Monday was April 16th. For those who don't know (and those are becoming many), it was Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On April 16th 2007, In the Middle East, in the state of Israel, a day of national remembrance and mourning.

On April 16th 2007, across the Middle East, Arab/Muslim state-sponsored newspapers were releasing editorials in which Jews were called "apes and pigs", and in which the blood libels of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were repeated.

On April 16th 2007, in "Palestine", the words of Palestine TV's Ismail Radwan from March 30, 2007 were still being repeated as they were quoted from Muslim scripture: “The Hour will not come until the Muslims will fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: ‘Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!’”. Protesters took to the street and shouted for death to Jews, support for Hamas and other terrorist entities, and all matter of other nastiness.

On April 16th 2007, on the Daily Kos website, a writer named "Sabbah" was putting up disgustingly anti-semitic videos. He's since changed his link and put up a disclaimer saying he "inadvertently" linked to a neo-Nazi site. "Inadvertently" my ass.

On April 16th 2007, a BBC "reporter" was already trying to spin the killing of longtime reporter Alan Johnston into a "the Jews really did it" story, ignoring the evidence he was killed by Palestinian terrorists.

On April 16th 2007, Syria was busy threatening violence again.

On April 16th 2007, Britain - for the first time since the Holocaust occurred - was not teaching the Holocaust's history in schools out of fear of "offending" Muslim students who are being taught Holocaust Denial in their Mosques.

On April 16th 2007, in America, no news network reported on the fact that it was Holocaust Remembrance Day, because they were too busy with "up-to-the-minute" bullshitting by camera-hogging personalities who all had something to say about Virginia Tech and a deranged shooter.

And yet, something amazing did happen.

On April 16th 2007, a lone man, a man who had seen the worst of humanity, a man who had every right to try to preserve his own life, did the precise opposite. Liviu Librescu - a 76 year old teacher who himself had survived the Holocaust, which the world was supposed to be remembering yesterday - used his own body to block the classroom door and saved his students' lives at the cost of his own.

He should be remembered. How he died, how he lived, the lives he taught, and yes, the horrible tragedy he witnessed firsthand, should ALL be remembered.

And it is a shame to all the world that all the other things I mentioned, went on while he was selflessly showing us the best of humanity with his final act.

Just when I start to reach a tipping point with my frustration of the obtuseness of white conservatives when it comes to race, I run across something like Seattle School district's rather stunning definition of race and racism:

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.

Now, I could get all high-and-mighty about the equivocation of libertarianism and racism. I knew that in the minds of some I am racist because I am a Republican, though being racist because of my libertarian streak is a new one on me - as is the notion that this is apparently the official view of the Seattle school district. But I will more-or-less let the proclamation that a preference for individualism over collectivism speak for itself. Anyone that believes that I am a racist should probably find something unracist to be reading, so you're welcome to leave because I don't think we have much to say to one another.

Independent Sources jumps on the "one form of English as standard" portion, which is a point that Adrianne Truett and others have noted in the past. I understand where they're coming from, though since I do believe certain aspects of English language should be dropped (who/whom, for instance) and common pronunciation is frequently wrong (as anyone that has heard me say the word "continuity" will attest) I can't muster up too definitive a case for language.

The part that caught me most by surprise was that about "future time orientation." Was this meant to say that thinking ahead is racist? If it doesn't mean that, what does it mean. I did a brief Google search and ran across Sound Politics, who helps define the term:

The time orientation of a person or culture can be past, present or future. (There are other dimensions, such as monochronic and polychronic, which we don't need to go into here.) Past-oriented cultures tend to believe all the great decisions were made in the past, and present society is a degenerate version of some past golden age. They don't value innovation highly, preferring to preserve what already exists. Tibet is a good example of such a culture, and fundamentalist Islam fits the definition, too. Future-oriented people, in contrast, believe in setting goals, planning how to reach them and innovating when necessary to accomplish their aims. Western society is the prime example of a future-oriented culture, and even for us it is a relatively recent invention, really only arising during the Renaissance. Present-oriented folks think only about the here and now, not considering how their acts relate to tradition or will effect their happiness in the future. They are impulsive and will not delay immediate gratification for some greater future reward.

