Access to Education

The single most impressive result of the mid-terms was the failure of the anti-government movement to influence the school boards, despite all the storm and fury. Only one-third of those slates won. Now, what does that mean?

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One month after leaving the Democratic Party, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is joining Fox News as a paid contributor.

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By the time he was in the sixth grade, Larry Summers had created a system to calculate the probability that a baseball team would make it to the playoffs in October based on its performance through the Fourth of July. In 1965 the Philadelphia Bulletin described Summers as the most qualified eleven-year-old oddsmaker in baseball.

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China announces change of Covid strategy:

“Identify population base of the elderly, patients with underlying diseases, pregnant women, patients with chronic diseases and other groups, and formulate health and safety protection plans for them.”

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Access to Education

The Black population of the U.S. is 13.6%. That is a large portion of the population to be unproductive. The education of children is seen as a lynchpin for advancement in the culture and the focus of improving the circumstance of Blacks in the economy.

But...

Chronic absenteeism in the San Francisco Unified School District has more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels, rising from 14% to 28%, according to preliminary data for 2021-22. Students are considered chronically absent when they miss 10% of the 180-day school year.

Chronic absenteeism doubled for most students–chronic absenteeism among Asians, for example, doubled from 4% to 9%–but chronic absenteeism increased from 38% to a stunning 64% among African Americans. As a result, some schools with a large percentage of African American students have 80% or more of their student body chronically absent.

That is not a problem that is going to be changed by education techniques.

MLK

A small and obviously idiotic effort to sow discord and animosity recently may point to an affirmation of  success on this day that remembers Martin Luther King.

In a discussion about legal immigrants bringing their extended families into the U.S., a loophole known as "chain migration," (the bringing of a "chain" of people,) Senator Durban said this:  “Do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African Americans believe that they migrated to America in chains. And when you speak about ‘chain migration’ it hurts them personally.”

This, of course, is simply made up out of whole cloth. Yet however twisted this may be, it is not the simple stupid albeit tender banning of words like "Niggardly," or books like  "Huck Finn." Or mindless albeit desperate symbolic acts like attacking statues. Or the blatant albeit ill-informed falsification of history like the Ferguson killing. Rather it is the creation of an empty calumny past its time, the declaration of something because of its very absence.

It is the confession of a thing's obverse, something King would probably see as a sign of progress.

Green Book

Milton Friedman had a lot of respect for liberty. He thought that political freedoms were inextricably related to economic freedom. Put another way, he thought economic freedom could influence political freedom.

"See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call." This was the heart of a Chevrolet ad campaign in the late 1900s. The cars were cheap, reliable, ran on cheap gas and the Eisenhower administration had financed huge, wide roads that connected the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Americans were on the move.

But there was an exception. Black people. Blacks of any economic status worried abut Jim Crow laws that legally enforced racial segregation in certain states. A Black driver or family could get caught in some place where no hotels or restaurants or repair shops were available to them. So they did not travel much, or they made wild efforts to avoid stopping in suspect areas and would drive all night with all sorts of contrivances to avoid stopping. But in 1936, a man named Victor Hugo Green started a travel guide to make life on the road easier and safer for black motorists. The guide listed, state by state, the restaurants, hotels, service stations, and other businesses that would welcome African-American travelers. Green called it “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” or “The Green Book,” for short.

Green was a mailman in Hackensack, New Jersey, who kept hearing stories about discrimination on the road. Jewish tourists, who also faced discrimination while traveling, had relied on similar guides to steer them away from hotels with a “Gentiles Only” policy. In the Green Book’s early days, it wasn’t easy to compile listings from across the country, says playwright, author, and filmmaker Calvin Alexander Ramsey, who has researched the history of the guide. So Ramsey says Green tapped into a nationwide network of African-American letter carriers. These postal workers, familiar with their local communities, were ideally suited to help fill in the gaps from state to state.

Distribution of the guide remained a challenge, says Ramsey, and Green relied on informal networks like the National Urban League, the NAACP, masonic lodges, and churches around the country.
There was also a big corporate sponsor that helped the guide expand its reach: Esso, also known as Standard Oil, and now known as ExxonMobil.

The Green Book would come to feature listings across all 50 states as well as locations in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. About 15,000 copies were printed each year.

As the Green Book caught on, businesses began to get in touch, asking to be listed. Black newspapers signed on as sponsors. The United States Travel Bureau helped spread the word about the guide. Eventually, Green retired from mail delivery to work full-time on the guide and to open a travel agency.

The Black traveler became a key example in Congressional debate over The Civil Rights Act.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the laws improved. The last edition of the book was published in 1966.

On the Outside Looking Out

Some important areas in society have always been supported by a tiny group. The symphony is one. Its market is small, its requirements large. Often towns have a symphony because of the dedicated effort of a very few. But there is no conflict between the symphony supporters and the general community, just little in common.

Things may be about to change.

According to PEW Research the median net worth of white households in 2007 was $134,992. After the crash of 2008, in 2009 it was $113,149. The median net worth of black families was $12,124 in 2007 and in 2009 it was $5,677. Net worth not income; assets minus debt. As Algernon Austin said in the The Economic Policy Institute's report, "In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households had two cents."

While this discrepancy implies a number of differences between the two groups, none is as important as how these two see the nation. It simply is impossible for them to see things in the same way. If your net worth is $5,677 you can not think of debt, interest rates, education costs or housing prices. More, where do you see the direction of the nation?

