WHITE ETHNICS DENIED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STATUS

The following is meant to be part of a chapter of my forthcoming book on civil rights and affirmative action.  This excerpt is a partial review of Skrentny's Minority Rights book.  Hugh Murray

THE MINORITY RIGHTS REVOLUTION(Cambridge, MA and London, Eng.: Belknap Press

of Harvard U. Press, 2002) by JOHN D. SKRENTNY

John D. Skrentny's The Minority Rights Revolution is probably the last, best academic history of the development of affirmative action in the United States. Overall, it is not an easy read or a beautifully crafted one, as he must describe laws, bureaucracies, rulings and regulations, court interpretations – not exactly the venues of poetry. Occasionally, political strategies are also included. What makes this an important work is that Skrentny attended Harvard as a graduate student where he was awarded a degree and studied under the prominent scholar Orlando Patterson; Skrentny interviewed men like Hugh Graham Davis, author of an earlier, fact-filled work on the development of civil rights; and Skrentny also interviewed Alfred Blumrosen, who may be considered the chief architect of what we call today affirmative action (hereafter AA). Skrentny's book is published by Belknap of Harvard University Press; it is academically solid with an abundance of discursive footnotes. Thomas Sugrue, a reviewer of this book, declared that Skrentny “has written the definitive account of the dramatic expansion of minority rights in America in the 1960s and 1970s.”(book's back cover) This work satisfies both academia and the Establishment. But what does it omit? What are the major questions about the development of “civil rights” that he fails to ask?

On page V, Skrentny asserts that he is mainly on the Left politically. He adds, “Policy elites make decisions and those decisions matter.”(14) In his book he basically traces the elite and how it, and its employees, arrived at what today we call affirmative action. Yet in doing so, Skrentny changes the meanings of words in an Orwellian sense. Thus, “The minority rights revolution was a sudden growth of federal legislation, presidential executive orders, bureaucratic rulings, and court decisions that established nondiscrimination rights.”(4) No, that sentence is absurd. Instead it established the right, and often the duty, to discriminate against white men. All are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Prior to outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Nazi legal experts researched America's segregation laws, for the purpose of adopting some for use against the Jews in Germany.(See James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Princeton U. Press, 2017) But once war erupted with the US, the Germans willingly highlighted the hypocrisy of the US that complained about Germany's racial laws when the US had numerous racial laws of its own. Skrentny does not mention it, but through WWII a majority of American states had laws forbidding intermarriage of different races. The Japanese invaded much of Asia, but they hoped the local people would view them not as invaders but as liberators! They would liberate the Philippines from the colonialist, white racist Americans; the Indonesians from the colonialist, white racist Dutch; IndoChina from the colonialist, white racist French; Hong Kong, Malaysia, Burma, India, from the colonialist, white racist British empire. Within the US, most Japanese (citizens or not) were interned in camps under Roosevelt, so they were generally too isolated to be aware of current Japanese propaganda: however that propaganda did evoke some response among other minorities, including on the then tiny Black Muslim movement. To counter this Axis appeal, “...President Franklin Delano Roosevelt strongly promoted the United States as a symbol of human rights and race equality.”(11)

Skrentny titles his second chapter - “'This is war and this is a war measure': racial equality becomes national security.”(21) In a radio address in January 1941 Roosevelt declared that those fighting against the Axis were fighting for the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.(24) A few months prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America's official entry into the conflict, Roosevelt signed and Executive Order to promote Fair Employment practices in America's expanding war-time industries. While Skrentny spends some pages on FDR's proposed social programs during the war, he does not mention a plank in the 1944 Democratic Party's platform that would limit salaries to a high of $25,000 a year.

