The Baja 500

Supporting unprecedented increases in immigration levels, as those who have taken up arms against the House’s “enforcement only” bill in favor of the Senate approach do, strikes me as a clever way to support laissez-faire economics while posturing as a high minded liberal—and the highest minded of the piously liberal at that, the egalitarian anti-racist.

Nowhere is that more in evidence than in the text of the “Open Letter on Immigration” offered by Greg Mankiw (I’m not sure if he originated it or is just a signatory, but he seems like a nice enough, if fatally mistaken, fellow to link to), and boasting of five hundred signatures from economists around the country. Here it comes to the fore, flexing the puffed up gym muscles of its moral superiority while proudly flaunting its sock-stuffed-in-the-crotch endowment of five hundred eminent signatures. Probably many of these signatories are more simply liberal individuals than libertarian economists. So it’s hard to imagine that if they were relieved of the considerable pressure to appear sublimely egalitarian they would sign off on something that proposes dispensing with the concerns of the poorest Americans because their concentrated pain is spread out to the benefit of their mostly better off fellow citizens in the form of lower consumer prices:

In recent decades, immigration of low-skilled workers may have lowered the wages of domestic low-skilled workers, but the effect is likely to have been small, with estimates of wage reductions for high-school dropouts ranging from eight percent to as little as zero percent.
While a small percentage of native-born Americans may be harmed by immigration, vastly more Americans benefit from the contributions that immigrants make to our economy, including lower consumer prices. As with trade in goods and services, the gains from immigration outweigh the losses. The effect of all immigration on low-skilled workers is very likely positive as many immigrants bring skills, capital and entrepreneurship to the American economy.

Perhaps one has to be an economist to understand how something that costs so little in the form of lower wages at one end (maybe nothing at all; it’s the rebirth of Bush Sr’s “voodoo economics”), brings significant benefits to the whole of the gargantuan American economy at the other end in the form of lower consumer prices. I was under the impression that all the well documented expenses from the public purse emanating from low-skilled immigration amounted to a subsidy of those lower prices, and then some.

Of course, one of the "restrictionist" points of view on immigration is that we should allow ourself the right, and more importantly the self-preservative concern, to place a premium on skills and education; hence the need for border security and a re-evaluation of immigration levels, as well as educational and skill levels of immigrants. Saying "many immigrants bring skills, capital, and entrepreneurship to the American economy," is not just making things more vague by lumping all immigration into one mass, it is an obfuscation of just what the debate is. By all means let's talk about skills and entrepreneurship, but let's be frank about it; some immigrants bring these things, many more don't. Why on earth wouldn't we allow ourselves the right to, brace yourself now, discriminate on the basis of these things? Perhaps the author doesn't understand that's what he is in fact arguing against. As for immigrants bringing significant capital with them, it's been a long time since Ferdinand Marcos touched down in Hawaii.

The author blunders through a couple of fatal fallacies here, not the least of which is that labor--human beings--can be viewed as not vastly different from "goods and services." Here is yet another instance of ideology running aground on the shoals of human nature. Of course, the captain is telling us that as soon as the tide turns and the children of all these unskilled laborers that are flooding the holds below suddenly reverse the trends of the past two generations and all become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs we'll be okay. Meanwhile, us rabble in the crew are bailing water like mad. Time to mutiny.

As is so often the case, the most egregious elitist callousness is lurking behind the facade of liberal concern, "a small percentage of native born" will be harmed; "vastly more" will benefit. The "benefit" claimed has never been coherently proven, other than in the form of lower consumer prices. Some would hold our civilization hostage to the price of lettuce.
In the totemic hierarchy of psuedo-liberal ritual, the poorer, the more foreign, and the less white one is, the higher the position. Dirt poor Latin American mestizo trumps native born working class every time. And pay no attention to the decidedly un-proletarian appearance of the priesthood, as they count their tithes in units of money and political power.
The author would have you believe that the costs are isolated and nearly insignificant but the benefits are spread out and magnified. Unless the nation really is struggling with a significant labor shortage, this is bunkum. Notice that the open borders argument takes for granted industry claims to this effect, despite long standing stagnation in wages in the industries that rely heavily on unrestricted immigration. Many who wouldn't dream of, say, taking General Motors at their word if they complain about the effects of CAFE standards (and I don't know anything about those claims; my point here is to illustrate the hypocrisy of certain otherwise reasonable people when it comes to this highly loaded issue), are now looking off and away, blithely whistling like a bribed umpire while certain industries are allowed to call their own strikes.

