Delaying That Dialog On Race

Are we ready for that national dialog on race yet? If and when we start it, can we put on the required reading list Hanna Rosin's American Murder Mystery from The Atlantic

The story turns on the rising crime rate in mid-sized cities (500,000 to 1 million population) -- a stat that's counter to the flat crime rates in the big cities. In Memphis TN, for example, the violent crime rate's been rising at 20 percent annually.

And it didn't take too long before a hint of a topic for the national dialog on race began to form up:

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? [Police Lt. Doug] Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

It is, of course, that the crime wave has a black engine -- and because Memphis politicians need the black vote, they would rather stick their heads in the sand. Good idea; a gunshot wound to the buttocks is less life-threatening than one to the head.

The story behind the Memphis stats is fascinating, so I'll pull a rather long quote from the story:

About five years ago, [criminologist Richard] Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

The process of tearing down the projects and moving the (primarily black) residents to more affluent (primarily white) neighborhoods started carefully; in fact, no projects were torn down. Fewer than 200 families were picked for relocation and screened to find the motivate families with fewer than five children. Not surprisingly, the results were very good -- more kids finishing school, families rising out of poverty.

Also not surprisingly, the media leaped on it, turning the resulting ACLU book, Waiting for Gautreaux, into the prophetic tome of leftist social meddling.

And not surprisingly, given the impatience of the left, what followed was the wholesale destruction of housing projects and accompanying relocation of all their residents -- not just the motivated, relatively low childbirth ones.

And finally, not surprisingly at all, what followed was bunny rabbits in Memphis. Memphis is now the fourth most violent mid-sized city in America, and think demolition of housing projects when you consider the three ranked worse, from third to first: Baltimore, Washington DC, Detroit. (Rosin found other stats that placed Memphis "at the very top.")

How did the leaders of Memphis respond to the data? Predictably, not well:

Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he’s still not moved. “You’ve already marginalized people and told them they have to move out,” he told me irritably, just as he’s told Betts. “Now you’re saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That’s a really, really unfair assessment. You’re putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that’s, quote-unquote, criminal.”

To Lipscomb, it's the data -- the reality -- that's criminal, not the splashes of red throughout the bunny's ears. It's the studies of black behavior that is criminal, not the behavior of blacks.

Is America ready for a dialog on race?

Of course, housing -- whether the projects of old or the suburban Section 8 apartments of today -- isn't the problem. Neither is race, per se.

My mother-in-law owned several apartments in Redding CA and did all she could not to rent to Section 8 renters -- who were mostly white or Hispanic there -- because they simply were more destructive and problematic than routine renters. Part of the Memphis crime problem is the result of the welfare, statist society the Left has succeeded in building in America.

And certainly, the uniquely black propensity to out of wedlock birth -- another residue of the ravages statism has caused in the black community -- has a lot to do with it. Rosin never mentions this in her article. Rather, she dwells on the difficulty project residents have getting acclimated to new neighborhoods, particularly those who weren't motivated to leave the projects, and ignores the fact that the families she writes about are mom and kid families, not mom and dad and kid families.

This is almost a taboo subject among liberals. For example, when recent stats on unwed births came out, the NYT trumpeted it as good news:

The birth rate for unmarried black women, long a focal point in the debate over the causes of poverty among African-Americans, has reached its lowest point in 40 years, Federal health officials said today.

According to figures compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 74.4 births per 1,000 unmarried black women in 1996 -- the last year for which complete data are available. That rate is significantly below the peak of 90.7 per 1,000 unmarried black women reached in 1989.

Buried 12 paragraphs down was the stat that the unwed birthrate among non-Hispanic whites was a still shocking but comparatively minuscule 21.5 percent.

In the face of all this, most of America wants to react like Memphis' housing director: Don't talk to me about race because I don't want to blame statism and I don't want to criticize black social behavior, even if it is destructive.

hat-tip: Jim

Kenji And Matsuko And Seiichi And Hanako, All One And The Same

If you thought the PC goons are far too powerful in our schools -- banning dodgeball and purging "most likely to succeed" from the yearbook -- you haven't been to Japan lately. This just in from the C-SM Asia Bureau:

The stage was set, the lights went down and in a suburban Japanese primary school everyone prepared to enjoy a performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The only snag was that the entire cast was playing the part of Snow White.

For the audience of menacing mothers and feisty fathers, though, the sight of 25 Snow Whites, no dwarfs and no wicked witch was a triumph: a clear victory for Japan's emerging new class of “Monster Parents."

