Sunday, August 31, 2008

And if Obama Loses?

By Nicholas Stix

“And If Obama Loses?” is the title of Pat Buchanan’s new column.

I will answer Buchanan’s question. If the politician of *undetermined identity running under the name “Barack Obama” loses, blacks will riot. And if “Obama” wins, blacks will … riot.

They will riot, because that’s what they do. They riot when they’re angry; they riot when they’re happy; they riot, knowing that rioting will make them happy, if only for fleeting moments; they riot, because they have no self-control, and it just comes over them. A substantial percentage of young blacks will participate in at least one riot in their life, and some will participate in dozens. Most “law-abiding” blacks will cheer them on, and not a few will commit obstruction of justice, in order to save black rioters from having to pay for their mayhem. As if they were in any danger of being called to account.

The vast majority of blacks, perhaps as much as 90 percent, believe that they are under no obligation to obey what they call “the white man’s law,” and teach this to their own and other blacks’ children, as they were taught it by Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad, et al. But few will admit this publicly. Then, when the children of whatever age do as they were taught, the same blacks conjure up racial fairy tales like the notion that the prisons are full of innocent black men who were targeted by racist white policemen through a policy of “racial profiling.”

What I’d like to know is, do the white socialists, communists, and soccer moms who will vote for “Obama” think that if they fall into the clutches of racist black sociopaths, politely informing the folks that they voted for “Obama” will cause their captors to refrain from raping (the women and the men), maiming, torturing and murdering them? Or do they delude themselves that they are safe from such predators?

And as among whites, a vote for “Obama” will only materially benefit a tiny, well-connected, elite, I have to ask the vast majority of His white supporters this: Is the feeling of moral superiority that comes from voting for “Obama” worth possibly bringing about everything from the economic ruin to the physical annihilation of millions of whites, including yourselves?



* Since unbeknownst to his teenaged mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, The One’s bigamous father was already married to a Kenyan woman, his parents’ marriage was invalid. Thus, his properly legal surname at birth would have been Dunham. And according to the Associated Press, when The One was five or six years old, after his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, adopted him, Soetoro filed a birth certificate in Indonesia with the legal name, “Barry Soetoro.”

Thursday, August 28, 2008

White Obamanoids Play for the "Stupid White People" Vote

David Gergen is presently hammering home the Lincoln talking point, saying "how interesting it is" that already two speeches have alluded to Lincoln, as if this were all some amazing coincidence! Gergen has no shame. He's not even feigning independence.

And now, another Obamanoid on CNN's payroll, Gloria Berger, is gushing that The One is "not a professional politician."

Extending that, a 60-something, white male operative is playing the "postpartisanship" talking point.

Do they still think they can get away with that?

And now Biden is talking about cops and firemen and assembly workers. I guess he's supposed to get those white Pennsylvania voters. But the Democratic Party stands for racist black and Hispanic cops and firemen and assembly workers!

There is apparently no limit to the contempt that the elites feel for the whites who are the only thing preesently standing between this country and anarchy.

"Obama": He's King ... and Lincoln!

By Nicholas Stix

On CNN, tenured racist Michael Eric Dyson argues that in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, King stood in the shadow of Lincoln. Al Gore is playing the same theme. This theme has clearly been scripted, in order to make the "Stupid White People" feel that Obama will be their president, too. To the whites, they say, "He's Lincolnesque!" To the blacks they shout, "He's another MLK!" There's some truth to one of those slogans -- for better or worse.

Desperately Seeking Significance: At "Obama's" Nuremberg Rally

by Nicholas Stix

While covering Barry Dunham/Soetoro/Barack Hussein Obama's Nuremberg rally tonight, CNN keeps flashing banal numbers on the screen, seeking to hype them into signicance. Thus, we learn that 14 percent of the delegates are 36 or under, and "almost 17 percent of the delegates are senior citizens 65 years of age or older." This is supposed to tell us that Dunham/Soetoro/Obama/Whoever is bringing together the youth and the senior citizens.

Let's do some subtraction. Less the "youth" and the "senior citizens," 69 percent of the delegates are between 37 and 64 years of age. How is this breakdown demographically unusual? And those 36 and 65 year olds are wealthy, connected people.

Before that, a white Omamanoid employed by CNN (in earlier versions, I assumed he was a Dunham/Soetoro/Obama/Whoever staffer), maybe 48-50 years old, with a helmet of silver hair and a football in his hand (old jock?), intoned, "If Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination tonight, he will literally change the face of American politics."

