Abstruse

Abstruse means difficult to understand.  I was called abstruse once when attempting to explain the distinction between index coefficients in canonical correlation analysis compared to those in standard structural equation modeling. From that one day in class more than 25 years ago, I still have a fondness for the term as an apt descriptive of myself. Personally, I do not consider my plane spoken comportment to be difficult to understand, but rather that most outside of the world of science, do not abide by taking one’s words as what they mean and are stated to mean. Many cases this is because people have bias that frequently prevent them from acknowledging facts that they too may be aware of but typically avoid because they do not support or confirm to their personal, political or philosophical narrative. Consequently, many consider that my views on race in 21^st century America, as a Black man too are abstruse in the age of Black Lives Matter and continuous charges of seeing racism everywhere someone goes.

Today, race and racism are seen around every corner. Whether if it is the orcs in Lord of the Rings or asking a group of black men with a history of dining and dashing to pay before they are served. Whenever a cop, especially a white cop shoots or kills a Black man, it is an instant racist success. Are any of these truly racist acts or are they rooted in common sense? If a group of white men with a history of dining and dashing were confronted by a Black person, would it still be racist? I ask this because for many Blacks in America, it seems they consider the biggest obstacle to success and achievement in America is racism. I vehemently disagree.

First, as one born in segregation in the deep south, nothing that we as Black folk confront, even the police is as racist as it was in the late 1950s and 1960s – NOTHING. For people to form an organization as if this is a real problem is sinister, superficial and disingenuous and I can provide elucidation on this. In 2017, there were 1147 killings by police of which 149 were unarmed including 49 Blacks and 51 whites. There are approximately 900,000 law enforcementofficers in the U.S., a nation with 328.7 million citizens of which 47.4 million (14.6%) are black and of that 21.5 million (48% of Blacks) are male. Using simple math, this means there was 1 Black killed for every 6.5 million U.S. citizens, 1 for approximately every 967,000 Black citizens and 1 for every 438,000 Black male citizens. When the same analysis is conducted using drowning, of which 2,760 Blacks died because of drowning, this accounted for 1 out of 118,000 U.S. citizens, 1 out of every 17,000 Black citizens and 1 out of every 7,700 Black male citizens. Thus, the query, if Black lives mattered, wouldn’t or shouldn’t drowning be higher than Blacks killed by police?

Such analysis is factual yet remain ignored. I have done similar analysis with Black accident victims, those of cardiovascular disease deaths and Black homicide victims – all way more significant that Blacks killed by police. I am not saying that this is not a problem, but rather it is disingenuous to say this is a major problem. But when I consider Black kids shooting each other, maternal mortality, poor education outcomes in the form of dropout rates and reading and math proficiency, poverty, health and employment, police killing Blacks isn’t that important and is more so an outcome of our learned helplessness.

The modern world view that appears to be only applicable to Blacks born in America is that we are helpless and cannot do for ourselves without the pity of whites. This nature is never applied to Jews, Koreans, Jamaicans, Nigerians or Chinese, just us. It is as if we have been taught as Black people that racism is more important than it is or that we have been taught over the past few decades that Blacks in America are the ONLY and first race in history to be proud to think we cannot succeed unless we have ideal conditions. Think about it, it suggests that because we are having problems we will never achieve or have success. It seems to be forgotten that we as a people had success even with Jim Crow and segregation. It is the goal of racist to implant such ideas to make us obsess about racism, even subtle, that we cannot succeed until racism is obviated. This is neurotic and illogical.

Yes, white privilege is real, but how does Black folk always talking about it solve our problems? Unfortunately, when you address it, you are attacked. Take the example of Bill Cosby. Cosby said what our parents and grand parents said. Be responsible, take care of your kids, study and work hard. Just saying that is what mad Ta-Nehisi Coates his career. His first major piece in the Atlantic attacked Cosby for “respectability politics.” What is wrong with being respectable? I know no Black mother father, grand mother or grand father that do not desire or preach for their kids to be respectable. Eric Dyson got so mad he wrote a book attacking Cosby for what in essences, Blacks have been teaching their offspring for more than a century. From their position, it is wrong o teach people to be responsible, respectable, and to believe you can succeed on your merit alone regardless of economic circumstances and history shows that we can, have and did achieve and only stopped this approach in the mid-1980s. It is easy to make a baby, but it is hard to be a father.