With the defeat of Hitler and Tojo, the US was soon engaged in a Cold War with Stalin's Communist Soviet Union. The world-wide Communist Parties had long stressed their opposition to both racism and colonialism (except when the topic was Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.) To many major players in the United States, if America was to achieve “world leadership and defeat communism,” the US would have to “eliminate white racism, both domestically and internationally.”(72) To achieve this end, some states enacted their own FEPC laws, the US Supreme Court outlawed legally segregated schools in 1954, Pres. Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock in 1957 to insure that several Black students could attend the white Central High School (of course, Ike was a Republican, but nevertheless, no president had sent troops South on behalf of Blacks since the Reconstruction era), and a few years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [hereafter, CRA]. “Because these reforms were classically liberal, however, the new laws did not identify any particular minority groups. The initial civil rights gains for blacks, for example, in fact protected any and all Americans. These were simply nondiscrimination provisions.”(84, emphasis in Skrentny's original.)

Black historian, former Chair of the Civil Rights Commission, and left-wing activist Mary Frances Berry asserted that the CRA of 1964 did not apply to whites; it was enacted for Blacks. At first glance, Skrentny seems to agree with her. He writes: “..., it must be emphasized that American citizens and political elites saw Title VII and the entire CRA of 1964 as being a law for African Americans.”(100) But on the very next page he quotes a leading liberal politician and floor manager pushing the proposed legislation through a Senate where filibusters had killed previous bills. The Minnesota senator was one of those most responsible for garnering the votes to pass the CRA into law and: “Senator Hubert Humphrey stated bluntly that 'the bill has a simple purpose...to give fellow citizens – Negroes – the same rights and opportunities that white people take for granted.'”(101) Here, as elsewhere, Humphrey spoke of equal rights, NOT preferential rights over whites. Skrentny also reports, it was not only Humphrey who interpreted things this way, for “...the civil rights leaders before 1965 never made affirmative action as later understood one of their central demands [however] the policy nevertheless became civil rights...”(343, again, the emphasis in Skrentny's original).

Skrentny acknowledges that AA meant “official minorities,” and abandoning the classical liberal approach concerning individual rights, and replacing it by dividing the nation into “oppressed minorities and privileged majorities.”(85) Moreover, AA was a cheap, easy, available way to appease the desires of the EEOC.(86) Who should be included on the list of minorities on the EEO forms to be sent to employers? The replies would determine whom they had hired and in what proportion. Blumrosen, of course, wanted the data concerning Blacks hired at any given firm. Earlier forms for various government agencies had included listings for Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans or Spanish-speaking, American Indians, and various words to include Asians too. The early EEOC forms did not include the category for women, although women were included in the CRA. Nor did the EEOC inquire of employers about Poles, Greeks, Irish, or Roman Catholics, or Jews. There were no inquiries on the forms about those categories, even though the CRA included categories for banning discrimination based on national origin or religion. But the EEOC ignored these aspects of the law. The reason for this omission: Skrentny thought the employer could readily make a tally by looking at his work-force, without asking them. This was not necessarily true, as most Hispanics viewed themselves as white, so looking at them might not have revealed that they were Hispanic. If the employer then checked their names, he could also have checked to see a Polish name, a Greek one, and Irish one. Yet, the ethnics were not counted in the government's official tally.

In the 1940s and 50s, Jews were included on some government forms. Blacks objected, and the Jews decided not to press the issue, as they were also aware of how the data might be used against them.(282-83) In the EEOC the question of religious AA in hiring was never broached.(435) For a time during President Nixon's drive to promote Black capitalism, and other minority enterprises, the Small Business Administration did include Hasidim (a very Orthodox Jewish group), but that effort did not last long.(162-63) Skrentny asserts that there were no AA university quotas for white ethnics (310); but he is wrong. Beginning in 1976 Italian-Americans were granted the privileged AA status at the City University of New York.(See Linda Kirillova's MA Thesis, “When Affirmative Action is White: Italian-Americans in the City University of New York, 1976 – Present,” Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2016) Nevertheless, this appears to be so unique that Skrentny's assessment of the issue is essentially correct. Blumrosen defended the policy of excluding white ethnics from AA because to do otherwise would have interfered with the main goal of helping Blacks.(438)

