Race Free Zone - Quotable Quotes

Quotable quotes: We are not alone. Some of the brightest and most courageous minds of history and the present day agree that affirmative action/race preferences are not only ineffective, but downright destructive. While these quotations include the voices of people of all colors, of special note are those of prominent black heroes like Booker T. Washington, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Star Parker, Ward Connerly, and many others who deny that they are any kind of a “minority.” We are all in the brotherhood of mankind, a race free zone!

Please scroll down for different subjects, such as "education," "women," "redesignation," "preferences' going to people for whom they're not intended," and so on. We have made an attempt to bundle these quotations, though many apply to more than one subject. Please take the whole tour to get the full meaning.

“Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism.” Walter E. Williams

“If we want to help someone based upon economic disadvantage, fine---but be completely colorblind about it. Otherwise the son of a black doctor is given advantage over the son of a white farmer. That’s not diversity. It’s just racism with a different colored hood.” (Diane Carey, bestselling novelist and columnist, in The Argus-Press)

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Booker T. Washington, a former slave who “overcame an almost unbelievable set of obstacles to become America’s leading black educator, orator, and institution builder. Washington transcended his experience of victimization without any trace of psychological debilitation or bitterness toward whites.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p 185

“How could we expect them (whites) to buy a product we have spent 400 years trying to have recalled—race-based advantage enshrined in the law?” William Raspberry, Why Civil Rights isn’t Selling, The Washington Post, 1991

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: “What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. . . . All I ask is that you give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! . . . Your interference is doing him positive injury.” (Frederick Douglass, 1865)

“When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, to write a book, or a Negro boy learns to groom horses, or to grow sweet potatoes, or to product butter, or to build a house, or to be able to practise medicine, as well or better than someone else, they will be rewarded regardless of race or colour. . . . I think that the whole future of my race hinges on the question as to whether or not it can make itself of such indispensable value that the people in the town and the state where we reside will feel that our presence is necessary to the happiness and well-being of the community. No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left without proper reward. This is a great human law which cannot be permanently nullified.”

RaceFreeZone: We would like to know why the black leaders of modern America never quote Booker T. Washington.

“The system we have in Michigan today has two possible effects: first, nobody in the targeted racial groups is given any real advantage, in which case it’s useless and should be eliminated. Second, people in the targeted racial groups ARE given advantage based on race, in which case it’s racist, and should be eliminated. So we’re useless at best and racist at worst, and we need a change.” (Greg Brodeur, father of a multi-racial family)

From a column by Brian Sopp, assistant to Michael Barone:
On June 29, the National Association of Scholars released a study of
university websites revealing what Stephen Balch, president of NAS, calls "an obsession with diversity unparalleled in any other sector of American opinion leadership." The report, entitled "Words to Live By: How Diversity Trumps Freedom on Academic Websites," found that the number of references to diversity on the websites of the top 100 universities in the "America's Best Colleges 2006" edition of U.S. News & World Report exceeds references to American ideals such as freedom, liberty, democracy, and equality. In contrast, a representative sample showed that the number of references to words such as freedom exceeds references to diversity on the websites of corporations, religious organizations, political parties, mainstream media, popular blogs, and labor unions. Balch believes that these results illustrate "the great gulf that has opened between our universities and the rest of the country." He concludes the report with apprehension:The onward march of diversity as an ideal, revealed in these data, may portend a profound transformation in America's conception of itself. Since its inception, America has seen itself as largely a community of individuals who, having put aside prior group loyalties, live together in equality under the law. If
any nation has embodied a liberal, universalistic conception, it has surely been the United States. If we are currently moving toward a new vision, in which America becomes a congeries of groups, a collectivity of collectivities, a domain of many peoples and cultures, the consequences not only for what has been America, but for the entire world, will be vast.

It is difficult to deny that universities are obsessed with diversity. One illustration of this obsession is the creation of the position of "chief diversity officer" at more than 30 universities. Many of these positions are created in addition to existing diversity administrators and lack a clear job description. While the findings of this study may not sound the death knell for American culture as we know it, they are further evidence that, at least in the realm of education, traditional American values are at risk of being sacrificed in academe's pursuit of diversity.

This grant comes shortly after Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, wrote his study, "The Racial Paradox of Corporate Law Firms," which will be in the next issue of the North Carolina Law Review. Sander concludes in his study that racial preferences in law firm hiring may actually hurt minority lawyers. Sander is also the author of "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," published in 2004. This report concluded that affirmative
action in law school admissions hurts minorities. By placing minority students in more elite schools than they should be attending, affirmative action has caused some of the disparity between minority and white law school dropout rates and bar passage rates. Sander suggests that without affirmative action, there may in fact be more minority lawyers. This study caused much controversy and led to the publication of many counter studies from what Sander calls "the
affirmative action establishment." While it is important to assess the effect affirmative action has on student performance and educational experience in law school, such an assessment is only valuable if it is unbiased and truthful. (End Brian Sopp column)

“As far as can be determined, the UAW, AFL-CIO and IBT have never had black or female CEOs. The UAW has been around for 70 years; what percentage of their membership is black? What percentage is Hispanic? What percentage is Asian-American? What percentage are women? Why the, with affirmative action in place for 40 years, has there never been a black, Latino, Asian or female CEO? Are they not qualified?” (Jack Lifton, retired auto industry executive and employee of several minority-owned supply companies) Is it the union’s position that it is less likely that these organizations will choose a CEO from any of these categories if government discrimination is made illegal in Michigan?

