Equal Opportunists!



Really, I hope I am no bigot —
but all this has been getting ridiculous long since.

There are Negroes, Blacks, Redskins, Indians, Jews, Asians, Arabs and whites. But that's discrimination!

Calling a spade an African-American
For starters, just like Ollie Weeks the equal-opportunity bigot, I am a bit sick of finding out what to use as the present politically correct name for any minority. Wodehouse used a coloured chappie, which is as kind as you can get. As kids, it wasn't bon ton for us to say nigger. Fine, who wants to go around calling people bad names? so we said negro, which word (of which my spell checker tells me it should be 'Negro') by now has fallen down almost as deep. Then, it became de rigueur to say black, which became colored, now replaced by African-American. Who knows what they'll think of next. All these what you can only call euphemisms mean nothing but 'the guy has a dark skin'. Likewise, these days the word farmer often is replaced by agriculturist — but all agriculturists still call themselves farmers. So don't write me letters and don't come bomb my house. Please? Besides, all this is scientifically correct.

Bumper Sticker — I dare you!



To Philosophically Wax
Why is this incredible put-down of blacks so universal? My better-than-most guess is, it's because the nights are dark and dangerous, so black has become the color of evil. Worst about this is, they seem to feel so themselves (after all, night time is dangerous in Africa, too — maybe even more so). What white honky bastard ever thought it necessary to exclaim Grimy pink is beautiful? Invariably Satan, when not a serpent or a goat, is depicted either black or red. The German god Wotan, or Odin, had an evil side-kick, colored black. Sinterklaas, the Dutch (and original) version of Santa Claus traditionally has at least one dark-skinned servant, Black Pete. Rather obviously, the man is a left-over early symbol of Christmas, when the sun vanquishes the wicked Powers of Darkness.

transformation

Dutch Piet and Austrian Crampus
In other European countries (Austria, South Germany, Switzerland, North Italy and Czechoslovakia), St. Nicolaus is seen as originally the German God Thor, and he is accompanied by an outright devil, a character by the name of Crampus - meaning Claws. The good Saint drove around on a chariot drawn by two white goats, Cracker and Gnasher; in rich Holland, he rides a white horse. Interestingly, Dutch Sinterklaas resides in Spain but the Central European one in the "Northland". The very word Santa seems to be related with Satan, which tells more about saints than I care for. The Christmas tree, an obviously magical tree as it kept its leaves, served to scare the devil away.
All very sad and hopeless. But I have to admit that in Hawai'i they reverse it: There, the devil is white. They may have a point.


refreshing

You mostly see whites made up as blacks, like Negro Minstrels, Othello or Sinterklaas servants -
but in Hermanus, South Africa during the annual Whale Festival it's the other way 'round.

Where It Gets Dangerous.
The selection of fire fighters may also leave much to be desired. An ALPA specialist claims that at some American airports like Miami 'positive discrimination plays havoc with hiring fire crews because the adherence to prescribed ethnic quotas may override considerations of ability to train'.
Stephen Barley, The Final Call - Why Airline Disasters Continue to Happen

Reverse Discrimination
Nineteen white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter sued New Haven, Conn., in 2004. They said they would have been promoted if the city hadn't thrown out the results of two tests for lieutenant and captain because minorities generally did poorly on the exams. Officials claimed the exams were unfair to minority firefighters and the city faced potential discrimination lawsuits if it went ahead with the promotions. Scores on the exams indicated that no blacks would be promoted, with 14 of the top 15 candidates for lieutenant and captain white. A trial judge dismissed the lawsuit and a three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal. But then six judges on the appeals court issued an unusual opinion asking the Supreme Court to take the case.
UPDATE: This is the celebrated case of which the Court of Appeals decided in June 2009 that the firefighters were right and the city of New Haven had to conform to their tests. "This decision will change the landscape of civil rights law," said Sheila Foster, a law professor at Fordham.
Politically Correct, 2009-01-11

Racist Games!
Chess and checkers are horribly racist.
White fights Black, need I say more?
Some chessboards use white and red pieces
but none use yellow.

A Good Question
What a bunch of hypocrites. Why isn't the Latino club racist? Or the Asian or African-American club?
Is what a student asked when 15-year old freshperson Lisa McClelland (June, 1007) gathered about 250 signatures from students and adults to start a club at Freedom High School in Oakley, Calif. USA, that would focus attention on European heritage and history. Her campaign has won the support of many students, not all of them white, who say such a group would be no different from the school's other ethnic clubs, which include the Black Student Union, the Latinos Unidos and the ALOHA club for Asian-American students. But those-in-power feel she shouldn't have used the word 'Caucasian' in the club's name.

