The stone refusal of U.S. news reporters to mention race even when it is obviously the big factor driving a story, baffles and amazes me.
This morning’s New York Post carries a full-page story (p.15) by one of the paper’s big-name writers, Andrea Peyser, about a 12-year-old boy, Eric Benson, who’s afraid to go to school. He attends New Horizons School in Boerums Hill, Brooklyn. “Should attend,” I mean: he’s been badly bullied, and now is afraid to go. He hasn’t been able to get the “safety transfer” which is apparently usual in these cases. His not getting the transfer is the main point of Ms. Peyser’s story, which has no mention whatever of student demographics.
The story has a picture of Eric, a mild-looking skinny white kid. My instinctive reaction was: “Oh, he’s getting beaten up by Sun People.” I went to GreatSchools.net to see student demographics for the school. Sun People: 90 percent.
Eric: “I don’t know why they don’t like me.” Uh …
Totally OT: Derb, love your book. My wife, not so much. She keeps having to ask why I’m laughing.
I don’t quite get this “Sun People” reference. What’s it mean? (I mean, I suspect, it’s just that I hope I’m suspecting wrong.)
@Polichinello
Melancholy depressive Ice People such as JD are often very witty.
Sun People is an ironic moniker for Non-Asian Minorities. It was invented by a multicult whackjob as means of contrasting blacks and Hispanics favorably to “Ice People”, whites and East Asians.
Mike, scroll down a little bit and you should see a related post talking about Sun People and Ice People which explains it nicely.
Completely unrelated… Derb, one of my co-workers at the college passed this along to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTby_e4-Rhg I understand about half of the references.
“I don’t quite get this “Sun People” reference. What’s it mean?”
Man, does everyone expect someone else to do their research for them these days? You can’t “google” “sun people”?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,157721,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Jeffries
I don’t know for sure what’s in Derb’s mind, but I believe he’s “appropriating” the term “ice people” in the same way that the “sun people” like to use the “N word” amongst themselves.
Sad story about this kid. He’d be better off in a majority white school getting beat up by his “own kind”. It’s sad to see ANY kid get bullied like this, but I understand your point. If it was a “sun kid” getting bullied by “ice kids”, we’d be hearing about it 24-7 in the “news cycle”. Sharpton, Jackson, Obama, Eric Holder, etc. etc., would all be standing on the White House lawn for their obligatory news conference, nodding their heads in agreement, ad nauseum.
This story actually reminds me of another bullying incident I saw on the NY City news years ago. It was actually a nerdy black kid, who was pushed down the stairs in school, and broke his arm or shoulder, can’t remember which. His mother was from the Caribbean, and I think she might have even attempted asking Al Sharpton for help. He wasn’t interested, because the bullies were “sun kids”. I remember her saying something like, “I guess Al Sharpton doesn’t think my kid is black enough”.
“Sun People” & “Ice People” was coined by Leonard Jeffries, chairman of African-American studies at New York’s City College. Sun people, like say Robert Mugabe, are compassionate and kind whereas Ice people, like Mother Theresa, are cold, oppressing and materialistic.
Professor Jeffries is also famous for his thoughtful remarks about the Challenger disaster.
The Sun People / Ice People business is just a riff on a passage in my book:
“NAM” stands for “Non-Asian Minorities.”
“The stone refusal of U.S. news reporters to mention race even when it is obviously the big factor driving a story, baffles and amazes me.”
Why does it baffle and amaze you? I understand why it would enrage and disgust you, but baffle and amaze? Don’t you understand the meaning of the word “taboo”?
What is it about the words “you are fired and moreover banished from polite society” that you don’t understand, John?
Although I’m sympathetic to the idea of hoisting people on their own petard, I can’t abide turning “Sun People” into a sort of racial epithet.
I would hope the twin discourses of atheism and conservatism can win hearts and minds without such name-calling.
#10: But if I am right about that “emerging demographic split,” we have the choice of (A) pretending not to notice it, or (B) facing up to it. If you were to tell me that most people would prefer (A), I don’t know that I could disagree with you. (Ms. Peyser’s article is a pretty good data point here.) A lot of people, including me, prefer (B), though.
That being the case, we must have names for the two sides of the split.
So your actual choices here are:
(1) Deny my premise. There is no “emerging demographic split,” except in the fevered fantasies of crypto-fascists like Derb.
(2) Accept my premise, but argue that we’re all better off if we just avert our faces — the Nelson option: “I see no ships.” (Or I guess, to bring it up to date, the Nelson-Peyser option.) That’s tenable, and, see above, very likely the most popular option.
