Neither the word race nor the word racism appear anywhere in the article, “Couple’s ‘buy black’ experiment becomes  a movement“:

“We’ve still got that ‘the white man’s water is colder’ mentality,” he said. “We can’t take us for granted. When we go to our establishments, it’s almost like we’re doing a favor. That ought to be a given for us.”

The Andersons remain encouraged by their momentum online and in the media. At the end of 2009, they hope to show $1 million in spending with black businesses among supporters across the country.

“The response has been so huge,” Maggie Anderson said. “We think so much can come out of this. We’re in movement-making mode now.”

Meanwhile, Catholicgauze tweets the lawsuit of a a white african-american student.

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My friend Michael sent me a copy of “The aftermath of Loving v. Virginia: Sex asymmetry in African-American intermarriage,” by R. Richard Banks (PDF). The piece is an attack on stereotypes of black marriage nand miscegenation: educated black females are more likely to marry than uneducated black females, the difference socio-economic status between black husbands and white wives is comparable to the different among white husbands and white wives, and, most strikingly, that the skew in African-American interrmarriage (where black men are much more likely to outmarry than black woman) is recent.

While nowadays black-white marriage is stereotypically between a black man and white woman, going back just a few decades presented a more gender-balanced picture. The case that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, Virginia v. Loving, was fought on behalf of a white husband and black wife. Likewise, the famous movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, features two interracial romances: one between a black man and white woman, the other between a white man and black woman.

Banks’ piece is very well written. My only complaint is that it is not long enough! It reads like a literature review to a great analytical piece, and hopefully that second section is coming at a later time.

Read it (PDF).

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I had previously known that Vice President Curtis as American Indian, in the sense that Barack Obama is black (both being racially admixed). I had not realized that Vice President Johnson (the least famous one) openly lived with an octoroon who acted both as his common law wife and business manager.

Barack Obama less represents a “post-racial America” than an America waking up from a weird historical period where race was considered a central organizational principle. Race was not so privileged during the Revolution — the bill of rights is clearly a set of laws for the monied and/or landed — and is not so now.

Related: Sino-American Miscegenation in Shanghai (1936).

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It’s really sickening how big-government liberals can create a problem, and then demand a big-government solution like the Bush-Pelosi bailout:

Half Sigma: Smoking gun article: liberals, Democrats, poor people and non-Asian minorities caused financial crisis
A conservative warns of the problem, but he is ignored by Democrats because Democrats and liberals know that the conservative is motivated by racism.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

It’s all clear…

Banks should have been smart enough to recognize that pro-”diversity” laws, rules, regulations, Congressional hearings, and the like were going to lead to the liquidity crisis, and tried to lobby against it as hard as they could.

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John McCain is once again against racial preferences.

Barack Obama plays the race card yet again, “jokingly” complaining that he is “too black.” This is analogous to if John McCain would complaining that he is “too heroic” — it is obvious, cheesy, and an attempt to short-circuit debate.

I am against race-based campaigns or race-based administration, so Barack Obama’s race-baiting (and John McCain’s attempt to move the country beyond race) makes the decision in 2008 even clearer for me.

John McCain already had my vote for his find stand on positions such as immigration, free trade, Iraq, and abortion. The weekend’s news made it clear that John McCain is right on race, too.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, is the Affirmative Action candidate. Too bad.

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Eddie of Hidden Unities emailed me the following story. My response follows the excerpt below:

Save D.C.’s Vouchers
Better schools. Higher scores. And satisfied parents. That’s the record of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. It is helping us keep our promise to leave no child behind in America. If Congress is thinking of breaking this promise, the nation deserves to know the story.

Signed into law by President Bush four years ago, the program is the first to provide federally funded education vouchers to students. It awards up to $7,500 per child for tuition, transportation and fees; in 2007-08 it enabled 1,900 students from the underperforming Washington public school system — the highest total yet — to attend the private or religious schools of their choice.

For many, this was their first opportunity to receive a high-quality education. “They not only educate them, but they are teaching them to be young men and young women as well,” Sheila Jackson, the mother of a 12-year-old scholarship recipient, told a reporter.

I responded:

Opposition from black political leaders would seem to come from some form of recognition that blacks are at a disadvante compared to other whites in market competition in most areas. (Wheter you say this is from g, or structural racism, or western-values, or whatever, the effect is the same.) So allowing blacks to rise according to individual effort and ability has the effect of “decapitating” the “black community,” giving those in the top 30% the opportunity to internalize “middle classness” (the bete noir of Obama’s old church), while the larger mass is stuck in “trainable” trades.

Thus, keeping the best blacks down is critical if blacks are going to remain a united political block.

I think this is accurate. The war that the black leadership has waged on blacks who want to rise up has been notable since W.E.B. DuBois overtook Booker T. Washington as a leading intellectual. I think men like Jessee Jackson, Al Shaprton, and Jeremiah Wright are dangerous, unamerican, and racialist, but I don’t think they are stupid.

They have a reason for opposing the integration of professional blacks into the middle class. To avoid decapitation.

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While it has a bewildering number of defenses, one of the primary functions of affirmative action is to assist blacks in resource competitions against hispanics. Both groups are disproportionatedly uneducated, but political organization among blacks far outpaces that among hispanics. Therefore, rationally, blacks political activists attempt to reward their supporters by supporting laws, rules, and regulations which assist blacks in getting jobs, contracts, and admissions, while making it harder for hispanics to do so.