“We can’t get rid of something if we institutionalize it.” (Diane Carey, interviewed by documentary filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney)

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him study.” Star Parker

“Is this fair? Are some racial and ethnic groups to be put on a list and treated like endangered species? Is this what America has become?” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“Institutional racism? What could be more institutional than having your own government check on what race you are, then telling you you’re the wrong one?”

“The Founding Fathers were only fighting the British. The race-mongers in 2006 are much scarier. They’re hiding their racism right out in the open.”

“I don’t want my grandchildren having to check boxes. I don’t want these PC census takers forcing them to embrace some kind of artificial identity. They’re Americans and they don’t need to say anything more about themselves than that.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“The mainstream of the black leadership eschewed cultural reform in favor of racial preferences and race-based programs. One reason for this is an ideological commitment to equality of results, but another reason is that civil rights activists found that color-conscious approach far more profitable for themselves. Many of them became black professionals . . . by becoming professional blacks.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p 233

“Whether or not minority students are as good as white ones is considered much less important than whether or not they are simply present in healthy numbers.” John McWhorter

“Being 65 years old, I can remember when blacks demanded that questions about race be removed from job or credit application forms. We said race was irrelevant and demanded color-blindness. In today’s racial spoils system, racial designations are required.” Walter E. Williams

“In the United States, mythical results – affirmative action as the basis for the economic rise of blacks, for example – have so completely supplanted facts that few who discuss this policy find it necessary to check historical evidence at all.” (Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World. p21)

“As far as can be determined, the UAW, AFL-CIO and IBT have never had black or female CEOs. The UAW has been around for 70 years; what percentage of their membership is black? What percentage is Hispanic? What percentage is Asian-American? What percentage are women? Why the, with affirmative action in place for 40 years, has there never been a black, Latino, Asian or female CEO? Are they not qualified?” (Jack Lifton, retired auto industry executive and employee of several minority-owned supply companies)

“No amount of suffering, past or present, gives you the right to be a racist, regardless of your political affiliation.” Star Parker

“My elder son is an all-American white kid. My younger son is full-blooded Central American Indian, born in Guatemala and adopted by us when he was 3 months old. One is white, the other is brown. There is no other difference between them in their backgrounds, or in our hearts. Because my elder son is white, he is an instant fiend in the eye of our government. His brown brother, who has only been in this country for (11) years-- hid whole life—will be told he has been oppressed and disadvantaged. How? My white son looks like some people who oppressed some others generations ago, so he has to pay now? I’m sure poor Southern whites and Irish immigrants of the 1800’s would argue this ‘advantage’ definition.” (Diane Carey, author and columnist, in the Argus-Press)

“Affirmative action was a seemingly humane social gesture that was actually quite diabolical in its consequences, not only causing racial conflict because of its inequities, but also validating blacks’ fears of inferiority and reinforcing racial stereotypes.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“Affirmative action has hardened into an ideology in search of a justification.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“Should we write those categories into our laws today, and count on the government to update them constantly by to reflect the changing population? Better we should acknowledge the simple fact that categorizing people by race is not just divisive and degrading. It is impossible.” Linda Chavez, Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, Washington D.C. “The Affirmative Action Debate,” 1996)

“It is no exaggeration to say that a rejection of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of a regime in which we are judged solely based on the content of our character is a virtual job qualification for leadership in the civil rights movement today.” Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p 165

“’Diversity’ was one of those concepts that sounded so good, a notion that called up images of different people standing joyously on a mountaintop singing ‘We Are the World.’ How could you oppose it? Of course, later on I understood that the people who use this word define it in a very narrow way. For them, diversity means people who have dark skin or wear a pants suit and unquestioningly support their ‘progressive’ political line. ‘Diversity’ is really about forming group caucuses and has nothing to do with the individual’s heart and soul, which is where true diversity exists.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“The American work force is being corrupted by the new ideology of racial preferences, which are imposing incalculable costs on productivity. (continued . . . ) These costs cannot be computed simply by reference to the $30 billion that companies spend annually on remedial training, or the additional billions that companies lose annually due to worker incapacity. Nor can they be limited to the approximately $100 billion that Forbes magazine estimates that federal, state, and private race-based policies cost.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p 335)

“If you think all your problems are because of the white man and all your solutions are because of the government man, then who are you?” Star Parker

“In the last few years we have finally reached a clearing after struggling through the tangled undergrowth of racial hostility for three centuries, and at last we can hope to one day see each other as individuals rather than categories.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

ECONOMICS:

“Companies may be cautious about hiring minorities and women because of the recognition that, when it comes to discrimination lawsuits, they have more legal rights than white males.” (Christopher Jencks, Rethinking Social Policy, p 57, paraphrased in The End of Racism by Dinesh D’Souza)

“Several observers have noticed that many new companies now choose to move to states with few black residents, or to the Southwest where most unskilled workers are Hispanic, or abroad. Japanese companies seem to have a special knack for finding locations such as Marysville, Ohio, where blacks are scarce. These moves are not motivated by irrational stereotypes, but by the genuine higher costs that companies face when they are forced to set aside merit-based hiring and recruit sizable proportions of less qualified black employees.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, citing Hacker, Two Nations, and Richard Posner, “The Efficiency and Efficacy of Title VII)

Posner, cited above, verbatim: The threat of civil rights litigation “makes it more costly for a firm to operate in an area where the labor pool contains a high percentage of blacks, by enlarging the firm’s legal exposure. There, when deciding where to locate a new plant or whether to expand an existing one, a firm will be attracted, other things being equal, to areas that have only small percentages of blacks in their labor force.”

RESULTS: Michigan, with large blocs of blacks, either has or will suffer greatly under the current jobs crisis because race preferences have made it so legally precarious for companies to employ blacks. Michigan will lose jobs because of affirmative action because companies won’t come here, or won’t expand here. The people who need jobs the most won’t get them.

