February 15, 2016 WP: ‘My demons won today’: Ohio activist’s suicide spotlights depression among Black Lives Matter leaders Luke Ford No sacred cows.

WP: ‘My demons won today’: Ohio activist’s suicide spotlights depression among Black Lives Matter leaders

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Luke Ford

Well, knock me over with a feather. I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

A solemn group stood in the shadow of the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, forming a circle on the snow-caked sidewalk. MarShawn McCarrel, 23, a well-known Black Lives Matter activist, had taken his own life on the statehouse steps. Now his friends had come together in his memory.

As evening turned to night last week, protest organizer Rashida Davidson, 25, recounted the personal toll of two years of activism: Trouble sleeping. Bouts of anxiety. Feelings of despair.

“This is really getting to us,” Davidson said. “And if MarShawn’s death does not show that… I don’t know what else we need to tell or show to say that this is really going on.”

Since he died early last week, news of McCarrel’s suicide has rocked the national police protest movement, forcing a round of introspection about a reality that predates the seminal 2014 shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.: Some of the most prominent activists and organizers are battling not only the system, but depression.

In Oakland, Calif., a prominent activist posted the phone number for a suicide prevention hotline on her Facebook page. In Cleveland, a lead organizer confessed on Facebook that he, too, had tried to take his own life. Dozens of others have shared stories of their battles with depression, anxiety and insecurity on Twitter.

“In the movement you’re just constantly engaging in black death, seeing the communal impact,” said Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri graduate student whose hunger strike last fall led to the resignation of the school’s president. “You’re being faced with the reality that I’m more likely to be killed by the police, that I’m being discriminated against. You start to see all of the micro-aggressions.”

Like many prominent activists, Butler said he has long struggled with depression, beginning with the death of his grandfather in 2011. His involvement with the protest movement at times has worsened his mental health, he said, not only because of the emotional strain of a single-minded focus on racism, but also because of more mundane stresses, such as media scrutiny and infighting among allies.

“So many people glamorize the visibility that comes with being in these spotlights,” Butler said. “And they’re not seeing the pressures.”

…Studies have found that black Americans are more susceptible to depression and anxiety — a disparity that health experts believe stems from social stigma and a lack of access to mental health resources in black communities, as well as a reluctance to take advantage of those resources when they are available.

“It’s really tough in the black community because we’re going uphill trying to fight all of these negative stereotypes about us, and the last thing a lot of black people want to do is give people one more reason to look down on us,” said Monnica Williams, director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Louisville. “I think a lot of African Americans are walking around depressed, coping from day to day, and not really living.”

A study by the federal Office of Minority Health found that African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience serious mental health problems than the general population. And for an activist, Williams said, depression can be especially dangerous. Much of the conversation about race and justice occurs online, where harsh and threatening messages are abundant…

“There are so many folks in this movement that have serious mental health issues,” said Alexis Templeton, who is among the most prominent organizers in St. Louis. “There are so many folks who are on the brink of killing themselves.”

When she first joined the protests in 2014, Templeton was one of those people. A year earlier, she had been a passenger in a deadly car crash that killed her father, uncle and partner. Her guilt about surviving was often hard to bear, she said, and there were many days when she sat in her room with a loaded gun to her head.

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Is John Roberts Queer?

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Datalounge:

* Here’s an old photo implicating him. Straight men don’t pose with food.

* During the 1980s when he worked in a DC firm, his associates (partners) thought he was gay, lived with a man as well assumed to be his partner. This from one of the associates- friend of my sister’s, a very successful attorney in WA state. When his was being vetted for his appointment- my sister found this out. Astounding if true. Of course he may consider himself straight now that he has married a devout Catholic woman (in his early 40s) and they proceeded to adopt a family.

* The men in the photos are all identified (somewhere) and are living as straight men.

* It is difficult to find perfect blonde children to adopt. Many people are adopting children from other countries, or children with disabilities, because there aren’t many white (much less blonde) babies up for adoption.

It shows that Roberts adopted perfect white children for the picture-perfect white-picket-fence family that looks so good in photo ops. I mean, if you were gay and trying to hide in the closet, wouldn’t you want your fake family to look like the cover of Family Circle magazine?