We need to take responsibility for not only ourselves but equally our families and communities. But according to Coates, asking people to be responsible and to raise their children is blaming the victim although we all see and know that individual behavioral dysfunction (speaking proper English is acting white, studying hard is acting white or reading is acting white) is the groundwork of African American economic disadvantage. First generation Asians in NYC who barely speak English hold education the highest of all aspirations so much so that many go without food and basic amenities, so they can pay for tutoring for their children. This is too much for us because we are locked in on being victims and the targets of steady racism. If we do not instill a capacity to function and compete in our children, we will never have equality of outcomes and crying racism will do nothing to accomplish such. Sure, Affirmative action will improve numbers and get you in the door, but it will never address the fundamental problem behind why our children do not stay in or perform well in the top institutions of higher learning in America.  This is a problem because it means Blacks will always be a peonage class collectively. To put it simply, we cannot blame white people for the failures in our communities or us as parents not doing homework or reading with their kids.

Blacks in Barbados, a nation also impacted by slavery and with high population of single parent households see their kids on average score 1300 on the SAT. Across Africa, the average GMAT score is approximately 510 compared to 433 for U.S.Blacks.

Once jokingly, a colleague of mine (a physicist) said: “now we can describe victimization as a time dependent projection matrix with intersectionality being the op-diagonal matrix coefficient.” It made perfect sense to me, for it implied that you have a set of characteristics which are ranked, typically on race and how they rate on the victim hierarchy, and it changes over time as a function of other intersectional variables such as religion, gender, and sexuality. This is where we are as Black people – we want people to lower standards for us to succeed as if we to dumb, stupid, disadvantaged and oppressed to do well on our own effort.

Acknowledging that a white person has white privilege such that they see me as helpless and inferior and can only achieve with white assistance and handouts is not only insulting but also the axiology of racism. It is the same disposition that whites exhibited toward Blacks during slavery, Jim Crow and the Black Codes.  It is the same disposition that led to segregated schools from Boston to Little Rock, for the good of Blacks.  Still we incessantly repeat the lunacy that Blacks will never have success until white come to terms with racism. I do not even know what that means. Is it saying that once this Fourier eutopia happens, then and only then, Blacks will be able to achieve success in America? Is it saying that once progressive liberal whites admit their white privileges, and atone for this original sin by admitting their inherent racism and worship their God Ta-Nehisi Coates will make it all good for Blacks only then? I think Not.

No matter how much white people read Coates and hoist the scarlet letter of white privilege, it will do nothing to address the underlying conditions that alone are contributing to our collective behavioral dysfunction. So far it has only resulted in a defensive populous that seeks to talk about the books by Black authors they read and endless pedantic twitter rants and op-eds that serve only to feed their egos, for targeted action in their minds directed at solving problems are not as essential as constantly complaining and blaming white people.

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How History Repeats Itself

It is an objective historical fact that one of the more noxious and defiling contribution Democrats inflected on Blacks in America was the concept of segregation based on separate but equal. This was a consequence of White Democrats (nationwide) desire to keep the races separate. Before the Civil war, there was no reason to have laws segregation blacks or slaves from whites, it was the de facto outcome of the peculiar institution.  However, after the war, unattested fears of Blacks being unfit to exist in a civilized white world in concert with being consider brute who posed threats to white women, states (mostly in the South) started to put laws and ordinances on the books that legalized racial segregation in public facilities. Nine states, from 1887 to 1992 implemented such laws which would extend segregation principles in public facilities including but not limited to parks, restaurants, trains, schools, cemeteries, and theatres. In aggregate, these were called Jim Crow and they persisted from the 1870s into the 1950s.

The civil rights movement in the U.S., especially the south, was started to end the practice of segregation. However, Democrats fought tooth and nail against this and eventually had to concede defeat when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law. However, it seems that history has a funny way of repeating itself and the same liberal progressive actors that introduced the norm of segregation more than 140 years ago are back at it again, yet this time with a unique co-conspirator.

It seems that segregation is all the rage presently, on U.S. colleges and universities. Now true, there has always been some form of (self) segregation on predominately white college campuses by different racial and ethnic groups, especially Blacks, but the way in which it is happening now is an indignity to those that pushed so hard to disprove the fallacy of separate being agnate to equal. Across America, because of identarian politics, post-modernism and political correctness, white progressives have been able to reinject the infectious prion of race differences in Black behavior that promotes and support segregation. As Alfred Edmond, Jr wrote, “Segregation was never good for black people. We were not better off during Jim Crow. Not even a little bit. Those who wax nostalgically about how we thrived during segregation and leveraged it to our economic advantage to support and sustain healthy, strong black communities are just straight-up wrong.”

