House of Eratosthenes

Ever notice the racial tensions between blacks & whites are consistently brought up to bolster ideas that have nothing whatsoever to do with black/white racial tension…and that, seemingly without exception, are spectacularly bad ideas?

I was noticing that when, fresh off watching this video from over at Rick’s place (which you can really watch just about anywhere by now) concerning Barack Obama’s race-baiting whitey-hating spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright…

…I stumbled into an article about this guy, Van Jones, who is considerably sweeter. At least on the surface. But like Jeremiah Wright, he seeks to inflame racial tensions within an issue that has nothing to do with race. At all.

You know, I don’t think that’s very sweet. At all.

“Try this experiment. Go knock on someone’s door in West Oakland, Watts or Newark and say: ‘We gotta really big problem!’ They say: ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta really big problem!’ ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but we gotta save the polar bears!’ ”

Mr. Jones then just shakes his head. You try that approach on people without jobs who live in neighborhoods where they’ve got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier, you’re going to get nowhere — and without bringing America’s underclass into the green movement, it’s going to get nowhere, too.

“We need a different on-ramp” for people from disadvantaged communities, says Mr. Jones. “The leaders of the climate establishment came in through one door and now they want to squeeze everyone through that same door. It’s not going to work. If we want to have a broad-based environmental movement, we need more entry points.”

Mr. Jones, who heads the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, which helps kids avoid jail and secure jobs, has an idea how to change that — a “green-collar” jobs program that focuses on underprivileged youth. I would not underestimate him. Mr. Jones, age 39 and a Yale Law School grad, exudes enough energy to light a few buildings on his own.

One thing spurring him in this project, he explained, was the way that the big oil companies bought ads in black-owned newspapers in California in 2006 showing an African-American woman filling her gas tank with a horrified look at the pump price. The ads were used to help bring out black votes to defeat Proposition 87. That ballot initiative proposed a tax on oil companies drilling in California, the money from which would have gone to develop alternative energy projects. The oil companies tried to scare African-Americans into thinking that the tax on the companies would be passed on at the pump.

I know it sounds very positive and productive to “[help] kids avoid jail and secure jobs,” and maybe I’m cynical but that just raises enormous red flags with me. I don’t know a lot about Van Jones, but one thing I know for certain is that he isn’t cool with the idea of helping a kid avoid jail and secure a job…and then go on to evaluate, independently and free from coercion, whether or not the polar bears need saving. He’s just used an elaborate salesmanship technique to connect environmental-socialist causes with skin color. He’s got a big beef with the fact that the “big oil companies” managed to point out that gas taxes are passed on to the consumer — and when you think on it awhile, how in the world could they not be? — and the argument was found to have some merit. By the wrong color of people.

Van Jones, one may soundly conclude, thinks that if your skin is dark you are his. Something is terribly wrong if you, a black person, decide the polar bear thing in a way different from the way he would…if you decide the gas tax in a way different from the way he would…and what else?

I don’t see a lot of difference between Jones and Wright. One’s slicker than the other; that’s all. From where I sit, the oppression of Jesus by the Romans doesn’t have any more to do with a racial divide, than saving polar bears. This is a problem. This is a sickness. There are reasons why it’s an exploding epidemic, but the fact remains it’s an exploding epidemic and we need to treat it.

Now that we’re exploring issues of racial divide all over again, I think 2008 would be a great year to demand out of anyone with an idea they think is worth arguing, at least, an idea unrelated to blacks-n-whites: Let’s see if you can make it sound convincing while leaving skin color out of it. If you can, maybe it’s something worth considering. If not, then piss off.

If it’s a wonderful idea, you can make it sound wonderful without injecting the most emotional issue of modern times into your presentation of it.

But I know that we’re not likely to demand this, and so we’re about to be buried in this nonsense. For years, if Obama is actually elected, which seems a sure thing now. Socialized medicine, socialized education, gun control, higher taxes, giving more money to union thugs and tort lawyers, appeasing terrorists — none of which have a damn thing to do with black-versus-white, but all of which will be presented that way so we can drum up popular support for the very worst ideas possible.

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Race NonsenseFriday, March 14th, 2008

Race Nonsense
Friday, March 14th, 2008