May 27, 2009

A Statistic That Proves Nothing

Though at least a couple of domestic terrorists want to claim it does.

"Fifty-seven percent of white voters did not vote for Obama," Dohrn said. Referring to hers and Ayers new book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy, she said, "That was the impetus for writing this book. We've got a big job to do to change those numbers."

So, a racial disparity proves racism? I guess, then, that Dohrn and Ayers concerned about the level of racism exhibited by the black community, which did not vote for John McCain somewhere in the 95% range. You know, black supremacy would have to be a bad thing, right – even worse than what the alleged white supremacy shown by a mere 57% failing to vote for a black candidate for office, given the severity of the former. Unless, of course, one is such a racist that one is unwilling to hold blacks to the same standard which one holds whites.

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May 24, 2009

City Where White Democrats Killed Blacks Elects Black Mayor

It is great to see the Democrat Party advance out of the nineteenth century – and move past the scourge of racism that overshadowed it for most of the twentieth century.

The city of Philadelphia, Miss., where members of the Ku Klux Klan killed three civil rights workers in 1964 in one of the eraÂ’s most infamous acts, on Tuesday elected its first black mayor.

James A. Young, a Pentecostal minister and former county supervisor, narrowly beat the incumbent, Rayburn Waddell, in the Democratic primary. There is no Republican challenger.

* * *

The city is 56 percent white, 40 percent black and 2 percent American Indian, according to the Census Bureau.

Once again, we see that a qualified black candidate who runs based upon qualifications rather than race can be elected in a majority white area -- even where Democrats are the prevailing political force and have been the main agents of racism (murderously so) for over a century and a half. So, let's move past the sort of focus on race that extends racism rather than eliminates it, and instead focus on love of country -- something which should unite all of us as Americans.

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May 14, 2009

Can A White Man Be An African-American?

According to one institution of higher education, the answer is no – even if that white man was born and raised in Africa.

Born and raised in Mozambique and now a naturalized U.S. citizen, Serodio, 45, has filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey medical school, claiming he was harassed and ultimately suspended for identifying himself during a class cultural exercise as a "white African-American."

"I wouldn't wish this to my worst enemy," he said. "I'm not exaggerating. This has destroyed my life, my career."

The lawsuit, which asks for Serodio's reinstatement at the school and monetary damages, named the Newark-based University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and several doctors and university employees as defendants.

Filed Monday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, the lawsuit traces a series of events that Serodio maintains led to his 2007 suspension, starting with a March 2006 cultural exercise in a clinical skills course taught by Dr. Kathy Ann Duncan, where each student was asked to define themselves for a discussion on culture and medicine.

After Serodio labeled himself as a white African-American, another student said she was offended by his comments and that, because of his white skin, was not an African-American.

According to the lawsuit, Serodio was summoned to Duncan's office where he was instructed "never to define himself as an African-American & because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so."

"It's crazy," Serodio's attorney Gregg Zeff told ABCNews.com. "Because that's what he is."

Serodio, who lives in Newark, said he never meant to offend anyone and calling himself African-American doesn't detract from another person's heritage.

Now let’s consider this for a minute. If I argued that it was somehow offensive for a black person to define him or herself as “American” because I’m an American and not black, I’d justifiably be called a racist. It is equally as racist for some blacks to seek to reserve the continent of Africa to themselves, given the multi-ethnic makeup of that continent. After all, while most people of sub-Saharan Africa are black, not all of them are. And in northern Africa, the vast majority are of an entirely different ethnic stock, a mixture of Arab and Semitic peoples among others. Are those individuals to be excluded from their African heritage in order to protect the hyper-sensitive feelings of racist blacks who want to lay claim to the continent as exclusively their own?

What’s more, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey is a public institution. Is it the place of a public institution to define the race of its students and limit how some students view their heritage based upon those determinations? I would argue that the answer is self-evidently “NO!” To expel an individual from a professional school based upon their ethnic self-identification is simply intolerable. And equally unacceptable was the attempt by school officials to gag the student by forbidding him to speak or write in any public forum about the issue of race, ethnicity and culture – last time I checked, the First Amendment still applied to public institutions.

Why do I defend this gentleman? Perhaps it is because for several years I taught with a young woman who was born and raised in South Africa – a woman who proudly identified herself as an African. Perhaps it is because I do not know how else to identify an individual like Teresa Heinz Kerry, also born and raised in Mozambique, other than as an individual of unambiguously African heritage. And yes, perhaps because I frequently remind my students that the entire human race has its origin on the continent of Africa, and therefore we all have some claim to the continent on which our species emerged – and in that sense we are all African Americans.

H/T Discriminations

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