WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE? by Hugh Murray

     This week in Milwaukee the Milw. Public Schools is sponsoring a class on white male privilege.  If one completes it, he will receive college credit for the course.  The class will be held at the Unitarian Church on the East Side.  I went to one of the services at that same church over a decade ago, but believed that, because I am not a liberal, I would soon be in constant conflict if I joined.  I had been quite active in the Unitarian Church in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s, even teaching in the Sunday School.
     Although the theme of the class is white male privilege, and although I wrote an article "White Male Privilege: A Social Construct for Political Oppression," and although I reside in Milwaukee, no one attempted to contact me.  My article was published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1999, and has been on google's p 1 of p 2 of the subject ever since.  If you read my article, you will soon discover why I am not invited to this class, or to the many university conferences meant to prove that white men have a privilege based on their sex and race.
     Below is part of my article.  The full article may be read on line simply by googling "white male privilege." As education departments and the general academedia complex assumes that white male privilege exists, and  white men should be penalized as a consequence, I urge everyone to read the article in full.  Here it is in part:
      WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE? A SOCIAL

CONSTRUCT FOR POLITICAL OPPRESSION

Hugh Murray

     Each day in America, white males face government-sponsored discrimination. If in high school, the white male may be denied a chance to apply for special programs because he is not a preferred minority, or in some cases, a female. There are scholarships available, but many cannot be awarded to white males. In applying for university, admissions will admit “basically qualified” minorities, but reject better qualified whites. When applying for a job, the same type of discrimination occurs. If the teen finally succeeds in finding employment, special on-the-job training may be denied him in order to guarantee slots for minorities, even if they be lesser qualified, even if they have been on the job for a shorter time. At the firm, he may be subjected to the racial and sexual harassment rituals called “diversity training,” whereby he is supposed to confess guilt to crimes committed before his birth. Yet, at the same time, he must deny his own experience; he must utter not a word about the discrimination he has encountered because he is a white male. His is the discrimination that dare not speak its name; were he to mention it, he would immediately be labeled “racist,” disruptive, and a possible threat to the firm’s good graces with the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and its commissars in his employer’s personnel office. If he tires of such oppression, or if he is fired, or wins a lottery, or somehow scrapes together enough money to begin his own firm, he will be denied even the opportunity to bid on many government contracts simply because he is a white male—those contracts are set-aside for minority or female companies.

     And how is this discrimination justified by our courts, our media, our academia? First, it is ignored. When occasionally the issue surfaces, it is dismissed as an aberration. But on another level, liberals proclaim that in the name of “equal opportunity,” equal opportunity must be denied white males. Before her appointment as Chair of the Civil Rights Commission during President Clinton’s first term, Mary Francis Berry, a black woman, had announced that civil rights do not apply to whites.

     The way liberals interpret and enforce the law, equal opportunity and civil rights are granted to some but denied to others.  Moreover, discrimination against white men is to be encouraged because it is the discrimination to end discrimination; government takes race into account so in future we will not have to take race into account. Such is the sophistry of liberal Supreme Court Justices and Civil Rights bureaucrats! To our governmental, corporate, and academedic elite, the white man deserves to be discriminated against because he is privileged. How did this system come to prevail throughout America?

     It is clear that the answer cannot readily be found in the media, with its liberal bias on race. Just ponder how what I described above has been purposely avoided on the nightly TV news.

Sociological journals have so neglected white male victims of affirmative action that Frederick R. Lynch titled his book on the subject Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action.1   Historians have distorted the history of the civil rights movement so as to pretend that this racial discrimination IS civil rights.

     In monster movies of the 1950s, scientists combed the countryside with Geiger counters measuring radioactivity; today “civil rights” proponents investigate every institution in America with their “proportional” counters. If blacks, or women, or Asians, or “Native Americans,” or Hispanics do not have their proportional share of jobs, promotions, managers, scholarships, etc., there is an immediate outcry in the media of “racism”; the EEOC, Justice Department, and other agencies swoop in to punish culprits and set quotas under the euphemism “establishing goals and timetables.”