The new standard is to promote and engender social division as opposed to encourage collective assimilation. From California State University to the University of Connecticut (where there will even be a dormitory specifically for males who identify as black) separate but equal is being promulgated as acceptable. It doesn’t stop there. From no white allowed pool parties to a Black Georgia Mayor Banning White Reporters from Press Conference to Black only graduations at Harvard, the nonsense borders of something that should be outlined as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic manual of mental disorders. Last I heard, institutions of higher learning were supposed to be places where young adults. In contrast, Black students seem to want to stick their heads in the sand or retract in their turtle shell away from the real world they will eventually have to function in.

This in my view, just serves to polarize and fracture the social fabric of the U.S. We cannot ignore that there is an existential value in learning from others that have different perspectives on issues with which we are all concerned with? Why is it okay to assign acceptable bias to non-whites while simultaneously assign negative bias regarding race to whites? This is as stupid as it is inconsistent. What does skin color have to do with thoughts, ideas, competence or ability? Boy, history certainly has a bazaar way of repeating itself.

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Why do impoverished Black people support Hillary Clinton?

When I think of Hillary Clinton, and the strong support she has from black people, it simply blows my mind.  Here is this woman, an elite northern school graduate from middle class Chicago whom was not only president of the young republicans but also a Goldwater girl in 1964 in the form of both volunteer and supporter. In case you may have forgotten, Barry Goldwater was the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction by campaigning to defeat the Civil Rights Act and consequently was the main person whom motivated Hillary Clinton to get into politics.

As expected, black politicians have lined up in like they were camping out to get the latest IPhone or new pair of Yeezies to endorse her. It as if by doing such and showing your loyalty to master, she will let you move into the big house as a reward for being faithful to the Clintons.  This was the way it was in 1992.

In 1992 when black folk put Bill Clinton in office in addition to some theatrics of his own (playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show and walking up to an American citizen during the debate to answer questions directly), African American communities across America in rural and urban areas were suffering and had been devastated economically. If one is old enough to recall, one reason for this was Bill Clinton’s ability to say things to the black community that he would say in opposite to white communities. On the same day in the morning Bill Clinton would be singing Lift Every Voice and Sing at a NAACP or black Baptist church meeting and later on that night speaking to a room full of Dixiecrats tell them how he was willing to be tougher on crime and make our cities safer than republicans ever could.

Bill, the democrats, the service economy, big banks, Wall Street and the average white American won but not black folk, we got the shaft. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of mass losses in factories across the nation and the diminution of U.S. manufacturing.  All because big corporations were moving abroad as a consequence of globalization and in search of cheaper labor and fewer regulations.  This continued at an even larger scale and greater pace with Clinton as President.

At the start of his presidency, America saw unemployment rates among young black men multiply to pornographic levels. As a direct result, crime increased and we were watching the start of the crack cocaine epidemic. Now Blacks were in essence caged in segregated public housing hoping that the Democratic president would do something to help as he promised during his campaign. He was able to secure 83 percent supportfrom black voters in 1992.

Unfortunately under the Clinton regime we observed the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates in American history. He was firmly in support of the sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which not only resulted in disproportionate arrest and sentencing for African Americans, it also increased funding for drug-law enforcement as a continuation of prior republican administrations war on drugs.  He also pushed for a federal “three strikes”law and in 1994 he signed a $30 billion crime bill that mandated life sentencesfor some three-time offenders, and provided $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces among other things.  

By 1996, after securing 84 percent black vote to gain a second term and using coded language about race (crime, welfare, crack cocaine) to divide the nation and divert attention from the economy that worked only for the top one percent, the federal the penal budget became twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. 

The next move for his administration was to cut billions from public-housing and child-welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)) budgets and have them re-directed to increasing incarceration. In fact, Clinton cut funding for public housing more than 60 percent ($17 billion) while increasing funding for prisons by more than 170 percent ($19 billion).

So what Bill Clinton supported from a policy perspective was what democrats in large urban areas had been supporting for the prior 50 years - discriminatory laws that keep black and poor people in their place while extracting lifeline resources that serve to sustain people during times of economic hardship. But this wasn’t enough for him; he had to go even beyond cruelty.

