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Check out any professional and most college basketball teams. Their starting five, and most of their other 10 players, are black, as is 80% of the NBA. This does not come anywhere close to the diversity and inclusion sought by the nation's social justice warriors. Both professional and college coaches have ignored and threw any pretense of seeking diversity and inclusiveness. My question to you is: Would a basketball team be improved if coaches were required to include ethnically diverse players for the sake of equity? I have no idea of what your answer might be but mine would be: "The hell with diversity, equity and inclusion. I am going to recruit the best players and do not care if most of them turn out to be black players." Another question: Do you think that any diversity-crazed college president would chastise his basketball coach for lack of diversity and inclusiveness?
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (National Accelerator Laboratory) is home to the world's most powerful experiments, fastest supercomputers and top-notch physics researchers. Much of SLAC's research is on particle accelerators that are complicated machines that are designed, engineered and operated to produce high-quality particle beams and develop clues to the fundamental structure of matter and the forces between subatomic particles. You can bet that their personnel makeup exhibits very little concern about racial diversity, equity and inclusion. The bulk of their scientists is not only Americans of European and Asian ancestry but mostly men. My question to you is: What would you do to make SLAC more illustrative of the racial, ethnic and sexual diversity of America? As for me, my answer would be the same one that I gave in the basketball example: I am going to recruit the brightest scientists and I do not care if most of them turn out to be men of European and Asian an!
cestry.
In the hard sciences, one will find black Americans underrepresented. For example, a 2018 survey of the American Astronomical Society, which includes undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and retired astronomers, found that 82% of members identified as white and only 2% as black or African American. Only 3% of bachelor's degrees in physics go to black students. In 2017, some fields, such as structural engineering and atmospheric physics, graduated not a single black Ph.D. The conspicuous absence of black Americans in the sciences have little or nothing to do with racism. It has to do with academic preparation. If one graduates from high school and has not mastered a minimum proficiency in high school algebra, geometry and precalculus, it is likely that high-paying careers such as engineering, medicine, physics and computer technology are hermetically sealed off for life.
There are relatively few black fighter jet pilots. There are stringent physical, character and mental requirements, which many black applicants could meet. But fighter pilots must also have a strong knowledge of air navigation, aircraft operating procedures, flight theory, fluid mechanics, meteorology and engineering. The college majors that help prepare undergraduates for a career as a fighter pilot include mathematics, physical science and engineering. But if one graduates from high school without elementary training in math, it is not likely that he will enroll in the college courses that would qualify him for fighter pilot training.
At many predominantly black high schools, not a single black student tests proficient in math and a very low percentage test proficient in reading; however, these schools confer a diploma that attests that the students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level and these schools often boast that they have a 70% and higher graduation rate. They mislead students, their families and others by conferring fraudulent diplomas.
What explains the fact that over 80% of professional basketball players are black, as are about 70% of professional football players? Only an idiot would chalk it up to diversity and inclusion. Instead, it is excellence that explains the disproportionate numbers. Jewish Americans, who are just 3% of our population, win over 35% of the Nobel prizes in science that are awarded to Americans. Again, it is excellence that explains the disproportionality, not diversity and inclusion. As my stepfather often told me, "To do well in this world, you have to come early and stay late."
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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Last week, I tallied Joe Biden's spending plans. This week, President Trump's.
Which presidential candidate will bankrupt America first?
When Donald Trump ran for president, he promised "big league" spending cuts.
Once in office, he again said he'd cut the budget, adding, "There's a lot of fat in there."
There sure is.
Since I was born, spending has grown faster than inflation most every year.
Then, President Obama, as Trump liked to out, "put more debt on than all other presidents of the United States combined!"
It's true.
But then Trump increased the debt just as much.
Now even more, with the COVID-19 spending.
One of his first biggest increases was the $738 billion defense spending bill. Trump bragged that it was "an all-time record!" He said Democrats had "depleted" our fighting ability, so he "had" to "fix our military."
