The Black Man Disappears - The Demise Of DEI And The Resetting Of The Nation's Moral Compass

Turn on the television any time of day, and blacks are everywhere - hawking Humira and Celebrex to seniors, jumping for joy for Reese's peanut butter, shilling for Toyota and Hyundai, and barkers for Cheese Whiz, Cheerios, and Charles Schwab.  They are on n afternoon soaps, prime time dramas, every Six O'clock News, ESPN broadcast, weather report, and Traffic On the Eights.  

There are far more blacks on television shows, in ads, or public service announcements than their 12 percent demographic representation would indicate. 

The disproportion is so great that if a European were to spend a day watching American television, he would have to conclude that at least fifty percent of the population was black. 

To liberal Americans this inflated representation is entirely called for to redress classic American racial prejudice and the underrepresentation of minorities in the media, Hollywood, and government.  If blacks are shown everywhere and in great numbers, the white population will 1) think that black people are indeed everywhere and that their voices must be heard; and 2) that they can fill the shoes of white people no matter what, no matter where. 

However, ordinary white citizens, especially those living the vast open spaces of America, can only imagine what the coasts are like.  Combining fabulist media demographics and reports of endemic crime, dysfunction, and disorder, coastal cities must be sinkholes of nastiness. To them 'Inner city' means 'entire city', and they feel better off with cows, pigs, and chickens than to be in such a minority miasma. 

That, plus the 90 percent blacks in the NBA, NFL, and NCAA basketball and football, the picture is complete.  Coastal cities, Iowa farmers conclude, are filled with black people, and despite hawking drugs, cars, and snacks they are really just athletes, pimps, and ho's. 

Nonsense, of course, for what about Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas and thousands of postal workers?  They count, surely; but what really counts in America is perception, and the hoopla promoting DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity), the forest wisdom of the African diaspora, and the ubiquity and gong-beating presence of the black man in the media, is simply noise.   

Left to their own devices, white middle class, Midwestern Americans would take the black man in stride like everyone else - good at some things, not so good at others; mostly good people but some bad apples in the barrel.  They would judge black men like they judge white - on the basis of talent, intelligence, sociability, good taste, performance, civic pride, and patriotism - and leave the rest aside; but under the constant, hammering, dunning, and hectoring of the liberal media, Congressional shills, and self-interested Black Lives Matter-like organizations, they are forced to judge within a constructed, artificial, baloney-filled environment. 

 

Of course in the light of day, objective analysis would corroborate many of the commonly-held preconceptions - the inner cities are still segregated, nasty, dysfunctional places; educational performance of black students lags far behind that of Asians and whites, and social indicators of marital stability, child care, and parental involvement are near the bottom of anyone's scale.

These facts cannot go away, but if the hype and hyperbole were removed, and if facts were addressed as soluble problems they might indeed be solved.  

The Trump Administration has vowed to do this - to bury DEI and affirmative action once and for all - and if he succeeds and returns America to simple pluralism, cultural heterogeneity, and natural selection, the country will be far less divided, divisive, and angry.  It is time to stop banging whites simply for being white, to eradicate all fictious notions of systemic racism, and stop exaggerated claims of both racial oppression and black racial superiority.  An equal opportunity America. 

Already the Left is scurrying for a response, but none is possible for what they say is such an unconscionable act, a return to Jim Crow, segregation, and the back of the bus.  They sputter, howl 'racism', and stand proudly with black men and women.  Yet their balderdash is falling on deaf ears.

After sixty years of pro-active investment in the black community since the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, after billions in entitlement money poured into the inner cities, after decades of addressing 'systemic racism' and the persistent discrimination against people of color, the ghettos are still miasmic, horrendous sinkholes of poverty, crime, and dysfunction, and enough is enough says the rest of America.  

 

Time for the black community to man up.  Individual responsibility and the end to entitlements has been too long in coming. A return to proportionality.  Instead of packing the media with a disproportionate number of black actors and pitch men, let the media look like America - not the overhyped multicultural, 'diverse' country which progressives insist cannot look white, but one in which the media looks like the real America- seventy-five (75) percent white. 