I suspect it’s clearer if you’re one who stands to gain more directly; if you’re Big Agriculture, the fast food industry, a major political party (that somehow both think they’re going to ensure their dominance well into mid-century by a sort of reverse gerrymandering of the electorate as a whole), or an economist ensuring his well feathered place in respectable punditry (now there’s a positively affected income).
They just keep laying it on thicker and thicker:

Legitimate concerns about the impact of immigration on the poorest Americans should not be addressed by penalizing even poorer immigrants. Instead, we should promote policies, such as improving our education system, that enable Americans to be more productive with high-wage skills.

This is a rhetorical head fake, albeit not a very good one. We've been grappling with disturbing trends in education for a couple of decades now. We might want to be a bit more prudent, and not sell ourselves on policy that confounds the situation further by promising we'll get around to doing something about it later. Saying we should do something about education means absolutely nothing in this context, unless you are addressing the effect of broad, low skilled immigration upon it. And we know that education is adversely affected by massive inflows of poorly educated, foreign language immigrants. The author would have you leap from a plane, promising he'll throw a parachute down after you. Come to think of it, it takes a lot of nerve to offer then we'll just have to do something about education as a sort of throw-away line. Bravo.

Of course the costs of illegal immigration on education are one of many issues left unaddressed in the letter. Since the letter makes only a few general assertions (perhaps that’s how you get five hundred signatures) I’m assuming that this is an appeal for the Senate’s mass amnesty combined with a doubling or trebling of legal immigration, as proposed in their bill.
Now someone tell me if I’m crazy, or ill-informed, or just plain mean, but this next line might be the silliest thing produced by the beneficiary of an Ivy League education (or this guy is just reaching way out of the strike zone):

We must not forget that the gains to immigrants coming to the United States are immense. Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid.

When coming upon a lunatic thought like this, I advise sneaking up behind it. That’s why we’ll start at the ugly rear of the thing, the least of it yes but this thing is a doozy so let’s be careful; “a truly form of effective foreign aid” he says. Is it? Would we consider direct payments to individual citizens in impoverished nations "effective"? Would anyone ever propose such a thing? I'm assuming of course that we're still talking about the best policy for this nation.

If the writer were really so convinced of the entrepreneurial nature of all of these immigrants then he would be, in his oh-so-global concern, fretting about our continually draining our fellow nations of their human capital, and its hobbling effect on their perpetually underperforming economies. Of course, no such thing is happening. Mexico doesn't spend money printing out handbooks on how to sneak into the U.S., nor does it send its president on tours of apple orchards in Washington State, because skills and entrepreneurialism are migrating here. If one considers Latin American migration into the U.S. clearly, it soon becomes apparent that countries like Mexico export their least employable to the United States. They recieve back remittances and net savings on social programs. Perhaps most importantly, they export potential political strife.
This silly argument reminds me of a guy I once heard describing his educational grant as an effective form of economic stimulus, because he was going to go out and spend the money after all.

Remittances (and I think we see where much of that "0-8%" in lost wages is going) represent capital flowing out of the economy. As in not spent here. It’s nice that this money ends up in the hands of the needy, after all, but if one is concerned with preserving this remarkable economy that is such a “beacon”, then it helps to understand that this money going abroad is no different, really, from capital lost to trade deficits. Or to increased spending on schools. Or on crime prevention, or on uninsured health care, or on welfare benefits, or on environmental costs…

Spin Cycle

Indulge me a moment.

Images merge and blend in the memory; things once seen in stark daylight or secondhand in snapshots, melding with television programs and picture shows, coalescing around imagination and vanity, clouded by dreams; the real, the transferred, the imagined and the wished intermingle, separate, and intermingle endlessly. All these charged electrons ricocheting around in my head, sometimes colliding and transferring particles, sometimes one capturing another and becoming something new.

All I know is the sum of my experiences, a collage spinning too fast to make out its parts until one slows and stands out momentarily: an old photo of a child—I know him—astride a bicycle, a Schwinn Sting Ray. This evokes a few more memories, hits showing up like the proverbial flashes in the gold pan; memories not only of images, some faint and some clear, but of sensations, some that feel like a fist in your chest, a vise grip on your heart that demands your attention.

The scent of seasonal change in the place you grew up, the smell of its dirt, home, girls—then women and maturation crowding all these out. Nothing will hold still. I didn’t even know how much I cherished these things, some of them mundane and treated with the contempt of familiarity, now viewed by a man weakened by sentiment and regret. Look around you now, yes even this will be mourned.