"The 'fix' looks a whole lot like bloated defense spending," says Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union. "It's more than our rivals around the world could even hope to spend."
Sepp's organization has fought government spending for decades. Sadly, they've had little success.
Now federal spending will grow even faster because:
1) The COVID-19 "stimulus" will grow.
2) Both political parties love spending your money.
3) Old people like me keep living longer.
Sorry about that last one. But I, rudely, decline to die.
Soon, my generation's Medicare and Social Security checks will crowd out everything else in the budget. (No, fellow geezers, we don't just "get back what we put in." We'll get, on average, almost triple our FICA deductions.)
Sadly, no presidential candidate expresses much interest in addressing that: Trump promises to "protect" Social Security. Biden says he'll increase it!
Trump was also eager to spend on special interests. He gave $16 billion to farmers and ranchers, $1.6 billion more to NASA and, despite government's horrible track record at "picking winners," he tried loaning $765 million to Kodak Pharmaceuticals.
After the pandemic hit, Trump joined Democrats in authorizing $6.2 trillion in new spending.
Signing that, Trump joked: "I've never signed anything with a "T" on it. I don't know if I can handle this one!" The politicians standing behind him laughed.
But it's not funny.
Now Democrats want to add even more spending.
Trump at least made some cuts, prepandemic. Sepp acknowledges that he made "important progress in reducing overhead (and) personnel costs."
He also cut the budget of his own office, plus the Departments of Labor, Education and State. Good! The State Department is bloated with 60 subdepartments, and its spending had increased at triple the rate inflation.
Still, media pundits whined about every cut. On CNN, one "expert" called the cuts to the State Department "insanity."
When Trump proposed other cuts, or just slowing the growth of government, Congress wouldn't let him. Trump's 2021 budget would still have increased spending by $39 billion. Rep. Chuck Schumer rejected that, calling it "a blueprint for destroying America!"
To sum up: What's Trump's total budget impact been?
Spending is up by more than $1 trillion a year. The national debt is over $26 trillion.
"Deficits and debt destroy economic growth," says Sepp.
"Nobody's talking about this stuff. You must be frustrated," I say.
"Very," he responds. "After 51 years as an organization, to see this kind of attitude and carelessness..."
When it comes to increasing spending, who is worse, Trump or Biden?
"Biden," replies Sepp, because he promises $1.2 trillion a year in new spending.
"We're already trillions in the hole. He's spending money out of an empty pocket!"
And Biden is favored to win.
Of course, some argue that when it comes to Republicats and Democans spending your and your grandkids' money, it doesn't matter who wins.
"Washington just seems to grow at the expense of everyone else, no matter who is in power," concludes Sepp.
So, next week, I'll report on an alternative to Biden and Trump.
John Stossel is author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media." For other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.
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Institutional racism and systemic racism are terms bandied about these days without much clarity. Being 84 years of age, I have seen and lived through what might be called institutional racism or systemic racism. Both operate under the assumption that one race is superior to another. It involves the practice of treating a person or group of people differently based on their race. Negroes, as we proudly called ourselves back then, were denied entry to hotels, restaurants and other establishments all over the nation, including the north. Certain jobs were entirely off-limits to Negroes. What school a child attended was determined by his race. In motion pictures, Negroes were portrayed as being unintelligent, such as the roles played by Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland in the Charlie Chan movies. Fortunately, those aspects of racism are a part of our history. By the way, Fetchit, whose real name was Lincoln Perry, was the first black actor to become a millionaire, and he has!
a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and, in 1976, the Hollywood chapter of the NAACP awarded Perry a Special NAACP Image Award.
Despite the nation's great achievements in race relations, there remains institutional racism, namely the widespread practice of treating a person or group of people differently based on their race. Most institutional racism is practiced by the nation's institutions of higher learning. Eric Dreiband, an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, recently wrote that Yale University "grants substantial, and often determinative, preferences based on race." The four-page letter said, "Yale's race discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular Asian American and White applicants."