This is not prejudicial against African Americans who will continue to have every right guaranteed and protected by the Constitution.  It will simply be reflective of their statistical minority and the first big step to eliminating race, gender, and ethnicity as markers of identity.  Each person of each racial and ethnic group will have the same opportunity, and the same consideration of every other and will be judged on merit - intelligence, talent, responsibility, performance, duty, and civic pride. 

Not only will the demise of DEI mean a new era of equal opportunity, it will restore the integrity of the past.  Statues will be replaced; street, school, and public building names returned to their originals.  The cancelling, expungement, and censoring of history in the name of protecting and shielding black people from historical unpleasantness will stop. 

Eliminating DEI, therefore, is not a superficial step or the fulfillment of a campaign promise, but a systemic change and one central to returning America to its originalist roots.  'Black' will mean nothing except a demographic indicator.  The quality of an institution, public or private, will be judged and assessed based on the performance of those with in it without regard to race, gender, or ethnicity.  Schools either succeed or fail, public sector agencies either perform up to standard or do not. 

No racial group will be lionized, honored for presumed worth.  No American will be regarded, judged, promoted, or demoted on anything but performance; and about time indeed. 

Calling Trump Hitler - The Real Horrors Of The Holocaust And The Spiteful, Vengeful Hatred Of The Left

Esther Pilchman, a survivor of the Holocaust and now nearing 100 without losing one bit of her acuity, composure, and articulateness, was nonplussed - no, angered and incensed - at the way 'Hitler', 'Fascist', and 'Nazi' were so casually used were used to describe the President.  She had survived the camps, had suffered for three long years of brutality, uncertainty, rape, and torture at the hands of prison guards, and nothing applied to him at all.

Before being rounded up from the Warsaw ghetto, herded onto boxcars and sent to Auschwitz, she and her family had been threatened, intimidated and badgered - spat upon by the Nazi SS who treated Jews worse than pigs, bullied them, laughed at their fearful humility and their abject submissiveness.  

One by one Jewish families disappeared, never to be heard from again, interned, gassed, and burned in the ovens of Sobibor and Dachau; but even this unsettling disappearance gave the ghetto hope. 'The Nazis need workers', Jewish families told each other.  'The war is not going well', they said despite the panicked fear that they were next.

Esther's family had been jewelers in Warsaw before the Nazi occupation, prosperous and respected with business connections in New York and Johannesburg, a spacious apartment on ______Street, with hopes of a good marriage for their daughter.  There were rumblings about the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, but that was still far away, contained, and for the time being at least remote. 

Yet the clouds of war could not be ignored, overseas radio reported the concerning rise of Hitler and the re-militarization of Germany, and the Fuhrer made his hegemonic intentions clear. Rumors of Jewish disappearances and murders surfaced but could not be believed.  It was too horrific to consider.  Humanity had had its shares of war, Jews had always suffered prejudice and exile, but never anything so unconscionable as this. 

 

Then the nightmare began, and the Jews were branded, condemned, and intimidated.  Herded into the ghetto they still kept their collective composure but could not help but think of what might happen, the horrendous and the unthinkable.

Esther, her mother and father, aunts, uncles, and aged grandparents were all taken on one April day, stripped of their belongings, marched through the ghetto to a destination they surmised but never knew.  As soon as they got to the railhead, her family was split - men in one car, women and children in another.  Her mother protested, and grabbed the coat of a Nazi soldier on the platform, and shouted to her husband.  The soldier raised his rifle, smashed the butt against her head, and left her bleeding and unconscious on the tracks to be decapitated by the moving train. 

How Esther stayed alive was a miracle, she told a chronicler of the Holocaust; but it was only because of her striking beauty that she did. She was raped continually, tossed aside with an extra crust of bread, allowed to wash and cut her hair before the Obersturmführer came to visit but otherwise lived like a street dog with the other women in Block 34, scabrous, hungry, cold, and spiritless. Every day one woman would be singled out and beaten, bloodied and bruised, an example to the others.

Every day women were dragged from their beds and taken to the gas chambers.  By now the prisoners knew what was happening.  They could no longer pretend otherwise.  As soon as one bed was vacated, a new woman, shocked, panicked, and beaten laid down in it.  The deadly machinery of the camps was efficiently cruel. 