A boy on a Sting Ray; a white banana seat with a half sissy-bar, sometimes we’d ride two on the seat and one on the handle bars, he has a crew cut grown out, bristly and sun bleached a grizzly-bear tan color, giving him an oversized head. His smile is hardly guileless, but blameless nonetheless. This image evokes another; riding the bicycle for the first time unassisted, surrounded by other kids, one shouting approval; and now it is the motion itself experienced in that moment that is remembered clearly. A memory so near the beginning of memory it always aches slightly of melancholic ecstasy to come upon it yet again, to indulge oneself and to hold it up to the light and peer into its cloudy, transparent core one more time. Almost afraid to look too closely or directly at it lest it vanish, like trying to observe a mote in the corner of your eye. This too will be lost.

She took me out into the middle of a field at night. This is the field I ran across when I escaped the man who put a knife to my throat. Sex and violence. Two children, furtively stealing out into the center of a shadow, dropping a bucket down into a forbidden well in the black of night. I don’t remember her face. I don’t remember her name. I remember the damp grass, the cool air on us, the scent, her; like one multi-dimensional sensation. I remember the field seemed like a mile wide expanse. I remember walking home.

The collage turns; a globe shaped mass of a million distinct, twirling particles spinning around an axis, some larger, some smaller, some surfacing in a split second to pause and reveal themselves and then submerging in the whirling mass. Here’s a girl’s face and in an instant faster than the speed of desire the heart quickens just as it did before, and this moment is now that moment of years ago, separated by a trillion moments between but connected nonetheless, and the sensation somehow travels along this chain like electrons through a wire to reach you now in an instant. The image of the face isn't clear, it won't stay put for examination, like a light smudge on your eye it skitters off to the side when you try to look directly at it, but the memory triggers a complex of emotion and desire that is real right now, even if the girl is gone forever.
But we know that electrons in a wire are lined up and waiting; flick a switch at one end and at the other one is pushed out. Instant light. Moments only line up in the imagination; in reality there is only one moment, this one.
It is bliss and heartache at once; damn, how I’ll miss this life.

Okay, I’m over it now. Back to work.

Iran, I Ran So Far Away

I have an idea on how George Bush can weaken Iran's hand in the Middle East.
An immediate, precipitous pull-out from Iraq. The inevitable civil war is the last thing the Iranians want. Of course full scale civil war may be inevitable anyway. Our continuing presence there is buying Iran more time to determine which mad mullah will prove out, al-Sadr or al-Hakim (or whoever else has surfaced). Our troops are presently Iran's bulwark against regional instability. Of course, Cheney and Rumsfeld are still holding out hope for a permanent military presence in Iraq; watch how they lower their expectations of democracization long before they give up those military bases and oil contracts.

Asia Times Online's Spengler pointed out here that Iran, whatever it may say, has a vested interest in the U.S. succeeding in its nation building enterprise, leaving Shi'ites dominant and presumably open to Iranian influence.
Ahmadinejad's high profile, anti-Semitic bluster has been in no small part an attempt to place Iran (and himself, perhaps to the dismay of the ruling clerics who reserve international policy for themselves) at the apex of a newly revolutionary and anti-Western ummah. He has made remarkable headway among the mostly Sunni populations of the region for his fiery bombast. He threatens to unite Shia and Sunni in an new Islamic revolution. I don't think it's likely; these guys take their sectarian differences a little more seriously than that.

Forcing Iran to either enter the civil war on behalf of a Shia faction and become natio non grata with its Sunni neighbors (or worse), or try its hand at occupation, or sit still and watch its influence dwindle away in the chaos ensures a weakened Iranian state, already under pressure from within.
The situation as it is may not be the boon to Iran that it should be after all; it seems the Shi'ites are already starting to break up into factions as they anticipate an American withdrawal, from The Australian:

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage has given a gloomy assessment of the situation.
"The British used to make a big deal of walking around in their berets in the south," he said. "Now they won't even go to the latrines without their helmets. The south has got much rougher, it's mainly Shia on Shia violence."

Of course, the increased bloodshed that almost certainly will follow our departure is still on our hands. We set this all in motion through classic imperial overreach. Something to remember when someone says time to get out and leave this mess to the Iraqis. The tragedy is that we will almost certainly have to do just that, after it becomes clear that our remaining is the greater evil. That clariy is just about upon us.

Leon Hadar has been arguing for a while now that we need to sit down with Iran for comprehensive negotiations beyond the nuclear issue. Wouldn't it have just been easier to leave Iraq be and sit down with Iran when they were reaching out previous to the Iraq war? (sullen leadership responds with dirty look) Just asking.