Yale University is by no means alone in the practice of institutional racism. Last year, Asian students brought a discrimination lawsuit against Harvard University and lost. The judge held that the plaintiffs could not prove that the lower personal ratings assigned to Asian applicants are the result of "animus" or ill-motivated racial hostility towards Asian Americans by Harvard admissions officials. However, no one offered an explanation as to why Asian American applicants were deemed to have, on average, poorer personal qualities than white applicants. An explanation may be that Asian students party less, study more and get higher test scores than white students.
In court filings, Students for Fair Admissions argued that the University of North Carolina's admissions practices are unconstitutional. Their brief stated: "UNC's use of race is the opposite of individualized; UNC uses race mechanically to ensure the admission of the vast majority of underrepresented minorities." Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, said in a news release that the court filing "exposes the startling magnitude of the University of North Carolina's racial preferences." Blum said that their filing contains statistical evidence that shows that an Asian American male applicant from North Carolina with a 25% chance of getting into UNC would see his acceptance probability increase to about 67% if he were Latino and to more than 90% if he were African American.
In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209 (also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative) that read: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." California legislators voted earlier this summer to put the question to voters to repeal the state's ban on the use of race as a criterion in the hiring, awarding public contracts and admissions to public universities and restore the practice of institutional racism under the euphemistic title "affirmative action."
When social justice warriors use the terms "institutional racism" or "systemic racism," I suspect it means that they cannot identify the actual person or entities engaged in the practice. However, most of what might be called institutional or systemic racism is practiced by the nation's institutions of higher learning. And it is seen by many, particularly the intellectual elite, as a desirable form of determining who gets what.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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Which presidential candidate will bankrupt America first, Donald Trump or Joe Biden?
Last year, we compared the costs of the leading Democratic candidates' promises. At that time, Biden, to his credit, proposed the least new spending.
Kamala Harris promised the most. She wanted to add $4.2 trillion to America's debt. Her lavish promises didn't win her supporters; she dropped out soon after. But now she's Biden's running mate, and Biden promises to spend more.
That's unusual.
Historically, Democrats moved left during the primaries, and then back toward the center once nominated. Not this time. Biden's people met with Bernie Sanders' staff and concocted a grotesque orgy of spending. That's the subject of my video this week.
"Joe Biden has been lurching to the left on federal spending for years, first as a senator, then vice president, now as a presidential candidate," says Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union. "Tax, spend and borrow is going to bankrupt the nation."
Originally, Biden proposed $170 billion a year in new "climate" spending. Now, he wants $500 billion. It will go for things like "green infrastructure... more efficient windows... 500,000 charging stations for electric cars."
"This is the way that governments grow at the expense of the American people," says Sepp.
I push back. "So they spend it. So what? We'll have more infrastructure."
"What we won't have is infrastructure that's efficient or effective," Sepp replies. "We will have holes in the ground and mass transit that people won't ride."
Biden wants to spend $77.5 billion more to pay caregivers for children and the elderly.
"A good thing?" I suggest.
I like Sepp's answer. "Why not leave more money in people's pockets ... so they can afford to provide care for their families? We as taxpayers know better how to take care of our families and ourselves than some distant government."
Biden wants $64 billion more for housing subsidies, saying, "Housing should be a right."
"A right to housing" may sound reasonable. So might a right to food, clothing, college, health care, etc.
After all, the Bill of Rights did grant Americans a right to free speech, free exercise of religion and the right to keep and bear arms.
But there's a key difference.
Those rights mean: Government must leave us alone.
But a "right" to housing -- or college, health care, etc. means government forcibly takes money from some Americans and gives it to others. That's very different.
As I write, Biden's new spending proposals total $1.2 trillion a year.
"We can't afford it!" complains Sepp. "Sooner or later, every nation faces a reckoning. Joe Biden's policies, if enacted in full, draw that reckoning even closer."
