{"id":51917,"date":"2014-01-13T14:09:35","date_gmt":"2014-01-13T22:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=51917"},"modified":"2014-01-14T16:23:14","modified_gmt":"2014-01-15T00:23:14","slug":"dont-notice-patterns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=51917","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Notice Patterns!"},"content":{"rendered":"

On election night, 1986, I was at election headquarters in Auburn, California covering the news for KAHI\/KHYL radio. One candidate for office who was defeated was drunk, and that shocked me. When I interviewed her, she sang that “Que Sera Sera<\/a>” French song. I had little experience with alcohol, growing up a Seventh-Day Adventist.<\/p>\n

There was this old guy, in his 70s, who started talking about voting patterns among various ethnic groups and I was shocked. Dumbstruck. Finally I sputtered, “You wouldn’t happen to be a racist?” He exploded. He said that noticing the different ways different groups of people voted was not remotely racist. I just stood there listening. I was out of my depth. I had never thought about that before. I had years of education that you are not allowed to notice differences among different ethnic groups, that it was a horrible thing to notice such patterns. It was racist and that was the greatest social sin. I had been schooled to be dumb. I knew empirically that there appeared to be significant differences between the races, I saw that every day on the playing field and the classroom, but I thought my noticing of these patterns was racist and must be kept to myself. <\/p>\n

It’s sad that it is verboten to notice and discuss reality. Appreciating the differences between cultures and races would be a true celebrating of human diversity. Different peoples are given different gifts in God’s world and all have a valuable role to play. <\/p>\n

As a great sage said<\/a>: “I think that one of the biggest, if not the biggest faux pas<\/a>, you can make in educated society today is to say or write anything that can be construed as racist.”<\/p>\n

When I discuss ethnic patterns in public, I usually get reactions like these: “Very Hitler of you.”<\/p>\n

“What you are doing is disgusting. You’re becoming a bitter old man that has nothing relevant to say, so you post racist rantings.”<\/p>\n

I love football and basketball. When I watch sports, I notice huge race differences. I can’t think, for instance, of a starting white cornerback or tailback in the NFL. <\/p>\n

I’m working on a song.<\/p>\n

I’m not a racist
\nI just want to be free
\nTo notice patterns
\nAnd reality!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On election night, 1986, I was at election headquarters in Auburn, California covering the news for KAHI\/KHYL radio. One candidate for office who was defeated was drunk, and that shocked me. When I interviewed her, she sang that “Que Sera … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51917"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51946,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51917\/revisions\/51946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}