(3) Accept my premise, agree to face the issue, but dislike my (and Prof. Jeffries’) nomenclature. Great. Come up with your own, see if it’s less obnoxious than mine/his, without being unacceptably cumbersome.
(4) Accept my premise, agree to face the issue, and accept my nomenclature.
There are no other choices.
I would hope the twin discourses of atheism and conservatism can win hearts and minds without such name-calling.
SWPL, please.
Well, I would say that you hardly read the story without some pretty heavy duty filters yourself, Bradlaugh. Clearly the point of the story is not about the bullying, which could take place anywhere without the need to presume, as you clearly do, that it is a chronic case of reverse racism. The point of the story is how the school is responding to the matter by denying that any bullying has occurred.
This seems to have completely passed you by. I find this astounding since your website says you have school age children. Are you home schooling? Or are they packed off to private boarding school?
Now I took a look at the story and chose the only paragraph I could find that could reasonably contain the racial and ethnic references you ask for, and wrote them in. The italics are mine.
“The curious case of Eric Benson is troubling because New Horizons is a school of just 200 students, grades six through eight, that guards a decent reputation. It mixes special-education and mainstream students, and boasts a “zero tolerance” policy on bullying. Forty-nine percent of the school is Hispanic or Latino, 41% is African-American, and 7%, including Eric, is white. School attendance is 5 percentage points below the State average, and 81% of the students are sufficiently impoverished to be eligible for the free or reduced price school lunch program. Eric, whose own folks are out of the picture, was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and is attending as a special-education student.”
Now, as the story stands, I can’t see how my insertion of this data adds materially to it. If Eric asserted that his being beaten up was reverse racism, or even if his uncle had said so, these things would probably be worth the column inches. But no American news reporter is going to presume the bullying was racial, as you do, without some serious testimony of it to report. And no American news editor is going to bother to waste part of the news hole on that data in a story about whether the school is covering up the bullying, unless there was some serious evidence that this cover-up is also racially motivated.
You have the luxury of operating on presumption [“obviously the big factor” is presumptive and not reportive] and you also have absolution from the responsibility for reporting the testimony as it is given and writing the story based on the testimony. A reporter for an American daily newspaper generally doesn’t.
#13 She should have asked him. “Was it the black kids who were beating you up? The Hispanics? Or what?” People want to know this stuff. Why shouldn’t they? It’s shoddy reporting not to find this out and report it.
And if it had been kids from the 7 percent white demographic who were beating up on Eric, THAT would really have been a news story!
But tell me, please: Why should the Post’s readership not be given this information?
Why not just tell us all the facts? Why the fear? Why the infantilizing of the American public? Just tell us what happened. It’s supposed to be a newspaper.
You have the luxury of operating on presumption
Sun Person, PLEASE.
Look up some statistics on aggravated assault and then speak to me about prior probabilities.
Why not just tell us all the facts? Why the fear? Why the infantilizing of the American public? Just tell us what happened. It’s supposed to be a newspaper.
Because the facts are endless and the column inches of the news hole aren’t. Can you tell me any serious reason why we should know the names and vitae of every teacher in the place? That’s part of “all the facts”. So are my figures on school lunches above. Can you tell me any serious reason why NYP should publish that?
Even you would finally succumb to the irrelevance of “all the facts” if they went on forever. So we all have some standard of relevance. I described above what I think the relevance rationale is, and should be, for news reporting.
But beyond that you are not asking for “what happened”. You are asking for an explanation of why the bullying happened–and you’re not much interested in the issue that the Post thought important, which is why the school was covering it up. And even more precisely than that, you are asking that this explanation fit your preconceived notion of why it happened.
I don’t know why this seems so hard to perceive as unreasonable. Would you operate this way in mathematics? Even if you happen to be right about the reverse racism, it’s still unreasonable to ask that it be reported, if no one will back it up with factual testimony.
Factual testimony is the bottom line in the news reporting business. If you’re the reporter and you can’t get somebody to say it, or some official reference to confirm it, then you’re not supposed to just interview yourself about it simply because you “know” what really happened.
And if you’re the editor, you can’t waste the very expensive news hole on facts which aren’t relevant to the story. The standard for relevance is simple. I outlined it above. If you can get somebody to say something about race being involved then facts about race are relevant, otherwise, no. They got somebody to say something about virtually everything that was reported and was printed.
That’s all that you can reasonably ask.
Look up some statistics on aggravated assault and then speak to me about prior probabilities.