But there is another reason white ethnics were not included on the EEOC forms that would have given them a guaranteed percentage of jobs, places in universities, promotions, etc. Would the inclusion of white ethnics really have harmed the Blacks? The Black proportion of the population presumably would remain the same. Was Blumrosen's explanation for the exclusion, the “reason,” or a rationale for depriving white ethnics of AA privileges? And many white ethnics did seek to be included among the AA beneficiaries. Indeed, Polish advocates wanted to know why Hispanics were the only whites included in AA.(293) And being excluded from the government's list of official minorities meant that “national policy therefore racialized ethnics as privileged whites.”(314) And today in public schools from elementary to high school to university, there are lectures and classes taught stressing how all whites are privileged and therefore ought to be restricted. In some classrooms today, several teachers have boasted that they do not call upon whites. From the seemingly minor point of an agency creating distorted regulations and sending employers questionnaires demanding information about employment of certain minorities, but ignoring other minorities, from that act of excluding some groups on a government form, from that seed forests of hatred have blossomed.

Bottom line, author Skrentny, like almost all academics, supports affirmative action and the manipulations of the elite forces to impose it on America. I disagree, and this review will be part of my forthcoming book seeking to expose the lies and deceptions of the civil rights movement.

ATTACK ON SYNAGOGUE IN HALLE, GERMANY AND MEMORIES

      About a week ago, a German tried to shoot the Jews attending a synagogue service on Yom Kippur in the small city of Halle, Germany.  Apparently, the terrorist was not Muslim, and was a lone-wolf, neo-Nazi.  The video of him shooting at the building from his automobile showed his determination, and hatred, and murderous intent.  It brought back many memories to me.

      I had to think about the past when news from Europe was reported.  Decades ago  I taught English in Europe, and our part of the university was the building Anglistik-Americanistik.  One day walking on the small street toward the building I passed a small wall with a metal thing atop.  But as I walked past, I realized it suddenly became a star of David.  I stopped a second.  Moved slowly, and the image disintegrated from a side view. Directly from the front, it was a Mogen David. When I asked a colleague, she informed me that that had been the front to the space of the synagogue, which had been destroyed by the Nazis.  This street and this building had been part of the old ghetto in Halle (as der Saale).  I asked if there were a synagogue then in existence, and she said no, as I recall, but she may not have known either way.  At another time, I recall walking with another teacher, very nice, and we passed a sign of the Kultur Klub Anne Frank.  I said, "Oh look, Anne Frank!"  She replied, "Who is that?"  I was too shocked that a name so well known in the US was unknown by a university teacher in Germany.

       When in Halle, I lived in an efficiency flat in the Hochhaus, a 10-story structure.  An elderly neighbor in the building was Jan Koplowitz, whose mother was Jewish. father was Czech.  She and her sisters each owned a series of small hotels near the Czech border.  He was an activist in the late 1920s and tried to organized the workers in his mom's hotel.  He was kicked out of the family as a result.  He was KPD. a member of the Communist Party of Germany.

    Soon after Hitler came to power, he was rounded up, not as a Jew, but as a communist, and he helped to build the first KZ, Dachau, outside of Munich.  "Helped build" as a prisoner of the concentration camp.  He escaped to Prag and remained red.  At some point, perhaps 1937 or 38, his mother was allowed to visit him in the Czech capital.  He thought that the Nazis wanted her to remain away so they could confiscate her hotel.  He wanted her to stay, as he feared things would get worse.  "What would I do here, wash dishes?"  So she returned to the Reich.  Later in 1938 there was the crisis of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, and as a result of the compromise at Munich, German troops moved into parts of Cz. - the German speaking area called the Sudetenland.

        As German troops marched through the border area moving into Czechoslovakia, on the front of his mother's hotel, someone place a photo of Hitler.  She was worried that it covered a smaller sign that indicated hers was a Jewish hotel.  She moved the picture of Der Fuehrer slightly so that people could realize hers was a Jewish hotel (one that had done well economically, because the Nazis fired many Jews from government service, and they retired to a place like hers where there would be fewer problems.  But now, some saw the 2 signs, and thought she was trying to say Hitler was Jewish.  They fined her the amount of the hotel; in effect her hotel was confiscated..  She could not get out of Germany any longer, so had to survive, she washed dishes in Berlin.  Until she was rounded up and ...