Next the Clinton Administration eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners seeking higher education to prepare for their release and overtly supported laws that would make it easier for public-housing agencies to deny shelter to anyone with any sort of criminal history.

It was President Clinton who proposed the “one strike and you’re out” initiative, which meant that families could be evicted from public housing because one member (or a guest) had committed even a minor offense – this was his brainchild. No black men whom had been released from prison with nothing could no longer return home to family if they lived in federally assisted housing or else the entire family would be kicked out. On top of this, the Clinton Administration promised,signed into law and made certain that anyone convicted of a felony drug offense would never be able to get federal financial aid if you had drug convictions.  He signed into law a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense.

When Bill was finished, more than half of working-age African-American with criminal records was now by legal sanction, burdened with congressional and presidential approved discrimination in housing, employment and access to education. Moreover, after his two terms as President, Clinton left the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, thanks to his 1994 Crime Bill which saw conservatively, more than 80% percent of all drug offenders sent to prison being black men and the unemployment rate for non-college-educated black men (including those behind bars) being north of 40 percent - all with the approval and support of the current democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the unusual accomplice of the black vote. Now I know many will say that this was Bill and Not Hillary. Truthfully they are one in the same – HILLBILL.

So all I am asking is what have the Clintons done to keep black folk voting for them other than belong to the Democratic Party? Why do impoverished Black people living from paycheck to paycheck support Hillary Clinton?

The housing bubble that precipitated the crash that created the Great Recession was done mostly on the backs of people of color. The bankers who profited from preying on the black communities got bailed out to the tune of trillions of taxpayer dollars; their victims mostly lost their homes. The perpetrators were never even indicted by the Obama administration, which had been tight with Wall Street from jump.

And it is bazaar how folk forget how she and her husband went after then Senator Obama.  In 2008 while campaigning in South Carolina Hillary suggested that Dr. King’s dream was wasn’t anything without President Lyndon B. Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act. Tim Russert, then the host for NBC Meet the Press said it was as if she was saying “it took a white man to get blacks to the mountaintop.” Then there is what Bill Clinton was reported to have said after it was reported in 2010 he was upset that Senator Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary. In the book Game Change written by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin it is reported in a conversation with Kennedy he said, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” describing Senator Obama.  We won’t even speak on her dismal record with Black New Yorkers or Blacks across the nation while she served as the Senator from New York.

The simple truth is that Black Americans have been voting for the Democrats consistently for more than the past forty years and we have little if anything to show for it with the exception of a few Attorney Generals, a President, and a museum. Why, because economically, we have been shown but fail to acknowledge that the economic positions of the democratic clearly elucidate it as being the party of the affluent white collar white and no one else.

How can we forget or ignore that it was the Clinton administration that deregulated banks and Wall Street which was a major factor in the financial crisis the U.S. experienced in 2008 and had a more than disparate impact on African Americans compared to any other ethnic racial group in the country. And his relationship with Wall Street and Big banks is no different from his wife.  How else can folk get upwards of $250,000 for forty-five minute speeches without doing any actual work? The role of the practices of big banks and Wall Street on the African American community cannot be denied yet she panders to us like the man on the corner begging for some change. She may speak out about redlining practices that are discriminatory and illegal and predatory lending but the only time we see or hear from her, like most other democrats is when they want our votes and support while at the same time she is all buddy-buddy with the folk who are making it extremely hard for African Americans (the people she called super predators and deadbeats) to obtain a fair and equal economic footing in America. So again I just ask why impoverished Black people support Hillary Clinton. 

For more than 40 years her party has collectively siphoned the African American vote without returning anything in exchange for our continuous and even subsistent electoral support and what have we received or to show for it economically?  A few social programs designed to make us helpless and dependent on government, the status of a permanant status as secondary class citizens in America just like during the Black Codes and Jim Crow, and historically high levels of crime in our communities, unemployment, poverty, incarceration rates, poorer health and wellness status and mass illiteracy.

I take it these basic public benefits are the aspects of Hillary Clinton’s policy that excites you and her base – have at it. Personally I deserve better and much, much more.

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BLM Adopts Jim Crow and Promote Black Codes Policy

On a Sunday morning the 15 of September in 1963, the Ku Klux Klan murdered four girls when they bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The church, which had been built in 1911, would be the last place Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley would ever grace. This was one of the seminal events that propelled the Civil rights movement to the forefront of the American consciousness as well shocked the nation presenting it with the horrors blacks in the south and across the U.S. had been dealing with for decades. In basic terms it painted the evil of segregation by race and the incongruence of the premise of separate but equal in the land of the free.