Where it gets insane
One genealogist has claimed he discovered evidence that black USA 2007 presidential candidate Barack Obama's mother, who is white, is a descendent of slave owners. Obama has therefore not suffered enough as a black man to be able to speak for African Americans.
So let's get this straight: They mean that your ancestors all have to be black for you to have suffered, personally? They must be kidding, but the subject is too serious for that.

Why Keep on Testing, Then?
In October 2007, co-DNA discoverer Watson first had to apologize, then to retire for declaring he was inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa because all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really. Watson, 79 anyway and due for retirement, later emphasized that he did not mean Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior. A fat lot of good that did.
But those IQ-tests do show these results. You can say a lot about those results that make them less than the final word, true. So why do they all continue testing for intelligence when they think it doesn't really mean a thing?

What is going on here?
When President Bush signed his sweeping education law a year into his presidency, it set 2014 as the deadline by which schools were to close the test-score gaps between minority and white students that have persisted since standardized testing began. (New York Times, 20 November 2006)
The problem is, test results have gone up since - but also for non-minority schools (whatever that means). On average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school. Asians perform as well as or better than whites (whatever that means - aren't 'Hispanics' white?)
Maybe that 'sweeping education law', well-meant as it is, falls in the category of outlawing the sun rising in the East.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is
to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN G. ROBERTS JR.
US Supreme Court majority opinion on school integration, 2007

Don't Mention It
In my innocence, the fact hit me long after the disaster. Of course the victims of 2005 Katrina hurricane were mostly black. But as I am a headline reader and never watch television news, I never realized this until I, much later, finally saw some photographs. This is where a taboo backfires - describe them as plain people, not colored folks: But that just happened to be the point!

That Explains It?
The Washington, D.C., police had to recruit personnel who reflected the (mostly black) community and got so desperate that admission tests were made almost impossible to fail. Some people at the police academy could not read or write, and it had graduates diagnosed as borderline retarded. The NYPD was unable to choose the best candidates, as any test passed by higher proportions of whites (which was the case with all tests they could devise) must be biased, if you assume all ethnic groups have equal average abilities. In Miami, almost 90% of police officers dismissed or suspended for serious misbehavior had been hired to fulfill aggressive affirmation quotas.
Ray Ward in Skeptical Briefs, December 2004


adapted from Kuifje/Tintin

That's Show Biz...
Hollywood (according to Marlon Brando full of Jews, but who cares) with all of oh-so-visible show biz, is among the top equal opportunity employers. At least in the limelight - I'm not so sure about what goes on backstage.
Way back when, Sidney Poitier claimed he did not accept a role that might not as well be played by a honky. Rather weird, when you consider he did play a rather explicitly colored chappie in Who's Coming to Dinner?, but okay. Poitier was a welcome relief from the comical butlers, cooks and housemaids, which were all Negroes got to play before him.
But these days it's getting so (after an English production did this for a laugh) if you do Othello it's almost obligatory to have a spade play the guy. Now look, the way Shakespeare wrote it, he must be a honky with boot-polish on his face. To me, doing it in this new fashion is like doing a Fem Lib version of Some Like It Hot with the roles of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag performed by some chicks; and Marilyn Monroe by a fag, oops, a Gay Person.
Hmm... not such a bad idea, at that... could turn out very funny!

What's this?

Nobody could possibly explain how, when it's a cliché that 'negroes are lazy', two standard English expressions are working like a horse and working like a nigger.

Be a Good Sport
As sports are just another form of show biz, only with much bigger audiences, you'd expect equal opportunity there, too. And so it is there - with a vengeance. When did you last see a honky basketball player on television? And it doesn't stop there.
Virtually all of the most successful sprinters and long jumpers, nearly all of the best of the heavier boxers, and four out of five of the professional basketball players [...] are black.
Steven Goldberg, When Wish Replaces Thought, Buffalo 1992
Come to think of it, why don't we have more heavyweight female boxers? Ladies, fight for your rights!