John Velde, testifying before Congress that his company could not get government contracts despite having the lowest bids, because the company was white-owned: “We learned we could no longer compete equally. We had the best prices for reputable service, yet we could not work.”

“Those who are hired in part on account of being black are subsequently treated as experts on blackness and civil rights. Black managers are exasperated at being packed off to ‘The Relations’: community relations, industrial relations, public relations, personnel relations. Virtually all of them experience the stigma of being considered unqualified, and none of them like it. As these remarks suggest, black angst appears to derive in part from the widespread perception of incompetence that racial preferences inspire.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p 325, citing Edward Jones, “Black Managers: the Dream Deferred” Harvard Business Review, 1986)

“Supposedly a means to redress the harm created by discrimination in the past, preferences and quotas established under affirmative action policies require neither the individual beneficiary nor even the group from which that individual comes to demonstrate any specific harm from prior discrimination. Thus recent immigrants from Asian or Latin America are eligible for affirmative action benefits in the United States, though obviously there was no past discrimination against their individuals or their forebears in this country, simply because they were not living in this country. Moreover, even among blacks, benefits to black millionaires under affirmative action are far more demonstrable than benefits to blacks in poverty.” (Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World, p 163)

“Allowing black millionaires in the United States to have preferential access to the purchase of radio station licenses does not reduce inequality among Americans, nor does it benefit people living in ghettos. Affirmative action does little for the poor in America, as elsewhere. The poverty rate among blacks was cut in half before there was affirmative action, and has changed very little since.” (Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World, p 166)

The reign of terror presided over by affirmative action officers will soon be a thing of the past, and those thick manuals of affirmative action rules, guidelines and timetables are headed for the ash heap of history, where they belong. Affirmative action has become an idea whose time has gone. . . . They want more race in American life rather than less. They want race to be a simple choice—a black or white choice—with none of the ambiguities that make identity such a complex reality.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“They favor the little boxes on bureaucratic forms that indicate race, but they are against a box for ‘mixed race’ because they realize that so many of us would check it and thus administer a setback to the racial spoils system they have created.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

Members of “non-preferred” groups get themselves “redesignated” into a preferred group. Individuals of mixed ancestry changed their self-identification into a “disadvantaged” group. Whites with traces of American Indian or black ancestry suddenly become Indians or blacks to get favors.

“The number of individuals identifying themselves as American Indians in the U. S. Census during the affirmative action era rose at a rate exceeding anyone’s estimates of the biological growth of this population. . . . For example, the number of American Indians who were aged 15-19 in 1960 was just under 50,000. Twenty years later, when these same individuals would be aged 35-39, there wre more than 80,000 American Indians. In other words, more than 30,000 people who had not designated themselves as American Indians in 1960 now did so in 1980, a more than 60% increase.”

“In the United States, affirmative action has been a boon to those already more fortunate. A study of a random sample of minority beneficiaries of government contracts set aside by the Small Business Administration showed that more than two-thirds of these beneficiaries had net worths of more than a million dollars each. (continued) . . .

“Because minority immigrants are eligible for affirmative action, even though they have obviously suffered no past discrimination in the United States, members of the Fanjul family from Cuba, with a fortune exceeding $500 million, have received government contract set aside for minority businesses. An absolute majority of the money paid to ‘minority-owned’ construction firms in Washington D.C. during the period from 1986 to 1990 went to Europeans businessmen from Portugal. Asian entrepreneurs have likewise immigrated to the United States and then acquired preferential access to government contract.” (Thomas Sowell citing Terry Eastland, “Ending Affirmative Action,” and Bob Zelnick, “Backfire: a Reporter’s Look at Affirmative Action, 1996, respectively)

“(Beneficiaries) include not only various immigrants from Latin America, Europe and Asia, but also Eskimos who have been granted preferential status in Virginia, where it is doubtful that many of their ancestors ever lived, much less suffered discrimination.” (Thomas Sowell, AAAW, -136

“Minority businesses preferentially awarded government contracts can then turn over the actual work of fulfilling those contracts to others, in essence collecting a royalty for letting non-minority firms rent their minority status to acquire business from the government. . . . A Baltimore grand jury was kept busy for months exposing such ‘fronts’ and an investigation of ‘disadvantaged business enterprises’ in Indianapolis ended up decertifying more than one-third of all businesses with that designation.” (Thomas Sowell, AAAW, p137)

“An entrepreneur who was 1/64th Cherokee Indian won a set-aside contract in California.” Thomas Sowell.

“Right now white people are doing everything they can to prove they’re black, to get set-aside admissions and contracts. How can it be argued that blacks are not being preferred in business? The affirmative action people are demanding we have ‘racial profiling’ to see who qualifies for a bigger favor than somebody else.” (Jack Lifton, retired automotive suppler executive, employed by several minority-owned and operated companies)

“Nationally, only (between 26 and 35 percent) of black students graduate six years after entering college. That’s about half the rate of white students. At some colleges, no more than 20 percent of black students admitted graduate. . . . These statistics are not new. They’ve existed since colleges began racial double-standards admissions.” Economist Professor Walter Williams, “Black Students as Meal Tickets”

“At a news conference in Nov. 2005, Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, denounced the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative by accusing ‘outsiders from California,’ namely Ward Connerly, of promoting division in our state. On Friday (April 7 2005) the NAACP announced that U. S. Rep Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, will be featured at an April fundraiser. Anthony claims she ‘brings to Michigan her experiences at a key time to show us what she and the state have been through.’ Why would the experiences of an outsider from Texas be given preferential treatment over those of an outsider from California?” (Steve Sutton, editorial letter to the Detroit News, submitted 4/07/06)