"If"? Is this brain-dead head of hair trying to inject drama into this choreographed-to-death event, as if anything isn't going to go according to script?

Helmet-head and some black Obamanoids also praised "the organization" going back to the beginning, and gushed about "the text-messaging." This is apparently supposed to make The Dunham/Soetoro/Obama Show seem young, hip, and spontaneous.

Obsessive text-messaging is for children, and those who would manipulate them.

Yes, by all means, let us emphasize the organization and the text-messaging.

It takes a middle-aged, white heterosexual male campaign consultant like David Axelrod, to fashion a properly anti-white-heterosexual- male political campaign.

An Obamanoid emphasizes that Obama's acceptance speech will constantly talk about America and barely mention the world. This is supposed to rope in the "stupid white people," you know, the ones who "cling to guns and religion" in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, who are going to suddenly see in this traitor a homespun, patriotic, Amurrican hero.

CNN emphasizes that "Colorado elected a Democratic Senator in 2004 ands a Democratic governor in 2006": Change! I have a dream! I have a dream today!

(The truth is that in Dick Lamm and Roy Romer, Colorado had Democratic governors for 24 consecutive years, from 1975-1999. Nice try, CNN.)

Wolf Blitzer is repeatedly tying in MLK. He tells us that "coincidentally," today is the anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech.

David Gergen, auditioning for a job in a Dunham/Soetoro/Obama White House, insists, "Race is an issue in this campaign...."

For weeks, Gergen has combined the parroting of D/S/O talking points with his own campaign to get back in the West Wing, by emphasizing how much more racially enlightened he is than millions of puportedly racist white Americans.

"The diversity ... we're seeing is the future," but whites may not yet be ready for it.

And if the Great Black Hope should lose, Gergen has covered his butt, and will be guaranteed future TV analyst work. It's a win-win situation.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Toobin emphasizes that The One is not comparing himself to MLK, other people are doing it. Toobin thus wants us to give The One credit for being like MLK, and give him credit for modesty for having flunkies to make the allusions and comparisons.

Tenured racist Michael Eric Dyson says that King's speech was great for anyone else, but a bit "wooden" for King -- "A 'C' for Martin."

Dyson conjures up a racial fairy tale, whereby King had been speaking, and suddenly Mahalia Jackson called on him to do better, "and he threw away the script," and spontaneously produced the "I Have a Dream" passages.

Bull...oney! They weren't even King's words, let alone spontaneously spoken. He plagiarized them from a speech the Rev. Archibald Carey gave at the 1952 Republican National Convention. That's why none of the marchers at the Lincoln Memorial that day in 1963 caught his plagiarism--they were all socialists and communists!

I have to agree with Dyson on one thing, however. King's speeches before black groups, with no live TV hookups were much better, because he didn't have to throw in phony quotables for the white folks that King didn't for one second believe, like the nonsense about being judged by "the content of one's character" instead of the color of one's skin.

As one black Obamanoid emphasized, the name of the 1963 march included "jobs." He failed to note, however, that those jobs were for blacks, and blacks alone.

Friday, August 22, 2008

School Violence and Race: Michelle Malkin Strikes Out Again

By Nicholas Stix

Initially, Michelle Malkin’s new column looks promising. “Abu Ghraib-i-fying America's Schools” discusses the violence plaguing so many of America’s public schools, and the ACLU’s racist disinformation campaign, whereby it presents black students as victims of racism, because black boys get punished 1.4 times as often, and black girls 2.1 times as often as their proportion of the school population. But then Malkin wimps out, and goes Republican.

But that disproportion does not automatically equal discrimination. What they don't tell you are the races or ethnicities of the victims of the thugs being disciplined. What they don't bother to mention—because it doesn't fit the America-as-torturer-of-minorities narrative—is the unmitigated violence perpetrated in American classrooms against minority teachers.

The recent videotaped beating of black Baltimore teacher Jolita Berry by a black female student—as other black students cheered and screamed, "Hit her!"—exposed the continuing chaos in inner-city districts. In that school system alone, 112 students were expelled for assaults on staff members this school year.

Federal education statistics show that between 1996 and 2000, 599,000 violent crimes against teachers at school were reported. On average, the feds say, in each year from 1996 to 2000, about 28 out of every 1,000 teachers were the victims of violent crime at school, and three out of every 1,000 were victims of serious violent crime (i.e., rape, sexual assault, robbery or aggravated assault). Violence against teachers is higher at urban schools.