Racial Profiling may be Correct
There is no room left for the blind politically correct procedures that ignore this reality — our enemy is nearly always a young to middle-aged man from a Muslim nation or culture, and it is madness not to focus mainly on those who most readily match the known profile. If preventing another Sept. 11 horror means delaying all travelers from such nations, well, then so be it.
The Examiner, August 2006

Latino is a race?!
Italian restaurant 'Geno's Steaks' (rather weird to start: Italian steaks?) in Philadelphia put up a sign This is America -- when ordering speak English because Latinos refused to speak anything but Spanish. They won't, will they? Geno [Gino] himself just happens to be an Italian immigrant from way back when. Now some maniacs are claiming Geno's a racist; I find that act extremely difficult to follow.

Face the Music
Duke Ellington, no doubt the greatest musician of the twentieth century, used to say Jazz is Negro music. I'm not so sure myself; even some of his own orchestra members looked practically white to me. But in theory, at least, his musicians were all black, no honkies need apply. Then, he paid them twice the going rate. But that's discrimination!

You Can't Win
Sperry Rand wanted to introduce a new electric razor in the UK, made especially to deal with Negro whiskers, shaped differently from Caucasian whiskers. The Commission for Racial Equality forbid them to advertise this as solely for black men, because telling them this was for them exclusively would be discriminatory. Tough, my friends - you're stuck with ingrown beard hairs. But it's for your own good! (give him another wallop.)
The Economist quoted in The National Lampoon's True Facts, 1981, p. 92

Unfair Exams
Because a number of California high school pupils had not mastered English, they failed to pass their 2006 exit exams. Then they started suing the government to have them pass anyway (they lost). Good question: What is the exam for?

And this is ridiculous! And not correct in any way.
On November 10, 2005, the New York Times announced how, in Iceland, a gene was discovered that gave what they called African-Americans a 250% higher chance on heart disease.
Do they really want to sit there and tell us that this does not apply to African-Europeans, African-Asians, African-Australians or African-Africans? And now they have a problem, because the good doctors do not want to be racist at any price, and wish to avoid racial stereotyping by checking for that gene if your skin happens to be dark (price being your life). Or for sickle-cell, maybe? It's dangerous to be politically correct.
Can't help wondering how many African-Icelanders there are. Just a thought.

Riddle

What race did the scientific illustrator belong to?

Chuck Yeager Learns a Little Lesson
I was caught in a buzz saw of controversy involving a black student. The White House, Congress, and civil rights groups came at me with meat cleavers, and the only way I could save my head was to prove I wasn't a damned bigot.
Chuck Yeager, Yeager, an Autobiography, New York 1985
[How do you prove that? Answer: No way, baby. Anyway, Chuck Yeager was training NASA astronauts]:
Only one black pilot had applied for the course and he was number twenty-six on the list. I was informed that the White House [to wit, Bobby Kennedy] wanted a black pilot in the space course. [So they brought one in, as #16 added to the originally planned 15. Yeager mentions his name, but I'll call him 16. With much special attention and help, 1#6 hung on and squeezed through, but NASA did not select him and a few powerful supporters in Washington demanded to know why. The finger of blame was pointed at the school and I was hauled on the carpet to answer charges of racism raised by [16] and some of his friends. [Yeager is exonerated. 16] had taken a cheap shot at my West Virginia accent to try to save face. Hell, if I had been from Philadelphia or New York he wouldn't even have tried. He was prejudiced against me, figuring that anyone from my part of the world was a redneck bigot [...] the type who thought of all blacks as niggers. [...] There never were black pilots or white pilots in the Air Force. There were only pilots who knew how to fly, and pilots who didn't.
[I devoutly hope so, in which case: Amen.]

Keep Our Cartoons Clean
Not only in the great Tom and Jerry cartoons all innocently racist jokes have been cut out long since for kiddy-hour showing. Blackened faces, Indian stereotypes, black accents even - O-W-T OUT! But Brooklyners are not spared - dese guys have to woik out deir problems demselves. Same for Frenchies, Mexicans, or Chermans - not Chews! that's a no-no.
That's discrimination! We insist: Have some neuter (naturally!) dub Cantinflas in Around the World in 80 Days. And while we're at it, patch up Charlie's pants. They're a disgrace.



If things go on like this, soon
we'll have to use minority acting persons in strips
Don't laugh - it's not funny

---

To keep this footnote snappy, Race is an idea biologists shrink away from using. You can't get a handle on it: It is quite possible to find some white men with darker skin than that of some black ones, and so on. Never jump to conclusions (like hiring people with darker skins to arrive at a minority quotum - or blaming me for noticing things that are obvious.)

We're more alike than we're different
and a hard-on reminder to hard-core feminists:
Vive la petite différence!

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