The bolded portion of the quote seems to suggest, oddly, that it is not conservatives that are racist but rather liberals. It is conservatives that speak more vigorously on traditional values and whatnot. Stereotypically it is they that want to "build a bridge to the 18th century," would more likely prefer women to stay at home like they used to, and seem to hold the 1950's up as a model society. These are not necessarily positions that actual conservatives support, but they are the kinds of things that the kinds of people that write things like this believe they support. It is liberals that are stereotypically "future oriented" in that they strongly dispute the notion that the great decisions lie in the past.

These broad strokes are smudged a little bit by the New Deal and Great Society plans, which liberals seek to preserve and conservatives seek to reform and/or dismantle, but be that as it may that is not how liberals percieve themselves at the moment beyond specific issues (namely government programs).

I'm not trying to prove a point, I just found that tidbit to be quite strange and the more scrutiny I give it, the stranger it becomes.

I'm not really offended as much as I am just confused.

Since discovering his blog, Sammler has become a daily read. I usually agree, sometimes don't, but his insights into all manner of issues always gets me thinking. Today he made the following comment that I can't quite get on board with:

Today, with affirmative action widespread, I think it is universally accepted that blacks will often be offered better positions than merited on the basis of qualifications. The debate over affirmative action is a disagreement over whether this is a good thing.

It depends, I suppose, on how you define "often." I can agree that it happens periodically and given the number of people that are hired on a given day, it could constitute the adjective "often." But that word, to me, suggests a frequency that's not a relatively insignificant percentage of blacks hired day in and day out. That's where I fall out of "universally."

For most advertised positions, I'd imagine that there are more individuals that are qualified to do it than there are positions to fill. I personally have been turned down a ton of times for jobs I easily could have handled. Why? I'd guess because there was someone more qualified than myself that was hired instead of me. Each time I was hired, I also imagine that there were other individuals who were qualified but sent back to the drawing board.

There are two questions: (1) What should and should not be considered when you have multiple candidates that are qualified for a given position and (2) What actually is considered when you have multiple candidates for the job. Most of us should be able to agree that in an ideal world race would not be a factor when it comes to hiring folks. But is affirmative action the only way that race is considered? Or, less drastically, is affirmative action more frequently a factor in hiring decisions than the racism is purports to counter? Is the proverbial cure worse than the disease?

That's where half of the disagreement is (the other half is whether or not the government has any business in addressing racial injustice even where it does exist. I will not explore that particular topic in this post). Even leaving aside the "atonement for past sins" rationale for affirmative action, there is a case to be made that affirmative action is still necessary in the here and now.

Any white person that is honest with himself will admit that he knows a racist. Not the skinheaded or white-hooded kind, but the kind that speaks in awfully broad strokes about other races and is not bashful in expressing his disapproval for the collective racial behavior of other groups. They're trained to tack an "I'm not racist but..." in front of their comments and hide behind Chris Rock (or Bill Cosby), but the overall message is: we'd all be getting along if it wasn't for those blacks/Hispanics would just get their act together and stop blaming everything on racism.

These people are not uncommon. They are not extreme cases. Most of the time, if the issue doesn't come up, you don't even know they hold the views they do. If it does come up, you find common ground with them and focus on that in order to avoid a pointless argument. But here's the deal: All across the country, people like that are making HR decisions. They are interviewing candidates. It is their subjective measurements that determine who does and does not get a particular job. It is these people that minorities must place their faith in to get a job. I don't blame them for being worried.

And more than that, it doesn't even take that. We're all wired to judge people based on appearence and skin tone is one of its most obvious features. We're all inclined to make judgments about people based on incomplete data. An interview is about more than a resume. If it was just a matter of qualified/not-qualified there wouldn't even need to be interviews. During an interview, an employer tries to get a feel for who they are going to hire: Will they fit in? Do they have the personal traits we're looking for? A lot of these subjective judgments come down to impressions. Impressions are subject to our biases. People feel more comfortable with people like themselves. People are more likely to think that those that look more like everyone else will get along better than everyone else.

The point to all of this is that it's not hard to see that the deck might - just might - be stacked pretty heavily in favor of the norm. Racially speaking, the norm is presently white. And I can honestly say in an absolute void and even with affirmative action in place, I would much rather go into the office of an interviewer with white skin than with darker skin.