America's problem isn't that we're too tough and cruel in the classroom. It's that we've become too soft and placative, too ashamed and timid to assert authority and take unilateral action to guarantee a secure environment. Exactly where the human rights groups want us.

As the saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie. The fake report presupposes the truth of the pseudo-scientific notion of disproportionate impact, according to which any index in which privileged minorities fare worse than whites is ipso facto proof of white racism. The fact of the matter is that black students are guilty of school disruption and violence with such disproportionate frequency, that they would likely be disciplined three-to-five times as often as white and Asian kids, if racist administrators weren’t coddling and covering for them.

The problem isn’t school violence as such, but black and Hispanic school violence. Heck, in many cities, the public schools are sites of such daily black and Hispanic racist terror, that school administrators are routinely guilty of felony child abuse, conspiracy to obstruct justice, the violation of white and Asian students’ and personnel’s civil rights, and accomplices to, and sometimes even the perpetrators of hate crimes.

Much of the “unmitigated violence perpetrated in American classrooms” is being visited upon white teachers. And if whites aren’t suffering the majority of the attacks (and for all I know, they might be), it is only because since the 1960s, (like most white students) most white teachers have been racially cleansed from urban, and increasingly even from suburban public schools, to be replaced with incompetent, racist, black and Hispanic “educators.”

Had Malkin taken the trouble to read my chapter on education in the National Policy Institute’s report, The State of White America-2007 (get a free download here), on which I was honored to serve as project director, she would know that white teachers in “urban” school districts are routinely showered with racial epithets and assaulted by racist black students, who are encouraged in such vicious, criminal behavior by black “educators,” from teacher’s aides to district superintendents, not to mention by their families. Two extraordinary white teachers, Barry Grunow and Jonathan Levin, were rewarded for their dedication by being murdered by black students. White female teachers, whom I’ll address in a separate report, are being raped by black boys.

And it is not teachers in general who are taught that they have no right to assert authority in the classroom. Black and Hispanic teachers, no matter how racist and incompetent they are, are encouraged to assert themselves, while white teachers, no matter how gifted and dedicated, are harassed and beaten down. Indeed, teacher education programs and public education conferences today are little more than diversity training programs; i.e., exercises in anti-white racism.

Emphasizing blacks as the victims of black violence, while ignoring blacks’ white and Asian victims, comes straight out of the playbook written by black racists such as Jesse Jackson’s ghostwriter, and their white socialist and communist allies, such as Nicholas Lemann and Jonathan Kozol. Such an emphasis is one of the giveaways of a dishonest political writer, and has long been employed by leftist and Republican writers alike. Jackson’s ghostwriter put the phony talking point about the problem of “black-on-black crime,” and the fiction that blacks were the predominant victims of black criminals into circulation in 1989, after it was already known that black criminals targeted whites more often than they did blacks.

When Malkin’s column first went national eight or so years ago, she was a Republican writer, but then she developed more independence. That was before she became a Republican diva with a circle of blogger-sycophants.

Malkin didn’t even have to wait for The State of White America-2007, to learn its lessons. Had she read my Insight on the News article, “Dubious Scholarship Feeds Racial Politics in Schools,” in which I fisked a fraudulent report reciting identical talking points as the ACLU report by a different leftwing activist organization, the Oakland, CA-based, Applied Research Council, she could have learned them another seven years earlier.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Obamanoids: They All Look Alike to Me

By Nicholas Stix

Not only do these race card rounds by Obama and his surrogates all sound alike, it’s getting impossible to even tell the surrogates form each other. It’s bad enough that the there is one generic white and one generic black race card dealer, appearing under a different name each time—this crap must be coordinated—every month or two, but there are so many of them, that even their names are beginning to sound indistinguishable.

I spent hours the other day, googling to find Timesman David Shipley, the guy who wrote the April 16 L.A. Times op-ed, “The Resonance of Racism,” claiming that criticism of Obama as “elitist” or “out of touch” were code phrases for racist attacks. But all I could find were hundreds of references to Shipley’s stunt, where in his function as New York Times op-ed editor, the 48-year-old had furnished Obama with a free ad, in the form of a guest op-ed signed by the candidate, while refusing to reciprocate for McCain. Eventually, I changed course, and was able to determine that I had really been looking for a different Obamanoid altogether, Timesman David Shipler. The 65-year-old Shipler wrote an unreadable book ten years ago, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, promoting “racial dialogue,” whereby groups of apologetic whites would meet with groups of inconsolable blacks, so that the whites could practice apologizing, and the blacks could practice refusing to accept their apologies.