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‘There’s nothing irrational about Donald Trump’s appeal to the white working class, writes Charles Murray: they have every reason to be angry’

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

From the WSJ:

If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between.
In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.

COMMENTS:

* Rod, what is Murray doing except stating the obvious? He actually gets paid to make these observations?

Like the working class does not realize it is getting clobbered by the Elites.

Of course Murray spouts his pedestrian wisdom from the warped intellectual summit of Neocon Social Darwinism – AEI. I.e., a propaganda mill for rationalizing shoveling TRILLIONS of tax dollars to the Security State for policing the planet while America rots.

And allowing Crony special interests to extract their many pounds of flesh from the American worker via support for bogus Crony crafted trade deals and massive immigration. (Because the American worker is too lazy and too stupid.)

BTW, in Murray’s essay he quotes the sky high median incomes of the Mainline, Brookline and the Upper East Side. Conveniently neglecting to mention McLean, Bethesda and Northwest DC where he and his plutocrat pals live fat and happy on their six figure “non-profit” salaries. (And that huge AEI stash comes from where?)

Must be nice being able to live large just for opining on social and economic pathologies from the perch of a cronied-up Think Tank. With nary a solution in sight.

I’ve said it before, the Crony Elites always walk away rich from their wreckage. And that includes the comfortably ensconced denizens of AEI.

BTW, according to the last filed (2014) IRS Form 990 by AEI, Charles Murray was paid $316,216 in total compensation.

His AEI pal James Pethokoukis heading up the arduous and freighted with risk job of AEI blog editor was paid $209,518 for his calm dedication and resourcefulness under pressure. I mean like Murray, he must sweat bullets for that 200 Grand to update the blog.

Pethokoukis penned a “conservative” response to Murray’s essay that includes not raising the minimum wage and easing public transport for unemployed Americans so that they can travel to illusory jobs that don’t exist for them because those jobs are currently held by the immigrants favored by AEI, (i.e., AEI’s Crony benefactors). And Pethokoukis implies that immigration is a false issue raised by the “the oxygen-gulping front-runner” Donald Trump. “Ignore those immigrants… Nothing to see here… Keep moving…”

In other words, the AEI cohort believes the Republican “I got mine.” Nomenklatura has the right message of camouflaged Social Darwinism and that the working class are Chumps for Trump. It’s just up to the “establishment” Republican candidates to convince the Chumps to believe the bankrupt theology of Conservatism Inc.

AEI took in over $223,000,000 in 2014 to fund their propaganda apparatus. Again, where does that money come from? You think from 50 and 75 dollar donations from Joe Sixpack “conservative” Americans? Or the Corporate Cronies and the MIC that shovel huge American Green to the “Think Tanks” that pimp for them?

* Automation is inevitable and it will gradually eliminate a larger and larger proportion of the work that humans did or are doing now. At some point only those on the far right of the bell curve will succeed in getting desirable jobs. And this will be true not just with respect to IQ but also artistic ability, athletic ability, sexual attractiveness, and other traits or combinations of traits. Already about 90% of the work that lawyers, CPAs, actuaries and the like do can be done better by AI (think Turbo Tax and the various law applications on the internet). AI can also read medical images and stained slides better than radiologists and pathologists. Machinery is currently being built to replace human workers in various types of stoop labor. Anybody who watches the television show, “How It’s Made”, quickly notices humans doing assembly line tasks that a machine could and undoubtedly soon will do better than any human. Even a lot of programming is automated these days. Nobody writes the enormous code packages surrounding real applications. This is done automatically by various programming tools. In the end only a very small fraction of humans will be needed to do essential and/or rewarding work.

For most of the developed world’s history the primary means of organizing society has been through a rewards system that connected labor and participation in other social activities. Now, under the onslaught of industrialization, that system is breaking down. The positive result is that soon most of humanity will be freed of the need to work unless they desire to. The negative impact is that social control and order are breaking down. Dealing with these issues is one of the major challenges facing the developed world. A way must be found to equitably distribute the wealth flowing from an automated economy while still being able to use that wealth to encourage socially useful behaviors and discourage socially destructive ones. The current system is already broken.