“Proponents never have the honesty to admit that what they really want are racial quotas. Indeed, the establishment does not even wish these issues discussed. That is why big business, organized labor mainstream media and both political parties have repeatedly tried to silence critics of affirmative action. They have engaged in all sorts of dilatory and legally questionable tactics to keep the MCRI off the ballot. . . . Ironically anyone who advocates the genuine equal protection of the laws that can only come from a color-blind system is smeared as ‘racist’ and ‘divisive.’ Opponents of this long-overdue reform will resort to the most vicious and ugly tactics to avoid having to address the merits of the issue.” (Joel C. Mandelman, former Deputy General Counsel to the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights and Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee)

“Cardinal Maida states the Catholic Church will assist in the fight against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative and promote the practice of racial and gender preferences. Would this be the same church that prohibits women from leadership roles?” (Steve Sutton, editorial letter to the Detroit Free Press, submitted 3/31/06)

“World War II was fought to stop race preferences: the Nazis thought they were the superior race. The Japanese thought they were the superior race. If you were 1/32 Jewish, you were Jewish and you went to the camps. If your great-great-great grandparent was Jewish, you were eligible for extermination. Deciding which people get ‘preference’ because of DNA is a human tragedy and must be stopped.” (Jack Lifton, retired automotive suppler executive, employed by several minority-owned and operated companies)

“Why are liberals like Al Sharpton not willing to let the New Jersey state troopers use racial profiles to combat crime yet are willing to demand racial profiling to secure admission to certain universities?” Star Parker, Uncle Sam’s Plantation

“Victimology, Separatism, and Anti-intellectualism (has guided anti-Proposition 209 forces) into being comfortable with minority students’ being the weakest performers on America’s university campuses.” (John McWhorter, Losing the Race, p 183)

“In life and death situations, such as those faced by the police, firefighters, and soldiers, mutual confidence is even more important. Yet black police sergeants promoted in Chicago over white policemen with higher test scores found themselves taunted as “quota sergeants” when they made mistakes.” (Sowell, AAAW, p 15)

FACTS: “In the United States, the proportion of the black population going to college doubled in the two decades preceding the civil rights revolution in the 1960’s, and this was reflected in the occupational rise of blacks. While it is an often-cited fact that the proportion of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations rose substantially in the years following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is an almost totally ignored fact that the proportion of blacks in such occupations rose even more substantially in the years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
(Sowell, p. 20, citing the U. S. Bureau of Census, “Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, p380, and Daniel P. Moynihan, “Employment, Income and the Ordeal of the Negro Family,” p 752)

“The percentage of black families with incomes below the official poverty line fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960 – all of this before the civil rights legislation of that decade, much less the affirmative action policies of the 1970’s.”

“Why should women vote to discriminate against our own sons, husbands and brothers? Women don’t exist in a vacuum. The opposition changed their argument from race to women because they think they can get white women to vote against the men in their own families. I won’t vote against my own husband or my white son in favor of my daughter or my brown son. Affirmative action tries to pit my family against itself, and you against your own family members.” Diane Carey

“As women began having fewer children—a trend that began in the 19th century and continued on into the 1930’s—they became better represented in higher levels of education and professional occupations. Then, then birth rates began to rise again, from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, women began to be less well represented in these higher educational and occupational levels. The role of men in all this was primarily that of fathers of the children born to women. . .

“The very same trends occurred in the hiring of faculty at women’s college, run by women administrators.” (Thomas Sowell, citing Helen Astin, “Career Profiles of Women Doctorates,” 1973)

“Consider that while black men on average earn substantially less than white men, black women at all levels of education earn about the same as white women with comparable credentials. Remarkably, black women with college degrees earn more than white women with college degrees.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p 301, citing The Economic Status of Black Women, An Exploratory Investigation, Staff Report, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Washington D. C. 1990) (continued) “This result directly contradicts to the theory of discrimination which holds that black women are subject to the ‘double jeopardy’ of both racism and sexism. Moreover, since black women are no less black than black men, their relative earnings parity with white women suggests the possibility that factors other than race might account for the black male earnings deficit.”

Our opponents say: Trish Knight, president of Business and Professional Women of Michigan, said that despite gains in recent years, Michigan women still lag behind in pay and in advancing to the top rungs of companies.
TRUTH: “The cold fact is that women were in many ways better represented in higher occupational levels in the 1930’s than the 1960’s. This can scarcely be credited to movements that had not yet begun in these earlier times, much less to affirmative action policies that began in the 1970’s. (Thomas Sowell, AAAW, p 133) see below:

“The crucial question is not how many black or other minority students are on campus at any given moment, but how many graduate?” Thomas Sowell

“If we had to single our one American institution that stands at the forefront of modern day racial discrimination, deception, and contempt for fundamental principles of liberty, it would be America’s universities.” Walter E. Williams

“By what perverted system of justice can those who never suffered under slavery be entitled to compensation from those who never enslaved anyone?” Joel C. Mandelman, columnist, April 2006

AFTER 209: “In the University of California system as a whole, the enrollment of black freshmen dropped from 917 in 1997 to 739, but rose again to 832 in the year 2000—a decline of 9 percent over this period—and then rose to 936 in 2002.”
Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World, p160

MYTH: That black children growing up in shabby neighborhoods need affirmative action to get into college. “ . . . implying that black Berkeley students have been primarily children from, if not precisely the ‘hood,’ then only a few blocks over. . . . Most of the black students at Berkeley have long been children of middle managers, municipal administrators, management consultants, educational administrators, and even doctors, lawyers and college professors—not food service workers, airline attendants or bus drivers. Of the 257 African American freshmen who entered Berkeley in the last class before the ban on racial preferences took effect, only 83 had parents whose total yearly income was $30,000 a year or less, a commonly used metric for ‘lower income.’ No less than 174 or the 257---62.5 percent of the class—came from homes where the parents income was at least $40,000 and usually much more. For those who resist considering even this a middle-class income, the parents of 107 of the 257 made at least $60,000 a year.” (John McWhorter, Losing the Race, p 167) (It is considered irrelevant) how many of the minority students at Berkeley and like schools have ever been ‘disadvantaged.’”