Along the way, I stumbled onto a perfectly splendid blog, Insight Analytical: Watching Our World, by Kenosha Marge, specifically her witty essay reviewing Obama’s rounds, “PUT THAT RACE CARD DOWN AND STEP AWAY FROM THE DECK!”

Sunday, August 03, 2008

VDARE: Immigrant Commits Atrocity, MSM Suppresses Story

Revised at 12:56 a.m. Sunday, August 3, 2008.

You may have heard about Tim McLean, the man who was beheaded aboard a Canadian Greyhound bus Wednesday night by the man sitting next to him. But what have you heard about the killer? Do you know his name? Possibly not. Nationality or nation of birth? Almost certainly not. And for a very good reason: The MSM doesn’t want you to know such relevant facts. Well, VDARE.com has the low-down (in chronological order):

“Chinese Man Decapitates Canadian on Bus,” by James Fulford, August 2

“Chinese/Canadian Atrocity Triggers US/MSM Atrocity,” by Patrick Cleburne, August 2

“It’s Official! Chinese IMMIGRANT Decapitates Canadian!” By Peter Brimelow, August 2

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Debate Coach, Caught Conspiring to Blacklist Critic, Feels “Violated”

By Nicholas Stix

Tammi Peters feels “violated”—by me. After all, she was only conspiring with some students and debate coaches to destroy me professionally, by getting me blacklisted from ever being published again. And then I had the nerve to go and write about it! In her mind, that makes Peters, a debate teacher at Golden (CO) High School, the victim of the piece.

So, conspiring to get someone professionally blacklisted is fine, but the target had better keep his mouth shut, should he find out about it. Moreover, Peters thinks it is immoral for the target (whom folks who are not members of a pseudo-intellectual cult would call “the intended victim”) even to check up, through perfectly lawful and ethical means, on what his enemies are publicly saying about him.

This whole business started when I wrote an article for VDARE.com on the scandalous final of the Cross Examination Debate Association national tournament in Wichita, Kansas last spring. Towson (MD) University’s Deven Cooper and Dayvon Love were pitted against the University of Kansas’ Nate Johnson and Chris Stone: “Towson U. ‘Great Debaters’ Mau Mau Liberal Judges”.

Cooper and Love, who are black, refused to debate the assigned topic, which required that teams argue “affirmative” or “negative,” regarding a proposed American policy of “constructive engagement” with Moslem governments and societies in the Mideast, Iran, and Afghanistan. Instead, they excoriated—they don’t trade in arguments—the “debate community” as being guilty of “racism, sexism, and homophobia.”

As I showed in “It Ain’t Over ‘Til the Black Team Wins: Race, Corruption, and the Academic Debate Community,” Nate Johnson, of the white KU team, decimated Cooper and Love. And yet, the eleven white judges gave Towson the victory, 7-4, with some of them leaving no doubt that they had acted out of racial loyalty to Cooper and Love.
The title of the conspiracy thread is, “White Supremacist Website Makes [sic] Cheapshots [sic] at Towson, Community.”

The “White Supremacist Website” would be VDARE.com. As far as these characters are concerned, any media operation not devoted to the destruction of the white race is “white supremacist.” On a thread begun on allied message board, net-benefits, by influential University of Wyoming debate coach Matt Stannard (see 06-30-08, 03:23 PM), “White Supremacist Journal attacks Towson Debaters,” academic debaters also made up a story, promoted by Stannard, according to which I have “ties to the KKK.” Stannard & Co. are so far left that if Lenin were reincarnated, they’d call him a “white supremacist.”

In my July 28 follow-up story at VDARE, “‘Debate Community” Organizes to Silence Critic—Me!,” I recount the so-called debate community’s frenzied reaction to my first story, though without their gutter language.

Initially, Tammi Peters was my biggest defender, making four major points variously supporting me, and contradicting Towson’s assertions: 1. Contradicting the assertions that debate is racist; the financial strains of debate are not limited to black students; 3. The language of debate is no more a hurdle for black than for white kids; and 4. Making “arguments about the state of debate [that] have no connection (and don’t even try to create a link) to the topic at hand” is unacceptable.