     To understand the incredible injustice of affirmative action, and the cover up of this injustice by the liberal elite, we must look more closely at this policy and the arguments presented to justify it.  How do liberals justify such discrimination? Their theory is based on a number of assumptions. First, all peoples are equally talented in all fields. Liberals modify the Jeffersonian “all men are created equal,” acknowledging differences in intelligence, athletic ability, character, between and among individuals.

     However, they assume that all large groups of people are equally talented in all fields. Women are just as intelligent, and given a chance to prove themselves, just as strong as men (though to maintain this some liberals will redefine strength to emphasize endurance or areas where women may outperform men.) Blacks have already proven themselves on the athletic fields, but given a fair chance, they can be seen as just as intelligent as whites (again, some liberals redefine intelligence to include emotional intelligence or artistic ability to emphasize areas wherein blacks may outperform whites). And so the assumption is made for all large groups—Hispanics, Asians, Amerindians, etc. If all groups are equally talented, then why are white men so dominant in business as CEOs, in government, and in academia? The reason is prejudice, past and present. Because blacks were enslaved, and then denied equal educational and other opportunities during the era of segregation, they could not rise to their proper place in government, medicine, business. Women, too, were oppressed, even being denied the right to vote for President until 1920, and denied equal rights in other areas until quite recently.

     And so with other groups. They lag behind in America today because of their history of oppression—racism, sexism, ethnocentrism. The beneficiaries of this oppression were and are white men. Today, the imperative of justice is to break the historic chain of injustice by ending the historic advantage inherited by white men.  Since all peoples are equal, it follows that in a just society, all peoples, equally talented in all fields, will each have their proportional share of lawyers, doctors, fire chiefs, criminals. But as this is clearly not the case in America today, the aim of justice is to strive for such in society. Thus, it is necessary, and fair, to give preferences to groups that have been excluded or underrepresented in various fields. So if a white teen has a higher score than a black teen from the same high school on an SAT for a scholarship, it is not really discrimination to deny the white that award and give it to the black. It only seems like discrimination; in reality, it is fair and just. 

     After all, why is the black teenager not performing as well as the white on the test? His father may be in jail; his mother on drugs; he may not have been encouraged enough toward academic pursuits. His cultural milieu is the heritage of slavery and segregation. The SAT test, far from measuring the intelligence or academic abilities of the two teens, merely measures the privileges inherited by the white. And so the SAT, the LSAT, the medical exams, nursing exams, teachers exams, and all other objective exams are objective only in highlighting the degree of prejudice experienced by blacks, women, and other minorities.

     Such “objective” exams are thus objectively racist and sexist.  Similarly, police and firefighters exams, even if minorities help construct the tests. Even drug exams are racist because it is natural that more oppressed minorities might be more prone to use illegal substances. Clearly then, seemingly color-blind objective exams are racist; sex-blind objective exams are sexist. The only test, the only exam that should be used is proportionality. Only when the same proportion of women and blacks and Hispanics do as well as whites on an exam is that examination truly free of immediate bias and the effects of past bias. The proportionality exam thus provides the test for discovering bias, the measure of discovering the degree of bias, and the method of overcoming such bias. The proportionality test is the test that tests all other tests. Thus, the white teen and his successor should be denied the scholarship until the black teen, and his successor, have a proportional number attending college, teaching in college, and as CEOs.

     This is the theory that underlies affirmative action (hereafter AA). For example, Barbara Bergmann, an economist, in her widely-publicized,  In Defense of Affirmative Action, presents her case. To her, AA is a matter of conscience, “planning and acting to end the absence of certain kinds of people . . . from certain jobs and schools.” The purposes of AA are to end discrimination, promote integration, and reduce poverty of minority groups. “The heart of an AA plan is its numerical hiring goals, based on an assessment of the availability of qualified minority people and women for each kind of job.” Bergmann acknowledges that AA programs “ do have quota-like aspects,” but she contends that this is the only method to get qualified women and minorities into jobs, for without AA they would be rejected.