Damned Lies

Sunday’s New York Times continues the paper’s campaign on behalf of the Senate approach to immigration reform in a lubricious feature on Colorado Democrat Senator Ken Salazar:

"The story of Hispanics in America has not been told," Mr. Salazar said in a recent interview in his office here. "My election and my profile in the U.S. Senate is an opportunity to tell that story."
If that sounds like the beginning of some genteel raconteur's tale of ethnic America larded with all the creaking clichés about melting pots and salads, well, you're thinking about somebody other than Mr. Salazar.
The story he tells, with greater frequency and gusto these days, to groups all over the country and especially among Hispanics, is about power.

Meet the next generation of brokers in our increasingly fragmented and corrupt racial spoils system. Loyalty to something beyond ethnic identity and the graft it produces in a republic is a sucker's bet in their racket, and a compliant press will, as they have in the past, imbue their corruption with a false narrative of triumph over racial discrimination.
If Salazar’s naked grab for power gets a critical pass, so does his blatant dishonesty:

Mr. Salazar is not an immigrant. His family roots can be traced to Spain, and Salazars helped found Santa Fe, N.M., in the late 1500's, decades before the Mayflower set sail. That also means, technically speaking, that he is not quite Mexican-American, as he sometimes says, because his ancestors arrived before there was a Mexico, or a United States, for that matter.

“Not quite”? No, not at all. In fact, Mr. Salazar is descended from an early wave of European colonists displacing indigenous Americans, yet here he is, in 2006, pretending to be the opposite. He even, apparently with a straight face, allows himself to use one of the trite slogans that buttress the increasingly platitudinous argument for negation of the southern border:

"It was a border that came over us," Mr. Salazar said. "We didn't come over the border."

What is particularly galling about his use of this slogan is that his own family history is in fact proof of its disingenuousness. When the United States wrenched the Southwest from a corrupt and ineffectual Mexican government the region was home to about 100,000 Spanish speakers, largely ignored by a capital in Mexico City that was continually rent by internal power struggles and periodic revolutions. Those who are now invading the U.S. daily from Mexico are descended from people who never lived in what is now the United States. Still, the sentiment behind this slogan presumes that the western U.S. would be the same wealthy and open society that it is today had it remained part of Mexico. The border not just geographic. It is ideological as well. That border marks off the First World from the Third.
Hispanics who ended up north of the border were very lucky; Hispanics who ended up south of the border weren't, but the existence of a thriving Anglo nation to the north has been a boon to them as well; as millions of immigrants and a homeland grateful for billions of dollars annually in remittances can attest. If we're going to be honest about the imperial nature of the U.S.'s acquisition of the Southwest, let's also be honest about what the Southwest would be if it had remained part of Mexico.

It's important to note that these lands were claimed by Mexico by virtue of Spain's claim to them, but not settled or developed in any significant way by it. Mexican Texas was overwhelmed by Anglo settlers, encouraged by the Mexican government, who then were allowed to declare their independence provided they didn't become part of the United States. They of course did just that, feeling a greater sense of loyalty to those with whom they shared a language and culture. Sound familiar?
Mr. Salazar, if honesty were expected of him, would have to acknowledge that he is very fortunate indeed that his family settled in what would become the United States. But no, the romance of racial discrimination won't be left un-utilized by a dime store demagogue of Mr. Salazar's character:

But he is a personal witness to ethnic bigotry, he said.
"I've been taunted, called names — from dirty Mexican to lots of other names — as I was growing up, and even now as a United States senator," Mr. Salazar said. "To have that personal experience in having gone through that kind of discrimination, it helps in terms of informing the debate and bringing a certain sense of reality to some of the issues we are dealing with on a national level."

How being called names, and one has to wonder if the senator isn’t embellishing here a bit when his description of himself as Mexican American is in fact a lie, gives one a greater understanding of the debate than, say, an Anglo who has been on the receiving end of Chicano bigotry is never explained. Salazar, recruited by Senator John McCain for his current role promoting the Senate amnesty bill, is milking it for all it’s worth:

In recent months Mr. Salazar has spoken to the League of United Latin American Citizens and to a nationwide audience in a Spanish-language radio address on behalf of Democrats. There have been profiles and interviews in publications like Hispanic Today and Latino Suavé.
"Whenever a Hispanic reaches that level, other Hispanics will tune in — they're really not your constituency, but they are," said F. Chris Garcia, an emeritus professor of political science and former president of the University of New Mexico. "To ignore that constituency is to look for trouble."