It’s ironic that Marx was ultimately right about one thing: Capital – automation – has accumulated to the point that ultimately most of us will be impoverished and only a very small proportion — much, much less than 1%! — will have any real wealth. He was just a century-and-a-half late and failed utterly to appreciate the mechanisms and results. But Marx was terribly wrong to assume that this would automatically lead to a golden age of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Whatever we wind up with it won’t be this simple and getting there is going to require a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, hard work, and suffering.

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JJ: Indict, expel, repeat: How Israel can create a loyal Arab citizenry

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

Israel can’t create loyal Arab-Israeli citizens because Jews and Arabs have very different interests.

Jewish Journal:

While the Knesset Ethics Committee decided to ban three Arab MKs from parliamentary activity earlier this week following a meeting they held with families of terrorists killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis, the silence of the country’s 1,800,000 Arab citizens was deafening.
There have been a couple of notable exceptions to the Arab Israeli citizenry’s opting out of assuming any responsibility for the outrageous behavior of its chosen representatives.
In late 2015, Nazareth Mayor Ali Salam shouted at Israel’s leading Arab Israeli politician, Ayman Odeh, to leave the city since his party’s MKs are ‘ruining coexistence’ between Jews and Arabs.
Then there’s Arab-Israeli newscaster Lucy Aharish, whose blunt criticism of her Arab-Muslim brethren included an on-air tirade against Arab-Israeli leadership and the culture of victimhood.
Neither of these two Progressive voices deny the existence of legitimate Arab-Israeli grievances against the Israeli government.
However, Salam and Aharish represent a painfully small minority of Arab-Israelis who believe that the best way to solve a problem is to speak up, not silently acquiesce to attacks on Jewish men, women and children.

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Sports Illustrated Puts Fattie On Bathing Suit Issue

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

Yuck!

NEWS: Not only has the popular magazine released three covers for its 2016 Swimsuit Issue, but it has chosen three stunning women with different body types.
Plus-sized beauty Ashley Graham, MMA fighter Ronda Rousey and model Hailey Clouson each grace a cover of the annual bikini special.
“All three women are beautiful, sexy, and strong. Beauty is not cookie cutter,” the magazine’s assistant managing editor MJ Day said.
“Beauty is not ‘one size fits all.’ Beauty is all around us and that became especially obvious to me while shooting and editing this year’s issue.”

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Europe’s open doors are a civilisation death wish

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

The Australian: Australians should feel unashamed about our immigration policies and instead fight the growth of identity politics and the undermining of free speech.

That’s the message of provocative Canadian commentator Mark Steyn, who tomorrow begins an Australian speaking tour sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Free speech is at the heart of Steyn’s message. He is surprised that the controversial section 18c of our Racial Discrimination Act is still standing when his own country successfully repealed the equivalent parts of its Human Rights Act in 2013.

“Free peoples are losing the habit of free speech,” he says. “They’re taught, not really just at university but in fact from kindergarten, that there is a correct view of certain subjects and that incorrect views are distressing. The last two generations raised in the Western world, they don’t do that thing, the apocryphal Voltaire line, ‘I disagree with what you say but I’ll fight to the death for you to.’ They’ll fight to the death for you not to be allowed to say it.”

The consequences can be disturbing. “People can actually lose the spirit of liberty and once you’ve lost that there are not a lot of easy paths back,” he cautions.

Steyn says the initial reluctance of politicians and much of the media to acknowledge, let alone discuss frankly, events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve or the growing problem of sexual assault in Sweden did nothing to preserve social cohesion but instead widened a democratic deficit between governments and the governed over the tide of asylum-seekers sweeping across Europe.

“Free speech is like being a little bit pregnant,” he says. “You can’t be a little bit free speech.”

He talks of meeting people fleeing the Balkans as a journalist covering the wars that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia. “In Europe the whole migrant thing is basically open mockery of the whole idea of refugees,” he says.

Steyn says EU leaders need to speak frankly about the forces now pulling people to the continent and how they are different.

He points to Africa. “People now have cell phones,” Steyn says. They can see what’s going on in the world. Even as recently as the 1980s their glimpse of life in the West came from re-runs of Dallas.