It’s thus not surprising that many hispanics are skeptical of Barack Obama:

The Weekly Standard
Napolitano, who describes herself as a “dyed in the wool” Democrat, said she will vote for and support the Democratic nominee in the fall. But she has not seen the type of commitment to Latino issues from Obama that she says she saw in Clinton.

“Unless I see something inherently helpful to our community, I’m going to sit back and see what happens,” Napolitano said. Napolitano and some of her Hispanic colleagues are informally boycotting Obama campaign events aimed at reaching out to Clinton supporters because the candidate himself has not asked for their help.

Obama has stated that he supports affirmative action. This helped him racially polarize the election in which he defeated Hillary Clinton, but has harmed him among latinos. So far, Obama has only vaguely hinted that he might modify the system, from prevent the marginal number of black millionaires from benefiting to shifting some the costs (in terms of unrewarded merit, lost opportunities, discrimination, etc.) to middle-class whites, jews, and asians.

However, Obama has only hinted as a recalibration of affirmative action’s costs. Further, it’s obviously more difficult to change a whole system than to continue a policy of rewarding supporters and punishing their rivals.

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For all the talk about Obama’s national dialogue on race, so far it’s been limited to blaming old people like his grandmother and his minister for living in the past.

But America’s racial problems are not the fault of the likes of Barack’s grandmother. Rather, they have their route in systemic and sustained differences in performance on a variety of measures. For instance: pro-social behavior.

Half Sigma: School teachers in Fairfax County are racist
(1) Someone decided that in addition to teaching traditional academic subjects, the Fairfax County schools should also teach life skills deemed “essential for success in the workplace” such as “the ability to contribute effectively in a group” the ability to “resolve conflicts,” and “the demonstration of moral character and ethical judgment.”

(2) Part of the plan included measuring students’ level of ability in these non-academic life skills.

(3) The measurements showed that blacks do poorly in these non-academic life skills compared to whites.

(4) The Fairfax County School Board thus votes to “abandon” the report (how do you do that exactly?) and change the plan because the skill gap between whites and blacks demonstrated that the teachers were racist in measuring their students. The Fairfax County School Board, you see, has received word from Higher Powers that blacks and whites are identical in these life skills, and thus they know that the only reason the measurements would show otherwise is because of racist teachers.

An actual national discussion on race would tackle the difficult question of how to create an equal and equitable society in a country of great diversity. Obama’s campaign and supporters, by contrast, have been limited to saying how great it is for a black to have a shot at a prestigious job.

Obama’s run a racially divisive campaign, so it’s no surprise that his base of support is largely blacks (who politically recognize themselves to be in a poor situation and thus rationally attempt to use political organization to extract wealth from society) and nearly everyone else (asians, latinos, uneducated whites, etc.). The exception here are educated whites who are socialized into the softer university subjects, and thus seek signs that they are not racist.

Obviously, a real national dialog on race would be better than this mess. We’re just not going to get it with Barack Obama.

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This is a great opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment, in which Barack Obama could make it clear that race-based preferences (under the euphemism of “recruitment”) have no place in our adoption laws.

De-emphasis on Race in Adoption Is Criticized – NYTimes.com

Of course, Obama won’t. The original “Sister Souljah” moment, after all, was done by Bill Clinton. And Obama is more liberal/leftist than the Clinton Machine.

And anyway, why would Obama criticize people he agrees with?

(Hat-tip to Half Sigma.)

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Genetics is fascinating. The study of population structure — those nations and races that make of humanity — has been infinitely improved by careful analysis of our genes. DNA has replaced the imprecise tools of facial features, skin color, and linguistics as the best tool for understanding the group-level diversity we see today. It was once thought (at least 10 years ago, when I came upon the theory) than the Ashkenazi Jews were an inbred German population, given their Germanic language (Yiddish) and looks that were taken to be exaggerations of European features. It is now generally accepted that the Rhinelander Jews are a Southeast European/Levantine population that at one time were more numerous than “white” Europeans.

Genetics continues to look at these subpopulations — races, you might say — deeply. Now comes an article on two ancient races, that existed for half of humanity’s history — entirely on the African continent:

Mitochondrial Eve And Humanity’s 100,000 Year Genetic Divide | Scientific Blogging
The human race was divided into two separate groups within Africa for as much as half of its existence, says a Tel Aviv University mathematician. Climate change, reduction in populations and harsh conditions may have caused and maintained the separation.

Dr. Saharon Rosset, from the School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University, worked with team leader Doron Behar from the Rambam Medical Center to analyze African DNA. Their goal was to study obscure population patterns from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Rosset, who crunched numbers and did the essential statistical analysis for the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, said the team was trying to understand the timing and dynamics of the split into at least two separate groups.

…

Recent data suggests that Eastern Africa went through a series of massive droughts between 90,000 and 135,000 years ago. It is possible that this climate shift contributed to the population splits. What is surprising is the length of time the populations were separate — for as much as half of our entire history as a species.

Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project and Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, said, “This new study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species’ history. Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.”

While much of this research is conducted because of scientific curiosity, the engine that keeps it going is pharmaceuticals. There’s big money in genes, in changing how they express themselves and even changing which ones are in a body. As we resurrect long-dead plants and animals, it will be fascinating to see how many “extinct genes” rise again through gene therapy and modern medicine.

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