Precious snowflakes at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania want the school to rename the school’s Lynch Memorial Hall. The word “lynch” is racist, you see.
Never mind that Clyde Lynch, for whom the building was named was the President of the college for 18 years.
So, should our Attorney General change her name, too? After all, it seems that the very names, when disapproved by a special few, are perforce racist. And she’s in a position to do the hanging.
The Democrats are at it again.
Projection is an unconscious defense mechanism by which a person attributes to someone else unacknowledged ideas, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Or, as the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health puts it,
It’s often called the “blaming” mechanism because in using it the person seeks to place the blame for personal inadequacies upon someone else.
It’s also a broader, more innocent thing: the attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others. Which is to say, in the latter case in particular, the assumption that everyone else is just like the one making the attribution.
Here’s Hillary Clinton, with that in mind.
Clinton said that laws requiring voters to show identification at polls were part of “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”
And
Clinton even made it personal, saying potential general election foes Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry were “deliberately trying to stop” minority voters from participating.
It takes a racist to manufacture a racism beef where there plainly is no racism involved (for the particular record, black voter turnout is the same or higher in those states with relatively stringent voter-ID laws than in those states without, and it’s the same or higher in those states with them than it was before those laws were enacted in those states). But then she’s a leader in the party of the racist KKK, she’s a leader in the party of racist Jim Crow, she’s a leader in the party of racist and sexist affirmative action.
She’s projecting.
A brief post about the movie Aloha. This is a movie I don’t intend to watch anytime soon because I don’t go to theaters to watch movies. I don’t need to see it, anyway, for this post; I’m commenting on the hoo-raw surrounding it.
One such is the bellyaching about the movie’s name. Not supposed to name a movie about a Hawaiian person “Aloha” because that word has special meaning to Hawaii’s special snowflakes. I guess that means no one better make a movie about a Texan and call it “Howdy.” Boy howdy.
Then there’s this:
Cameron Crowe has apologized for offending anyone over his casting of Emma Stone in a partially Asian, partially Hawaiian role in his film “Aloha.”
Never mind that Stone is, by all accounts, a fine actress. Never mind, either, that one of her character’s hang-ups was the lack of any outward sign of her Chinese/Hawaiian ethnicity; the character looked like a white girl. Like the actress who played her does. Mm, mm. Gotta whine about that, too. In response, Crowe’s being downright chicken. And in his cowardice, he’s throwing Stone under the Oahu Bus.
In the end, this is folks wasting their talent and energy looking for excuses to be offended. It isn’t pure cowardice, not by the whiners or by guys like Crowe; it’s worse than that. It’s insidious, it’s a running away from the truth of life.
…not of the Supreme Court. I writing now about the Court’s ruling in the Michigan affirmative action case (Schuette v BAMN) concerning the state’s “decision to end affirmative action at its public universities.”
The Court ruled 6-2 to uphold Michigan’s decision, holding essentially, that such a choice should be left to the States’ citizenry and not determined by the court system.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Court (mostly—there were a number of separate concurring opinions), expanded on that:
The electorate’s instruction to governmental entities not to embark upon the course of race-defined and race-based preferences was adopted, we must assume, because the voters deemed a preference system to be unwise on account of what voters may deem its latent potential to become itself a source of the very resentments and hostilities based on race that this nation seeks to put behind it.
Justice Elena Kagan recused, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg joined the dissent.
Sadly, Sotomayor’s dissent was fundamentally racist.[1] She insisted that “race matters.” And
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.
Indeed. But the Constitution, which must be applied “with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination,” must be applied as it is written—especially because, in the present context, the Constitution is color—and gender, come to that—blind, and explicitly so under the 14th Amendment. That means that there cannot be anything other than equal treatment under law; in particular, there cannot be special treatment for some groups, and there cannot be special treatment for some groups at the expense of other groups.
Applying special treatment, as Sotomayor demands because of those centuries of racial discrimination, is only to maintain that racial discrimination for centuries more.
She attempted to offer alternatives to citizens speaking their voice:
In the wake of Grutter, some voters in Michigan set out to eliminate the use of race-sensitive admissions policies. Those voters were of course free to pursue this end in any number of ways. For example, they could have persuaded existing board members to change their minds through individual or grassroots lobbying efforts, or through general public awareness campaigns. Or they could have mobilized efforts to vote uncooperative board members out of office, replacing them with members who would share their desire to abolish race-sensitive admissions policies.
This, of course, is just what the voters of Michigan did—only they did it state-wide, rather than piecemeal. There is no difference between the two, except in the mind of Sotomayor.
She buried this in a footnote:
Although the term “affirmative action” is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies, I instead use the term “race-sensitive admissions policies.”
Which is nothing but the racism of preferential treatment based on race. Made blatant by her preferred term of reference.
Sotomayor concluded her dissent with this:
For members of historically marginalized groups, which rely on the federal courts to protect their constitutional rights, the decision can hardly bolster hope for a vision of democracy that preserves for all the right to participate meaningfully and equally in self-government.
Because, of course, we cannot demarginalize those groups by treating them like adults and equals, we can only demarginalize them by perpetuating their status as…dependents…through continuing to single them out for special treatment.
I respectfully dissent from Sotomayor’s dissent.
[1] I of course do not mean to suggest that Justice Sotomayor wrote with anything like invidious intent. But the dissent at issue in this case seeks to change the rules of the political process and of the 14th Amendment to the disadvantage of members of our society disfavored by government.
Update: Added Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s first name to the first time she’s mentioned in the post. It’s my usual habit; I missed it this time.
Justice Clarence Thomas has one. Fisher v University of Texas at Austin was a case that wound up in front of the Supreme Court that involved a white woman who was denied admission as a result of UTA’s racial preference admissions system that explicitly deprecated some students and elevated others in the UTA admissions system solely on the basis of race, or so she claimed in her suit.
Monday, the Supremes took the easy way out and sent the case back to the Appellate Court on the legal technicality that that court had used the wrong criterion in reaching its decision upholding UTA’s race-based admissions system.
Justice Thomas, in his separate concurring opinion, had this to say concerning race-based discrimination, as cited in The Wall Street Journal:
While I find the theory advanced by the University to justify racial discrimination facially inadequate, I also believe that its use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity. I suspect that the University’s program is instead based on the benighted notion that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities…. The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.
Slaveholders argued that slavery was a “positive good” that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. See, e.g., Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837, in P. Finkelman, Defending Slavery 54, 58–59 (2003) (“Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually….”)
…A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. They argued, for example, that separate schools protected black children from racist white students and teachers. See, e.g., …Tr. of Oral Arg. in Bolling v. Sharpe, O.T. 1952, No. 413, p. 56 (“There was behind these [a]cts a kindly feeling [and] an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted….”)
…Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.
What he said.