“Despite many hysterical media reports and dire predictions of minorities losing “access” to higher education in the wake of bans on affirmative action, there were very modest changes in the numbers and proportions of black students in the state university systems in both California and Texas—and, in the end, a rise.” Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World, p 161)

“The nation’s more than 3000 colleges means there’s a college for almost anybody. A large part of the failure to graduate problem is academic mismatch: the wrong students’ being in the wrong college.”
Walter Williams, “Black Students as Meal Tickets.”

“Black students at M. I. T. complained that other students there did not regard them as being desirable partners on group projects or as people to study with for touch exams. Similar reports came from other academic institutions—and from black professors as well as black students. Blacks regarded as “quota” professors have complained of being less often invited to collaborate on research, which is crucial to their advancement.” (Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education, p144, and William Moore and Lonnie H. Wagstaff, “Black Educators in White Colleges, 1974)

“What seems like ‘racism’ on the surface is actually self-preservation by those who achieved their positions without a ‘racial’ boost. It’s certainly not arguable that white college professors are acting on racism, since the vast majority of white college professors are proud liberals or socialists. It is just too logical to assume that minorities achieved ‘position’ artificially, and logically are not of a high enough quality to have earned it legitimately. Even the vaunted ‘non-racist’ liberals make that conclusion in practice, when philosophy doesn’t matter anymore.” Diane Carey

“Minority professors on American campuses have complained that being thought of as “affirmative action” professors by their colleagues has led to less intellectual and research interaction, which in turn reduces the minority faculty’s development as scholars. This can be a serious handicap in achieving one’s potential.” (Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World, quoting William Moore Jr. and Lonnie Wagstaff, “Black Education in White College” 1974)

“According to a report released by the University of California, Asian-American admissions would increase by 15 to 20 percent if the university based its decisions on academics and socioeconomic status but not race. That means countless Asian-Americans have been shut out by UC by racial preferences.” (Linda Chavez, Chairman, The Center for Equal Opportunity, “Promoting Racial Harmony”)

“Companies may be cautious about hiring minorities and women because of the recognition that, when it comes to discrimination lawsuits, they have more legal rights than white males.” (Christopher Jencks, Rethinking Social Policy, p 57, paraphrased in The End of Racism by Dinesh D’Souza)

“In the United States, the proportion of the black population going to college doubled in the two decades preceding the civil rights revolution of the 1960’s, and this was reflected in the occupational rise of blacks. While it is an often-cited fact that the proportion of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations rose substantially in the years following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is an almost totally ignored fact that the proportion of blacks in such occupations rose even more substantially in the years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” (Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World, p 20)

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘I Have a Dream’

“But there is something I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads to the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” M. L. King, I Have a Dream.

“Black power symbols and Afros were overshadowing the posh and polished black clergy who had marched with Dr. King. His was a movement of the soul; theirs was a movement of the fist, and the gangsta style of the Panthers attracted the disaffected youth of black America who had no desire to join the mainstream. His was a movement to get education; theirs was a movement to get even. He wanted revival; they wanted revenge.” Star Parker, Uncle Sam’s Plantation

“One by one, the leading civil rights spokesperson took the podium, gravely invoking the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . but I did not hear anyone invoke King’s principle of a race-neutral society in which laws and policies are indifferent to color.” Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p201

“These ‘civil rights professionals’ never hesitate to mention Martin Luther King’s name, but in my opinion they have defiled his legacy by suggesting that if he had lived this visionary leader would have stood with them at the racial pork barrel, ladling out preferences based on race and ethnic membership; that he, who wanted only that black children should be allowed to come to the starting line with whites, would have acquiesced in policies that place black children in a racial version of the Special Olympics.” Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

“It does not diminish the greatness of the founders to acknowledge that they were fallible.” Star Parker.

“The intellectual and moral ferment that produced the American Revolution, Gordon Wood argues, should be judged by its consequences. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every state in America. Yet by 1804 (38 years later) every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery, either immediately or gradually; Southern and border states prohibited further slave imports from abroad; and Congress was committed to outlawing the slave trade in 1808, which it did. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege. ‘Before the revolution, Americans like every other people took slavery for granted,’ Wood says. ‘But slavery came under indictment as a result of the same principles that produced the American founding. In this sense, the Civil War is implicity in the Declaration of Independence.’” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, p110, citing Gordon Wood)

“Abraham Lincoln was the most perceptive student of the American founding in his time or since. He not only understood clearly the framers’ dilemma, but knew that he had inherited it. . . . It took a civil war to destroy slavery, and with it much of the infrastructure and economy of the South, between 1860 and 1865. More than half a million whites died in that war, ‘one life for every six slaves freed,’ D. Vann Woodward reminds us.” (Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, quoting D. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past)

“They intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say that all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them . . . They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” Abraham Lincoln, about the Founding Fathers.

“Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands. . . . Notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong or slavery, we are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.” Booker T. Washington, born a slave, went on to become the most powerful black statesman and educator in the United States.

“An achievement of the civil rights movement was to make the point that multiracial democracies require a moral consciousness that rejects race—and for that matter, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientations—as a barrier to individual rights.”