“It’s a different world now. They can see in real time their cousin who got on a boat from Libya and wound up in Italy and walked over to Sweden. They’re seeing in real time the kind of life their cousin is living. What percentage of North Africa has to decide ‘We’d quite like to move to Europe’ for there to be no Europe?”

As a result, Steyn sees nothing wrong with Australia’s asylum-seeker policies. “Australia does what every country used to do until the 1960s. It reserves the right to pick and choose who it admits to within its borders.” He adds: “In effect, everyone in Australia is Donald Trump.”

But Steyn points to the different recent experiences of asylum-seeker flows of Europe and Australia. “Europe is basically as near to Africa as Australia is to Indonesia,” he says, describing the EU’s approach as “the equivalent of Australia telling everyone in Indonesia, ‘See you in Darwin on Tuesday’.”

Steyn is blunt on the potential consequences of the uncontrolled flows of people. “If you lose control of your border you don’t have a country,” he says. In this environment, he is particularly concerned about the impact of identity politics and diversity policies that play on differences. He points to his experiences in the Balkans. “Once people start to think of tribal identities, you end up with tribal politics,” he warns. “It doesn’t matter if the tribe is Bosnians or Croats or whether its transgender and lesbians versus straight white males.”

Steyn jokes about “the Stanley Gibbons stamp collection approach to diversity” but says it is a trap that can cause divisions in wealthy, comfortable and largely homogenous societies, be they in Europe or our own.

“I raise my kids in New Hampshire which is 99.99999 per cent white,” he says. “I think there’s rumoured to be three black guys somewhere in the southern part of the state and two Hispanics. That’s it for New Hampshire.

“It gets kind of boring and people think wouldn’t it be nice to have bit of this and a bit of that. We live here and we’ve got all these people called Smith and Jones and all the rest of it. It would be much more interesting if we can have a bit more diversity. So look. There’s that nice gay couple who have moved into No 28 Victoria Gardens. And — ooh, aren’t we lucky now? There’s a nice fire-breathing imam who has moved into No 30.

“They can all meet. The fire-breathing imam can make conversation with the nice gay couple over the garden fence as they do on a Sunday afternoon.”

Then the joking ends. “The situation they’re now realising in Europe is that when you’re so boundlessly tolerant that you tolerate the avowedly intolerant then you basically have turned that whole kind of Stanley Gibbons diversity thing into a civilisational death wish,” Steyn says.

He warns against embracing the self-loathing that comes with the increasingly common use of concepts such as privilege and entitlement to delineate societal goodies and baddies — witting or not. “The minute you start using these things like privilege, what you’re doing is incentivising the most reductive kind of identity group politics,” Steyn says.

Here, he specifically references 18c and “what groups you can claim to be a member of” so before the law “what matters is not that you are a citizen like any other” but which “groups you have a purchase on”.

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Trump Goes Code Pink on George W. Bush

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

Michael Grunwald writes for Politico:

It was weird that an angry Code Pink-style protester interrupted last night’s Republican presidential debate with a barrage of familiar Democratic talking points about George W. Bush—that he lied the country into a disastrous war in Iraq, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and even whiffed on an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden. It was especially weird that the protestor was one Donald J. Trump, who happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
Trump didn’t just call the Iraq war a mistake. He called it “a big fat mistake.” And he didn’t call it an inadvertent mistake because of faulty intelligence. “They lied!” he thundered. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction … and they knew there were none.” Trump even groused that the war cost $5 trillion that could have helped rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, a common Democratic attack line that sounded like a canine talking point at a feline convention, especially in military-heavy South Carolina.

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Anti-Semitism Doesn’t Just Attach Itself To Nationalism, It’s A Feature, Not A Bug

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

Any time I read the phrase, “must repudiate it,” my BS alarm goes off.

Charles Murray tweets: “This kind of thing has attached itself to Trumpism. Trump supporters need to take the lead in repudiating it.”

He’s responding to these two tweets by a white nationalist:

*To hell with your fictional notion of an “American creed”, old man. We are at war.
* May I say it’s genuinely treasonous that you never once mention the unifying cause of all the social problems you note: Jews?

All gentile nationalisms are likely to exclude Jews and to usually include varying degrees of anti-Semitism, just as all forms of Jewish nationalism contain anti-gentile sentiment.