So am I advocating affirmative action? Not necessarily. I have some pretty serious problems with it. When it comes to college admissions, I think it does more harm than good. A lot of the subjective judgments that plague job interviews aren't as much a factor when you're looking at GPAs and test scores. Not to mention that I think public schools doing this are unquestionably in unconstitutionalland. But in the working world, I'm not sure how much faith I'd put in the people doing the hiring to make the correct subjective assessments without some sort of measuring stick and if we were in a city as diverse as (for instance) Houston and yet 4/5 of incoming employees were white, I'd want to know why.

There are a fair number of non-English speakers in Houston. I used to joke about my old apartment complex that English was the third language there, fourth if you count Ebonics. But on the whole I had a great deal of respect for my neighbors, packed by the dozen in apartments, hanging out at a "job pick-up" point at the break of dawn, and trying to carve out a life for themselves here. I also ran into a lot of them at a warehouse based job I had where there were enough Spanish speakers that the second shift was predominantly Spanish-speaking.

The subject of people who can't speak English came up recently in a couple of places. I haven't met anyone that can't speak it, but I see requests for bilinguilism on certain job postings, so there's no doubt that they're here.

The biggest question that pops to my mind is: Why?

If I were a Spanish-speaker, I would be awfully reluctant to leave the southwest. In Houston, you can pretty much set up a life (albeit not a particularly nice one) in a Spanish-speaking community. Obviously it's in everyone's best interest (especially theirs) for them to learn English, but the point is that if you can't for this reason (too busy working) or that (no documentation), the next best thing is to find a place that people can speak your language. Such places exist throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California (as well as others, I'm sure). Not so much in Pocatello, Idaho, as far as I can see..

Are they really out of jobs in southern California and New Mexico? Do they have family up here? Are they trying to push their comfort zone?

It's hard to say, but I'd be curious to find out.

I was walking Gruene Hall to head out to San Marcos. On my way to the car, an attractive young black woman - about my age or perhaps a bit younger than myself - stopped me and asked if I was coming out of Gruene Hall. I told her that I was.

She said that she was new to the New Braunfels area and had heard a lot about the place. I said that it was somewhat legendary throughout Texas (which it is if you follow Texas country music). She asked what kind of place it was and I said it was a "nicer than usual honky tonk."

"What do you mean by that?"

I explained that it was a honky tonk sort of atmosphere, though not as dingy as some honky tonks are stereotyped to be. When she asked me what a "honky tonk" was, I knew that she really wasn't from around here.

She asked if it was an "exclusive" place.

I asked what she meant by that.

She asked if she was dressed okay.

I thought that she was, if anything, a little overdressed. But a lot of people overdress to that sort of thing, so I didn't say that. I told her that it wasn't a particularly exclusive place.

She got a little sheepish and giggled out of nervousness or embarassment. She said she had a question for me, but was afraid to ask it. As nicely as possible, I told her to go ahead and ask it. I started to get an idea that the question might pertain to her race and their degree of acceptance of that.

She said that she'd met some "ugly people" in New Braunfels. She didn't say precisely what she meant by "ugly" people and I should have asked, but I didn't. She asked if there were ugly people in there. The way she asked it, though, had me wondering if I was totally off-base. Like she meant very heavy people. I was a little reluctant to bring race into a conversation that it hadn't been established as concerning it.

She gigglingly said something like, "I mean, I know that there are ugly people everywhere. But are there a lot of ugly people in there?"

By the time I eventually did get to my car, it was never established whether she meant ugly temperamentally or physically. Honestly, if it had been a racial query, I don't know what I could have told her. The truth is that I've never been black in the south and no matter how much I might try, I'm not going to notice everything that a black person would. I would have felt it presumptuous to say that racism wouldn't be an issue, but it's not something I'd particularly noticed (I've never really heard offhand comments derogatory towards blacks at Texas country music shows) so I couldn't have said that either.

If she was worried about fat people, I honestly would have cared less about informing her because I don't do well with snobs.

