Devah Pager of Princeton and Algernon Austin of EPI Use White Racist Stereotypes To Explain Issues Crucial To The Black Community

At the risk of further alienating my liberal friends in New York who have knee-jerked me all the way into a hell reserved only for the vilest conservatives, I feel I must once again make what I consider to be valid observations of the Black and White left, reveal a few inconvenient truths, and then compare them, when appropriate, to the hard-line right.

So what is wrong with the Black and White intellectual left in America? Can they ever be unbiased? Non-racist? Can they ever dream of anything other than a simplistic Ebony Magazine-Al Sharpton view of White racism as a catch-all explanation for one of the single biggest and most embarrassing circumstances facing the Black community, namely, the disproportionate rate of Black youth incarceration and education failure?

Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute, in his 2006 article, Don't Blame Black Culture for Economic Decline (Why Bill Cosby is Wrong), references a study by Princeton Professor of Sociology Devah Pager that purports to prove old fashioned White racism alive and well and preventing Black youth from obtaining entry-level jobs. Steve Horowitz, author of an article reviewing Devah Pager's 2007 book which includes the study ( Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration ), allows passion to overcome him when he notes:
The Princeton professor isn’t the first to point this out [that Black males spend way too much time in prison], but she does well to bring this up in context of her research for two reasons. First, all Americans should be outraged by these facts. They should be shouting this information from the rooftops, demanding explanations from their elected officials, and actively working for solutions. Why is America incarcerating so many people and why are so many of them black?

The view of Devah Pager and Steve Horowitz, based on my experience, pretty much sums up the viewpoint of White liberal America ... Soooo it's the fault of America? It's the fault of that abstract entity no two people can define the same way? Huh? ... And Americans should be outraged! Yes. Americans should be outraged that the Black and White left in America avoid and deny the complex circumstances that work to prevent Black youth from achievement. And why? Because most of these well-documented facts by unbiased and balanced studies point to issues other than White racism as determining factors for failure and incarceration. In other words, they violate principles of the Religion of The Eternal Victim that have gripped much of Black America and their White supporters. And God help us all, some of these facts actually fault the Black community, Black leaders, and Black culture as having some responsibility ... Now, I just have to avoid the snipers! Making statements like these is kinda like revealing to hardcore Christians their ongoing hypocrisy for supporting the Iraq War.

Stepping outside the confines of the Religion of The EV, let's breeze over a few things that tend to contradict its beliefs, i.e., that tend to show compelling evidence that forces other than White racism are at work. Anyone at anytime, can research the many instances of intense and pervasive government corruption that have plagued the city of Washington, D.C.--from the trial of Mary Treadwell (Mayor Barry's wife) and her cronies to the more recent Washington D.C. Tax Office scandal--and conclude quite readily that the Black government of D.C., empowered to help the Black community of D.C., instead did just the opposite for the better part of three decades. By means of fraud, embezzlement, abuse of power, and wasteful spending, the politicians and bureaucrats of D.C. stabbed the Black community in the back so many times that only through a miracle of denial (related to blaming the White racism of Congress) have the Black community of Washington been prevented from taking to the streets in massive protest. The D.C. Tax Office, once the investigation was complete, was found to have brilliantly siphoned off 40 million or more of public funds before getting caught. And this is just for starters!

In other words, the Black government of D.C., supported by the Black elite of D.C. and the Black and White media, willfully and knowingly deprived its citizens of those funds necessary to maintain their communities and their schools, and in the most shameful manner imaginable. Not a single member of The Religion of The Eternal Victim will ever admit that conditions such as these play a role in the subject at hand. They will laugh at you, accuse you of being a racist, avoid you, become enraged, argue illogically, but never an admission. Once more, the Black and White left of America remind me of Evangelical behavior at such time you provide them undeniable proof of evolution.

But now let's return to Devah Pager of Princeton. It appears Devah Pager has failed, and in remarkably obvious fashion, to examine studies by groups in her own backyard of Princeton, studies that offer a viewpoint on Black youth that contradict her conclusions and those of her followers like Steve Horowitz. From the Future Of Children website:

A more important explanation focuses on respect: low-income men often fail to work because doing so would violate their self esteem. Black youth, for example, typically demand higher wages before they will work than whites with the same qualifications. Economists might say that they have a higher “reservation wage”—the wage that would induce them to accept a job. But this framing again suggests a quality of calm calculation that is lacking. Actually, passion reigns. Black youth will often refuse to work for “chump change” even if it means not working at all. Or they accept jobs but then find them unrewarding or abusive. So they leave them in a huff or are fired.

And further:

Low-skilled blacks feel that employers treat them as expendable, firing them at the least provocation. To the employers, however, it seems that the men simply “don’t want to work.” So bosses grow wary of hiring them, particularly minorities and ex-offenders. They often hire women or immigrants instead. One cannot call such preferences racist, because black employers voice the same complaints as whites.

Okay, now another comprehensive and scholarly study that also presents a more complex picture than Devah Pager, Algernon Austin, and their supporters would have you believe. It is put together nicely in a book entitled, The Meaning of Race for Employers, by Joleen Kirscheman and Kathryn Neckerman. Here is a slice:

Despite Black's disproportionate representation in the urban underclass, however defined, analyses of inner-city joblessness seldon consider racism or discrimination as a significant cause ... Lacking the mainstream role models they once had, inner-city blacks no longer learn and value the habits associated with steady work.

Because of this viewpoint that life is more complex than the Religion of The Eternal Victim will have you believe, the Black and White left will accuse me of being a racist, of supporting the White racist conspiracy, and will readily accuse any Black American of being a race traitor if she or he dares to voice any agreement with my viewpoint, or let's say, with the viewpoint of anyone who doesn't accept the basic beliefs of the Religion.