It seems that all of that was struggled for just some fifty plus years ago has been thrown down the drain by self-pitying, micro-aggressed, spoiled self-proclaimed social justice warriors whom appear ill-equipped and unable to exist in the real world without artificially constructing it to meet their self-absorbed make-believe worlds. I guess this is what happens when you raise a generation of mollycoddled kids who are used to getting a trophy just for paying a fee and participating rather than having to earn or work hard for it.

Recently, while reading, I came across something that was truly out of Alice in Wonderland. It seems there is a new “social justice” movement going on on college and university campuses across the nation in which Black college students are demanding that they be segregated from white students, calling for “safe spaces” only for students of color. At Oberlin University, students have demanded “safe spaces” for black students only, as well as rooms in the library, science center for specific use by black students. They even want black/Africa only events at some universities and at Scripps and Pomona colleges, several such have already occurred. The Afrikan Student Union at UCLA is asking for an “Afrikan Diaspora floor” as well as an “Afro-house.” The University of Connecticut is even building a new dorm for black students only. At Cal State Los Angeles, a new housing program opens up dorms for black students who want to be separated from the rest of the campus. A similar housing option is available at UC Davis.

HELLO, this is segregation. As a child of segregation and born in Memphis in 1962, this nothing to play with and not so simple a thing to be tossing around because somebody got their punk azz feelings hurt or micro-aggressed. It also seems as if these kids do not understand the historical precedents set in motion ex post facto Jim Crow regarding segregation and the concept of separate but equal. Let me remind your dumb azz. In the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson, the issue of whether public facilities may be segregated based on race was first proffered in the context of transportation. As a result of this case, the Supreme Court said that the Equal Protection Clause was not violated by a Louisiana law requiring whites and blacks to ride in separate railroad cars. From this point on for decades to follow, the courts would hand down a series of decisions that permitted states to segregate people of color up until the 1930s when Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP started a surgical dismantling of the "separate but equal" position which defined Plessy. Segregation was rampant in public education from Boston and Maryland to Birmingham and Arkansas. The final nail in obviating segregation and the postulate of separate but equal occurred in 1954 when the Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was the conclusion and opinion of the Court that "Racially segregated schools” are "inherently unequal."

 To be honest, I am bedeviled with what social justice means and what a social justice warrior is. First they can’t be too social if they desire to be isolated from the world, nor concerned about justice if it is only interesting when black folks are killed by cops and not each other and warrior, I won’t even go their (brave or experienced fighter). I mean they are afraid to live around people who have a different skin color than them and are even traumatized simply by reading the word TRUMP written chalk. Likewise, I am trying to figure out what social justice work is for today it seems to be the exact opposite of what it was when I was raised as a child in the segregated south. All I can surmise is that it means tweeting a lot, making a couple-a-few hashtags, protesting and marching in the streets and crying and asking for space when you hear something you don’t like. Clearly it doesn’t involve patrolling streets in Chicago or Memphis, or volunteering to tutor at your local neighborhood school, or working in the jails, prisons and homeless shelters I prefer to spend my time in personally regularly.

The concept of self-segregation is weak and is in dialectical opposition to what Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activist in the past envisioned regarding an America that was open to all without any barriers. Moreover it is comical for people to desire to be segregated while at the same time incessantly complaining and pointing out that they (blacks) are frequently excluded when compared to other students. I would wager if whites had a white only party these same kids would protest vehemently - maybe even saying that doing such would be a form of overt discrimination by other students and a sign of disrespect.

It is also evident that what some of these new age cats want is impossible and more unlikely than taking a yellow brick road to see a wizard. There is no constitutional right not to be offended and just because a baby cries don’t mean you will or should get it. It is impossible to “bullet-proof” any person from reality.

No institution should be in the business nurturing idiotic preconceptions just because someone is uncomfortable. Moreover it is completely impossible to go through and to accommodate every possible example and or situation that might bother or upset someone: especially in places where folks are actively looking for things and ideas to become offended by. I just hope these soft as wet toilet paper social justice warriors that frighteningly and frenziedly represent the future coterie of African Americans, get a spine and learn to deal with know you cannot control everything and that are aware they are pro Jim Crow and black codes when they propose idiotic suggestions like self-segregation.

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