“No group in human history has been lifted into excellence or competitiveness by another group.”

“Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations.”

“Freedom is not a state-imposed vision of the social good. Rather it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedoms of individuals. In a true democracy, freedom is a higher priority than the social good.”

“Free societies become more like unfree societies when they decide that some social good is so important that it justifies suspending freedom’s discipline of principles.”

“At the heart of this anger was an empowering feeling of license—the feeling that being black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum. . . . I was nurturing anger as the central feature of my identity.”

“Racial unity is politically self-defeating in freedom, since it leavesthe nicely unifed race to be taken for granted by power. Freedom can only be seized by individuals. And the fact is that we blacks
are free.”

“Whites know on some level that they are stigmatized by their skin color alone, that the black people they meet may suspect them of being racist simply because they are white. And American institutions, from political parties and corporations to art museums and private schools, not only declare their devotion to diversity but also use racial preferences to increase the visibility of minorities so as to refute the racist stigma. Surely genuine good will may also be part of such efforts. But the larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the good will or the genuine decency of people. It depends on their fear of stigmatization, their fear of being called racist.”

“Only after the mid-sixties, after the strongest anti-discrimination laws in history had been passed, did a new generation of black leaders begin to argue that racism was a determinism as well as a barrier—and thus a far greater enemy of black freedom than had been previously imagined. Logic would have argued the other way, that the new civil rights legislation meant that blacks were facing a far less deterministic racism. And surely black leaders would have agreed with this logic if they were responding to actual racial oppressions. But they weren’t. They were responding to white guilt.”

“By the mid-sixties, white guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leadership, not selfless men like King who appealed to the nation’s moral character, but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, haranguers—not moralists, but specialists in moral indignation—who could set up a trade with white guilt.”

“White guilt made racism into a valuable currency for black America—a currency that enmeshed whites (and especially American institutions) in obligation not to principles, but to black people as a class.”

“Notice that affirmative action explicitly violates many of the same principles—equal protection under the law, meritorious advancement—that the King-era civil rights movement fought for.”

“When I visit university campuses today, black students often tell me that racism is everywhere around them, that the university is a racist institution. When I ask for specific examples of racist events or acts of discrimination, I invariably get nothing at all or references to some small slight that requires the most labored of interpretations to be seen as racist. Global racism allows these students to feel aggrieved by racism even as they live on campuses notorious for almost totalitarian regimes of political correctness—and to feel more aggrieved than black students did forty years ago, before the civil rights victories. This is because their feeling of racial aggrievement is calibrated to the degree of white guilt on university campuses and not to actual racism.”

“Even announcements of a new commitment to ‘diversity’ within an institution will very likely increase feelings of racial aggrievement in minorities. We blacks always experience white guilt as an incentive, almost a command, to somehow exhibit racial woundedness and animus.”

“Global racism has given the age of white guilt another of its familiar features: the ‘race card,’ or blackmail by white guilt. Threatened with stigmatization that can gravely injure businesses and ruin careers, whites can be pressured into treating the merest accusation of racism as virtual proof of global racism. When an executive at Texaco Corporation was overheard making a remark that some thought racist, no one in the company hierarchy had the moral authority to combat the prima facie impression of racism. In flight from stigmatization, Texaco paid $750 million to the corrupt diversity industry even though the ‘racist’ executive was found to have only repeated a nonracist term he picked up at a company-sponsored diversity-training program. Texaco, Coca-Cola and Toyota are only a few of the corporations that have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid ‘global’ stigmatization of race.
“The race card works by the mechanism of global racism: even a hint of racism proves the rule of systemic racism. So these corporations never pay to the measure of any actual racism; they pay to the measure of racism’s hyped-up and bloated reputation in the age of white guilt.”

Paraphrased from a segment discussing the O. J. Simpson trial and verdict: Race should not suspend the law.

“To gain employment today in most American institutions, whites must somehow pledge allegiance to ‘diversity’ as if to demonstrate a white identity of contrition and deference. Even in the corporate and military worlds—not the mention academia—no white goes far without genuflecting to diversity.”

“In the age of racism, blacks were held accountable to these values and principles even though they were also openly oppressed. Therefore, there was a cultural coherence in America based on these values and principles that applied to everybody despite the presence of segregation. This coherence, in itself, was a good thing, and was surely responsible for much that was great in the character of white and black Americans.”

“When people argue for diversity and, thus, for racial preferences, black students are effectively Sambo-ized. They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it, not even good schools and high family incomes.”

“To up the ante on white guilt, this new black consciousness has led blacks to a great mistake: to talk ourselves out of the individual freedom we had just won for no purpose whatsoever except to trigger white obligation.”

“The new black consciousness I was learning from people like Dick Gregory wanted me to voluntarily, even proudly, do the same thing that racism had done: make my race more important than my individuality.”

“Gregory was clearly pulling for the era’s all-purpose emotion: black anger.”

“(Johnson’s) Great Society was, among other things, a redistribution plan for responsibility by which he asked white America to assume considerable responsibility for black advancement. Thus, by implication, the president of the United States had agreed with the new militants that it was morally wrong . . . to ask (blacks) to be fully responsible for pulling themselves up.”

“Suddenly I could use America’s fully acknowledged history of racism just as whites had always used their race—as a racial authority and privilege that excused me from certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even the law.” (Italics intended by author)

“Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization because the new ‘black power.’ Then, as this power supported the next generation of civil rights leaders, it evolved into what we call today ‘the race card.’”

“Black power (now had) a powerful new edict . . . that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems.”