Yes, been there, done that ... I'm wistfully taken back to a telemarketing job I once had and the group of Jesus freaks there shouting at me viciously in the lunch room that I was going to hell because I didn't accept their version of reality.

Back to my motto. The truth will piss you off.

Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America - Algernon Austin of The Economic Policy Institute Still Blames Whitey

"Are black students really afraid of 'acting white'?" Algernon Austin asks in The Daily Voice. According to him, the answer is NO. Austin is director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, and apparently, based on a read of his recent article, a man who carefully avoids the complex issues affecting black student performance in American schools. After a long piece that omits any possible evidence, study, book, or dialogue that does not support his facts, he predictably summarizes his argument by blaming black student problems on nothing more obvious than White racism:

Adults concerned about raising black student achievement have two options: we can get back into the civil rights business of confronting the social and economic inequalities that produce the achievement gap or we can cling to convenient stereotypes and keep on blaming black students. Blaming black students certainly means less work for us.

In other words, black communities, leaders, families, and students bear zero responsibility for underachieving black student performance on all levels over the past 20 years. This is an age-old and seriously flawed observation, among others that have acquired cult-like status among the Al Sharpton racists. But nothing dispels such notions faster and more powerfully than John McWhorter's classic, Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America. To quote John McWhorter:

Victimology is seductive because there is an ironic and addictive contentment in underdoggism. However, it also inherently gives failure, lack of effort, and even criminality a tacit stamp of approval. In addition, because focusing on the negative debases the performance of any human being, focusing on remaining aspects of victimhood rather than the rich opportunities before us is a ball and chain restraining any effort to move ahead.

And no scholarly note here, but still, an interesting comment on Amazon.Com by one of the books many supporters, D. A. Martin:

For years I have grown sick and tired of liberal "blacker than thou" pseudo-intellectuals who claim to have MY best interests at heart as a Black American. They blame all of our problems on racism, constantly making us out to be victims - even 30-plus years after the Civil Rights Movement! Yet, they are never willing to turn the microscope on us as Black Americans and how we should take responsibility for the ways in which we do ourselves in, but are quick to try to censor, berate, and/or brand as a "traitor" someone like McWhorter for doing so, all for the so-called crime of "airing our dirty laundry."

Though I'm not Black, this comment resonated with me. Why? Because I've heard these same comments myself, made privately to me by Black friends and associates who are exhausted by the stereotype White liberals force on them via academia and the media. It seems that Algernon Austin, even many years after John McWhorter's ground-breaking book, even after the studies, many anecdotes, and hot debate on these issues, continues to adopt a simplistic and convenient racist stance, i.e., he exclusively faults White people as the ultimate cause of all Black failure in America.

As human beings, we need to begin openly and forcefully rejecting such notions, for the sake of defeating racism in all its forms, whether it derives from White liberals or Black intellectuals. If not, meaningful change and dialogue will remain impossible.

Are White Academics Attacking Black America? Did Ebony Magazine Help Invent "The New Racism"? Am I Delusional?

On the heels of intense and ongoing racist bloggery following the now infamous Duke Rape Hoax in North Carolina, I've been researching why it always seemed to me that starting in the 1990's a significant portion of middle and upper class Black Americans began to believe they were the constant victims of a definable and obvious "new racism" on the part of middle and upper class Whites. Recently, I backed into this article from 1996 by Hans J. Massaquoi that appeared in Ebony--a magazine that never stops insisting that a White racist lurks around every corner. And yes, this is NOT an exaggeration. Ebony Magazine spends more time fanning the flames of racism than the White House spends on making us afraid of terrorists. A quote from that 1996 article in Ebony as follows:

After years of hard-won gains made by some talented and upwardly mobile Blacks, a new wave of racism has been sweeping the nation that is threatening to turn back the clock. In the resulting anti-Black climate, Black achievers have become the frequent targets of inappropriate behavior on the part of Mutes that ranges from mindless disrespect to overt hostility and physical abuse. The result is that no Black person is too distinguished, too famous or too rich to be spared by the resurgence of overt bigotry.

Mutes? ... The story also quotes a claim by ex-governor Wilder of Virginia that he was suddenly and brutally assaulted by an airport security guard simply for pointing out that his suspenders might have caused a beeping alarm--a story that seemed to be absurdly exaggerated but was nevertheless "settled" to avoid the kind of publicity that Wilder could muster before going to court.

From Ebony Magazine in 1991:

The "new racism" is the term some observers use to describe the recent attacks-some subtle, some not-so-subtle-on Black progress. It is evident on predominantly White college campuses, where Black students and faculty face mounting hostilities. It is evident in corporate suites, where Black executives are butting their heads against glass ceilings that prohibit their advancement. It is evident in national polls that indicate White Americans-despite the overwhelming evidence of their individual prejudices-continue to labor under the mistaken belief that discrimination has been completely eradicated. And it is most evident in the nation's neighborhoods, where resistance to integration still runs deep.

So how about an example from today? There are plenty of reasoned approaches to racism by black commentators, but It seems, in some quarters, that the insistence on racism getting worse has become even more strident, perhaps to point of dementia? Well, okay, you decide. Here is a 2007 quote from BlackCommentator.Com, a very popular black website:

Black faculty, the few left, capitulate so as not to lose their jobs, homes, cars, and expensive clothes! Worse, whites have taken over Black studies and white women teach and write (they have control over the journals) about black women authors...there are white chairs of African Americans studies and white women have taken hold of Black women's literature as if it is their own. Black women or men who bring the history of oppression and resistance, bring a political consciousness to academia, or what they call 'an attitude' are not wanted." Indeed, this is "an insidious way to annihilate Black people."

Whites have taken over Black studies? Um ...