        When the Germans invaded the rest of Cz and Prag, Jan fled to Poland, and somehow made it to England, where he was interned during the war as an enemy alien.  He remained CP.  With victory, the Brits did not want professionals to go to the eastern part of Germany.  He went anyway.  Became a writer and songwriter.

       One of my colleagues was English.  He was born a Jew but was CP.  After the war, he was stationed in the British section of Germany, married a German woman who had been married and had a child by a German soldier, but he was dead.  They married and moved from the west to the east Germany  Remember that Angela Merkel, the present German Kanzler, came from a West German family that also moved to the east.  While over 3 million moved from east to west, about half a million moved from west to east.  Len was English and taught British English at the university in Halle, the Martin Luther University.  He was staunch CP.  I recall some of his Jewish relatives came for a visit, but unlike their other relatives who would visit Israel, they were anti-Zionist, purposely not going there and instead would vacation in Egypt.  Bottom line, even if Halle then had a synagogue, I doubt if either Len or Jan would have gone.  Len and Kate had 2 children of their own, but I doubt if they identified at all as Jews.  One son was given a very unGerman name of Keith, very English.

       I recall meeting Frau Kuchinsky, daughter of a prominent KPD intellectual of the 1920s.  She was sharp, and allowed to get the NY Review of Books.  Perfect English. 

       Back in NYC, I was then involved with the Irish movement and was selling newspapers concerning events in Northern  Ireland and its civil rights movement, one Sunday morning.  Police said I could not sell the papers in front of St Pat's so I moved across the street to Rockefeller Center.  One person walked by and chose to buy one, 25cents.  He was Mike, who was planning to study at Princeton; he was from Germany.  More we talked more interesting.  His parents were Jews from Vienna.  When Hitler took Austria, they made it to the US.  He was born in Ohio.  Parents were CP.  During the McCarthy era, they fled back to Europe, first Vienna, then E Berlin.  He was a baby, and was told they stayed in the remnants of the famous Hotel Adlon where he slept on a pillow in a drawer.  In school, he excelled in math.  To come to Princeton, it was during the VN war, he had to renounce his American citizenship, as he did not want to be drafted - his parents had taken him out of the US when he was a baby.

       A few years later I stayed with him at his parents home in a pleasant suburb of E Berlin.  Their neighbors were the W German ambassador.  His mother was a judge, and his dad a leader of the academy of scientists organization in E Germany.  Each of his brothers had different citizenships, because as foreigners they could travel more easily outside East Germany.  Mike Rappaport is now a prominent mathematician today. 

       One of my students had a Jewish connexion, but I may have forgotten details.  Her father had left Germany before Hitler came to power.  He lived in the UK.  During the war, he fought on the side of the British in the RAF against his Vaterland.  When his plane was shot, he was not treated as a pow, but as a traitor and sent to a KZ.  He weighed under 100 pounds at war's end.  I think he married a Jewish woman and they went to east Germany.  They divorced, and he returned to Britain.  His daughter was an excellent student, but somehow there was a 2nd marriage, and I forgot all the details. 

        Anyway Halle, and Martin Luther U. where I taught there, brought back many memories.,

       HUGH MURRAY

RULE BY JUDGES IS THE END OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

To All,  Still working on a book, so doing less on the blog.  Here is an article similar to one of the topics I shall cover in my upcoming book.  This is from VDARE site.  Hugh Murray
Kritarchy: The End Stage Of Liberal Democracy—Unless We Start Impeaching Judges

By James Kirkpatrick     4 Oct. 2019
Liberal democracy isn’t “in crisis,” as journalists and academics keep saying, it’s already over. In the U.S., the critical 

decisions on immigration, Affirmative Action, and other issues are now made by judges, a system known as “kritarchy.” In the U.K., the British Supreme Court has usurped the monarchy as the font of law in a decision blatantly intended to prevent Brexit. Across Europe, judges simply overrule elected officials and formulate immigration policies. The illusions most Westerners have about their “free” political systems can no longer be maintained and we must purge ourselves of fantasies if we want real change.

