| News item: "Civil rights leader" Jesse Jackson and attorney
Johnnie Cochran attack the National Football League because "only" three
blacks serve as head coaches in a 32-team league. The NFL, they claim,
violates its own policy requiring each team to "seriously" consider at least
one minority candidate for head coach openings. The good ol' boy network
strikes again!
Real news item: Nationwide, a mere 40 percent of eighth-grade
white students passed the 2000 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational
Progress) test for math. But consider the nationwide passing rate for black
students -- 6 percent! The Wall Street Journal examined the black passing
rates for select states: "New York, 8 percent; California, 6 percent;
Michigan, 6 percent; Tennessee, 6 percent; Texas, 7 percent; Arkansas, 2
percent."
News item: Jesse Jackson attacks the commercially successful
"crossover" black film "Barbershop." In a brief scene, one of the characters
argues that other blacks refused to surrender their seats on Jim Crow buses
before Rosa Parks famously did so in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. Even though
another character immediately calls the remark disrespectful, Jackson
demands an apology from the studio, and requests that the studio edit out
the "offensive" scene in the DVD and VHS versions. No justice, no peace!
Real news item: Nationwide, only 55 percent of black kids
graduate from high school, while whites pass at 76 percent. According to The
Wall Street Journal, "Three years ago in New York, the percentage of black
students who did not graduate from high school was 54 percent. In
California, 41 percent. In Tennessee, 54 percent didn't graduate. And in
Wisconsin . . . 59 percent. . . . Across the nation, the average
non-graduation rate for black students is 45 percent (versus 24 percent for
whites). These numbers are surely the same year in and year out, which means
that every June in America, largely unnoticed and unremarked upon, almost
half the nation's black kids wash over the falls of our urban school
systems."
News item: Notre Dame seeks a new head football coach, and Jesse
Jackson urges the school to hire a black one. "If a school like Notre Dame
makes that breakthrough," said Jackson, "it changes the whole mental
construct of the issue." Change the whole mental construct? Tennis great
Arthur Ashe once took out a full-page newspaper ad, chastising blacks for
placing sports above academics. Guess the Reverend never saw the memo. In
other news, attorney Johnnie Cochran declares his support for reparations,
"It would be the beginning of giving back to us the pride that was robbed by
the institution of slavery." Mr. Cochran suffers from a lack of pride? Say
it ain't so.
Real news item: "Mortal Wounds: The Unseen Agony of
Black-on-Black Murder," headlines a recent Los Angeles Times front-page
story. In 2002, 40 percent of Los Angeles' 659 killings involved black
victims, although blacks comprise only 11 percent of the population.
"Authorities say most black homicide victims die at the hands of other
blacks," according to the Times. "Witnesses often are afraid to step
forward. Few killers are caught.
. . . Of the LAPD's four bureaus, one has 41 percent of the city's
homicides -- the South Bureau, which spans precincts in South-Central,
Southwest and Southeast Los Angeles. One South Bureau precinct, the 77th
Street Division, consistently leads the city in homicides, most of them
black-on-black. The caseloads of South Los Angeles detectives are about 40
percent higher than those of their counterparts in the San Fernando Valley.
High caseloads are tied to poor rates of solving murders. Homicide
detectives in the 77th Street Division hit a low point in 2001, closing only
17 percent of their cases with arrests."
News item: Kweisi Mfume, the president of the NAACP, criticizes
Hollywood for failing to promote on-screen and behind-the-scenes
"diversity." Mfume said, "By any reasonable standard, African Americans and
all other races of people are underrepresented in almost every aspect of the
television and film industry." Liberal Hollywood, closet bigots?
Real news item: The Bush administration attacks the University
of Michigan's admissions policy of racial preferences. Jesse Jackson
responds, "Mr. Bush has, in effect, turned more white people against black
and brown people." Under a point system in which 100 points almost
guarantees admission, a black, Hispanic or Native American applicant
automatically gets 20 points, irrespective of socio-economic status. By
contrast, a perfect SAT score earns the applicant 12 points. Never mind that
lowering a minority's admission standards decreases the chances of
graduation. But economist and writer Thomas Sowell notes, "At the flagship
University of Colorado campus at Boulder, where the average SAT score of
black students is more than 200 points lower than that of white students,
only 39 percent of the black students graduated, compared to 72 percent of
the whites. At the University of Colorado at Denver, however, where the
difference in SAT scores was only 30 points, half of all black students and
48 percent of all white students graduated within a six-year span."
Never put it past the "black leadership" to snatch trivial from
the jaws of crises.
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