     One of her points is that not only is AA necessary to redress the wrongs of slavery and segregation in the past, but that in today’s job market there is considerable racist and sexist discrimination proved by her charts showing continued racial and sexual segregation in employment. Furthermore, the wage gap continues to exist between white men and black men, white men and women.  Because “a majority of Americans desire to live in a country that is fair,”  the only method to overcome such discrimination is by continuing and intensifying affirmative action. Bergmann does consider alternatives to AA, such as a program based on economic need rather than race, but as most of the poor are whites, they might overwhelm such programs unless there were quotas and set-asides established for poor blacks. So Bergmann concludes, the present system is the best.

     Bergmann opens her book by commending President Clinton for his desire to choose a Cabinet “that looks like America,” shortly after his first election. But, which group was most overrepresented in the Cabinet by the end of Clinton’s first term? Is it the privileged white males, villains of Bergmann’s book and liberal ideology? Of the 14 members of his Cabinet in the summer and fall of 1996, eight were white men. As whites are about 76% of the national population, those eight white men and two white women compose approximately the “fair share” Bergmann would allot to whites. But white men are 57% of the Cabinet, far more than their 38% of the population. Again, just looking at the Cabinet, one can encounter white male privilege! Bergmann seems correct. But look closer. Four of those white males are Jewish. So white male gentiles, who compose about 37% of the population, form only 28% of the Cabinet—they are underrepresented. Yet, Jewish males, some 1% of the population, compose another 28% of the cabinet. And, because Jews are so vastly overrepresented, the underrepresented white male gentiles are branded by liberal Jews as the “privileged” group!

     Bergmann and the other liberals distort the picture of America through their misuse of statistics. Thus, gentile white males are called “overrepresented” and deemed worthy of being discriminated against, when they may indeed be underrepresented and, by the liberals’ own standards, “deserving of affirmative action.” But white male gentiles are denied any aid because liberals consciously ignore them in their statistics by including with them the overwhelming overrepresentation of Jews! Liberals seek to camouflage the overrepresentation of Jews by pointing the finger at alleged “white male privilege.” But what is true in Clinton’s Cabinet is true in medical schools and law schools and other elite areas. No wonder, Bergmann can declare, “we no longer have a ‘Jewish seat’ on the Supreme Court because it is no longer needed.”  Of course not! The reason: of the nine justices, two are now Jews. So representatives of 2% of the population compose 22% of the highest court of the land. Bergmann does not complain about this “unfair” proportion. (Since this article was published, Jews now have yet another seat on the Supreme Court, so that 2% of the population has 33% of the High Court.)  Similarly, when Mrs. Bergmann complains about so few women and minorities in the United States Senate as an illustration of discrimination, she neglects to mention Wisconsin, where both Senators are Jewish men. Thus, less than 1% of the state’s population provides 100% of its Senators. True, Bergmann might complain, but only because it is an all-male delegation. Then, consider California’s Senators—two female Jews. No complaint from Mrs. Bergmann. She is from the most privileged, the most over-represented group in America. Yet, she diverts attention by decrying the overrepresentation of white males, even declaring white male waiters in restaurants privileged, though they serve her!

     Mrs. Bergmann’s statistics are aimed at obfuscating and distorting. She seeks to portray all white men as privileged because some are overrepresented in profitable enterprises. And because of this “privilege,” preferences must be granted to all those who are not white men. But the group most overrepresented is NOT white men, it is Jews. Even economically, the gap between whites and blacks is NOT as great as that between Jews and gentiles.

     So, if Bergmann is accurate that the purpose of AA is to narrow the economic gap between blacks and whites, how much greater the necessity for AA on behalf of gentiles to narrow the ever wider economic gap between Jews and gentiles? If Bergmann were to reply that this is beyond the scope of the Civil Rights Act, she is wrong. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on religion as well as any based on race, sex, or ethnic origin. Bergmann, the EEOC, and the civil rights lobby all stress that the individual is less important than the statistical aggregate in exposing “discrimination”; that statistics are the method of revealing what is wrong in the work place, and, with, AA (quotas) goals, and timetables, providing the best means of overcoming the discrimination proved by the numbers. Then, by her own system of determining discrimination, it is clear that Jews are the most overrepresented group in the most lucrative positions in the nation. Furthermore, the average income of Jews is sufficiently higher than gentiles to exhibit a massive economic gap. Why does not Mrs. Bergmann include this among her statistics? After all, she is an economist.