It should be obvious that the chances are 9 in 10 that Eric’s assailant among the 200 other students was either African-American or Latino without bothering to refer to some other statistics somewhere. So obvious, in fact, as to be redundant.
But Bradlaugh is not talking about that. He is talking about motives. He is talking about why Eric was assaulted. You can put it this way:
If X is black or latino, and Y is white, then every interaction that occurs between X and Y is motivated by race and ethnicity.
Put it baldly like that and it’s obviously ridiculous. Talking about the weather? Asking which way to the restroom? Even in a more restricted form:
If X is black or latino, and Y is white, then every conflict or argument that occurs between X and Y is motivated by race and ethnicity.
It’s still pretty suspect. Just change the terms to Catholic, Protestant, and Secular and the conclusions to religion and you can see how spurious it is.
All this business about Sun People and Ice People is just a way of avoiding putting what is being said into a strictly logical form and asking whether the logical conclusion is justified.
Now, luckily, I’m neither secular nor conservative, so I can talk without these weird metaphors.
When I do, something strange happens. All of a sudden most of the religious Latinos are Catholic, most of the religious African-Americans are Protestant and evangelical. Most African-Americans are politically left of center unless they are religious. In that case it’s not unknown for them to be right of center, like LaShawn Barber. Not many are, but it’s still not unknown.
Most Latino’s are left of center on most issues, but the religious ones are generally right of center on Roe v. Wade. And for obvious reasons of Catholic doctrine.
And a secular black or latino will respond to religious questions in much the same terms as someone like Bradlaugh or Heather MacDonald. Take it from me, I’ve heard them do it. In cases like this dialect or diction really doesn’t matter that much.
So let’s melt down the ice and sit in the shade and cool off. Shall we?
The relevant question isn’t whether his attackers are black, but whether the other 7% of white kids are also being bullied. If the school is 90% black, than it’s reasonable to assume that 90% of the bulliers are black too. When I was a kid, there were plenty of white kids who were picked on by both blacks and whites.
Oh and BTW this was in Georgia less than 10 years after integration. One would assume that it would be blacks who were bullied. Some were, but whites too.
Don’t you understand the meaning of the word “taboo”?
But why is genetics taboo? It’s not the first time either (e.g. Lysenkoism), tho other taboos come and go. I think it’s that the subject conflicts with how people like to view humanity (“We’re special!”) and particularly in conflict with the Marxist/groupist/egalitarian philosophy that’s the default setting for modern western news scribblers – a default that’s easy to achieve because “We’re Special!” A feedback loop, perhaps.
Because the facts are endless and the column inches of the news hole aren’t.
Which facts do you think would be relevant if the races in the story were reversed?
For the races to be reversed, you would have to go to a different school and a different situation. And the issue would still require somebody in the story to assert that race was an issue for it to be responsible journalism to bring it up. Now I don’t know what the New York Post would do in such a case. There’s lots of things I don’t “know” that conservatives seem to have priviledged access to, and I think I may be pardoned for thinking that they are talking about prejudgment and not knowledge.
Signal, surely.
I don’t think it matters whether I forsee a future of demographic crisis.
Mr. Jeffries’ terminology comes from a mindset of contemptible racism. The fact that he uses this terminology for himself, or that some in his community use this terminology for themselves, does not change the hateful nature of it. The assertion that racial genetics makes people innately good or evil is an assertion I can live without.
Let me discuss an apropos example. Suppose that a black person were to refer to all white people as “Klansmen”, even those who have no professed affiliation for the Ku Klux Klan.
The white EMTs who resuscitated his mother? Klansmen. The 7% of white students attending the New Horizons school? You *know* they are Klansmen. That jerk John Darbyshire. Gotta be a Klansman.
Some minority of Caucasians would wear that badge with pride and speak eloquently that it implies a sort of exceptional identity – even a Christian identity. For most, however, it would draw an uncrossable line between the speaker and others, even others within his own community, who would detest its use.
If we agree that Mr. Jeffries’ invention of the terms “Sun People” and “Ice People” is intended to express hate, and we agree that the term “Klansmen” applied to people who do not subscribe to those ideals is intended to express hate, can we also agree that the use of “Sun People” to lump together citizens of African-American and Latino descent — particularly those who have expressed no sympathy for Mr. Jeffries ideals — is also a form a hate?
This illustrates the emerging demographic split in the U.S.A.: Whites and East Asians on one side, African Americans and Hispanics on the other. African Americans and Hispanics — NAMs — “travel together” when you scrutinize U.S. demographics. East Asians, with some fringe exceptions like the Hmong, “travel” with whites.