But Peters was also nervous about sounding supportive of me, and so she sandwiched her support within specious criticisms of me (e.g., charging me with “vitriolic rhetoric,” and suggesting I was uncivilized, criticisms that were much more appropo regarding the Towson team and most of the debate posters attacking me, including the coaches). Then, in order to assure the totalitarians on the board that she’s one of the good guys, she hunted down and posted the e-mail addresses of several outlets that have published my work, along with a supportive cheer, “Perhaps these sites will help with the revolution.”

Tammi Peters initially posted her complaint within the CEDA board’s response to my July 28 VDARE story, “White Supremacist Posts Response to Community” (leftists use the epithets “white supremacist” and “neo-Nazi” interchangeably), on Thursday, July 31, at 11:26 a.m. The following is her complete post, which she had edited before I saw it:

This response by Mr. Stix really bothers me -- mostly because I believed the posts I was making on this forum were for the eyes of members of our community: coaches, competitors and those who have been actively involved in what we do in other capacities. Folks who have a sense of who I am and the broader context of the issues within our community. I wanted to work through some issues that had been perplexing me and I wanted some feedback from those within the community. What I would say to insiders is VERY different from how I would make similar points to outsiders (I probably wouldn’t make such points to outsiders as I want to promote forensics in all possible forms). I’m angry, I’m hurt, I feel violated (somehow). I fell like someone spied on a semi-private conversation (after all, what casual observer would want to read posts on a debate forum?). I chose not to email Mr Stix; my role in this issue was limited to providing a list of Mr. Stix’s publishers. But now my comments on this forum are out there for whomever to see. My name as a coward. And just when I am hoping to have credibility linked with my study.

And I do try to make peace -- that’s part of my personality. Mr. Stix makes that seem so . . . dirty. I’m not sure how I “triangulated.”

Also, I’m not part of CEDA. CEDA isn’t at the high school level. Of course, folks who are IN this community know that.

I’d like to be able to laugh at this article -- maybe the next time I read it.
________________________________________
Last edited by tpeters; Yesterday at 11:39 AM.


Only one poster on the entire thread, Tom Ferguson, had the character to put things in perspective.

does anyone else find this amusing.

Whenever a debater tells a project team in a debate round that they should focus on the resolution and maintain a policy-orinted round, they are associated with just maintaining old-school policy, “ill read more cards than you” debaters.

when somoene outside our social circle calls those projects out, they become KKK, racist pigs.


Golden High School has a grand tradition (please forgive me for linking to Wikipedia!). Thus, it is a shame that Tammi Peters should sully its reputation. But then, nowadays all sorts of famous institutions of learning daily see their reputations dragged through the mud.

I happen to believe that conspiring to professionally destroy someone, not only for disagreeing with him, but in Peters’ case, for agreeing with him but seeking to cover up that fact and thereby appease potential enemies, makes Tammi Peters unfit to teach debate. If you think the same, you might consider contacting the Jefferson County (CO) Public Schools. (Golden High School is re-opening in a new building on August 12, and its Web site is currently down. I found a telephone number of (303) 982-4258, but don’t know if that is the old or the new number.)

Jefferson County Public Schools
1829 Denver West Drive | Golden, CO 80401 | Phone: (303)982-6500

Peters’ lack of self-awareness, let alone of irony, is typical of her “community.” Of course, she thought she was posting in private, “for the eyes of members of our community.” She thought she was part of a conspiracy! Her conversation, however, was neither private nor “semi-private”—whatever that means—but on a public message board. I didn’t spy on her; I simply caught her compromising any professional integrity she might ever have had. But instead of being mortified, she’s “angry” at me! Of course, she’s a coward, and she should feel dirty.

Friday, August 01, 2008

The Trouble with White People: Racial Non-Dialogue

By Nicholas Stix

As I write this, my sister-in-law and her live-in boyfriend are visiting. They’re in the other room. “Parbatee,” the sister-in-law, and “Joe,” the boyfriend, were previously married to other people, and have been together four or five years, now. As Parbatee is my wife’s sister, she’s a Trinidadian Indian; Joe is Italian. Like many New York Italians, Joe could pass for a Jew, which is what I long assumed him to be. When I said something about him being Jewish last year, and he corrected me, he didn’t seem flattered. Whatever.