     Bluntly, the proportional test, the liberals’ test of all tests, when applied to the religious clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, shows Jews to be the most privileged and oppressive people in America. The favorite test of liberals reveals white men to be less privileged than Jews. Why does not the New York Times, the EEOC, the television networks, report that statistic? The media is silent on Jewish privilege. But if the media began to expose “Jewish privilege” and demanded preferences for gentiles until they had received their “fair share” of important posts, there would be immediate denunciations of the media’s bigotry.

     However, the media and government are even more bigoted when they denounce white male privilege and demand preferences for women and minorities. Yet, few denounce this bigotry. 

     Either the liberals’ proportionality test is valid, in which case Jews are the most privileged and oppressive people in America, or the proportionality test is flawed, providing bizarre results, and should not be used to allege white male privilege. Nor should that test be used to undermine the SAT, the LSAT, the medical tests, the police exams.

     Concisely, here is the liberals’ dilemma—either white male privilege is a myth and AA, erected upon the myth, should be demolished; or, if white men are privileged, then Jews are even more so. And if, because of white male privilege, AA is essential to aid underrepresented minorities and women (the majority) until they have achieved their “fair share” (quota) of lucrative rewards in society, then because of Jewish privilege, all the more reason to institute AA to aid underrepresented gentiles (again, the majority) until they have achieved their “fair share” of lucrative rewards in society.

For the full article and the footnotes, you can read it on line by googling my name and “white male privilege.

Death by Liberalism

Dunn’s Done Well
A review of J. R. Dunn’s Death by Liberalism:
 The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies (New York: 2011)
Reviewed by Hugh Murray

            J. R. Dunn has written a wide-ranging indictment of liberalism, contending that it is murderous.  He notes that American liberals showed that malice is NOT necessary for democide (government-sponsored killing), just carelessness, arrogance, and ineptitude.  However, Dunn provides sufficient evidence to demonstrate that liberals are indeed motivated by malice, along with guilt/shame, anti-white racism.

            It is easier to view Dunn’s larger picture of liberalism by analyzing his final chapters first.  Dunn provides excellent quotations from environmentalists who have concluded that the main cause of the earth’s problems is over population.  Their solution is simple: depopulation.  So one environmentalist concludes that the problem is a “plague of people.”(p. 244)  We must systematically reduce the world’s population from 7 billion down to about 2 billion.  Objections?  One was disappointed because the AIDS epidemic had killed so few.   Another responded, “Who misses all those who died in the Second World War?...the 20 million executed by Stalin?...Hitler’s six million Jews?”(245)  Who indeed?  Surely such environmentalists reveal a malice toward 5 billion living humans and millions of the dead.  Dunn concludes that with such environmentalists “the human race has been downgraded to the status of universal pest.”(246) 

            It is not liberal “compassion,” but liberal malice that is its major modern attribute.  This can be illustrated by the liberal war against the generally harmless, effective DDT.  It is the best insecticide for exterminating disease-infecting mosquitoes.  After DDT was banned, about 500,000 Third Worlders died due to malaria.  Most would have lived had DDT killed the mosquitoes.  Instead, sick and dying humans who had been infected by mosquitoes caused decades of deadly “silent summers” in the Third World.  Blame the compassionate liberals for these mass deaths.  And in America today we experience the resurgence of the bed bug, a pest nearly wiped from our shores by earlier, effective use of DDT.  As bed bugs return, people suffer not only from bites, but possibly some revived epidemic because of the new bed bug infestations.

            The malice of the liberal government is displayed in other areas too.  For asthma sufferers, the best medication has been a small, light-weight inhaler that the afflicted may personally apply when necessary.  Because these inhalers contain a miniscule amount of fluorocarbons, the US Government demands their prohibition in order to prevent expansion of the ozone hole.  (The science that these inhalers affect the ozone hole is questionable, and even whether the hole simply waxes and wanes with the seasons.)  However, there is little question that denying asthmatics these inhalers will cause suffering and possibly deaths.  That a person who is suffocating and cannot breathe should be denied assistance from the inhaler is another example of liberal “compassion.”  I call it malice.  Malice and murder.