Indeed.

Ducks

Well I don’t know how you take in all the shit you see
No don't believe anyone and most of all
don’t believe me
Believe you
G-ddamn right it's a beautiful day
—Eels, Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues

Who would not choose to follow the sound of running waters?
—Thomas Mann

Today I went down to the water, to a park I’ve recently found on the lake that is mostly ignored during the week. It can hardly said to be out of the way; it isn’t even out of earshot of the highway. But it provides a respite. Even the sound of nearby traffic is relaxing in this setting; as for the large homes on the water that I can’t help thinking would be better set off a bit and made less obtrusive, no matter; neither does a jet skier in the distance disturb this, just another type of fauna, natural and as in-its-place as anything else here; and who can begrudge an occasional water takeoff or landing by one of the pontoon-outfitted planes that are part of a tour fleet stationed nearby? I’ll never recover from my childish sense that witnessing that is something of a treat. No, I’m not looking to escape my fellow humans, just to put a little distance between us. Forgive me, but sometimes I like them better from this remove; standing back from humanity so as to appreciate it more fully.

Even though the area is thoroughly settled by humans, everything but the depths of the lake belongs to the birds. Just now as I walk the footpath to my spot a crow passes by with a sardine-sized fish in its mouth, maybe an unfortunate salmon fry. The birds are all anglers each with its own ingenious methods and remarkably resourceful in their own way.
The gulls and crows are the working class toughs; stout and homely, moving about in conspiratorial groups, cawing mysterious orders back and forth. They’ll snatch a fish from the surface of the water, they aren't too proud to scavenge, they'll steal from another bird or from one another; they are generally disorderly. The crows gather in gangs like ruffians; the seagulls collect in twos and threes, carousing like sailors on shore leave.

Occasional swallows flit about with an odd, arrythmic fluttering of their swept back wings; a burst of effort, a short glide, another burst of effort. Terns (I think) pass overhead, long out front like old World War II fighters; capable, all purpose aviators. There are at least three bald eagles living near the lake; massive things that motor along with big, broad wings that don’t flap but push huge cushions of air out from under them with a calm, confident motion, unfurling a bit with each stroke. Today one of them is working the lake's surface, scoping out his prey from on high before coming down to a low level glide over the water, perhaps pursuing a school of fish. He makes a diving grab, raising a splash of white. I can’t see if he was successful. Another large eagle, maybe a female with a brood, chases him off and then returns to a nest high up in one of the evergreens.

I am depressed; an insidious low-energy sort of depression. That’s why I’m here. Sometimes depression gnaws at you; “rage turned inward.” Sometimes, for me, it is simply a void in my chest harboring a vague, unidentifiable dread that commands the bulk of my attention until it subsides, entirely of its own inscrutable logic. You just have to endure it as you would any pain; a place like this is as good a balm as you'll find.

I have taken up the pretense that I would use my newfound haven to read, and that here I would read things that were of no pragmatic concern or compromise. Only things to be appreciated entirely for their own sake; fiction or poetry. I choose a picnic table bench that is placed too high, inconsiderately leaving my feet to dangle like a child in a high chair. This won’t do, so I find another. The lake stretches out before me. I settle into a book but, as is so often the case, can’t keep with it. My eyes are repeatedly drawn to the water.

Why do I always find myself staring at the water like a dullard? It’s the eyes that need this place most, I think. The eyes are so put upon in our world, loaded up, freighted down and overtaxed, all sorts of unnatural behavior is demanded of them; deciphering text, making sense of pulsating television screens, enduring all manner of artificial light. It’s much needed relief then, for the eyes; an apology, for the same four walls everyday, for the familiar tedium, for television, computer screens, newspapers, billboards, crowds, halogen lamps, mirrors, spandex clothing. The sight of the water is a purgative for the eyes.

I’m at my wooden bench when before me a Canada goose appears, first just the head popping up at the water’s edge as she struggles up the steep, muddy bank that's out of view. Comically, her head drops out of sight suddenly, as if a trap door had opened up beneath her feet; she has slipped back down the incline. She’s back just as quickly, somehow looking more determined, step-slipping up the bank until I see her entire neck, black down to its base with a martial white chin strap. She moves inland a few feet and strikes an impressively stern and upright pose, scanning the landscape for predators that aren’t there.