Parbatee and Joe live way out on eastern Long Island, in Suffolk County, a 90-minute drive from Queens. And I very well know why he lives so far away from The City. Black people upset him.
A few minutes ago, he told me, “I don’t agree with you about black people.”

You don’t agree with yourself, I responded (my responses are without quotation marks).

“I like black people. I was just on 54th Street [there is more than one 54th Street in Queens], and three black people said ‘Hello’ to me.”

Well, then, I invite you to move here.

“No, that’s not why I don’t live here, I just don’t like living in The City.”

Of course, you don’t.

“Do people bother you around here?”

My neighbors don’t, but none of them are black. (I forgot to mention that I do occasionally have confrontations with blacks and Hispanics who either came to the neighborhood for the purpose of harassing whites, or who were here to do a job, and saw an opportunity to make it a "twofer.")

* * *

The street Joe was talking about, with the friendly black folks, is one of a set of streets in projects so violent that many local cabbies, fearing they are being set up for a robbery, refuse to go to to pick up fares. (I never asked if that rule holds 24/7 or just at night.) My sister-in-law went there to see a doctor, but had Joe known of the street’s reputation, it’s unlikely he would have taken her there.

I pointed out what he had said a few years ago, and he simply denied it.

(It turns out he hadn’t said it to my face; it was my sister-in-law who—when Joe was wasn’t around—had said that he gets so upset about blacks that he can’t even talk about them, let alone live and work around them. And mind you, Joe is a bright, worldly man, who has worked in the past as a bouncer for a club. He’s not a tenured, “progressive” professor, leading a sheltered, privileged life, racially harassing white kids.)

But today, he even gave me that line about there being good and bad people in each race. And he’s not even a socialist! As a matter of metaphysics, of course he’s right. But what are the odds of me getting murdered by a white, as opposed to a black assailant?
Hell, even most black folks my wife knows don’t want to live around black people! Of course, they’re all West Indians who have failed to “assimilate” to black American norms. Many of their kids feel differently; I call them, “North Indians.”

Most black Americans think that white people sit around all day complaining in private about them, because that’s what blacks do regarding whites, and they project their vices onto whites. (Like their constant hoaxes claiming that whites called them the “n”-word, because each hoaxer uses “the most obscene word in the English language” 1,000 times a day.) Heck, to my knowledge, whites are the only group that doesn’t obsess in private over blacks. (I am convinced, however, that blacks want whites to privately obsess over them, i.e., to never have a moment’s relief from black racism.)

Since the black fantasy is obviously true about yours truly—except that I talk more about race publicly than I do privately—does that mean that, like James Watson, I have black blood in me? (Actually, that claim was more likely a hoax pulled by a company that does expensive analyses of people’s genomes, in order to gain favorable publicity at Watson’s expense.) Or is this a case of “race does not exist,” and genetics thus has no influence on behavior, so that I must have picked up my behavior from being around blacks so much? Without a guide, it’s so hard to know which dishonest talking point to use in a given situation!

Unlike blacks, who typically insist that they are experts on everything white, where whites are concerned, I can only speak to what I have actually seen, heard, and read. And according to that, blacks’ beliefs about whites are the diametric opposite of the truth about most whites. Old-line white coppers, for instance, would typically come home to their lily-white neighborhoods after a hard day’s work, and talk about anything but “the job.” They saw it as a man’s duty to deal with life’s ugly realities, and to protect his family’s lives, sanity, and moral balance from said realities. Such a way of life is both moral and prudent, which are, unfortunately, foreign concepts to most American blacks.

On the other hand, 30-50 years ago, unless a white was already a socialist or a communist, he wouldn’t have cause to have a private conversation with another white in which he would act as stupidly or as dishonestly as Joe did.

Even today, with old-timers, it’s still like that. Almost three years ago, I wrote about a conversation I’d had with an Irish neighbor, a retired nurse who must be about 78 by now. She was talking about why she’d had to sell her home during the mid-1960s and move her family out of their East Flatbush, Brooklyn neighborhood, which only a few years earlier had been as safe as they come. Shortly after the first black families moved in, the burglaries—which had previously been unheard of—started. (No, burglaries are not essential aspects of urban life.) But the black burglars didn’t just climb in through rear windows in the dead of night; they were kicking front doors in, in broad daylight. During a friendly conversation during a quiet morning on our peaceful street she said, “The problem is … you know what the problem is.”

A generation ago, whatever they might have felt obliged to say in public, whites didn’t feel the need to lie, much less act superior about it, in private.