            In order to reduce reliance on oil during the shortage of the 1970s, the government encouraged and then required American automakers to produce smaller, lighter cars.  The policy did save gasoline, but for those involved in accidents, they paid with their lives.  The liberal government traded gas for lives.  President Obama now expands of this policy.  Ironically, some of the same crowd who shouted no lives for oil in wars in the Middle East, may be causing more American deaths by requiring fuel-efficient, lighter automobiles that can be deadly in accidents.  Unfortunately, in the US there is little discussion of this crash policy.

            Some types of asbestos are quite toxic, but most are not so dangerous.  Yet, the asbestos scare, and the hurried removal of the insulation from so many schools, offices, and public buildings probably left more asbestos in the vicinity and in the air to be inhaled.  Dunn believes it would have been safer, and less expensive, if most asbestos buildings had been left intact.

            Liberals are intent upon shoving America into a new Dark Age with the upcoming prohibition of incandescent light bulbs.  If one of the recommended mercury bulbs breaks, the instructions on the removal of the toxic mercury are so complex that television host Glenn Beck made a comedy routine by trying to follow their directions.  Meanwhile, America will pay higher prices for dimmer lights.

            Some liberal environmentalists, viewing humans as pests, responded by unleashing real pests upon us.  Bring back the grizzly bears, restore the coyotes, reintroduce the cougars, wolves, alligators, etc.  Encourage them to do what they naturally do.  And ignore the cries of angry people when they report the killing of their pet dogs or cats, the death of their infants, the mauling of their daughters.  Compassionate liberalism must not yield to such emotions.

            The liberals, including those like Republican Governor Rockefeller of New York, sought to close those “horrible” insane asylums.  Despite the romanticizing of the crazies in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the demonizing of Nurse Ratchet and those others who sought to restrict the mentally ill, the great liberal experiment of releasing the unstable has failed.  It is such a flop that many of the homeless (who even have no flop-houses) and many in prisons are simply the thousands of refugees who lost asylums when mental institutions closed.  Groups like the ACLU have prevented the sick from receiving mental treatment while unleashing and inflicting the crazies on to every public spot in urban America.  Life in America has become intolerable for the poor, honest, and sane who cannot afford to reside in gated communities and posh suburbs.  The poor must endure the loss of their parks, trains stations, and sidewalks, or share them with shouting crazies who may turn violent at any moment.  Meanwhile, the mentally sick suffer the loss of their space while they seek to survive in a hostile world.  No wonder, some of the sanest among them choose to go to jail.

            Dunn has a terrific chapter in simple English on the major problems of Britain’s National Health Service, Canada’s Medicare, and Australia’s Medicare.  His point is that the compassionate liberals who enacted Obamacare are leading us down the same unhealthy, socialist path.  For example, in the UK in 1948, at the onset of the NHS, Britain had 480,000 hospital beds and a staff of 350,000.  By 2008 there were only 160,000 beds and a staff of 1,368,000!  Will Obamacare work any better in the US?

            Dunn has chapters on other topics, like abortion, medically assisted suicides, and other topics, too.

            His weakest chapter is that on crime.  Dunn does mention race here and there, but he fails to understand race as the core reason that brought about America’s change in attitudes toward crime, criminals, and the right to defend oneself.

            First, in the early 1960s the newly expanded television news programs pictured a new type of criminal: the well-dressed, well-behaved individuals who openly defied certain laws they deemed wrong and immoral.  The lunch-counter sit-ins occurred almost daily somewhere and were seen on the nightly newscasts.  Sometimes cameras also presented scenes of those opposed  as they spat, cursed, yelled, and even beat the peaceful protestors.  True, the Montgomery bus boycott occurred earlier in the 1950s, but the story lacked emotion because there were no cameras when Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat.  Moreover, the pictures of bus stops where no one enters the bus are hardly exciting television.  The crowds screaming in Little Rock at the few Blacks who sought to integrate Central High in 1957 was riveting news fare, but the story came and went.  It was the sit-ins that sparked a nation-wide movement, and one in which most of the viewing public sympathized with the “criminals.”  Indeed, by the end of the 60s, the media had portrayed sheriffs of the South as sinister villains, criminals worse than those who had violated the law.