Many Americans thought they were getting real change when they elected Donald Trump president on a platform of immigration restriction. In the teeth of Ruling Class hysteria, it’s still hard to believe that he was actually elected.

Yet it almost didn’t matter. Judges have continuously overruled his policy decisions, seemingly out of spite. One was U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, who in 2017 overruled President Trump’s executive order which mandated a travel ban for people from certain countries [Boston Federal Court Puts Hold On Trump’s Travel, Refugee Ban, by Shanoon Dooling, WBUR, January 29, 2017].

Allison Burroughs is also the judge who upheld Harvard’s affirmative action policy earlier this week. Her rambling, flowery judgment declares that “it is somewhat axiomatic at this point that diversity of all sorts, including racial diversity, is an important aspect of education.” Beginning from this questionable “axiom,” she justifies policies that harm Asian-Americans and whites because of the “compelling interest” of achieving “diversity.”

The government’s “compelling interest” in achieving diversity has already been established by the Supreme Court. Programs, policies, and trainings to achieve “diversity” are now staples of American life. “Diversity” dominates our discourse. Yet there is nothing in our Constitution that mandates this–courts simply asserted it, and the political and academic systems obeyed.

Somehow, Judge Burroughs thinks allowing colleges to discriminate will ultimately lead to a racially neutral society. “The rich benefits that flow from that diversity will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race conscious admissions obsolete,” she writes. Yet why would that happen when affirmative action incentivizes non-white students to organize based on race? Rachel Dolezal and Elizabeth Warren didn’t pretend to be non-white because they wanted to be oppressed. They did it because they wanted the material, economic benefits that “flow from that diversity”—if you can claim the right caste membership.  

Judges have imposed other sweeping changes on our way of life. In 1994, California voters approved Proposition 187, which would have massively reduced (if not eliminated) illegal immigration into the once Golden State by eliminating taxpayer subsidies. A District Judge, Mariana Pfaelzer, threw out the law on the grounds that California was enacting its own immigration policy, a power that properly belongs to the federal government. Governor Gray Davis, directly working with the Mexican government, abandoned the appeal.  Since then, California has been dramatically transformed into what is essentially a Third World state. Its political culture and way of life was utterly transformed in defiance of its citizens’ wishes.

Today, California judges like Dolly Gee pronounce verdicts defying federal immigration policy, essentially reversing the arguments used to destroy Proposition 187. In theory, judges interpret law. In practice, judges are political actors like politicians. They simply use whatever arguments necessary to justify the end they want.

The same thing just took place in the United Kingdom. Its constitutional monarchy has just been quietly abolished without many people noting.  The Supreme Court ruled that Prime Minister Boris Johnson unlawfully suspended Parliament several weeks ago [Supreme Court: Suspending Parliament was unlawful, judges rule, BBC, September 24, 2019]. Yet technically, PM Johnson wasn’t the one who suspended Parliament; the Queen did. The Supreme Court is essentially claiming that it can overrule the Queen and that it, not the Crown, is the font of law [The Curious Remainer Coup, by Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, September 24, 2019]. In practice, this abolishes the unwritten British Constitution, which is why pro-Brexit MP’s like Jacob Rees Mogg claimed it was a “coup” [Jacob Rees Mogg attacks Supreme Court ‘coup’ in raging Cabinet phone call, by Nicola Bartlett, Daily Mirror, September 25, 2019].

Matthew Walther accurately notes:

Queen Elizabeth is head of state in name only, a kind of bejeweled notary public, and the prime minister, Boris Johnson, is merely the head of her government. His recent prorogation of Parliament in the hope of forcing a no-deal Brexit was declared null on Tuesday by the recently created Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, led by "Red" Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, with whom the British people are being told the buck ultimately stops.