For they had taken on the system and won. After a relentless campaign of bullying, hectoring and nuisance phone calls, the monster parents had cowed the teachers into submission, forcing the school to admit to the injustice of selecting just one girl to play the title role. (Fox News)

I can't help it. Images of the fall of Rome overwhelm me. Images of Bushido, the Japanese samurai ethic disappear like a mist in bamboo. Japan has raised a generation that curses any hint of the societal regimen that has served the nation so well, replacing it with a bunch of blame-shifting, over-protective infighters and ear-biters.

The article concludes:

Previously, when a child was in trouble the parents apologized profusely to the teacher; nowadays, they try to have the teacher sacked.

Where previously schools were trusted and respected, they are now the targets of concerted activism. Dozens of educators have been forced to resign in the face of the blazing fury of parents who no longer tolerate anything that appears to disadvantage their offspring.

Any guesses how this coddled, uncompetitive population will turn out? How many of these kids will turn out to be whining primadonnas, serial_killers_in_a_cubicle and never_leave_the_nest middle-agers?

How few will be able to lead their country to anything beyond descending mediocrity?

How much alike our two countries are.

hat-tip: Jim

Dumpster Diving As Politics

Purity and insanity can sometimes be hard to tell apart, as is the case with freeganism, one of the most bizarre, and bizarrely pure, political movements this side of Kim Jong-il worship.

The astute will immediately see the word Freegan is a combination of "free" and "vegan," a hint that we're onto something weird and intense here. A haphazard visit, brought about by StumbleUpon, led me to Freegan.info, where I learned that Freegans:

• Freegans are far more out there than mere Vegans:
  
  "Freegans take [veganism] a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy. Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of wildlife on farmland as "pests", the violent overthrow of popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day."
  
  Not a cheerful bunch, it seems.
  
  
• Dumpster diving, also known as "waste reclamation" is their primary source of livelihood. It too is a political statement:
  
  "As freegans we forage instead of buying to avoid being wasteful consumers ourselves, to politically challenge the injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, and to reduce the waste going to landfills and incinerators which are disproportionately situated within poor, non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma."
  
  Wow, from waste to environmentalism to social justice, all in one dumpster dive.
  
  
• Don't count on Freegans to enjoy a Sunday spin, because they aren't really all that fond of automobiles:
  
  "We all know that automobiles cause pollution created from the burning of petroleum but we usually don't think of the other destruction factors like forests being eliminated from road building in wilderness areas and collision deaths of humans and wildlife. As well, the massive oil use today creates the economic impetus for slaughter in Iraq and all over the world."
  
  I guess driving a Prius won't even do for these guys.
  
  
• Freegans don't believe in property rights, but they do believe in housing rights, and exert that right through squatting:
  
  "Squatters believe that real human needs are more important than abstract notions of private property, and that those who hold deed to buildings but won’t allow people to live in them, even in places where housing is vitally needed, don’t deserve to own those buildings."
  
  If you have no job and smell like a dumpster, it's a good idea to come up with a way to idealize living illegally on someone else's property.
  
  
• Freegans, you're probably not surprised to learn, are not to keen on working for a living. In fact, they rebel against the concept:
  
  "Once we realize that it's not a few bad products or a few egregious companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our world but rather the entire system we are working in, we begin to realize that, as workers, we are cogs in a machine of violence, death, exploitation, and destruction. Is the retail clerk who rings up a cut of veal any less responsible for the cruelty of factory farming than the farm worker? What about the ad designer who finds ways to make the product palatable? How about the accountant who does the grocery’s books and allows it to stay in business?"
  

And what about the PR guy who helps land developers get projects approved? Guess I won't be getting too many job applications from Freegans.

A good test of a social/political movement is to ask the question: Could we survive if everyone became a _______? With Freeganism, the answer is most assuredly "No."

Freeloaders need something to freeload off of, so they are as utterly dependent on the machines and systems and corporations that they so despise; they just prefer not to pay for their sustenance.

A nation of Freegans would quickly pick all the dumpsters clean; would have no hated automobiles to wait for, thumb up; would find no market for the materials they recycle among a population which, like them, has no need for material goods.

Demographics on Freegans are, to my knowledge, as rare as money clips in Freegans' pockets, but if the pictures on their Web site are any indication, they are all white college kids who got caught up in the big extreme green machine; you know, the one where Big Green merges with Big Red.

Pity their distraught parents, worried not just that their beloved children are on the street, but also that they've become so hateful of society, so crazed by progress.

Our Crumbling Civilization: Sick Santa Edition

I don't even know how to write this. How do you tell people that in New York there's a place one can buy a ... a ... a ... Santa With Butt-Plug to mark the holiday season? For $100, yet?

This past Easter, it was Chocolate Jesus, now we have to suffer through a chocolate Santa with a butt-plug. Is there a lower basement our culture can settle down into?