Us vs. them is the most natural thing in the world.

Donald Trump is the first nationalist with a good shot at the American presidency in more than a hundred years.

Anti-Semitism, most of the time, does not mean mass killing of Jews, just as Jewish anti-Gentile sentiments usually do not mean mass killings of gentiles, but there are plenty of directions in both directions (the Nazis are an obvious example of anti-Semitism, and Stalin’s willing executioners may well be an example of genocidal hatred by certain Jews against gentiles).

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How Do You Change Social Hierarchy?

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I understand the concept of social hierarchy. What I can’t understand is who gets to decide if one can move up, or if the relationships between the layers can be changed, or if a new layer can be added. Who gets to say, “This is it; this is the hierarchy that we need”? Leaving that aside, if we just say that we accept the hierarchy as it currently exists, how does it ever change and who gets to decide if it’s okay to make changes? By example, we had a certain hierarchy in the USA in 1860. Few would say that we should still have that hierarchy today. When did it become okay to change that hierarchy, or should it never have been changed?

* Inequality is a natural outgrowth of liberty, which permits people to realize their differing potentials (for good or for bad). Equality of condition can only be realized by suppressing liberty; the tall flowers are cut off, the nail that sticks up is pounded down till it no longer does.

The much-vaunted “equality of opportunity” is a mirage, for only equal persons can seize opportunities equally – and no two persons are equal in any sense – not physically, not mentally, not morally. This, as another great conservative now unjustly ignored, Mel Bradford, once said, is the truly self-evident proposition.

The only equality that a free society can or should expect to offer is the equal application of its rules. Liberty permits each player of the game of life to bring his unequal talents to the contest, and lets the best man win.

* I think the point is that if you want to create a taboo around certain kinds of political questions, it helps if 500,000 people died in the recent past over that question. For example, I think the Holocaust has resulted in shutting down a broad swath of political questions, and I don’t mean through criminal laws, I mean mostly unconsciously. [Yes, I am sure that some groups have self-consciously used the Holocaust for political ends, but I imagine that these taboos would still be in place if these groups did not even exist.]

If you don’t believe me, try to publish an essay on why Southern Christians were correct that Christianity permits and encourages slavery, or write an essay on why Hitler was a great leader of the same stature as Roosevelt and Churchill and has been unfairly maligned. See what happens.

Why? Is it because no cogent case can be made for these positions (even though many such cogent cases were made during the time that these were open questions)? No, I think it is the power of blood that prevents it.

* Blood & Soil:

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring!

Our joyful hearts today,
Their grateful tribute pay,
Happy and free,
After our toils and fears,
After our blood and tears,
Strong with our hundred years,
O God, to Thee.

* Conservatives are plugging into Kirk, sometimes unknowingly, when they wax longingly about Tolkien’s depiction of the Hobbits and the Shire- free people, different people, living in their own communities, side-by-side, in peace, making their own industry, being different people and different communities.
The conservative loss of this notion is in part due to a generalized demotion across the political spectrum that’s been applied to the rights of communities to exist, in their own right.
That takes many forms. Undermining freedom of association is one, although the decimation of unions and organized labor is another. Of course – organized labor has a bloody hand in its own decimation but that’s another story.
Trump doesn’t represent the opposite of this. Trump is correctly understood by those with perspective, across the pond, who see him as manifesting ethnonationalist proto-fascism. Fascism is “capitalism in decay” (h/t: Vladimir Lenin) – it is the attempt to use force to impose order when self-organizing methods of preserving order fail, or “decay”.

Conservatives should resist the temptation to turn to fascism, as we’d expect of the hobbits and of Tolkien. Instead: conservatives, in the spirit of Kirk, should organize to reverse the atomizing forces everywhere they are. Fight atomization. Strengthen the ability of communities to cohere and to remain coherent, while also co-existing.

* If we are interested in the real world, there was nothing in the Italian Fascist movement or the German National Socialist movement that related in any way to immigration. Both Mussolini and Hitler encouraged emigration from their countries, and Mussolini was angry when Americans restricted immigration in the 1920′s. If he was alive today, he would be taking the same policy tact that Soros takes on American immigration policy. So if anyone is siding with the positions of the actual fascist movement, it is the open borders crowd.

