Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 4:31pm

Just in Case There Isn’t Enough Racial Animosity in This Country

 

Theodore R. Johnson at The Washington Post has a proposal to cure the problem in this country of too much amity between blacks and whites:

 

 

Thanks to a compromise between Southern slaveholders who wanted enslaved blacks counted in the population, for the sake of boosting Southern congressional representation, and Northern whites who didn’t, the framers enshrined the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. This agreement set the census value of a slave as 60 percent of the value of a free person. Even after the 13th Amendment neutralized the political (and moral) compromise by abolishing slavery, Jim Crow laws, which contravened the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equality, stopped blacks from voting. The just answer today is to invert that ratio. If black Americans were once counted as three-fifths of a person, let each African American voter now count as five-thirds.

 

Go here to read the rest. Sigh, where to begin.  The 3/5’s compromise was to lessen the power of slave holding states in the House of Representatives.  It did not harm blacks in the slightest.  Diminution of black voting strength today comes not from the schemes of nefarious white “good old boys” but from mass immigration from Latin America and abortion.  Even if non-Hispanic whites were crazy enough to agree to this scheme out of some misguided sense of guilt, I doubt if Hispanics, Asians, real African-Americans (immigrants from Africa), etc. and the rest of polyglot America would ever agree to this.  Of course when the issue is race, liberals like to pretend that it is literally a black and white issue, conveniently forgetting how multi-shaded America is these days.

 

The idea at the core of this proposal, an increase in black voting strength, does get to the root however of a large part of the racial problem in this country.  Since the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, the idea that there can be a government solution to black urban poverty has withstood the staggering amount of evidence to the contrary.   Johnson’s proposal, by enhancing the strength of the Democrat party through this legerdemain, is a prescription to increase the bad government policies that have devastated urban blacks.  More welfare will merely exacerbate the breakdown of the black family.  More abortion on demand will merely increase the already very high abortion rate among blacks.  More money spent on education will merely go to rotten urban schools that already do a miserable job of educating generation after generation of poor blacks.  Less policing will lead to an explosion in crime, driving businesses out of urban centers.  More of the cult of victimization will merely produce more losers before they even begin to compete in society.

Economist Thomas Sowell sums it up:

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

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Clinton
Clinton
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 10:09am

Thomas Sowell is a national treasure. I highly, highly recommend his books. He is
a black man who has nothing but scorn for the intellectual plantation on which the left
prefers black Americans to live.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 10:19am

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

I’m eating it up with a spoon. Dr. Sowell is second-to-none at producing lucid and concise delineations of what ails us. You read something he writes and you have a fine chance of saying to yourself: “why didn’t I think of that?” or “wish I’d said that”.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 10:22am

One little facet of the media is the habit of haut bourgeois types finding a highly articulate knucklehead with an ample supply of melanin, and handing him a megaphone. It’s kept Ta-Nehisi Coates and Charles Blow from being motivated to find serious work.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 11:19am

One of the most beneficial (and my most favoritest) aspects of six-plus years of Obama is the racial love he’s engendered. He’s by far the worst president since (only the good die young) Jimmy Carter.

Mary De Voe
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 1:26pm

Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and movies of the 1960s, described law as “the crystallization of prejudice” making of everyone who kept the law, a victim of prejudice. This might explain some of the victimhood claimed by some, especially those persons forced to keep the law. Mumia Abu-Jamal for instance.
In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court gave atheism free reign over First Amendment civil rights. The sovereignty of the person was subjected to the sovereignty of the devil. The Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments was removed from every public school and the students were left with a void that was filled with the devil possessed antics of whomever had the most power, legitimate or criminal, might makes right. The human being, composed with body and soul, became a joke and a point of disparagement. The murder of 60,000,000 unborn became a civil right (Roe v. Wade) and the blasphemy and perjury to blame God for the sodomy of the sodomite (Obergefell “I am a sodomite because God created me homosexual.” Therefore, sodomy is not a sin and if sodomy is a sin, it is God’s sin) because God created the sodomite, homosexual. This is our culture. The insanity of blaming God for the sodomy of the sodomite while professing the belief in no God causes schizophrenia.
A nation with no moral compass or a moral compass controlled by the devil cannot survive.
Returning God’s love to the people might make them love God.
An education is teaching people how to think, not what to think.

Micha Elyi
Micha Elyi
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 8:29pm

In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court gave atheism free reign over First Amendment civil rights. The sovereignty of the person was subjected to the sovereignty of the devil. The Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments was removed from every public school…
–Mary De Voe

The root cause of this outcome were all those Protestants of yesteryear who thought themselves so clever by turning over their schools to the State and trying to use State power to push Protestant bibles and teaching onto Catholic children.
 

Let’s return to Separation of School and State. It’s a matter of conscience, a matter of principle. and–to make a point persuasive to the pragmatists among us–all the alternatives have proved impractical anyway.

Tom D
Tom D
Saturday, August 22, AD 2015 11:59pm

Haven’t we already effectively implemented Dr. Sowell’s sardonic proposal via gerrymandering and the various facets of voter fraud?

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Sunday, August 23, AD 2015 5:02am

Micha Elyi wrote, “all those Protestants of yesteryear who thought themselves so clever by turning over their schools to the State and trying to use State power to push Protestant bibles and teaching onto Catholic children.”
The French solution, contained in the Jules Ferry laws, is an ingenious one. No religious education may be given in public schools, but they close for a half-day on Thursdays (it used to be Thursdays and Saturdays, when Saturday was a school day)), so that parents may provide their children with religious instruction, if they so choose.
In the case of private schools (most of which are faith-based), the government pays the salaries of the teachers and librarians, but not the principal or other staff. Pretty well the only restriction is that instruction must be in the medium of French, except in foreign-language classes.

Mary De Voe
Sunday, August 23, AD 2015 4:20pm

unless God is acknowledged as the Supreme Sovereign Being and man is acknowledged as made in the image of God, man will become a digit, a unit of work, a servant to the state, a subject to the government that man’s sovereign personhood, the image of God in man, constitutes. Free will and freedom are created for man by God. The state only guards and protects the free will of man and his freedom. When the state takes credit for creating freedom, the state then begins to take freedom away.

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