Here's the photo and the story, which unfortunately for America's reputation ran in the Times of London:

Is it a raunchy festive talking-point? Is it a work of art? Whatever it is, the $100, 10in tall chocolate Santa with Butt Plug is the talk of chic New York - and is delicious, even if the sugar rush could keep you awake.

I'm not 100% clear what one would use a butt-plug for, and please don't tell me. It's enough to know that this little bit of sickness is the creation of one Paul McCarthy, "the 62-year-old Los Angeles-based artist whose reputation was forged in the 1970s with performances that involved him rolling about on the floor, filling his pants with tuna and cramming his mouth with frankfurters."

The Times said "artist," not me. Shoot me, but I still feel artists create works that lift us up and inspire us, not works that exist only to outdo the last abomination foisted on us by the likes of McCarthy.

McCarty is selling his Sick Santa's in a gallery run by Michele Maccarone (say the name, don't just read it). Yes, a gallery, not a store, because this is art, you know. One thousand buyers thus far, many of them "art cognosenti" tell us it's art, as does The Times:

It’s all part of [McCarthy's] stream of thoughts about the infantilism of much contemporary culture, of how it all leads back to ingesting and defecating, to food and sex and toilet training.

Shudder. I actually agree with McCarthy: Much of contemporary culture is infantile indeed. But I bemoan the fact; I don't go around celebrating it by turning a revered childhood symbol of giving into a ass-inine attack on what's left of our culture.

And since you may be thinking, "What good is a chocolate sex toy anyway," and thereby contributing all the more to society's slide into hedonism, I'll leave it to Maccarone to explain:

“Well, if you want to break this off and stick it . . . I wonder. It might work . . . I haven’t tried."

It appears there remains room for Maccarone to get sicker still.

Why The Left Loves Europe

Let's visit Europe today, where human rights are celebrated -- unless, of course, they are the civil rights of conservatives.

In Germany, believing abortion to be as murderous as the holocaust is a crime, and educating your own children is a crime too. In France, saying that “homosexual behaviour endangers the survival of humanity” is a crime, and so is the distribution of pork soup to the poor. In Belgium, speaking out against immigration is a crime.

Sounds like the Fairness Doctrine-loving Dems would love a passels of laws like that, so they could do stuff like this:

Last week, a German court sentenced a 55-year old Lutheran pastor to one year in jail for “Volksverhetzung” (incitement of the people) because he compared the killing of the unborn in contemporary Germany to the holocaust. Next week, the Council of Europe is going to vote on a resolution imposing Darwinism as Europe’s official ideology.

And this:

Indeed, next Tuesday, the Council of Europe (CoE), Europe’s main human-rights body, will vote on a proposal which advocates the fight against creationism, “young earth” and “intelligent design” in its 47 member states.

According to a report of the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly, creationists are dangerous “religious fundamentalists” who propagate “forms of religious extremism” and “could become a threat to human rights.” The report adds that the acceptance of the science of evolutionism “is crucial to the future of our societies and our democracies.”

“Creationism, born of the denial of the evolution of species through natural selection, was for a long time an almost exclusively American phenomenon,” the report says.

Banning the human rights of creationists in the name of human rights -- ah, Europe! How enlightened!

All of the pulled quotes above are from one article, Secularist Europe Silences Pro-Lifers and Creationists, in Brussels Journal. Being a conservative, I don't require stuff of others (except those on my payroll and under my roof), but if I were a liberal, I'd make this piece required reading for everyone this weekend.

Except if I were a liberal, I wouldn't want anyone to read what's really going on.

When Civil Rights Stop

Julie ... uh, John ... no, Julie Nemecek should just pack his ... anatomically speaking anyway ... bags and get the heck out of Spring Arbor, but she ... speaking gender orientationally ... is suing instead.

John was a business professor and associate dean at the evangelical Free Methodist college for 15 years before the earings, dresses, hormones and breasts came, and the request that others call him Julie. And that got Nemecek (Boy! That's easier than the whole him/her thing!) fired.

The college cited a community covenant all employees must sign, affirming biblical principles and tht they will "model Christian character to our students." They are not required to be Free Methodists, according to U prez Gayle D. Beebe, but, she (and she is a she) told the WSJ, "It's an expectation they will be acting out the Christian faith both in the way they teach and in the way they live."

Nemecek signed the covenant and agreeably lived under it for 15 years. He cannot manefest an appearance that supports homosexuality and still live under that covenant, so he had two legitimate choices: Stay in the closet and get counselling, or resign and get a job at a place more compatible with his changed belief systems.

Try as they will, and they will try mightly, religion is not asexual. Because of the power of the sex drive for both good and evil, all serious religions need to deal with it, and have since their creation. Many failed religions that are no longer with us promoted sexuality without constraint. Those that imposed rules, morals, on sexuality have survived the test of time.