The actual parallel for Trump would be the Israeli Right, both with respect to immigration restrictions on Muslims, and building a wall. Is it is a fair comparison to say the Israeli Right are Nazi’s or fascists? Whether or not the Israeli Right are your political cup of tea, it is a grotesque distortion to call them Nazi’s.

* Vox magazine not regarded as either right-wing or particularly friendly to Trump. Nonetheless, they sat down to speak with several experts who all concur that Trump is not a fascist.

You note the names four experts who all conclude Trump is definitely not a fascist: Roger Griffin, Mathew Feldman, Robert Paxton, Stanely Paine. You will find that many of these individuals are associated with left wing political movements and hostile to fascism.

It gives one the distinct impression that anyone who says that Trump is a fascist is either ignorant, a liar or certifiably delusional. Perhaps you are simply speaking an “emotional truth” like those who deny that Obama has valid U.S. Citizenship?

I would recommend going back to reading Jonah Goldberg. As you know, he believes all liberals such as Hillary Clinton are fascists, so I am sure based on his exacting scholarship that Trump is a fascist too.

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#AllStarsSoBlack

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: The original rosters announced for both the East and West teams in today’s NBA All Star Game were all black: 24 out of 24. In fact, all were American-born blacks.

…But, mostly, #AllStarsSoBlack just seems to be the usual combination of nature and nurture leading to racial imbalance among top performers.

COMMENTS:

* The irony if Spike and Will have front row seats!

* The AAU system is overwhelmingly coached by blacks. (I played against the team Adrian Dantley coached after they had won the national championship.) AAU coaches have (had) a reputation for being slimy, and I never really saw exactly what that meant, my coach was hugely ethical, but I assume they make and break a lot of promises to underprivileged kids, and perhaps get funnelled from wherever the kind of petty cash that hooks slimy black dudes. Strikes me slimy black dudes might recruit white players less just because those ones tend to come with parents they can’t confidently bullshit, an effective racism out of respect. But generally yeah those coaches are racist. I mean they seem to basically be self-made recruiters of kids. That sounds pretty slimy plain and simple.

* Systemic racism against white developing players may exist, but I haven’t seen it in twenty years of coaching at various levels. I think it’s more likely that parents of good, tall white athletic boys recognize early on that their sons can be successful in a number of sports, notably baseball, football and basketball, but the natural genetic advantages in quickness and jumping ability that the best black athletes enjoy mean that the white kids would have to have incredible skill advantages just to stay even.

Basketball, more than football, and far more than baseball, is a sport that rewards natural genetic advantages. Even if you can’t shoot, why if you’re quick enough and can jump high enough to keep grabbing the ball, you’ll eventually get it to go in. The best young black kids can do that better than most of the best young white kids.

Most white parents are not stupid and can intuit this or see it in action at a young age. So, predictably, they make the rational decision to push their sons away from basketball and into other (often much more skill-based) sports.

This is especially true for white parents of taller, athletic daughters. Very few white parents are pushing their daughters into AAU or travel basketball, where they would have to compete with aggressive, large black girls. Instead, white parents are pushing their tall daughters into travel volleyball.

Travel youth basketball results in heavily black high school teams for both boys and girls.

And, that travel volleyball, travel soccer and travel baseball results in almost all-white teams later on in high school is, as you have noted many times, for both black and white parents, a feature, not a bug.

* What white kid in his/her right mind would willingly enter a locker room where he’s the only one of his kind and surrounded by angry Africans talking smack about cracker this and peckerwood that? From both personal experience as well as confidential conversations with other very big athletic white guys, I can unequivocally say that African behavior pushes a lot of otherwise capable white kids away from team sports like this and into things like swimming, diving, golf, lacrosse, skiing, motorsports, hockey, etc. We may still play b-ball with our (non-angry racist African) friends, but that’s it. For me, the real loss there was football and the closing off of opportunities for athletic scholarships. But until you’ve experienced situations where you’re the only white guy (or one of just a tiny minority of whites) in an overwhelmingly African environment, you simply have no conception of how unpleasant it is.

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