Study: Blacks are twice as likely as whites to have performed a heroic deed

According to a study conducted by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, and featured in an article in USA Today, blacks are twice as likely as whites to have performed a heroic deed. That finding seems dubious to me.

Society implicitly has different expectations for different groups, and the "hero" bar is often set much lower for blacks than for whites. For example, when the restaurant chain Firehouse Subs issued "hero cups" in 2009 to honor firefighters who had displayed "incredible acts of bravery," they selected four white men and one black woman as heroes. All four of the white men had risked their their own lives to rescue civilians in life-and-death situations, while the black woman's act of bravery was "spearheading a community-based program to strengthen fire safety education for seniors."

Similarly, the Stanford study muddles the definition of hero by conflating real acts of heroism (e.g., helping another person in a dangerous emergency) with, for lack of a better word, "affirmative action" acts of heroism (e.g., defying unjust authority, confronting an injustice). The USA Today article doesn't break the list of heroic actions down by race, and I wasn't able to find the study online, but I suspect non-whites were more likely than whites to have chosen "defied unjust authority" or "confronted an injustice." Those terms are so vague that acts such as resisting a police officer or attending an "anti-racism" rally would seem to qualify.

Even if blacks were more likely than whites to report having "helped someone during an emergency," that could be because of differing views of what truly constitutes an "emergency." It seems like whenever there's a news report about an angry fast food customer who made a frivolous emergency 911 call, whether because the restaurant ran out of chicken nuggets or lemonade, because their french fries were served cold, or because they were dissatisfied with the amount of food they received, the caller is invariably black. I wouldn't consider mediating a heated fast food dispute a heroic act, but some black people might.

Or maybe I'm off on this one.  Maybe the harsh realities of inner city living provide blacks with greater opportunities to respond heroically in emergency situations, and more often than not they rise to the occasion. I don't know.

Rochester Residents Again Responsible for Violence at Suburban Mall

Back in early June I wrote about an incident in suburban Rochester, NY in which several hundred youths from the city of Rochester converged at the Greece Festival for Youth, a yearly charity event held at The Mall at Greece Ridge in the west-side suburb of Greece, and started a melee. I wrote that, in response to the violence, the 20-year-old event was closed down a week ahead of schedule, and its future was in jeopardy.

Patrick Cleburne later reported on the VDARE Blog that the festival had indeed been canceled for good. A VDARE reader who lives in Greece and patronizes The Mall at Greece Ridge chimed in to confirm that there was a noticeable uptick in the mid/late 2000s of anti-social behavior among black youths from Rochester at the mall. This corroborates accounts I've heard from friends about the deteriorating conditions of certain parts of Greece over the past decade.

Earlier this week, The Mall at Greece Ridge was again the scene of a scuffle, and once again the violence was plotted over the Internet. According to witnesses, roughly six girls fought in a fountain while others stood around it pushing, shoving, screaming, and cussing. One of the women pulled out a sharp instrument during the fight and began flailing it, but no one was stabbed. There was one arrest: Rochester resident Tamiya Jackson (pictured) was charged with menacing. Said one Greece police captain of the fight, "I could put 50 cops in the mall and I couldn't prevent [the fight]... The mall is safe."

Who Said It? Caste Football or African-American Sports Writer Jason Whitlock

Left-wing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has once again taken to smearing organizations on the racial right. This time she's gone after the website Caste Football. In a mocking tone, she says of the site: "Caste Football is research - racial analysis of NFL teams in which they count the white people." (watch the video on The Political Cesspool blog).

I’m guessing that Maddow didn’t object when the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport released their annual report earlier this year ranking men's pro sports leagues on their “diversity” (sounds like "racial analysis" to me). In the report, the NBA received the top grade (an 'A' for diversity) because 77% of the players are black and there are a large number of blacks in front-office positions (needless to say, the NHL didn't fare as well).

Putting that double standard aside, as an example of how horribly racist Caste Football is Maddow read a quote from the site about how the Indianapolis Colts have a mostly white starting offense.

Here's a fun game. There are 10 quotations about the Indianapolis Colts' offense below. Try to identify which 5 are from Caste Football's analysis of the team and which 5 are from African-American sports writer Jason Whitlock's. Check your answers below and see how you did.

1 - "the Colts started and played nine white guys on offense... NFL rosters are nearly 70 percent comprised of African-Americans. What the Colts did was significant"

2 - "the Colts' offensive line is almost always one of the best, and again this season follows its time-honored formula of starting white men everywhere except left tackle"

3 - "the best offense in football was 82 percent white"

4 - "the Patriots, like the Colts and Packers, have a predominantly white starting offense"

5 - "Tight end Dallas Clark reached career highs in 2009 with 100 catches, 1,106 yards and 10 TDs, one of the very best seasons ever by a TE. [The Colts] use Clark as a receiving tight end and as a wideout, dispensing with the nonsense that white TEs must be great blockers in order to start."