But will they stand the idiocy of certain "enlightened" Western judges?

An interesting sidebar is Nemecek's wife, Joanne, shown here with her husband, or whatever. Joannes on the right; it's' not too hard to tell. She told the WSJ, "I feel like Julie's condition doesn't negate my marriage vows."

That is a Christian response if there ever was one. Joanne would be justified in leaving Julie if Julie was sleeping around or violent, but God's desire to keep marriages intact is clear in the scriptures, and it appears that Joanne is one who take vows made as a Christian seriously.

So should Julie. He/she made a vow when he signed the covenant.

Our Crumbling Civilization: William, Mary And Sex Edition

What would William & Mary's most famous alums -- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Tyler -- think if they knew the school they attended was using public funds for pubic (no typo there) events?

A recent "sex workers" art show at the College of William & Mary is prompting more questions about President Gene R. Nichol's leadership of the 314-year-old public university.

Mr. Nichol allowed the "Sex Workers' Art Show" to stop at William & Mary last week as part of its national tour. The event included male and female strippers, escorts and prostitutes in various states of undress expressing their feelings on subjects ranging from their jobs to global politics. (WashTimes)

Is what an escort thinks about the war in Iraq now considered meaningful education? Is watching hookers sit around wearing (or not wearing) who knows what the sort of learning activity taxpayers had in mind when the nation's second-oldest college went on the public dole back in 1906?

Nichols justified his position on the sex show as you would expect:

"I don't like this kind of show, and I don't like having it here," Mr. Nichol told the Williamsburg-based Virginia Gazette. "But it is not the practice and province of universities to censor or cancel performances because they are controversial."

Of course, he's not telling the truth. The open door is extended to liberal and secular programs; questions are raised only about conservative or religious ... make that Christian ... programs. In fact, another controversial move by Nichol did just that:

The criticism against Mr. Nichol began in October when he removed a cross from the school's Wren Chapel to make it more open to people of all faiths.

Mr. Nichol said he removed the cross because potential students and their families viewing the chapel on campus tours immediately departed and because a Jewish student required to participate in a program in the chapel vowed never to return. ...

Before Mr. Nichol's decision about the cross, it was always on display but could be removed by request. Now it can be returned by request.

What did Nichol do to the cross? He censored it! He cancelled its performance, which had been continuous since Williamsburg's historic Bruton Parish loaned it to the college in 1940.

One hypersensitive and bigoted Jewish student raising a stink is not exactly a big-time controversy, but it was enough to get Nichol jumping up and ripping down the cross, an action since approved (Natch!) by the faculty and student assemblies.

One alum, Karla Bruno, who has decided to withhold financial support from the college until sensibilities are re-established, put it nicely:

"Where's the line? There's got to be a line somewhere. He's making a judgment call about the cross, but he refuses to make a judgment call about this depraved event that was going on at the University Center."

Our Crumbling Civilization: Nether Parts Edition

Scrotum.

There. For the first time in C-SM's 28-month history, that word has appeared. I would have rather it not, but it's there for comparison's sake.

It didn't take nearly as long for Susan Patron, shown here typing away, to get the word into her children's book, “The Higher Power of Lucky." She actually got it on page one.

And that, perhaps, is what got her the Newberry Medal, the top prize in kiddy lit. Create a buzz, win a prize.

In the book, the main character, Lucky, hears the word through a wall, when another character says his dog was bitten by a dog in that particularly nether part of the body.

Lucky's response is:

“Scrotum [Oops, I've typed it again] sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

I'd argue that the real problem with Patron's presentation is the word "important," which gives the word greater weight (probably -- I haven't read the book) than it deserves. Nonetheless, the library world is a-tizzy over the mention of the body part.

It's tough for a librarian not to stock a Newberry Medal winner because, the NYT says, it's the kiddy lit counterpart to being on Oprah's book list. But many are opting not to stock it, afraid in part of the controversy that would follow a decision to stock, and in part because they don't want themselves or parents to be forced into an anatomy lesson they don't want to give.

For her part, Patron says Lucky is growing up and learning about body parts is a key part of that process. Besides:

“The word is just so delicious,” Ms. Patron said. “The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

Aha. Delicious. An admission of deliberate provocation.

No mention is made in the NYT piece of Patron's child-rearing status. She's merely shown with a dog. My bet: She's not a mom, or if she is, not a very good one. A good mom would not invite this conversation among 8 year old girls, the target audience for the book. A good mom would not include, as one librarian said, a "Howard Stern-type shock treatment" because she knows controversy sells books.

But, sadly, a good mom probably wouldn't win a Newberry Medal.