What on earth are you talking about Bradlaugh? “Travel together”? And just what demographics are you scrutinizing? Do you mean they live in the same location? Use the same means of transportation? Have the same percentage who self identify as “Christian”? Have approximately the same median income? Or rate of joblessness? Or the same mean number of children? Or the same number of single parent households? Or of households below the poverty line? Or what? They’re all “demographics”. And there are dozens more. So which ones are the relevant ones? And why?
You apparently posit some sort of “crisis” developing from this “split”. Other than the fact that you and your family are on one side of it and people you don’t appear to much care for are on the other side of it, this “crisis” seems to me to be rather occult, and almost certainly not explicit in whatever demographics you are using, alone. So what are you bringing from outside and applying to the data to establish that the evidence indicates a coming “crisis”?
I must confess that I have already found your ambiguous conflations of phenotype and culture to be more than a little disturbing, although I don’t think I’m nearly as disturbed about it as RickRussellTX.
I’m not that sensitive about labels and who coins them, but I would point out that the basis for all the demographics I that can imagine you might possibly use consists of self-identification by category to parse out the statistics. To my knowledge, none of these demographic instruments include “sun people” and “ice people” as choices, and arbitrarily imposing these categories on data derived from far different survey methods is intellectually suspect. The mere fact that you have lumped groups together with these labels that are completely extraneous to the evidence as collected at least mildly suggests that you drew the conclusions first and applied the data to them later.
It may be cumbersome prose and an inconvenient problem of literary composition to always talk about “African-Americans”, “Latino or Hispanic”, “Non-hispanic whites”, “Asians”, “Native Americans”, and so on. But I would be far more reassured of the power of your conclusions if you did. Consider one simple statistical problem: your own household could be described both as Asian and as Non-Hispanic White. So if you are using these categories to differentiate household data, in which one does your household belong? Or is it statistically legitimate to record the data twice, once under each category?
Using “Sun people” and “Ice people” smooths away little problems like this, but only at the cost of disguising potentially relevant issues in the actual evidence that might lead to different conclusions.
@Joseph Marshall
Reminds me a bit of an oldish small town newspaper editor who was also a lawyer. After I had complained that a local politician was dodging questions he told me words pretty much to the effect:
‘Reporters envy lawyers because they can get subpoenas and question people under oath. Lawyers envy reporters because they can pretty much go to press with their best reasonable guess even if they don’t have hard evidence. Write what you think happened and support it as best you can. Show it to him and give him a chance to respond; but don’t change it unless he shows you proof. I’ll read it before I run it; but it’s pretty hard to be caught up for libel when a public figure is involved.’
“Using “Sun people” and “Ice people” smooths away little problems like this, but only at the cost of disguising potentially relevant issues in the actual evidence that might lead to different conclusions.”
Please understand that when I criticize use of these terms, I do so with the full understanding that Mr. Jeffries created this mess, and I admit that there is a certain intellectual purity in using “their” terminology to describe “them”. I’m not blaming Mr. Darbyshire for the invention, and there are appropriate situations to use these terms. There is certainly no harm in calling a “Klansman” a “Klansman”, if that is what they desire to be called, especially if it serves your rhetorical interest.
But, even though I recognize that the constantly shifting demographics of the US present many challenges, I intellectually resist the urge to split anything along the lines of “us” and “them”. Part of it is purely due to my own morality, but part of it is the recognition that it is increasingly invalid. Genetics are being mixed, young people are mating across racial lines as is their right, and these distinctions already seem trivial and disgusting. Our president is bi-racial, a future presidential contender once called “the little brown one” is bi-racial, and honestly a substantial fraction of the people I know are in interracial relationships.
As their children give birth to tri- and quad-racial children, we’re going to find ourselves wondering why these distinctions were ever important. So I guess you can put me in camp number 1, Mr. Darbyshire, because the upcoming demographic crisis seems like it will be resolved in a decade or three, probably before I retire from the workforce.
Hey, Mister Moderator — what happened to that SWPL filter you promised us?
“SWPL” is an epithet that Steve Sailer invented (referring to the popular blog Stuff White People Like) to refer to whites who would act horrified by Sailor’s and Derbyshire’s racial essentialism. No wonder Derbyshire resorts to it when he can’t defend his hate-mongering.
@abe
I am still awaiting an actual response to my challenge about Derb’s white nationalism.
You just keep rehashing, white nationalism is baaad, white nationalism is baaad, this isn’t an argument, no response is possible beside ad hominems.