            Meanwhile, the non-violent protests at lunch-counters were followed in 1961 by non-violent Freedom Riders, and non-violent marchers, and children attempting to attend integrated schools.  Much of America was becoming more sympathetic to the “criminals,” and more critical of both the law and the law-enforcers.

            First, then, one had the change in the images of the “criminals,” and of law-enforcement, and indeed of the law itself.  In 1963 the large, non-violent March on Washington sought to pressure the government to pass civil rights legislation.  A few months later, following the shocking assassination of President Kennedy, pressure increased, and in July 1964 the Civil Rights Act was enacted, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission created to enforce it.  Equal opportunity was the name of the game.

            But it soon became clear; most Blacks were not equal to the task.  When objective standards were used, few Blacks could compete with whites for jobs, promotions, university admissions, or scholarships.  Many Blacks believed they were being discriminated against even after passage of the Civil Rights Act.  Their anger rose as riots raged.

            These race riots of the mid-to-late 1960s included sacking of stores, setting ablaze trash cans, autos, buildings.  It also meant beating whites or anyone who sought to thwart the mob.  Police now were targeted as “pigs,” and some were killed trying to keep order.  Government responded with blue-ribbon panels like the Kerner Commission, which blamed the violence – not on the rioters - but on “underlying factors” like insufficient numbers of Black police, insufficient numbers of Black reporters, and more generally, white racism.

            The elites, now fully aware that equal opportunity would not help that many Blacks move up, behind the scenes colluded with the EEOC, The media, and the courts to destroy the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by turning it on its head: Equal Opportunity now meant preferences for Blacks (and later, other pet groups) and the denial of Equal Opportunity of white men; no hiring for racial balance was now to mean hire for racial balance; and the CR Act that had banned quotas was now used to require quotas – only calling them goals and timetables, or later diversity.  While most Americans had accepted the notion of equal opportunity for all embedded in the CR Act, few were aware of the maneuvers behind the scenes, that were destroying this policy, and in an Orwellian manner, requiring the opposite of what the act proclaimed.(For more on this process, see my "White Male Privilege: A Social Construct for Political Oppression").  Republican President Nixon essentially made affirmative action and racial balance national policy.

            The underlying principle upon which the new policies were framed was that of proportionalism, racial balance, and quotas.  If Blacks did not have a certain percentage on the police force, it must be due to racism.  Testing, in which few Blacks could compete, had to be abandoned or so watered down that almost all taking the test could be declared “qualified,” and then the administrators would hire by quota among the “qualified.”  Similarly, physical testing, in which few women could compete to be firefighters, had to be abandoned or so watered down that almost all taking the test could be declared “qualified,” and then the administrators would hire by quota.  And this process extended throughout society.  The current fashionable term for this proportionalism is diversity.

            The notion of proportionalism, diversity, has been absorbed into the liberal idea of justice.  If Blacks did not have the same percentage in college as whites, the cause of the disparity must be racism.  If women were underrepresented in the sciences, it was due to sexism.  If Hispanics were underrepresented among bank CEO’s; racism.  Even today the media, using statistics of underrepresentation of this group or that, expose “racism” and “sexism” almost weekly.

            So why are Blacks so overrepresented in jails?  It must be racism.

            I worked in a court and people would come to my window.  I would ask, ”Why are you here.”  “Driving while Black” was the quick retort, shouted so all could hear.  Their response implied that the only reason they were in court was because of the racism of the patrolmen.  Some years ago liberals in New Jersey charged the state police with ticketing more Blacks than whites because of racism.  Statistics verified that a higher percentage of Blacks were issued tickets.  However, cameras were installed at many major traffic stops, and the photos showed a much higher percentage of the violators were dark-skinned.