“Even though the president (Johnson) was about to spend billions of dollars on blacks, he still lacked the moral authority to spell out the ways blacks needed to be responsible for their own advancement. It was a classic white-guilt speech, implying that racial inequities are overcome solely by the efforts of whites and American institutions. (Today’s college presicents routinely make such speeches when they stand to proclaim their institution’s commitment to ‘diversity.’”

“Black leader after black leader argued that we could not pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, because we ‘don’t have bootstraps.’ But this humiliating plea for white intervention only projected whites as powerful and blacks as helpless.” Continued “The best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.”

“The inferiority imposed on blacks by four centuries of oppression is ignored as institutions shoehorn minorities into their midst (by lowering standards) simply to get the ‘result’ that shoes the institutions to be beyond racism. Preferential affirmative action, the classic ‘results’-oriented racial reform, tells minorities quite explicitly that they will not have to compete on the same standards as whites precisely so they can be included in American institutions without in fact achieving the same level of excellence as whites.”

“No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement.”

“So white liberals and American institutions (along with a corrupt black leadership) keep seducing blacks with social justice as though it were also development. When universities bring in black students with SAT scores 300 points below the student average, the illusion is that by arranging this diverse ‘result’ they will magically develop black students until this 300 point gap disappears. But, of course, there’s no evidence that this gap ever disappears or even shrinks.”

“If a young black boy cannot dribble well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an injustice. No one will worry about his single-parent home, the legacy of slavery that still touches his life, or the inherent racial bias in a game invented by a white man. His deficiency will be allowed to be what it is—poor dribbling.”

Continued “But if this boy’s problem is reading or writing rather than basketball, white guilt will certainly prevent even a modified version of this natural human process from happening. Career hungry academics will appear in his little world, and they will argue that his weaknesses reflect the circuitous workings of racism. (continued) The boy will not be asked to truly work harder, nor will he be guided by the mastery of sentence structure, parts of speech, and verb tenses. No one will righteously insist that he speak correctly (as certain people once did for me) . . . Yet just beyond the widow of his classroom, on the pockmarked basketball court with the netless and bent hoop, another weather pattern prevails. On that court, almost nothing is forgiven, and he will be ‘blamed’ and held responsible for all his deficiencies. And all through the torpor of a day structured to spare his feelings around reading, writing, and arithmetic, he will long to be on the other side of that window, where everything is asked of him.”

“Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free. This is a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.”

“Our understandable fear of freedom had led us to bank our fate on an absurdity: that we can develop by taking less responsibility for ourselves.”

“How could a people that has survived centuries of slavery and segregation—through ingenuity, imagination, and great courage—get this confused? . . . Slaves again, our fate the responsibility of others.”

“America—for all its transgressions—is also indisputably great.” Continued “If white societies were racist and imperialistic, they were also the centers of an indisputably great civilization, one that absorbed contributions from many other races and cultures. But when white supremacy was delegitimatized, whites did not simply lose the authority to practice racism . . . whites also lost a degree of their authority to stand proudly for the values and ideas that had made the West a great civilization despite its many evils.”

“Over one hundred American institutions—universities, corporations, the military, state and local governments—submitted briefs to the Supreme Court in the Michigan case supporting racial preferences. Yet, despite all this commitment to diversity and racial preferences, I am not aware of a single institution that based its call for preferences on a careful analysis of why so many minorities were not competitive enough to win places in their institutions unaided by racial preferences.”

“Of course, these institutions are not interested in the reasons for minority non-competitiveness; they are interested only in the fact that this persisten weakness means they must use preferences to rope in enough minorities.”

“O’Connor is saying that it is perfectly constitutional to have a remedy that remedies nothing, a race-based remedy that does not remediate racial discrimination.”

“When you give a racial preference to the child of two black professionals with advanced degrees and six-figure incomes—as entrée to a university that has not discriminated against blacks in more than 60 years—then you are clearly implying an interent and irremediable black inferiority.”

“Worse, implied in (Justice O’Connor’s) decision is a view of blacks as inferiors who simply cannot compete without twenty-five more years of white paternalism. Add to this her rather imperial tone and you have a perfect tar baby.”

“(Maureen Dowd) says that instead of complaining, (Justice) Clarence Thomas should show ‘gratitude’ for affirmative action. . . . (She) effectively calls Justice Thomas a nigger who—given his fundamentally inferiority—should show ‘gratitude’ to his white betters. . . . Dowd plays the oldest race cards of all—I’m white and you’re black, so shut up and be grateful for my magnanimity.”

“Tell me, when in human history did we have a ‘level playing field’? In what country? Among what peoples?”

“Rather than urge improved K-12 performance by black students, these compassionate educators support lowering standards to achieve ‘racial diversity.’ Yet, if you ask them how they personally became so successful, most likely they will say through ‘hard work.’ But this formula apparently does not apply to people of darker skin. This is not only wrong, but insulting.”

“Today, many blacks ignore the meteoric progress of blacks, a success under way well before anyone heard of the expression ‘affirmative action.’”

“What about black Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell’s over-the-top defense of affirmative action? ‘Everybody who is a person of color in this country has benefited from affirmative action. There’s not been anybody who has gotten into college on their own, nobody who’s gotten a job on their own, no one who’s prospered as a businessman or businesswoman on their own without affirmative action.’”

RaceFreeZone comment: Mayor Campbell’s words are astonishing. Is this what the slaves of the past had in mind when they dreamed of freedom? For all blacks to believe they could not possibly succeed on their own, without favors and hand-outs from whitey? Shameful. This man is no “leader” and should be rejected by black America. Sadly, he won’t be.

Elder: “Affirmative action tends to undermine the spirit of individual initiative. Such is human native; why struggle to succeed when you can have something for nothing?”

