New York Times: But the mischievous teasing at times turned serious, as blacks invoked a painful history of prominent white figures stealing the work of black artists and presenting it as their own. “I’m not surprised Melanie plagiarized from Michelle,” wrote Yasmin Yonis. “White women have spent centuries stealing black women’s genius, labor, babies, bodies.”
* Her remark has to be understood in the context of black rhetorical style. Facts are not really important – it’s more a matter of sound, rhythm and alliteration. She was rapping for the NYT reporter, making it up as she went along. She needed to quickly come up with a list of things that white women had “stolen” from black women just like Melanie had stolen from Michelle. Their genius, of course , but what else, uh, uh, …. black ….. bodies, babies , booties (no, not that)…
* It’s a little known fact that the poems of Emily Dickinson were actually all written by Harriet Tubman.
* Yeah. That was just prior to her tumultuous affair with Henry David Thoreau. She finally left him because of the neckbeard thing. Scholars have only recently discovered how huge swathes of Walden were lifted from her journals.
* Black people have things to actually be proud of; Jazz, Barbecue, Gospel. Those are not nothing. A more secure people would not have to make stuff up and be so delusional about what they did and did not do. Japanese people know they did not create Blues, Jazz, or Rock and Roll. They still are crazy for them all and do quite well as performers and interpreters of the music. They don’t feel ashamed because they did not produce Elvis, Howling Wolf, Louis Armstrong, or Bruce Springsteen.
It speaks poorly of any prospect of peace any time soon.
* Whites emphathize far too much with blacks. It’s a characteristic that will have to change or at least be suppressed if whites are to survive as a race. As Steve has pointed out, population projections for Africa indicate catastrophe by mid-century if not earlier. Whites will simply have to inure themselves to black suffering. Actually, they’ll have to be as impervious to black suffering as blacks are themselves.
* One of the nasty little secrets of BLM is that America’s orphanages (yes, we still have a lot of them) is outrageously over represented by black babies, children, and teens. Visit one sometime, and your heart will break.
Americans of all races just don’t want black babies.
* Wikipedia: It’s well known that MLKs Dream speech included parts from a speech by a black preacher at the GOP convention in 1952. He also plagiarized his academic work.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers were donated by his wife Coretta Scott King to Stanford University’s King Papers Project. During the late 1980s, as the papers were being organized and catalogued, the staff of the project discovered that King’s doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.[1] [5]
As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, “instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career.”[6]
Boston University, where King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he appropriated[6] and plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.[7][8]
According to civil rights historian Ralph E. Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project directing the research on King’s early life, King’s paper The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism[9] was taken almost entirely from secondary sources.[10] He writes:
Moreover, the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long-established practice.
* The Japanese are also quite confident and proud that their nation, culture, heritage goes back nearly 2,000 yrs in a mostly unbroken continuous line. That’s why their nation remains ca.98% racially or ethnically Japanese. They know what their accomplishments and achievements are, are quite proud of them, and don’t need to make stuff up in order to make them feel better.
If you truly want to see what African-Americans have to be proud of, what their original accomplishments are/were, go back to the history of Sub-Saharan Africa and go back before western colonial intervention. In other words, examine the achievements of Sub-Saharan Africa from thousands of yrs ago up to about 1600 and compare them with the rest of the world.
* Someone who tried to make a living stealing black women’s genius would quickly find himself destitute.
* Kylie, last year black students at Oberlin College, arguably the most liberal campus in America, presented the college president with a list on non-negotiable demands. Oberlin has a strong music program. Demands included the inclusion of African music into the program and the end of Classical music studies. I think without musical notes it would be hard to teach music. But hey, whatever.
* In the case of Ambrose and Goodwin, the narrative was the details, so they simply copied or paraphrased long chunks of other people’s factual narrative into their own. I’m not sure about the “research assistants” but all high volume academic or quasi-academic authors use them.
The best way to avoid plagiarism is to fact check your sources and read other sources that cover the same material. The first thing that will give you is an insight into how common plagarism, paraphrase, and (probably) a lot of unintentional echoing is. The second thing such a read through will do is help you define another way of speaking about the same topic. That in turn usually means you will write less, but people who write 500 page books do not want less, they want their 500 pages.
All of this takes time. I remember reading Ambrose on Nixon once, and he was ridiculing Nixon for saying that he spent a lot of time on his 1968 convention acceptance speech, and he thought for hours about how to craft a few sentences. Ambrose said something to the effect, “nobody goes to that much trouble to write.” After the plagiarism stuff was revealed, I got a better insight into why he would say that.
