radical racist pastor, then he says he thinks she is a typical white person. In other words, he thinks all white people are just as racist as his pastor. So how is it that he can condemn what his pastor says when he has just shown he believes the same things himself? So what is worse, the fact that he believes all white people are racist against blacks, or the fact he was willing to sacrifice the reputation of his own grandmother who raised him in order to score political points?
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POPSRacism in Israel not just confined to neo-Nazis Until Israeli society begins seriously combatting this dark racism, it will continue to regard the "neo-Nazis" as aliens who suddenly landed here. Public opinion will continue to believe that if we only send them back to the distant planet from whence they came, everything will be resolved. This is really not the case.
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POPSOddity in Picking Jurors Opens Door to Racial Bias According to a 2003 report of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, which studied 390 felony jury trials in the parish from 1994 to 2002, the district attorney’s office used peremptory strikes to remove eligible black jurors three times as often as white ones. In the two decades since Batson, there have been 20 murder trials in Jefferson Parish that ended in death sentences. Information about the race of the jurors is available in 18 of them. Because the parish is 23 percent black, according to the 2000 census, you might expect to see about 3 black jurors on each 12-member panel. But of the 18 juries, 10 had no black members. Seven had one. One had two. None had three.
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POPSSPLC urges CNN to retract Lou Dobbs' false claims "We're not talking about a newscaster who simply made a mistake — we're talking about someone with a national platform who cites wildly inaccurate data to demean an entire group of people and who, when confronted with the truth, simply repeats the lie," said SPLC President Richard Cohen. "It's outrageous, and CNN should do something about it immediately."
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POPSDarwin's Legacy it is not so much the idea that Hitler was the result of Darwin than it is the idea that Hitler was able to rise to power, spread his filth, and propagandize his ideas of the supreme race because of the irrationality of some misguided Materialists. The same way Islamist irrationally twist their faith. These materialist ideas had their roots in the thinking of Kant, Nietzche, Keirkegard, and Darwin. It seems to me pretty obvious that Hitler would not have been able to gain a foothold in German society were it not for his understanding of these ideas, given the environment occurring in Germany at the time. It seems to me that understanding the underlying principles behind world views and philosophies is beneficial. There are lots of scientists and thinkers that have had their ideas used by later societies. Examples: Jefferson borrowed philosophies of Hume and others to write The Constitution, Lenin used Marx, Bin Laden used Mohammed.
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POPSHow white racism increases support for death penalty A survey asked whites about their support for the death penalty. When whites are asked a straight-forward question about support for the death penalty, 65% say they support it. When whites are told that an argument against the death penalty is that its unfair because most of the executed are black, support for the death penalty rises to 77 percent. Now, I am not saying that all (or even most) proponents of the death penalty are racist. At the very least, what the study shows is that there is a group of whites whose racial animosity leads them to support the death penalty.
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POPSThe American Conservative Crackup A former assistant editor to The American Conservative explains why he left the magazine after it published a disingenuous (and racist) attack on Barak Obama.
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POPSWhite Dog (1982) - allegorical film about racism
White Dog was directed by Sam Fuller but the studio never released it in the US. Bootleg copies are available. The film is about an aspiring actress (Kristy McNichol) in LA who adopts a white German Shepherd and discovers that the dog was trained to attack and kill black people. A black animal trainer (Paul Winfield) takes on the challenge of deprogramming the dog. The film is surprisingly effective, for a low-budget Sam Fuller film--he actually got some decent performances from his actors this time. Maybe its because I love dogs, but I got caught up in McNichol and Winfield's struggle to save this dog's soul from racism (and from being put to death). It is hard for me to see any profound messages in the film's narrative though. Racism is seen as a problem of psychotic, extremist whites but that is a very narrow conception of racism. Still, I'd recommend it, for no other reason than it is a well-made film with an interesting story and good acting.
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POPSTime: National Front drawing immigrant support The only evidence Time has to support this claim: A National Front politician who is of Algerian descent and an informant named "Habiba" who says ethnic minorities in her neighborhood are voting for Le Pen (the leader of the National Front). I am not an expert on France, but I do know that Le Pen is an out-and-out racist, and I am extremely skeptical that he attracts a significant proportion of French ethnic minorities.
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