This is lawless. Never in the history of the British Isles has the judiciary exercised any power over such decisions. The font of law is the monarch, who has given her assent to the prorogation upon the advice of her ministers. The Supreme Court's ruling is nonsensical on its face because it assumes a jurisdiction that it does not possess.

[Why Boris Johnson should be the next Oliver Cromwell, The Week, September 25, 2019]

Yet ultimately Johnson, Rees-Mogg, and others have simply accepted the decision.

This is the typical Anglo-American conservative attitude towards the courts; baffled rage that judges are simply asserting powers they do not possess, followed by meek acquiescence. Boris Johnson now finds himself negotiating with a European Union that has no interest in making a deal, meaning that the next few weeks will be consumed by utter chaos [E.U. rejects Boris Johnson’s Brexit proposal, raising prospect of chaotic break within weeks, by Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, October 3, 2019]

There are similar cases in Europe. In August, a judge ruled that “international law” requires Italy to accept hundreds of migrants. In Denmark, a judge mandated family reunification in some immigration cases, undermining the center-left government’s ability to control immigration [EU court rules against Denmark in remarriage immigration case, Reuters, July 10, 2019] In Hungary and Poland, attempts by nationalist governments to assert control over the judiciary have to led to efforts by the European Union to sanction them [Hungary optimistic over swift end to ‘absurd’ EU rule-of-law row, by Valerie Hopkins, Financial Times, September 29, 2019].

Who rules? Not the politicians, and certainly not the people. It seems judges and journalists do. Indeed, it’s the mistaken belief that we rule which allows this situation to continue.

Thus Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug)’s return to political writing comes at the perfect time. Yarvin is revealing (and dispelling) many cherished political illusions in a five-part series, the first installment of which was just published at The American Mind [The Clear Pill, Part 1 of 5: The Four Stroke Regime  , September 27, 2019]. “Public opinion is an effect, not a cause,” he declares. He argues that the “civic core,” identified as the permanent civil service and “civil society” [i.e. journalists, academia, philanthropic organizations, etc.] directs the “political core,” the people who supposedly are sovereign.

Ravin also accurately notes that the “commoners,” i.e. the suburban middle class, are constantly opposed by the alliance between the “gentry” and the “clients,” the “votebanks” who support them. This elite/client alliance against the middle class has also been recognized by the late Sam Francis and Angelo Codevilla.

Of course, more than any other issue, the issue that defines the split between the elite and the middle and working classes is immigration. Big Business wants cheap labor, Democrats want “votebanks” of reliable non-white supporters, nonprofits want more clients. The rest of us just want to keep our country.

Yarvin has not addressed, yet, the role of the judiciary. It’s becoming clear that popular sovereignty is a myth and we are ruled by an elite as impenetrable as that any that presided over the Holy Roman Empire. And in some ways, elected officials benefit from judicial rule. They can tap into grassroots anger over bad decisions while avoiding the responsibility of making new laws. The Founders did not anticipate this.

Currently, judges make law, journalists police the Narrative and manufacture opinion, and politicians, even supposed “authoritarians” like Trump, go along with it. Kritarchy may represent the real end stage of “liberal democracy.”

To change this, we need to abandon the pretense that we are free and recognize that we are ruled by an elite hostile to our interests. We need to delegitimize the institutions that keep us in this situation. We need to strip away the aura of sanctity that surrounds these judges who are arbitrarily deciding our country’s most important policies. Judges are politicians, just like journalists are activists.

The Democrats want to impeach President Trump. But instead, it’s about time Republicans at the federal and state levels start impeaching some judges.

If they don’t, then we should frankly admit the Constitution has failed—because one branch of government has achieved supremacy above all others.

In that case, I hope journalists can spare us the moralizing about “liberal democracy.” It’s long gone—if indeed it ever existed.