6 - "Austin Collie, Garcon’s replacement, put a clown suit on the Denver secondary with precise route running and nifty moves after the catch. Some practice-squad kid, Blair White, performed a Collie impersonation when Collie was tired."

7 - "Blair White... has all the qualities NFL coaches dream about -- when a receiver is black that is."

8 - "Peyton Manning is the Larry Bird of this era. I mean that as high, high praise."
 
9 - "The unwritten rule in sports writing/journalism is we’re only supposed to mention racial progress when it involves dark-skin minorities."

10 - "But keep repeating, the NFL is colorblind, white and black football players are treated exactly the same, there's no agenda, there's no affirmative action when it comes to giving out scholarships and developing players. Keep repeating that, and keep living in a fantasy land..." 

Answers:
Jason Whitlock: #1, 3, 6, 8, and 9
Caste Football: #2, 4, 5, 7 and 10

Note: In some of the quotes I altered the capitalization (e.g., I changed "White" to "white") for consistency. Otherwise, none of the quotes have been altered, except where indicated.

Kentucky Education Commissioner: "no school in America... will make adequate yearly progress if they have any sort of diversity in their building"

An unintentionally revealing quote from an article in The Courier-Journal:

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said Kentucky schools overall aren't progressing fast enough to meet the rising standards of No Child Left Behind, which requires all schools to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014.

Many schools are falling short because they can't meet the testing standards among their minority, low-income, learning-disabled or limited-English students. If even one group should fail to meet the reading or math goals, then the school is judged to be failing, which Holliday says “isn't fair.”

“By 2014, there will be no school in America that will make adequate yearly progress if they have any sort of diversity in their building,” Holliday said.

At one Louisville school, the Olmsted Academy, the district spent $2 million "to reduce class sizes, add technology and provide more professional development for teachers, many of whom had to reapply for their jobs." But student scores went up only "slightly," and the school will face sanctions under No Child Left Behind this year.

If scores don't improve quickly, it's possible the Olmsted Academy could be closed. That's what happened to Sam Houston High School in Houston, TX, where the school was deemed a failure because a small group of black students underperformed on a state-mandated math exam year after year. The school was only 4% black and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to raise black scores, to no avail. The school was closed, and 2,400 white and Hispanic students had to be relocated.

To fund an increasing amount of remedial instruction for blacks, schools across the country have been closing science labs, dropping French, German, and Latin courses, eliminating honors programs, and leaving high-achieving white and Asian students to fend for themselves.

h/t: whitey333 @stormfront

NY GOP Distances Themselves from Congressional Candidate Endorsed by this Blog

It's being reported that Westchester County Republicans are dropping congressional candidate Jim Russell after allegedly racist quotations from his 2001 essay "The Western Contribution to World History" surfaced on Monday.

I was aware of Russell's past writings when I endorsed his candidacy back in July, and in fact at one time I linked to the offending essay on this blog. I'm re-posting my article from July in full below.


Saturday July 17, 2010
Westchester County Update: Republican Congressional Candidate Jim Russell Vows to "Stop the HUD Steamroller"

Last summer officials in Westchester County agreed to spend more than $50 million "to create affordable housing in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market it to non-whites in the county and in neighboring New York City."

The agreement settled a lawsuit filed against the county by an organization called the Anti-Discrimination Center. County officials had fought the lawsuit for three years, but settled because of what County executive Andrew Spano called "a historic shift of philosophy" by federal housing officials.

What "historic shift in philosophy" was Spano referring to?

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is intent on integrating racially segregated neighborhoods - not just in Westchester County but across the country. Indeed, HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims said that the Westchester County settlement was a first step, and that he hoped it could "serve as a model for building strong, inclusive sustainable communities in suburban areas across the entire United States."

"Strong, inclusive sustainable communities" is liberal-speak for multi-racial neighborhoods that have high rates of violent crime and low levels of civic health. For years the federal government has been tearing down public housing projects in inner cities and giving the displaced residents Section 8 vouchers that allow them to rent housing in upscale suburban neighborhoods. According to a 2008 article in The Atlantic, police have discovered there is a "near-perfect" match between Section 8 rentals and incidents of violent crime. And in what was the largest study ever conducted on civic engagement in America, Robert Putnam, a liberal Harvard University professor, found that "all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings." Specifically, Putnam found that "the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings."

Westchester's incumbent Congresswoman, Democrat Nita Lowey, supported the settlement, but Lowey's 2010 Republican challenger, Jim Russell, came out strongly against it.

Russell recognizes that "HUD has an insatiable desire to reconfigure neighborhoods across America" and understands that the settlement it forced on Westchester County will "lead to the irreversible demise" of the county. If elected, Russell vows to introduce legislation that will amend federal housing laws to "stop the HUD steamroller" and let "natural housing patterns" endure.

