Category: Race and Race Relations
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Three Strikes and You’re Out, Mr. Ryan
by James A. Bacon If University of Virginia President Jim Ryan wants to recruit more African-American students, faculty and staff to the university, here’s some advice: stop reinforcing racial paranoia. Stop lending legitimacy to the idea that Blacks at the University of Virginia are under threat. So far this semester, there have been three racial…
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Square Peg, Meet Round Hole
by James A. Bacon I love it when The New York Times tries to explain to its liberal and progressive readers what makes Republicans tick. Viewing the world through their woke lens of intersectional oppression, an article published yesterday concludes that the depravity of White Republican political views reflects their ignorance and racism. The Times…
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Diversity Done Right… and Wrong
by James A. Bacon The drive to institutionalize Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in elite colleges and universities is profoundly destructive, according to presenters at a Friday conference of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Far from contributing to intellectual diversity, as it purports to do, DEI constrains free expression and free inquiry. It…
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Police Bias in Traffic Stops? Still No Proof.
by James A. Bacon The Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) has published a new report that finds that Black and Hispanic drivers in Virginia are more likely to be stopped than Whites, and they are more likely to be searched and arrested. However, the report also says there isn’t enough data to draw definitive…
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Solar Farms Trump Environmental Justice in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock Virginia is a solar energy boom state. The Commonwealth ranked 4th in total generating capacity of new solar installations in 2020. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) in 2021 ranked Virginia 6th nationally for projected growth in solar capacity over the next 5 years. The left is consumed by concern for…
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Scandal in Virginia Not-for-Profit Hospital Reported by the NY Times – Regional Perspectives
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes my subscription to The New York Times pays off. This is one of those times. The subtitle on the Times story is: Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program. It is a blockbuster…
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Three Virginia Counties Are Great Places for Black People to Live
by Ken Reid In the aftermath of the nationwide orgy of riotous violence perpetrated by supporters of Black Lives Matter due to George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020, both the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors and Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) School Board issued resolutions of “apology” for how…
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Graph of the Day: Maternal Mortality
by James A. Bacon When writing about “systemic racism” in health care, journalists routinely cite the disparity in health outcomes between White and Black Women. Here in Virginia, the maternal death rate per 100,000 for Black women in 2018 was 37.3 — nearly twice the rate of 14.9 for White women. The disparity has grown…
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“Our Life Is Always Threatened”
by James A. Bacon Last week an unidentified White man draped a noose from the statue of Homer at the University of Virginia. Without any evidence of the perpetrator’s motive, University Police and President Jim Ryan promptly proclaimed the incident a hate crime. Yesterday, a group of 60 or so students gathered near the statue…
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Remember When News Outlets Engaged in Fact-Checking?
by Kerry Dougherty Dang it. The BYU women’s volleyball story had everything the corporate media salivates over: A conservative Christian school and an alleged racial slur against an African-American female athlete. Pity that like so many other stories that feed the narrative that America is just a nanosecond away from Jim Crow and that conservative…
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Can We Learn from the Lexington Outlier?
We can learn a lot from outliers. They draw attention to variables and correlations we may not have considered before. In researching the previous post, I came across this anomaly: in the City of Lexington, economically disadvantaged Blacks passed their Standards of Learning reading tests at a higher rate (83.3%) than Blacks who were not…
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Where Black Students Outperform Whites
by James A. Bacon A major concern arising from the latest Standards of Learning (SOL) data is the fact that the racial divide between Asians and Whites on the one hand and Blacks and Hispanics on the other has gotten wider over the past three years. This disturbing trend has occurred despite unprecedented efforts to…
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Why the Enrollment Decline at VMI? Look to White Males for an Explanation.
by James A. Bacon When the Virginia Military Institute re-opened for its fall semester Monday with its usual parade-ground pageantry, it counted only 375 cadets in the 1st-year class. That’s down 24% from 494 the previous year. “We believe there are a number of contributing factors,” says VMI spokesman Bill Wyatt. “Schools throughout the commonwealth…
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Free Speech Discredited Racism Better Than Cancel Culture Ever Could
by James A. Bacon The attacks on Bert Ellis, newly appointed member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, continue without letup. The Cavalier Daily, the UVa student newspaper, has published an article resurrecting an event from the 1974-75 academic year in which Ellis, who led the University Union at the time, invited IQ…
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Systemic Racism Lives
by Dick Hall-Sizemore For those folks on this blog who keep denying that systemic racism either ever existed or is still a factor in today’s society, I offer an incident reported in today’s New York Times as evidence that systemic racism is still alive and operating to discriminate against Blacks. Last summer, a Black couple…