American Racism

Milwaukee Riots

New York University is going to make it easier for ex-criminals to attend its institution. In the conservative Weekly Standard, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes that NYU is taking questions about criminal background off its applications. To Riley, the reason is obvious. NYU wants more blacks in its student body, and criminal backgrounds disproportionately keep blacks away.

But Riley, who is sensitive to how poorly affirmative action actually helps disadvantaged minorities, reminds readers that the practice

has led many students to make the toxic assumption that minority students are not as capable. As NYU's very own Jonathan Haidt wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, "As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers." Admitting, in the name of diversity, students who are even less qualified "is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus.”

Do we really want affirmative action bringing black ex-felons to the academy? Says Riley:

Now imagine what would happen if white and Asian students on campus had the impression that not only were their black peers less likely to have performed well on standardized tests or on their high school report cards, but were also more likely to have criminal records.

We all know that alumni preferences have long favored white applicants. Or have they?

Riley tells us that

one recent Harvard study of 30 elite colleges found that "legacy" applicants—often disdained as receiving a kind of old-boys-network preference—actually had slightly higher average SAT scores than the overall pool of applicants.

So much for that affirmative action excuse.

Conservative Heather MacDonald, in the City Journal, is upset about the continuing violence of blacks against police from one American city to another that has now reached Milwaukee (see picture, above). She calls it racism.

To MacDonald:

the narrative’s biggest lie is that white people are the most powerful source of racism today—a lie embraced by elite white society itself. When that society is not twisting itself into knots trying to hire or promote as many blacks as possible, it is in a constant state of anguish trying to track down those deep, if invisible, pockets of white racism that supposedly explain ongoing racial disparities. Black racism, however, is far more pervasive than any vestigial white racism, as anyone who has spent time in inner-city black neighborhoods knows.

I have been warned by residents of one Harlem housing project not to venture into a neighboring project because the hatred of whites is even more acute there. A resident of the Taft Houses in East Harlem told me of the abuse she took as a child because her mother was Irish. Black flash mobs and participants in the “knock-out game” are motivated by anti-white animus, though the media strive frantically to ignore both the violence and the emotion generating it.

Blacks are the primary source of interracial violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author by a Bureau of Justice Statistics statistician. Blacks, in other words, committed 85% of the interracial crimes between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13% of the population. It would be naïve to think that some of that black-on-white violence does not have a racial tinge to it.