 

Soon all her aunts were gone from the barracks, sent to the gas chambers, leaving Esther entirely alone, fearful, abused, and barely alive.  The rapes continued until the Nazis tired of her. Sick of her now almost skeletal body, sunken cheeks, and hollowed eyes, they tossed her aside. She waited for the call, the herding, the death march to the ovens. 

It never came, for on a bitter cold, snowy day in January 1945, American forces liberated the camp.

It took decades for the horrors of Auschwitz to recede - never to be erased - from her memory, and her dreams were still of her mother's body on the tracks, of the brutal rapes by the Nazi soldiers, of the cold, the hunger, and the misery; so when asked to recount her experiences, she hesitated.  Why face it all again? Why relive such a past? But in the end, in the spirit of Never Again did she tell her story. 

So it was no surprise that when the terms 'Hitler, Fascist, Nazi' were so casually and cavalierly used to describe the President of the United States, she could only shake her head.  The Left which she had always supported for its unfailing commitment to the poor and disadvantaged, had lost its moorings and their bearings and had ventured into perverse fabulist imaginings. 

She warned them of the dangers of such dangerous perversion.  Unless the real horror of the Holocaust was remembered and left undiluted in all its exterminating inhumanity, it might happen again.

Calling Trump a Nazi, a reincarnation of Hitler was a bizarre absurdity, a callous demeaning of the office of the President, and craven attack on the democracy she loved, and nothing less than sheer, blatant ignorance. 

It was the same Left that called the January 6th frat boy folly an insurrection.  The Left that had never experienced the brutal civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia - brutal, bloody affairs with wigged out child soldiers trained to kill and dismember, death squads, exterminating phalanxes of government troops razing entire villages.  

An insurrection was a fearful thing, a murderous, hateful, morally unredeemable thing; and the folly of the Halloween-painted, Viking helmeted, drunks storming the Capitol, as regrettable and staining as it was, was no insurrection. 

Her cherished Left, her progressives, her liberals had lost their compassionate, understanding center.  They had become unhinged with hatred. Nothing remained of the progressives of past - LaFollette, Debs, Dewey, and Brandeis were done and gone, their ideas only remnants, scraps of a forgotten history.  In their place was only foulness, hysteria, and intemperance. 

Her skin crawled when she heard 'Hitler' shouted and 'Nazi' bandied about.  Each time called up memories of the camps, the ghetto, the SS, the boxcars, and the ovens.  She wanted to step out onto her balcony and yell to the streets below, 'Stop it!; but she was an old lady who thought she would live out her last days in peace, and drawing on still powerful reserves of spirit and rectitude, sat down, and waited for the awful moment to pass. 

Useless Marches, Demonstrations, And Protests - Camaraderie, Solidarity, And Feeling Good About Yourself

Ophelia Marshall had been a solitary child, so much so that her parents worried about her.  Pleased that she was so attentive to her studies, quite religious in a quiet, respectful way, and as dutiful as a daughter could be; they were still concerned that she was becoming a recluse, timid, and hesitant to join others in the outside world. 

She was like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, a frightened young woman who spent more time with her delicate glass figurines than with people.  Laura finally comes out of this self-imposed reclusiveness to entertain a gentleman caller.  She is charmed by him and delighted that her fortunes might be turning around.  A life, a normal life, perhaps did await her. 

She is disappointed, of course, for the gentleman caller is otherwise engaged and joining Laura and her family only out of politeness, and when he leaves, Laura, disconsolate, wounded, and convinced that she has no worth except to her glass menagerie, returns to her room from which she will never leave. 

Ophelia was no Laura, at least not yet, but she was enough of a withdrawn, delicate, and sensitive girl that she might stay as a chrysalis and never emerge as a butterfly. 

Her parents needn't have worried, for Ophelia was only tending her garden, as she put it, a tender shepherdess of her own, special feelings.  She was sure that one day she would no longer need such tenderness and care, so she allowed herself the luxury of fantasy. 

True to her wishes, she began to gain confidence and certainty - the camaraderie of girls, their intimate clustering, and their shared secrets were comforting.  Ophelia knew that her life would not have to be alone, but in the company of women who shared her desires, fears, and ambition. 