“Jesse Jackson frequently attacks banks for denying blacks’ ‘access to capital.’ But blacks collectively have a gross domestic product of $500 billion annually, enough to make blacks among the fifteeth weathiest nations were they an independent state.”

“Thirty percent more blacks perceived discrimination against Hispanics than did Hispanics themselves. . . . Thirty percent more blacks perceived racism against Asians than did Asians themselves.”

“Many blacks blame substandard urban schools’ performance on racism, claiming that urban districts get less money for schools than suburban and rural districts. So, the, it’s about the money? But, in districts like Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles, districts spend upwards of $9000 per child, far more than the average tuition for private and parochial schools. Furthermore, black superintendents run many urban districts, often with substantial black membership. Many of these troubled districts reside in cities run by black mayors and where the city council is substantially, if not majority, black. Despite the money, despite black management, all too often, the results are lousy.”

RaceFreeZone: from Greg Brodeur, former President of the Owosso, Michigan School Board. “ The money spent on inner-city schools, including Detroit, is several thousand dollars higher than the per-capita $$ spent on students in other school districts, such as Owosso. Inner-city schools are tragic sink-holes of poor management, bad teaching, bad discipline, and crippling corruption, not lack of money or white racism, since few whites have any control in those areas. Critics of inner-city schools need to look inward to find the problems which are ruining the potential of America’s young black students, who deserve their shot at the American dream. We need to turn a critical eye toward the people who are really stealing that dream from them.”

“Black Harbard sociologist Orlando Patterson said, ‘The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations . . . is now the least racist white-majority society in the world, has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black, offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including those of Africa.’” Quoted from Larry Elder’s book.

About media bias away from hate crimes by blacks (which belies media bias in general against white society, while forgiving anti-social behavior by blacks and claiming that blacks are victims)

“In 1997, three white teens from northern Michigan hopped a train that landed them in a predominantly black area of Flint, Michigan. Several black youths brutally attacked them, beating, then shooting the two white boys in the head, killing one. The white girl was forced to perform oral sex, after which she was pistol-whipped, robbed of ten dollars, then shot in the face and left for dead. Hate crime? Apparently not.”

RaceFreeZone: A crime is a crime. What’s in the mind of the perpetrator neither absolves nor condemns him more than the crime itself. Our comment is about the media’s clear bias of drumming coverage of white-on-black crimes, while ignoring black-on-white crime. This crime happened only blocks from where I (Diane) and my husband lived on Hathaway Drive in the north end of Flint. Another crime, that of a small black boy who brought a gun to school and shot a white girl whom he didn’t like, also disappeared from media coverage within two days. That boy lived in a crack house north of Flint, where guns were available, and where it’s likely that he heard the mantra “our problems are caused by whites” all his life. So he did what came natural—he eliminated a white girl from his life. He was of pre-school age, and already poisoned. If the crime had been a white child’s killing a black child, we would still be hearing about it. It would be in the national memory bank, a constant unforgotten indictment of America. This kind of tilted coverage—either daily, hourly Chinese water torture vs. sudden and total silence--damages race relations in America, and the media is actively complicit in that wreckage.

Larry Elder: “Here are the ugly facts: Blacks, usually young black men, commit nearly half of all street crime, and most of certain other categories of crime such as robbery. . . . The fact remains that 40 percent of violent crimes—murder, attempted murder, non-negligent manslaughter, and aggravated assault—are committed by young black men, who account for no more than 3 percent of the nation’s population.”

RaceFreeZone: We publish this not to batter America’s decent blacks with the kind of guilt that has been imposed upon whites for the crimes of others. We publish this to make a point that reflects from Booker T. Washington’s quotation about human nature—that any person, of any race, who makes himself valuable to society cannot long go unvalued. If any person adds to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of a society, he will be welcomed. America’s black society, with its constant and chronic crime (of which most victims are black), illegitimacy rates reaching 75% (which means 100% if we eliminate mainstream married blacks with jobs), and the chip-on-the-shoulder “gimme” attitude, has made itself an undesirable element. As Shelby Steele concludes, white society has been the enabler, telling black society that it can behave in anti-social ways and still be given hand-outs. The pattern must be broken.

“We need historical perspective. Yes, slavery is American’s horror and shame. But slavery, unfortunately, appears throughout the whole of human history. Europeans enslaved Europeans, Asians enslaved Asians. Those we refer to as Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans. Slave traders brough more African Slaves to the Middle East and to South America than to Colonial America. Yet this country fought a civil war that resulted in the eradication of slavery. No other nation can say that.”

“How warranted is this black hatred of Republicans? Abraham Lincoln became the first nationally elected candidate from the newly formed Republican party. The party platform that year sought to prevent the spread of slavery. . . . As a percentage of their respective parties, more Republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats!”

“The growth of the black middle class long predates the adoption of race-consious social policies. In same ways, indeed, the black middle class was expanding more rapidly before 1970 than after. . . . Many of the advances black Americans have made since the Great Depression occurred before anything that can be termed ‘affirmative action’ existed. . . . In the years since affirmative action (the black middle class) has continued to grow, but not at a more rapid pace than in the preceding three decades, despite a common impression to the contrary.”

From Larry Elder’s book TEN THINGS YOU CAN’T SAY IN AMERICA:
“This ‘but-for-affirmative-action-I’d-be-driving-a-truck’ mentality is yet another unintended consequence of preferences. The ‘beneficiary’ demeans and cheapens his own achievement by overestimating the impact of affirmative action on his own life.”

From Star Parker, author of “UNCLE SAM’S PLANTATION”
“If you think all your problems are because of the white man and all your solutions are because of the government man, then who are you?”