Struggling up the hill behind her appears a youngster, much bigger than a chick but about half adult sized, with small undeveloped wings that look like palsied arms. He manages the climb with greater ease than mom, and soon another and then another appear, all scrambling up the hill in a hurry like soldiers assaulting a position. I return to my book and a while later look back to see there are eleven siblings, all little dull brown feathered dinosaur-like creatures moving about on their backward folding legs. There are three adults with them, shepherding them along as they move in an orderly mass, pecking at the ground. One of the adults guards the landward side of the perimeter, standing still and periodically turning her gaze, sometimes with one leg up and poised, like a runner in the blocks. Another adult takes the shore and a third brings up the rear of the flock, alternating between feeding himself and herding the youngsters. Occasionally one of the adults communicates with another by a sudden, insistent downward movement of the head. Sometimes one moves an adolescent from a spot by lowering its beak to just above and parrellel to the ground and extended out in front like a mechanical arm, then giving a honking charge. Occasionally one of the adults rears up and flaps her wings, for no apparent reason. Sometimes one of the adolescents mimics this behavior with its own undeveloped wings.

They make a little circuit, moving up the bank for a distance and then turning back and inland, making their way back to their little bay where they came ashore. Then as a group they all set about grooming, and they become little feathered masses of movement, twisting and turning their necks about to rub their heads, like scrub brushes, over as much of their body as they can reach. This goes on for some time until their energies subside gradually, and before too long the young ones are all napping, with their heads tucked away, and the adults keeping guard.

A small sailboat comes in, slipping noiselessly into the marina. Overhead a 737, a dark grey silhouette emerging as if a product of the pale grey clouds above, silently begins its descent into the city. There’s a dock that extends well out into the water where some kids are fishing. One calls out to another; a hit on the line that turned out to be nothing. I head on home.

Mos' Def'

Following up on the post below, Seattle Public Schools has now posted an explanation for the disappearance of their controversial "Definitions of Racism":

In response to the numerous concerns voiced regarding definitions posted on the Equity & Race website, we have decided to revise our website in a way that will hopefully provide more context to readers around the work that Seattle Public Schools is doing to address institutional racism. The intended purpose of our work in the area of race and social justice is to bring communities together through open dialogue and honest reflection around what is meant by racism and the impact is has on our society and more specifically, our students. Our intention is not to put up additional barriers or develop an “us against them” mindset, nor is it to continue to hold onto unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality. It is our hope that we can explore the work of leading scholars in the areas of race and social justice issues to help us understand the dynamics and realities of how racism permeate throughout our society and use their knowledge to help us create meaningful change. This difficult work is vital to the success of our students and families. Thank you for sharing your concerns.[Boldface mine.]

Can't wait for more context from leading scholars on race and social justice.

They weren't just catching flak from conservatives; in addition to the many, mostly conservative blogs that lined up to have a go at this pinata, at least one local liberal publication, the free press Seattle Weekly, was highly critical.

addendum: I just happened across this quote from the irrepressible, irreplacable Fred Reed:

This brings me to my belief that the intense racial discord that quietly underlies American life is largely the product of the policies of special privilege and lack of responsibility. As I’ve said before, when I was twenty I believed that policy should be determined without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin. I was called the merest liberal and perhaps a dangerous communist. Now, forty years later, I believe that policy should be determined without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin. This makes me a racist, a racist being one who does not believe that blacks should automatically get everything they want.

I don't suppose the folks at Seattle Public Schools are ready to consider this possible explanation for the so-called "unsuccessful" nature of assimilation and meritocracy, but they deserve to hear the truth as well as anyone, and seem to need it more.

Time, and Other Tools of The Man

(*re-edited @ 21:25, 5/30)

Update: The Seattle Public Schools links below have been vaporized sometime since yesterday (5/30).

White man clock on the wall,
tired of gettin' up and goin' to work,
for that,
white white white white man y'all

Ol' Dirty Bastard, All in Together Now

But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.
Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965

The essay quoted above was a radical claim to ownership of the truth on behalf of socialist revolution. The author declared that a capitalist society was inherently unfair, discriminatory, and violent; therefore any defense of capitalist democracy (quaintly, “the Establishment”) was not entitled to freedom of expression. The tenets laid out in this essay form the totalitarian underpinnings of current multiculturalist thought, and are codified in public education policy today. Notably absent from the tracts setting out this policy is the word “tolerance.”
One such example comes from the Seattle Public Schools' “Definitions of Racism” found on their website under “Equity and Race Relations”:

Racism: The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.