The simple, innocent camaraderie that Ophelia had enjoyed at secondary school was a thing of the past at university.  Girls had grown up, matured, and while they still enjoyed female company, it was far less innocent and girly and much more demanding and political.  The young women joined together in solidarity rather than socialness - the innocent bonding had changed to collusive activism.  

The campus was filled with causes, everything from women's rights, to climate change, to the plight of the black man, and Ophelia was urged - dunned, actually, given the zeitgeist of inclusivity on campus - to join in one or more groups for social justice. 

Although Ophelia was not and never had been political - her parents were moderate Republicans, schooled long before the contentious politics of today - she understood that political affiliation and espousal of political values was tantamount to social acceptance.  Alliance For Climate Action, Bitches For Justice, and Gay Pride Forever were just some of the groups which courted her, and she accepted all of them.  Breathing the same heady air as a hundred like-minded women would be exhilarating.  

When asked about the specific purpose of their protests, demonstrators often answer, “To raise awareness”; but by now all issues have been presented, discussed, vetted, debated, and filed.  There is no more useful awareness to be had.

So it all comes down social collectivity – an expression of concern for a common cause which unites thousands into a community of ideas – an identity community with markers, banners, logos, doctrines, and liturgies.  Belonging feels good, feels important, feels useful, and most importantly reflects one’s own goodness.

The protests on campus were but the prelude to real, concerted action; and when a number of climate groups joined forces and headed to the National Mall for what they hoped would be a massive show of support for forcing radical change in energy use.  Ophelia was delighted.  This is what real female solidarity was all about - women's natural sociability, easy intimacy, and special, mature bonding joined with righteous passion was an irresistible force for change. 

The bus trip down to Washington was no different than the school bus shuttling girls from home to St. Mary's Catholic School in Radford - laughing, giggling about boys, virtual shopping for Manolo Blahnik and Armani, bitchy gossip about those girls on the peace train.  It was a joyful jamboree, a happy outing, an excursion that meant something.  The girl next to Ophelia smiled broadly and gave her a big hug. 

Ophelia was home.  This is what she as a timid, withdrawn little girl had  dreamed of and hoped for. The march was for climate sanity, but it could have been for anything.  The cause didn't matter, it was the generosity, emotional energy, and love that did.

Marches on the National Mall are unique phenomena. Although they are shows of popular democracy and free speech, they mean little or nothing to the residents of Washington - an unfortunate majority of whom are poor and isolated in nasty ghettos or managing in shabby middle class neighborhoods.  

Washington residents are used to these demonstrations and pay them little mind.  Washington is a city with its own problems – crime, drugs, dysfunctional families, corruption, and failing schools – and these are issues for the municipal government. Gun violence is endemic in the city, although concentrated in three majority black wards, and the issue is not gun control but police vigilance, community action, and  family responsibility. 

 

Marches for racial equality mean little in these de facto segregated wards where few if any white families live and even fewer risk driving through.  There is racial equality in Ward 8, but the worst, most pernicious kind – a persistent, dangerous, and violent homogeneity with no moderating influences.  No white, successful, middle class models of rectitude and community responsibility.  No entrepreneurial success stories.  No high-performing schools. 

 Yet the joy at these marches and demonstrations is palpable.  Demonstrators are not angry but happy, for they are shouting in unison with their sisters, hugging and kissing in exuberant displays of female solidarity.  Their soprano voices, loud and choral, might never be heard by the men that decide, but that is of no consequence.  It was femininity, femaleness, feminism expressed joyously and with abandon. 

What could be better, Ophelia thought, surrounded by hundreds of her sisters, all raising their voices in unison, validating womanhood and every woman, a great jamboree of togetherness, love, and affection. 

The trip back to school was memorable.  The young women, tired, worn, and hungry were in the best of moods.  Victory was a heady affair, and they had certainly won.  Won what was not the question, for the fact of such political commonality, of so many voices raised in unison creating one great orchestral piece on Washington's front lawn was more than enough. 

Some of the girls fell asleep on each others' shoulders, others were content to relive the event, and some chatted about this or that.  

Ophelia, who had for years longed to come out of her room and be one of the crowd, loved and accepted, had found a fulfillment she never dreamed of, and thanked her stars for such good fortune.