Russell gets it. He understands the danger posed by HUD and groups like the Anti-Discrimination Center, and he's willing to do what it takes to save Westchester County (and all other communities across the country that HUD is intent on "reconfiguring"). He deserves our support.


Jim Russell, the Republican challenger in New York's 18th Congressional district race.

Black and White Dolls

Back in March, a Walmart store in Louisiana made headlines when it priced a discontinued black Barbie doll less than a similar white Barbie doll. ABC News quoted a Harlem community organizer who said Walmart was "devaluing the black doll" and a sociology professor from California who said that Walmart was sending a message that they "value blackness less than whiteness."

Now a Target store in Florida is in the news for pricing a discontinued white doll less than a similar black doll. Is Target being accused of "devaluing the white doll" and "valuing whiteness less than blackness"?

No, of course not.

Instead, Target is being accused of racism against blacks for making them pay more for a doll that resembles them. The Miami New Times quoted a black Target shopper as saying, "I feel sick right now."

When a Target employee explained to the customer that "most people are happy to hear that their doll isn't being discontinued," she became even more disconsolate. "When is this sort of thing going to stop, man?"

Attacking Whitey in Iowa

In a concert in Dubuque, Iowa earlier this month, rocker Ted Nugent allegedly looked out over the crowd and made the statement, "There's a lot of white people in this crowd! I like that! This a white town."

In response, the editorial board of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald warned that Nugent's "racially insensitive" remarks could have "spark[ed] a confrontation" and rhetorically asked whether the concert venue's employees should be expected to work in such a potentially dangerous environment. Noting that white concertgoers didn't express disapproval of Nugent's remarks, and in fact many had cheered him on, the editorial board concluded that racism is alive and well in Iowa: "Anybody who thinks racism is in Dubuque's past had better think again."

Now comes word that there were a number of racially motivated beatings at the Iowa State Fair this past Friday. Did white Iowans, riled up by the hateful words of the pro-gun, Tea Party-supporting rocker, assault innocent black fairgoers?

No. Of course not.

White fairgoers were brutally assaulted by a pack of 30-40 black youths who roamed the festival openly calling it "beat whitey night." One 36-year-old white man was hospitalized with "severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones, and nose." Two police officers also suffered injuries.

According to one of the police reports, this was actually the second weekend in a row that black youths assaulted whites in or around the state fair. One officer's report reads, "A large group of black male and female juvelines was report[ed] to have started assaulting people again, like last Friday night." In one of the attacks the previous weekend, a white man was beaten by a group of black youths while onlookers shouted racial slurs and yelled "Just kill the white dude."

This isn't the first series of black-on-white beatings to take place in Iowa since Obama's inauguration. Last year, under the heading "Iowa City troubled by surge in downtown beatings," AP reporter Nigel Duara wrote of a series of unprovoked gang assaults that had shocked the "quintessential college town" of Iowa City.

Noting that the University of Iowa had just launched an "alcohol summit" to combat student binge drinking, Duara tried to pass the assaults off as something intrinsic to the college town's "bar culture" and suggested the violence was the inevitable result of the "mix of young people and alcohol."

While Duara tried to give the impression that drunken white college students were responsible for the violence, he left clues that that was not the case. Duara wrote that onlookers cheered on the assailants, and that bystanders who tried to intervene were beaten. The assailants seemed to be committing assaults purely for the "sheer pleasure of it," and police were worried by the "intense violence and random nature of the attacks."

The AP article didn't provide any suspect descriptions, but the Iowa City Police Department's web site confirmed my suspicion that black youths were responsible for the gang assaults:

"Witnesses reported that the victim had run to the aid of a college age male who was being beaten up by 6 to 10 black males. The victim, who was knocked unconscious to the ground, was treated for non life threatening injuries at Mercy Hospital. The suspects were last seen running north on Dubuque St, randomly punching other males as they ran by them."

Whether verbally by the liberal media or physically by black youths, it seems that attacking whitey has become a sport in Iowa.

Westchester County Update: Republican Congressional Candidate Jim Russell Vows to "Stop the HUD Steamroller"

Last summer officials in Westchester County agreed to spend more than $50 million "to create affordable housing in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market it to non-whites in the county and in neighboring New York City."

The agreement settled a lawsuit filed against the county by an organization called the Anti-Discrimination Center. County officials had fought the lawsuit for three years, but settled because of what County executive Andrew Spano called "a historic shift of philosophy" by federal housing officials.

What "historic shift in philosophy" was Spano referring to?

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is intent on integrating racially segregated neighborhoods - not just in Westchester County but across the country. Indeed, HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims said that the Westchester County settlement was a first step, and that he hoped it could "serve as a model for building strong, inclusive sustainable communities in suburban areas across the entire United States."