I say to Sepp, "We've been taxing and spending and borrowing, and except for COVID, we were doing well!"
"Deficits and debt don't matter until, suddenly, spectacularly, they do!" he replies. "No one ever knows when doomsday happens until it already has. Ask the folks in Greece. Ask the folks in Weimar, Germany."
The Weimar Republic printed so much money that the price of bread rose from 250 to 200,000 million marks. People brought wheelbarrows full of money with them when wanted to buy something.
Will it happen in America? No one knows. But eventually, we'll have to pay our debts. A rubber band stretches and stretches but at some point, it breaks.
Our national debt is now a record $26 trillion.
"Deficits and debt destroy economic growth," says Sepp. "It's going to hurt the American people. It's coming."
Next week, I'll compare Biden's spending plans with President Trump's.
John Stossel is author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media." For other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.
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Parents, legislators, taxpayers and others footing the bill for college education might be interested in just what is in store for the upcoming academic year. Since many college classes will be online, there is a chance to witness professors indoctrinating their students in real-time. So, there's a chance that some college faculty might change their behavior. To see recent examples of campus nonsense and indoctrination, visit the Campus Reform and College Fix websites.
George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley warned congressional lawmakers that antifa is "winning" and that much of academia, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is complicit in its success." In his testimony before Congress Turley said: "To Antifa, people like me are the personification of the classical liberal view of free speech that perpetuates a system of oppression and abuse. I wish I could say that my view remains strongly implanted in our higher educational institutions. However, you are more likely to find public supporters for restricting free speech than you are to find defenders of free speech principles on many campuses."
The leftist bias at our colleges and universities has many harmful effects. A University of California, Davis, mathematics professor faced considerable backlash over her opposition to the requirement for "diversity statements" from potential faculty. Those seeking employment at the University of California, San Diego, are required to admit that "barriers" prevent women and minorities from full participation in campus life. At American University, a history professor wrote a book calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. A Rutgers University professor said, "Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness." A Williams College professor has advocated for the inclusion of social justice in math textbooks. Students at Wayne State University are no longer required to take a single math course to graduate; however, they may soon be required to take a diversity course.
Maybe some students will be forced into sharing the vision of Professor Laurie Rubel, a math education professor at Brooklyn College. She says the idea of cultural neutrality in math is a "myth," and that asking whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 "reeks of white supremacist patriarchy." She tweeted, "Y'all must know that the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH." Math professors and academics at other universities, including Harvard and the University of Illinois, discussed the "Eurocentric" roots of American mathematics. As for me, I would like to see the proof, in any culture, that 2 + 2 is something other than 4.
Rutgers University's English department chairwoman, Rebecca Walkowitz, announced changes to the Department's graduate writing program emphasizing "social justice" and "critical grammar." Leonydus Johnson, a speech-language pathologist and libertarian activist, says Walkowitz's changes make the assumption that minorities cannot understand traditional and grammatically correct English speech and writing, which is "insulting, patronizing, and in itself, extremely racist."
Then there is the nonsense taught on college campuses about white privilege. The idea of white privilege doesn't explain why several historically marginalized groups outperform whites today. For example, Japanese Americans suffered under the Alien Land Law of 1913 and other racist, exclusionary laws legally preventing them from owning land and property in more than a dozen American states until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. During World War II, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned. However, by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans had almost disappeared. Today, Japanese Americans outperform white Americans by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes and test scores, and have much lower incarceration rates.
According to Rav Arora, writing for the New York Post, several black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Trinidadians and Tobagonians, Barbadians and Ghanaians all "have a median household income well above the American average." We are left with the question whether the people handing out "white privilege" made a mistake. The other alternative is that Japanese Americans, Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians and Trinidadians and Tobagonians are really white Americans.
The bottom line is that more Americans need to pay attention to the miseducation of our youth and that miseducation is not limited to higher education.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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