Either way, though, as I headed to the Exxon station and she into the bar, I doubt that she had a particularly good time and she's probably regretting having trusted the nice things I said about the place and the music there. But I do hope that I am wrong.

adriAnne has a wonderful post up on interracial children & adoptions:

I did quite a bit of reading on this years ago; I may well be one of America's experts on internal (non-international) Indian adoption law, since I've actually read the laws on the subject, the arguments against allowing Indian Christians to adopt, the legal opinions, and statements by adoption activists, as well as visiting several orphanages and adoption facilities. This site includes one of my pet peeves, why interracial adoption's bad. There have been many arguments in America on the subject. For example, Amerindian groups have repeatedly sought to ban adoption of Amerindians out of the community, although they have practically no prospect of adoption within the community. Better to be in a foster home (generally with at least one anglo parent) than to be adopted and made officially part of such a family. There were similar calls from the NAACP, if I recall correctly; if not from them, then from a similar group. The thing is, you see, white people cannot raise black children appropriately; they'll raise them as if they were white children, which is, obviously, a Very Bad Thing.

[...]

Another thing along similar lines that gave me pause, before I was sure enough of myself to realize how foolish some people are, was the argument against interracial marriage -- it creates mixed-race children, you see. [...] Or, it's mean to give them life, because there are people in the world who will look at them funny. I've even gotten this from some of my old-lady friends, who will rejoice that we've come so far from their rural childhood where the sign outside of town said, "nigger, don't let the sun set on you here," but haven't realized that there's been progress past toleration of equal rights; they say they're personally fine with it, but "other people" will disapprove and make my children's lives hell. There was a special about inter-racial procreation and adoption on, I believe, the BBC (or WGBH-Boston), several years ago, in which a few interviewees spoke of their lifelong depression and anguish at not being able to fit into a pigeonholed stereotype because of their multicultural upbringing. I was distressed by this, until I thought about it a bit more: First off, there are a lot of people with culturally unified upbringings who have mental health problems and try to define their own identity.

I've never really thought about why I feel the way that I do about a number of these subjects, though I'd guess that my rationale is similar to Adrianne's.

Further, outside of exceptional circumstances, I find the notion that a life lived poor/adopted/disabled/interracial is not a life worth living to be condescending on its face - and if there's one thing I don't do well with, it's condescension. With the exception of those that actually do commit suicide, even people that grow up with obstacles that most of us don't have to endure choose to live life.

And, as Adrianne points out, even those without said drawbacks tend to find things to make us feel alienated and upset.

And on a last note regarding disability specifically, in the office space below my current employer is a rehabilitation and therapy center for the mentally, emotionally, and physically disabled. Day in and day out we see them come in and out. Some of their impairments are pretty minor and some are very serious. Yet, person for person, they are surprisingly happy and upbeat 90% of the time. Happier, I'd say, than my coworkers upstairs are.

Be forewarned, this is not a politically correct post.

I had a dream last night that I enrolled at the University of Montana. I don't know much about UMT except that it has a stellar I-AA football program and a lot of people in Gate City are UMT alums (It's said that when Montana plays the local university, the crowd is split 50-50). So I decided to learn a little more about the university and much to my surprise, they have an African-American Studies program.

Such programs are not unusual and think that they're worthwhile projects over all, but at the University of Montana? One of the most striking things about Idaho isn't so much that it's lilly white (about 90% of the population), but that there are so few blacks here. There are a fair number of Native Americans and Hispanics, but very, very few blacks (I'd say I've seen maybe 15 or so since I got here). So I looked up Montana's racial demographics and African-Americans comprise of a paltry 0.3% of the population with less than 3,000 in a state that has a population of over 900,000, putting it behind Native Americans and Asian-Americans (as well as Hispanics, I'd imagine, but they aren't given their own category).

I can just imagine the first day of class. "Okay, class. We brought in William here so that we can show you what a real live African American looks like...."

More seriously, though, they have a wide array of cultural programs including those for Asians, Native Americans, and others. I find it a bit weird that it's not an African Studies, but rather African American (the Asian Studies is just Asian, not Asian-American). Given our vast ignorance of the continent, I'd imagine that an African Studies course would be a lot more useful.

Andrew Sullivan takes the New York Times to task for using it in their assessment of Illinois senate candidate Obama Barack:

All this fumbling has left Mr. Obama, the smooth-talking, Harvard-educated law professor from Chicago, looking like the only candidate in a race that may make him the only African-American in the Senate. Voters who don't know him yet surely will after the Democratic National Convention, where he will be keynote speaker. But it would be too bad if Mr. Obama cakewalked into Washington. Not just for Mr. Obama, who would take office with an asterisk ("*ran against incompetents"). Illinois voters deserve to see a capable opponent force him to answer tough questions and defend his positions. In other words, they deserve a nonludicrous race.