            In Cincinnati and from time to time other areas reports surface of alleged racism in schools because the percentage of Blacks expelled, suspended, or reprimanded is higher than that of whites.  What if a higher percentage of Blacks are disruptive in schools?  Expel more innocent whites?  Lower the standards so fewer disruptive Blacks are expelled, thereby making classroom teaching impossible?  The courts have less interest in teaching quality than in avoiding charges of racism.  The government's chosen policy is evident by the fact that now many public schools have metal detectors.

            Though some Americans may oppose the death penalty on religious or ethical grounds, I doubt if this is the case for liberals.  They oppose it because most of the accused are Blacks.  Surely, a higher percentage of Blacks than whites are convicted of murder.  Dunn includes the 1972 decision of the US Supreme Court banning the death penalty as “cruel and inhuman” punishment.  (Note that all of the justices swear to uphold the Constitution of the US, and the Constitution itself prescribes the death penalty for certain crimes.  But to liberals, a Constitution can mean anything the justices decide it to mean.  Just like “equal opportunity” now means preferences for favored minorities and a majority, women, and discrimination against white men.)  The high court later permitted the death penalty, but only after many expenditures had been made by the prosecution.  In 1987 liberals sought to disrupt things again by claiming there was disparity in treatment of those who had murdered whites and those who had murdered Blacks.  This time, a slightly more conservative court rejected the liberals’ charge of racism by a slim 5-4 margin.  If murderers of Blacks (mainly Black) were to receive the death penalty at the same rate as those who murder whites, then death rows would be overwhelmingly Black, and new charges of racism about the penalty would ensue.

            While Dunn places much of the change in attitudes toward crime in the 1960s on the theories of sociologists, social workers, and Karl Menninger, in stressing treatment and rehabilitation for the criminal, I would suggest the theories were less important than the media’s changing depiction of race in the 1960s

            1) Some “criminals” like Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights activists were really heroes; conversely, come sheriffs and police were sinister, brutal racists.

            2) Urban ghettos were like colonies with few rights.  The white police were like an occupation army.  Blacks had a right to seek power in their communities (like Gold Coast, Nigeria, and other African colonies were doing in the 1950s and 60s in achieving independence from Britain.)  Making the comparisons, Blacks had a right to seek power in their American communities, even if it meant destroying white-owned shops, firing white autos, and firing on white police and civilians.  Therefore, riots were justified, and crimes (riots in slow motion) were justified also.

            3) Because the crimes were justified, if caught, and if prosecuted (two big ifs, after the Miranda and similar help-the-perpetrator rulings), criminals should received the lightest possible sentencing.  Prisons lost population, while those in community service, on parole, and in rehab of some sort rose.  Of course, crime was skyrocketing.

            Dunn is good at showing the change of view as to the “victim.”  The violent criminal (if Black) was now seen as a victim: of society, poverty, racism.  Meanwhile the victim of that criminal (often white) was dismissed as an oppressor, deserving of the broken arm, the cut eye, or whatever damage the perpetrator had inflected.  It became ever more dangerous to be around Blacks.  If whites lived near them and moved out, they were judged racists, fleeing to the suburbs.  If too poor to move, and continued to reside near Blacks, they might be beaten, burgled, and some in the family killed.  (See some of Jack Cashill’s writings about growing up in his integrated neighborhood in Newark, and what happened in the late 1960s.  But he is a poor white, so the elites of both parties can dismiss his approach.  Of course, the liberals have made Newark what it is today – and Detroit, and …)

            Dunn asserts that Blacks suffered most from the pro-crime policies of the liberals.  I dispute that.  True, poor and honest Blacks left in ghettos dominated by drug-dealing gangs did duffer.  But white refugees from liberal Urbania, who earned little and had suffered physical or mental scars, would receive no special preferences, no special scholarships, for minorities, no affirmative action admissions, no pro-minority jobs, no…no.

            Dunn estimates that the cost of liberal crime reforms is 265,000 deaths.  I suspect the figure is higher.  I also urge readers to look again at Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions, especially his chapters on crime.  Also check the internet work, The Color of Crime to evaluate the role of race and crime.  I suspect if Dunn had stressed the importance of race, his book might not have been published by an imprint of Harper Collins.

            Despite my quibbling here and there, Dunn has written a book with a wide scope.  It is easy to read, and provokes thought.  It should be widely read.