Obama's grassroots mobilization of this voting block was impressive. But, as a subset, the population responsible for the nation's economic and cultural growth is shrinking. And hostility towards them is apparently growing. The "1%", the racial element, "us vs. them" was very prominent.

What happens in a culture when the mainstream becomes the minority? And is disliked?

And if your constituency is made up of people who make up the majority but are not within the economic or cultural mainstream, what do you think they expect of you? And what can you do to please them?

Hopefully only symphonies and their music houses will be sacrificed.

Symbolism and Bigotry

The violence in the United States, especially among the black community, is simply appalling. On St. Patrick's Day weekend in Chicago, forty people, 40, were murdered. Now we are treated to national outrage over one murder, the Florida shooting of a black teenage boy by a Hispanic man named Zimmerman. At first the killer was white and then became Hispanic, the victim a child and now less so. But any objectivity here is random; all the national stories now have some pre-scripted scenario, some template. The huge picture will be replaced by some focused leveraged emotional narrative. Asians are bad drivers; lacrosse players kill.

Part of this distortion is the progression we have made from individuals of distinction to groups with superficial similarities. One of the characteristics of the original constitution was its preoccupation with individual qualities, individual rights. These don't work quite as well when dealing with mobs.

It may be soon reported that Zimmerman has some Jewish blood.

America's Greatest Threat

The next ten years the United States will try to come to grips with the financial problems we have and what compromises of which principles must be made to solve them. Charity, our military responsibilities and our admitted obligations to vulnerable citizens will all be on the block. But these new problems, as difficult as they are, pale before an old unresolved problem that corrodes the nation: Its history of slavery and the nation's relationship with Black Americans.

It some ways it is remarkable. The Americans have fought savage wars, two in Europe and one in the Pacific with brutal, ruthless and remorseless enemies all of whom have been accepted back as trading partners and military partners and who have been accepted as new citizens without difficulty.

The Japanese position would be expected to be worse than the German: A different race, a surprise attack, savage wartime behaviour that seemed cultural, a horrific American retaliation. Yet the Japanese have overcome this wartime animosity to be admired competitors in the nation and, in some areas, preferred marriage partners. And the American Japanese, segregated and interned during the last war despite being American citizens, seem unfazed; in my memory I have never heard an American Japanese suggest he deserved reparations for an unquestionably shameful and illegal act. All this in two generations.

The Black American community, however, seems captivated by their past and are unable to shake it. And it has been 150 years. Interned Japanese are still alive; so are American Pacific troops. How have these enemy races made peace--indeed become close--while the Black American still languishes in his history?

Black American Wealth

A new article by Thomas Sowell explores the terrible statistics on the development (or deterioration) of black American wealth over the last years. He lays it at the feet of the politicians who tried to jerry-rig the economy to accommodate unqualified home owners, mostly black.

That may be true but it misses the point. The real scandal is the failure of the black community to show any participation in the American social and economic process, its complete separateness from the American mainstream. How could white households have 33 times, 33 times!, the net worth of black households? And when will the black community stop its O.J. Simpson-like search for the perpetrator?

Lying Back at the Numbers

A number of years ago Sports Illustrated did an article on the emerging fighter Sugar Ray Leonard and how he might be helped and hindered with regard to marketing himself to white America. One factor, deemed a negative by the writer, was Leonard's illegitimate daughter whose picture he flaunted on his sock during bouts. A mitigating factor, it was offered, was that within the black community this was quite common--over 70% of kids were illegitimate--and that might soften the effect among white Americans. The following week several letters to the editor proclaimed outrage of what they perceived as a misprint; it was inconceivable to them that 70% of black children were illegitimate. It must have been 7%.

It was indeed 70% and still is. There is, however, a part of us that has difficulty with the astonishing. Facts outside our norms are not dealt with well and often just ignored or forgotten, like a bad date or an unpleasant illness. So it is with the recent statistics on net worth of families. According to PEW Research (maybe with an ax to grind) the median net worth of white households in 2007 was $134,992, in 2009 it was $113,149. The median net worth of black families was $12,124 in 2007 and in 2009 it was $5,677. Net worth not income; assets minus debt.

These are numbers that most will see and squeamishly look away. An objective person must look on these numbers with horror. Initially some will point out the discrepancies, of course, and call to the barricades. Some will muse this kind of disparity will be socially destabilizing, although being on the lower end of the scale in America has little connection to poverty when seen in a broader geographical--or temporal--framework. Moreover inequality always exists, if and how it becomes destabilizing appears no more defined than coffee house surmise.

But there is a real and obvious problem here that has nothing to do with comparisons. The black community has amassed no wealth. They clearly are living from check to check. They have no savings, no fallback position in a crisis, nothing for a down payment, no extra money for a luxury, no extra money for school, no money for a rainy day. A dental bill is more than a problem, a fender bender a disaster. Most of all, all of the country's discussions must be obscure to them. Taxes are meaningless, interest rates do not apply, the housing market an abstraction, savings and the very notion of self denial towards a desired end--a concept most Americans would think inherent to the nation--the stuff of a foreign culture. Somehow the black community has managed to live in a nation of great flux, immigrants coming and going, with mandatory affirmative action and have remained separate from the basic heart of the country.

The only thing more numbing is how this came about and where it is going.