(Yes, you read correctly: Latino/as. It takes a committee to come up with that. Book title: It Takes a Committee.)
Don't accuse the author of burying the lead. Entrusted with teaching your kids to read, educators have instead commandeered their moral education, and these overenthusiastic foot-solders of egalitarianism, following the orders of their intellectual higher-ups, are implicating American society from top to bottom; from the private thoughts of the individual to our most basic institutional foundations.

Just what they’re achieving is questionable. As a parent of a high-school age child, I know that kids are satirizing this stuff the moment they're out of Teacher’s earshot. You want to know how to render something, anything, an object of ridicule? Present it to children as sacrosanct, repeatedly. Recently my daughter’s high school imposed a day of silence for gay rights. The report I received was that the students were equal parts amused and annoyed. The kids are already, I suspect, distressingly tolerant in the eyes of their teachers, who are so eager to be in the vanguard of a new egalitarian order. Indeed, it must be quite a letdown to come strapped for battle with the forces of patriarchy and eurocentrism only to find the enemy is nowhere to be found. They are, however, undeterred; America must be a hotbed of oppression. Otherwise we're left teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Where's the fun in that? Anyone one who runs is a Vietcong. Anyone who stands still is a well disciplined Vietcong.
But we’re just getting started. It all begins at the subconscious level and where it stops nobody knows:

Individual Racism: The beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can occur at both an unconscious and conscious level, and can be both active and passive. Examples include telling a racist joke, using a racial epithet, or believing in the inherent superiority of whites.

Active Racism: Actions which have as their stated or explicit goal the maintenance of the system of racism and the oppression of those in the targeted racial groups. People who participate in active racism advocate the continued subjugation of members of the targeted groups and protection of “the rights” of members of the agent group. These goals are often supported by a belief in the inferiority of people of color and the superiority of white people, culture, and values.

Passive Racism: Beliefs, attitudes, and actions that contribute to the maintenance of racism, without openly advocating violence or oppression. The conscious or unconscious maintenance of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that support the system of racism, racial prejudice and racial dominance.

Of course every second-rate educator worth his tenure knows that capitalism and Standard English are inherently racist, but I bet you didn't know that planning ahead and punctuality are racist strategies:

Cultural Racism: Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

*Here is the fundamental problem of “multicultural” society; some cultures, and some aspects of some cultures, are better than others. Clearly, the innovations and values of more advanced cultures are both products of and reasons for their, excuse me, superiority.
A “future time orientation” is critical to enlightenment and progress. Individualism is inherent in liberalism and democracy. Individualism is an advancement beyond "collective ideology", which is another phrase for a primitive state wherein the individual is indistinguishable from his clan. Wherever collective ideology is the norm outside of the West (putting aside the question of socialism) it goes hand in hand with the subjugation of women and the hoarding of resources for dominant clans or families.
Individualism and "future time orientation", in the eyes of the author here, present greater challenges to underperforming minorities (an assumption not allowed the reader, as racist) and are seen as European values, therefore we must renounce them; in other words, we must renounce progress. This is the stink of it all; the irrational, reactionary flight from reason in the name of a religious devotion to an ideal that is seen as morally purifying.

*One wonders why they would stop at planning ahead, as it is in fact practiced in every culture. Why not go after things that are more clearly products of Western thought? Why not the written word? Why not place astrology on a par with astronomy? How about mathematics (in fact cultural mathematics has been introduced in some places as a fairer, "non-racist" way to teach math to black and hispanic children; curious how Asian kids thrive on math, and no one needs to shove an abacus in their hands to get them started).
I doubt if those who propagate this believe it. They merely seek to subvert; they think they have found an unassailable position from which to do that, anti-racism.

“Community” is no longer possible. “Collective ideology” is allowed. “Individualism” is suspect. Where to go from here? On to the socialist paradise I suppose, or we’ll all start wearing grass skirts and living off the land.
Attributing anything to differences in talents and abilities among races is forbidden, so with nowhere to go to explain the persistence of inequality, the very foundations of liberal democracy must be assaulted. Should we acknowledge nature's limitations, accept them and preserve liberalism and the law? Not if you're committed above all else to egalitarianism.
We once sought equal rights. Now we seek something else. A permanent state of racial-moral redress. A vigilantly enforced moral superiority of the "oppressed" above the "oppressor." Nietzsche’s "slave morality” is the order of the day. It’s only a matter of time before democratic, liberal values themselves are brought into the dock:

Institutional Racism: The network of institutional structures, policies, and practices that create advantages and benefits for Whites, and discrimination, oppression, and disadvantages for people from targeted racial groups. The advantages created for Whites are often invisible to them, or are considered “rights” available to everyone as opposed to “privileges” awarded to only some individuals and groups.

