Coyote Blog

I pretty much hate the term "systematic racism," which is a clever rebranding by the DEI folks of the Christian concept of "original sin."  Try to tell the Church that you have behaved ethically?  Doesn't matter, you still need us to remove the stain of your original sin.  Try to tell the DEI trainer you don't have a racism problem?  Doesn't matter how you act, you are part of the systematic racism.

I want to go on a brief (but typical of this blog) digression.

Years ago, probably in 2017 after the Charlottesville / proud boys kerfuffle, I had a Jewish friend express his concern about rising Right-wing antisemitism.  He and I don't really talk politics much but my sense is that -- like many Jewish voters in the Northeast -- he is a reliable Democratic vote.  I remember telling him that I really did not think the sort of knuckleheads at Charlottesville presented much of a threat.  He asked me why.

I had to think about if for a minute -- I had a gut feel my statement was true but I had not really thought about it carefully enough to understand why.  After pondering it for part of dinner I finally said that I didn't think the antisemites (and overt racists) on the Right were a threat because most of them were low-status.  They did not have the power to do anything.  It's not like they were hiring for Bank of America or on the admissions committee at Harvard.  People with any sort of status or authority on the Right did not respect or follow these people (they might shill for their votes, but politicians of all stripes pander to the most absurd fringes of their part for votes).  [Almost without thinking about it I said that if I were he, I would be more worried about antisemitism from the Left, because the folks in the BDS movement (for example) on universities are just the opposite of antisemites on the Right -- they are among the elite.  I seldom am very prescient on cultural trends, but at the time I was very involved with the issue of discrimination against Asians at Princeton, and I thought I saw some parallels with Jews.  I think we have all seen the explosion of antisemitism that has come out of the mainly Leftish elite over the last year].

When I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, racism was overt.  Things began to improve remarkably in the by 1980, though I remember at that point my dad could not get the Exxon CFO into our country club because he was Jewish and there was pushback when George Forman tried to buy a house in tony River Oaks.  By 2000, a generation later, much of that crap was gone, or at least way better.  But they key change that should have made these changes sustainable was that racism was not only isolated to lower-status groups, but it became seen as a marker for being low-status.  Demonstrating racism became the reverse of virtue-signaling -- it marked one as a loser.

If there is such a thing as systematic racism, then it has to be perpetrated by people who are part of the system.  People like the proud boys are outsiders -- I guarantee they are not on any country club membership committees.  They are not determining Ivy League admissions.  They are not hiring at Goldman Sachs.

I do think the system goes wrong for blacks but it is not in any arena controlled by the proud boys.  And I  have a strong opinion on where that system failure lies:  K through 12 education, and probably even more specifically K-5 education.  We have affirmative action in the workplace for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  Before that we have affirmative action in college for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  We keep changing the SAT test.  Why?  Because blacks historically struggle to score as well as whites and other races on the test.  We keep changing (lowering) high school graduation requirements.  Why?  Because to many black children fail to graduate with the higher standards.

All of this stuff are after-the-fact attempted work-arounds that avoid fixing the real problem:  K-12 education is totally failing black kids.  Any root cause failure analysis would get to this conclusion.  You want to say that systematic racism exists?  Well here is the place where the system is totally failing one race.  If I were more of an expert, I could probably tell you which grade it is where things go off the rails but my guess is that it is an early grade where reading and basic math are not getting taught.

If I were the biggest racist in history and wanted to come up with a Dr Evil scheme to destroy blacks in America, I could not come up with a better plan than the K-12 education system, particularly in many large cities.  So here lies systematic racism, right?

Well, here lies the systematic failure to help African-Americans towards prosperity.  But it is hard to call it racism when in most of these cities the entire school board, the city council, and the mayor are all black or mostly black.  Here is the school board in E. St Louis -- not many proud boys there.  Here it is in Chicago.  Both of these districts are lavishly funded -- East St Louis spends over $25,000 per student and has a 12:1 teacher ratio  (the national average is about $18,000 per pupil and 14:1).  The student body is 96% black and US News report that in E. St Louis  "4% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 7% tested at or above that level for math."  Well no surprise that Blacks are struggling when freaking 96% of them graduate from public school systems like this without being able to read.  No affirmative action plan ever invented is going to magically create a future for adults who can't read or do math.

This is a f*cking crime, and it has nothing to do with racism or funding.  Trump can make headlines getting rid of DEI programs -- fine, they were a fix for this problem that was never going to work.  But until we seriously talk about public school education, we are not serious about fixing the systematic problems blacks face.  And the system is going to fight back hard.  Already folks in the system are telling us that the testing that shows blacks doing poorly should be eliminated.  Why?  Well they say it is to help blacks but that can't possibly be true.  Its like telling me that I am better off not getting a cancer test and finding out I have cancer.  The push to eliminate testing is a push to cover up this absolute tragedy by the insiders who are a part of it.

Anyone think there are some smart people out there with access to capital that could provide a better education privately for $25,000** a year in a school choice system?

** Postscript:  $25,000 is an average.  Typically in most school systems elementary school costs might be half the average and high school 150-200% of the average.

Today I got three letters with a subject line and/or opening sentence accusing me of discrimination.  Here are the three complaints:

1. A camper did not get the $8 senior discount to which he was entitled, in large part because my new employee did not recognize his very old-style government recreation access card (I processed a refund immediately).
2. A 20-year-old accused me of age discrimination when we told her she was too young to work in a store, despite the fact our manager explained patiently several times that we are prevented by law from hiring minors to sell alcoholic beverages
3. A camper accused me of discrimination because we would not let him occupy a site clearly marked as having been reserved by another camper (who had not yet arrived).  This obviously is odd -- I am discriminating against people without reservations for reserved sites?

None of these folks appear to be a part of a legally protected group, nor did they site any treatment they received that was different from similarly situated people at the same location.  They just didn't like a particular policy and wanted to complain, but have been taught by society that the best way to get attention is to claim DISCRIMINATION -- sort of like a witchcraft accusation in the 17th century.

All of this is to answer the question of why someone like myself who has vocally supported gays and gay marriage for decades would oppose legislation naming homosexuals as another government-protected class.  I have defended openly gay employees of mine against ignorant accusations that their homosexuality somehow posed dangers to the kids camping at the park they helped to maintain.   But discrimination law makes me crazy.   Think of it this way -- bad things happen to everyone from time to time.  I am a white male, but despite this status I have gotten turned down for jobs, have been laid off from jobs, and frequently have received bad, even rude customer service.  Everybody does.     Discrimination law often takes these typical day-to-day indignities we all face and converts them, literally, into a Federal case.