"Strong, inclusive sustainable communities" is liberal-speak for multi-racial neighborhoods that have high rates of violent crime and low levels of civic health. For years the federal government has been tearing down public housing projects in inner cities and giving the displaced residents Section 8 vouchers that allow them to rent housing in upscale suburban neighborhoods. According to a 2008 article in The Atlantic, police have discovered there is a "near-perfect" match between Section 8 rentals and incidents of violent crime. And in what was the largest study ever conducted on civic engagement in America, Robert Putnam, a liberal Harvard University professor, found that "all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings." Specifically, Putnam found that "the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings."

Westchester's incumbent Congresswoman, Democrat Nita Lowey, supported the settlement, but Lowey's 2010 Republican challenger, Jim Russell, came out strongly against it.

Russell recognizes that "HUD has an insatiable desire to reconfigure neighborhoods across America" and understands that the settlement it forced on Westchester County will "lead to the irreversible demise" of the county. If elected, Russell vows to introduce legislation that will amend federal housing laws to "stop the HUD steamroller" and let "natural housing patterns" endure.

Russell gets it. He understands the danger posed by HUD and groups like the Anti-Discrimination Center, and he's willing to do what it takes to save Westchester County (and all other communities across the country that HUD is intent on "reconfiguring"). He deserves our support.


Jim Russell, the Republican challenger in New York's 18th Congressional district race.

Black Youths Use Social Networking Sites to Coordinate Violence, Disrupt Memorial Day Activities in Suburban Rochester, NY

Seabreeze Amusement Park in Irondequoit, NY was unexpectedly closed this Memorial Day. For many years the historic amusement park (the fourth-oldest in the United States) has marked the unofficial start of summer on Memorial Day. The park's owners didn't provide a reason for the closure, but the Rochester Police Department said there were rumors of a large fight to take place at the park.

The rumors of a large fight were true, and with Seabreeze closed, Rochester youths were forced to find a new location for their mayhem. They settled on The Mall at Greece Ridge, where an annual charity carnival called the Greece Festival for Youth was being held, and used social networking sites to get the word out.

That night, 200 teens converged on the carnival, half wearing yellow, the other in green, and began fighting. Greece Festival of Youth Organizer Bill Selke said, "They were running around, pushing, shoving, fighting. We just can’t afford to have anybody get hurt." The charity event was closed down a week ahead of schedule, and the 20-year-old event's future is now in jeopardy.

"We just can't guarantee that nothing's going to happen," said Selke. "And since Seabreeze set the tone and closed down, if Wilmorite [the owner of The Mall at Greece Ridge] doesn't close down and something bad happens, it would be bad for them."

Police made no arrests Monday night, but Greece Police Chief Todd Baxter says his department will not tolerate youth violence. Baxter, who took office in February, says he can't afford this bruise on the town’s image and the mall's reputation. "We're looking to find out where they came from...why they ended up at our mall."

Here's a hint for Todd: The youths came from the city of Rochester. In fact, black youths from the city have been responsible for a number of large fights at the Greece mall in recent years. Black youths used to congregate at Irondequoit Mall, but their ominous presence scared off white suburbanites (who used the mall for its intended purpose - to buy merchandise - rather than to simply loiter and fight), and that mall closed earlier this decade. Ever since, city youths have been taking the bus to The Mall at Greece Ridge to spread their mayhem. Hoping to avoid a repeat of what happened to Irondequoit Mall, The Mall at Greece Ridge's owners have instituted a number of new rules for teens in recent years, to little effect.

Add Rochester, NY to the growing list of cities across the country where black youths have used social networking sites to coordinate violence in white communities. Apparently most, if not all, of the violence in Greece was black-on-black, but it's only a matter of time before these teens attack a white family that's trying to enjoy a peaceful summer day at the amusement park or the mall.

White Men Turn Against Obama and the Democrats

According to an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party. The op-ed, titled Revenge of the white men, included this interesting fact:

"blue-collar white men, who make up only 11% of the workforce, constitute 36% of those who have lost jobs. In total, nearly half of the recession's casualties are white men, having held 46% of all jobs lost."

Unemployment is expected to remain high for the foreseeable future. But even after employment begins to pick up again, laid off white men shouldn't expect to get their old jobs back.

After President Obama was elected in 2008 he selected Robert Reich to be a member of his economic transition advisory board. In that capacity, Reich testified before Congress that criteria should be put in place to ensure that new blue-collar jobs go to women and minorities instead of "white male construction workers."

"Infrastructure spending is a very important and good way of stimulating the economy... The challenge will be... to find projects... that have a high social return... I am concerned, as I'm sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers."

The Republicans at least pretend they're looking out for white men. The Democrats flaunt that they don't care about that segment of the population, and this November the white men might start to get their revenge.