Category: Race and Race Relations
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The New African Migration
by James A. Bacon While the United States indulges in an orgy of introspection over the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans arriving on the shores of Virginia, it might be worthwhile reminding ourselves that that was then, and this is now. It may have escaped the notice of the New York Times, but the country…
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Do “White People” Suppress Black History?
by James A. Bacon Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond and an African-American, professes to know how white people think. Here’s what she said yesterday at a Richmond forum that, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was organized “to dispel racism against African Americans.” White people want to feel good about…
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From Oppression Narrative to Opportunity Narrative
by James A. Bacon I have fallen into a trap — a snare of my own making. Day after day, Americans are subjected to a barrage of commentary and “news” on the topic of racial/gender-driven victimhood and grievance, the most recent example being today’s New York Times‘ 16019 Project, which reinterprets American history through the…
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Unintended Consequences and SOLs
It has been fascinating to observe the reaction to the disappointing news that Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores for reading and writing for Virginia’s major racial/ethnic groups declined in the 2018-19 school year, and that, despite strenuous efforts of school administrators to address racial inequities, the gap between blacks and whites grew wider. The…
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VCU Study Jumps to Unsubstantiated Conclusions
Richmond-area schools suspend black students at four times the rate of white students, a gap that exceeds the national average, a study by the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education has found. The findings have been duly reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. One in five black students in the region received an out-of-school suspension during…
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Magnifying Partisan Research with a Partisan Spin
Social scientific studies are increasingly infected by ideological bias and a crisis of unreplicable results. Compound that with the ideological bias of the mass media, which spin findings to advance their own partisan narratives, and you get articles like this one from the Washington Post: “Trump’s presidency may be making Latinos sick.” Trump’s presidency may…
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2018 Hate Crimes Down
Looks like Attorney General Mark Herring will have to come up with a new campaign theme in his run for governor. It’s bad enough that he got caught up in the blackface scandal. Now the central premise of his campaign launch — that the nation was in the grip of a surge of white supremacist…
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Now Private-School Tax Credits Are Racist
The Left continues to racialize everything, absolutely everything. It makes me sick to the stomach to write about race on this blog so often, but the “progressive” assault on a post-racial society in Virginia is an unrelenting, 24/7 activity, and if I don’t call the Left to account, it appears that no one else will.…
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Racial Disparities in Maternal Deaths: Another SJW Fraud
Virginia’s Medicaid program is targeting an alleged racial disparity in maternal deaths. African-American mothers have “consistently” died at more than twice the rate of white mothers during and after pregnancy, and they are more likely to die of natural causes, the Richmond Times-Dispatch informs us. (Black women are three times more likely to suffer a…
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Blackface Mystery Solved: Ralph Northam as Michael Jackson
Published in the Roanoke Times today, a concise synthesize of my blog posts about Ralph Northam costumed as Michael Jackson: Ralph Northam’s racism controversy has tumbled down the memory hole. The governor has struck with the story that the photograph appearing in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook of a man in blackface was…
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War Wounds, Lost Income and the Reparations Debate
As the reparations issue heats up across the country — Congressional Democrats are considering forming a commission on reparations, reports the New York Times — it’s just a matter of time before the divisive debate comes to Virginia. The Old Dominion, after all, was a slave state and a segregationist state. We have a history…
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Arlington Schools’ Non-Solution for English Learners
Arlington County, which has one of the most politically “progressive” school systems in Virginia, has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to bolster support for students learning English, reports the Washington Post. The column described systemic problems in the school system. English-as-a-Second-Language students are often taught below their grade level and grow…
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Special VPI Graduation Ceremonies for Everyone (Except for Straight White Christians)
I don’t know what was considered deficient with the main Virginia Tech commencement ceremony — too white? too heteronormative? insufficiently diverse? — but the university this year provided ten supplementary graduation programs for African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and other groups. Apparently, the administration deemed it inadequate for some students to revel in what they…
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Cranky Strikes Again, Shows Rampant Cheating in Richmond Schools
I have been chronicling the administrative-cheating scandals in the Richmond Public School system, noting with each post that the situation is even worse than it appeared the previous time I wrote. Now it appears that administrative cheating is even more systemic than even I had suspected. In a statistical tour de force, John Butcher, writing…
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Counseling, Jail Time, and the Cycle of Violence
Families in south Richmond have long held community cookouts at the Carter Jones Park. Last Sunday evening, an altercation broke around at a basketball/skateboard facility nearby. Gunshots were fired. Nine-year-old Markiya Simone Dickson and an unnamed 11-year-old boy were struck by bullets. Markiya died. Community members and city leaders gathered at a vigil yesterday to…