The most odd thing to me about the passage is not its "racism," but rather that it's the first time I've heard it used as a verb. Sullivan goes on to quote someone defining what exactly the two definitions of "cakewalk" are:

1. Something easily accomplished: Winning the race was a cakewalk for her. 2. A 19th-century public entertainment among African Americans in which walkers performing the most accomplished or amusing steps won cakes as prizes.

The Mirriam Webster online dictionary lists it's most conventional usage last:

1 : a black American entertainment having a cake as prize for the most accomplished steps and figures in walking
2 : a stage dance developed from walking steps and figures typically involving a high prance with backward tilt
3 a : a one-sided contest b : an easy task

I must confess ignorance on this one. I've apparently used the term once, ironically when posting involving racist Georgia politician Lester Maddox. It'd never occured to me that the term might have racist origins. I'm not sure what difference it makes when the term doesn't actually use the name of a race to denote something negative (such as "to jew" or "to gyp" something, or "Indian giver"), I've not heart complaints over the words usage by supposed targets of the racist comment (blacks), and if I was unaware of its origins (and I consider myself a reasonably educated individual) I can't help but wonder if the words origins are even relevent anymore.

In addition to a link to let someone watch a cakewalk, Sullivan also runs a comment by someone with a different definition:

Thirty years ago in the small West Virginia town where my father grew up, I participated in what was billed as a "cakewalk." The contestants simply walked around in a circle. One person standing just outside this circle was blindfolded and held a broom. At his whim he let the broom fall across the path of the circling contestants. If the broom fell behind you, you won the cake. Thus I have always assumed that a "cakewalk" referred to something accomplished by blind luck, without any element of skill. Perhaps this Appalachian contest, helps explain the etymology of the first definition of "cakewalk" provided by your reader.

Interesting stuff.

Santa Fe, Texas, was one of those places that I always meant to visit. I'd forgotten that SF was ground zero in the school prayer debate and didn't know that they have a long history of "racial strife." In any case, the KKK made their way through Santa Fe to gauge support and found it lacking:

The Ku Klux Klan may no longer have a sympathetic audience in this small community with a long history of racial strife.

Saturday, a group of 10 Klansmen, a few dressed in the traditional white robes and hoods, were in town to promote their group. But while nearly 2,000 people, mostly protesters, came out when the group visited last year, this time around they were pretty much left alone.

Santa Fe police officers were under orders to ignore the Klan with the hope the group would eventually pack up and leave, the Texas City Sun reported Sunday.

That's basically how you gotta handle it, the best that I can figure.

John J. Moores has been good to the University of Houston. Since he graduated and went on to make a fortune founding BMC software and buying the San Diego Padres, he has donated untold amounts of money to the university. He helped build a fountain on the part of campus where he proposed to his wife. He donated enough money to the music program that it's called the Moores School of Music.

Unfortunately, Moores falls on the left side of the political spectrum. He donated heavily to Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000 and was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents by Gray Davis.

With that in mind, I was surprised to read that Moores has apparently taken a stand against UC's blatant lawlessness in disregarding Proposition 209. He's paying a price for it:

Californians probably think racial preferences in college admissions ended in 1996 when voters approved Proposition 209. But John Moores, chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California, says some UC administrators have been manipulating the system and defying the law for the past eight years. Mr. Moores's fellow regents voted 8-6 to censure him for expressing these views in a recent Forbes magazine opinion piece. A medal is more like what the man deserves.

In his article, Mr. Moores details how Berkeley, the UC system's flagship school, is admitting hundreds of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans with SAT scores as many as 400 points below the whites and Asians who are being rejected. This is because the liberals who run Berkeley, and their enablers on the Board of Regents, all worship at the altar of "diversity."

They're more interested in some ideal racial mix on campus than in matriculating students who are best prepared to do the work and most likely to graduate. In the real world, Mr. Moores had the temerity to write, this idealism translates into "kids who struggled with eighth-grade math hav[ing] to compete with kids who aced advanced-placement calculus."

While my own views on affirmative action are somewhat conflicted, the law is the law and congratulations to Moores for standing up for it.