More from the father of this strain of thought, Herbert Marcuse, who laid the groundwork for today’s institutionalized radicalism in education:

Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance.

There is nothing new in the language of today’s anti-racists. It is at least forty years old. This dogma is in midlife crisis; it’s getting a little flabby, it’s past its prime, it’s been very successful, but it isn’t satisfied because while it has amassed a fortune it hasn't really changed a thing. Is that all there is? The sixties movement's version of company men, young so-called radicals who went on to become professors, now sit at the helm of the educational establishment; still the idyll never materialized. The old order is still firmly in place. What to do now? Ignore reality and drive on. This is not a quest for truth, after all, but an insurrection. There is plenty of evidence that capitalist democracy, whatever its shortcomings, has accommodated racial minorities like no other system before. Capitalism undermines racism along with morality, community, and tradition.

Black Americans wield a cultural influence which is remarkably disproportionate to their share of the population and belies the fiction that they are oppressed by a great, mysterious web of White collective unconscious. Asians (who one might expect to be most disadvantaged of all) accumulate wealth in greater proportion than the white majority, just as their reputation for intelligence, thrift, and hard work would predict.

But other inequities persist, regardless of a generation-old raft of codified privileges awarded to underperforming minorities seeking to increase their stubbornly intransigent low representation in elite professions and assuming that this lack of achievement can only be the result of “racism.” This assumption is disproven, and most people privately acknowledge this. Yet they can’t speak this aloud, and educators are attempting to indoctrinate their children in the quaint assumptions of the sixties. Even the language is the same. The only solace a parent has is in the knowledge that our teachers are notoriously inept at teaching. Small consolation.

Of course, race is such an insubstantial concept you wonder what all the fuss is about:

Race: A pseudobiological category that distinguishes people based on physical characteristics (e.g., skin color, body shape/size, facial features, hair texture). People of one race can vary in terms of ethnicity and culture.

As behavioral genetics advances from here, it will be interesting to watch what becomes of this mythology. It is something of a cliché to call this sort of thing religious, and a little unfair to the religious, but the comparison is apt.
If one disallows ideas and contradiction, no matter how certain of the justice of his goal, he becomes totalitarian. In the case of multiculturalism, a sort of ideological speciation has occurred, the liberal roots of the movement are severed and it is no longer compatible with liberal Western tradition, but is now hostile to it. This is why assimilation is denounced in language like this:

The process of giving up connections to and aspects of one’s culture of origin and blending in with the host/dominant culture. Also, the wholesale adoption of the dominant culture at the expense of the original culture.

Irony, make yourself known:

Prejudice: An attitude or opinion that is held in the absence of (or despite) full information. Typically it is negative in nature and based on faulty, distorted or unsubstantiated information that is over generalized and relatively in-flexible. Prejudices can be conscious or relatively unconscious.

That's like the pot calling the kettle black. Did I say black? I may have just overtly attributed normality to whiteness. I'm not sure, was that overt or covert? In no doubt unrelated news, Seattle Public Schools (whose motto is “education for every student in every school”) will close down several schools, disproportionately affecting minority students. They aren't educated, they’ve been spared assimilation, and they haven’t been discriminated against by learning a future time orientation. Yet they’re acutely aware of the inherent evil of whiteness. And they're coming to your white child's school soon, Seattle. Is that concern on your face I see, or are you engaged in covert, passive, unconscious racism?

We’re more than two full generations past any legal or codified discrimination in favor of the white majority. Desegregation efforts began fifty years ago. Affirmative action is over thirty years old, and now vigorously defended as a necessary group right in perpetuity. Combined with a system of “civil rights” litigation it has ensured just the sort of racial spoils system that is the apparent goal of the morbid, funeral march of postmodern theory above.
Yet still, the clamor for more separation, more concession, and more guilt instilled at ever younger ages in Whites and more resentment and paranoia in minorities grows more shrill and insistent from increasingly hidebound and insulated academics.

True conservatives, not neocons or theocons or corporatists but traditionalists skeptical of revolutionaries and utopians who are forever seeking to turn the prevailing order inside out whether it's necessary or not, are the only ones left to defend classical liberalism.
Liberals must make the break with racial demagoguery to reclaim their place alongside conservatives in defense of liberty. Conservatives, for their part, must make the break with militarism and the unrestrained globalist approach. If these highly unlikely things happen we might be able to save the nation from bankruptcy and cultural suicide.