Reason Magazine
- reason.com
- reason.tv
- reason.org
- Donate
- Site Search:
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSSGet Reason E-mail Updates!
Manage your Reason e-mail list subscriptionsadvertisements
I'sa Sho 'Nuff Like Me Some Weekly Standard
Readers of The Weekly Standard will be familiar with its back-of-the-book "Parody" page (always prominently so labeled so you know it's meant to be funny), which in their October 30 issue consisted of "Kids' Letters to Barack Obama." My eyes bulged ever so slightly at this knee-slapper:
Dear Senator Obama,
I'm a student here at Harvard and my mama tells me there ain't no way a person of color be treated fair in Amerika even if they go to Harvard and [stuff]. You cool with that?
Franklin
Cambridge, Massachusetts
FYI to Bill Kristol: Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense is that very few Harvard students of any race speak and write like minstrel-show extras.
brian423|11.4.06 @ 3:13PM|#
Watching Love at
First Bite the other night, I was reminded how transitory
public opinion on ethnic humor is. As a non-subscriber to the
Weekly Standard, I can't be sure whether that bit of ebonics is
racist in context.
Why is this post anonymous?
Know-it-all|11.4.06 @ 3:55PM|#
Haven't these guys learnt anything from from the furor over that ad with the Playboy woman and Rep. Ford? Just more ammo for the Democrats. Get ready for some major backpedaling once the mainstream media gets a hold of this.
|11.4.06 @ 4:18PM|#
This, of course, also presupposes Harvard students of any race know how to write letters.
|11.4.06 @ 5:18PM|#
Haven't these guys learnt anything from from the furor over
that ad with the Playboy woman and Rep. Ford? Just more ammo for
the Democrats. Get ready for some major backpedaling once the
mainstream media gets a hold of this.
I hope they do. Racial quotas/affirmitive action is one place where
the public is with us and anything that can bring such atrocities
into the public sphere is good.
|11.4.06 @ 6:06PM|#
FYI to Bill Kristol: Affirmative action notwithstanding, my
sense is that very few Harvard students of any race speak and write
like minstrel-show extras.
Jebbus... they aren't even trying to hide it anymore, aren't
they?
|11.4.06 @ 6:10PM|#
Interesting how Jane Hamsher's photoshop of Joe Lieberman in
blackface wasn't quite as post-worthy.
I'm just sayin', dog.
|11.4.06 @ 6:48PM|#
Seriously! The Standard's editors need to brush up on
their ebonics, Clearly that should have been ....I be
a-studyin' at Harvard an' my mama tell me dat dey ain't no way no
colored folk be treated fare in Amerika eben if dey goze two
Harvard and [stuff*]. Dat cool wid yew?
It is good to see that Charlie Brown's Negro pal is doing
well.
Kevin
* Where "stuff" stands in for the execretory expletive.
|11.4.06 @ 7:54PM|#
Katherine M-G worked there. Lets ask her. In addition to advocating mass global war are they racist twats as well Katherine?
|11.4.06 @ 8:31PM|#
The Tar Baby of political correctness always makes me paranoid.
Been there. Done that.
I just want to say I'm looking forward to the full analysis of the
Ford-Corker contest in Tennessee. I hope someone will be able to
isolate the racism strain. It won't be easy, but it will definitely
be there. (Tennessee was where I was born and raised.)
And I think we have recently done a whole lot worse than Osama bin
Obama as a President of the USA.
Finally, did I mention I happened to spend the night at the home of
the official Uncle Remus of Georgia down in Eatonton, many years
ago? (You are correct. He was white, but his heart was in the right
place.)
|11.4.06 @ 9:58PM|#
A. Yalie Bonesman III writes:"This, of course, also presupposes
Harvard students of any race know how to write letters."
What a cruel and democratic notion - were we to dismiss our social
secretaries, their wives and children might have to seek domestic
service in New Haven
|11.4.06 @ 11:37PM|#
"FYI to Bill Kristol: Affirmative action notwithstanding, my
sense is that very few Harvard students of any race speak and write
like minstrel-show extras."
That is the whole point. Barack O. is a black (sort of) Harvard Law
Grad who supports Affirmative Action. The joke is that minority
students at Harvard are ignorant and need special treatment.
|11.4.06 @ 11:40PM|#
sam_h | November 4, 2006, 11:37pm | #
"FYI to Bill Kristol: Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense
is that very few Harvard students of any race speak and write like
minstrel-show extras."
That is the whole point. Barack O. is a black (sort of) Harvard Law
Grad who supports Affirmative Action. The joke is that minority
students at Harvard are ignorant and need special treatment when
they obviously are pretty capable.
|11.5.06 @ 12:30AM|#
Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense is that very
few Harvard students of any race speak and write like minstrel-show
extras.
And if any do, I certainly wouldn't let them write my books for
me!
|11.5.06 @ 12:32AM|#
Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense is that very
few Harvard students of any race speak and write like minstrel-show
extras.
And if any do, I certainly wouldn't let them write my books for
me!
|11.5.06 @ 12:33AM|#
Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense is that very
few Harvard students of any race speak and write like minstrel-show
extras.
And if any do, I certainly wouldn't let them write my books for
me!
|11.5.06 @ 4:35AM|#
Dear Weekly Standard,
Why are liberals able to paint conservatives as racists, despite
the fact that the civil rights era ended 4 decades ago?
See letter from Franklin of Cambridge.
Eagle|11.5.06 @ 10:23AM|#
Have any of you actually spent any time around a college campus recently? As an undergrad at Hopkins, I hear ebonics and broken english all the time; and if the writing some of them turn in to the campus paper is any indication of their academic work, it's amazing any of them made it into college at all, let alone Hopkins.
D.A. Ridgely|11.5.06 @ 10:46AM|#
Eagle, that would be "broken English." And when are you guys going to start putting the apostrophe in "John's"? (N.B. - that's a joke.)
|11.5.06 @ 12:08PM|#
Eagle -- What the [heck] does Hopkins have to do with it? We're
talking about Harvard here!
(heh heh -- couldn't resist -- I went to both JHU and HLS,
actually, so it's ok for me to make a joke like
that)
|11.5.06 @ 12:38PM|#
"We're talking about Harvard here!"
Harvard? Harvard? You mean that other school in Cambridge
where students who aren't any good at math and science go?
thoreau|11.5.06 @ 3:18PM|#
Q: Where do you go for grad school if you're a physicist
couldn't get into UC Santa Barbara?
A: Harvard.
Yes, Santa Barbara really is that good.
thoreau|11.5.06 @ 3:58PM|#
blah. Bragging about alma mater and I can't even use proper
grammar.
Correction:
Q: Where do you go for grad school if you're a physicist
who couldn't get into UC Santa Barbara?
D.A. Ridgely|11.5.06 @ 4:38PM|#
Gosh, thoreau, and here I thought the bad grammar was just further evidence you were Harvard material, at least by Weekly Standards' lights!
|11.5.06 @ 7:21PM|#
sam h,
"That is the whole point. Barack O. is a black (sort of) Harvard
Law Grad who supports Affirmative Action. The joke is that minority
students at Harvard are ignorant and need special treatment when
they obviously are pretty capable."
I wish the Weekly Standard was making a joke at the expense of
people who oppose affirmative action and look down on black college
students.
Sadly, that magazine has been quite vocal in its opposition to
affirmative action, and articles appearing therein have included
statements about the incapacity of "affirmative action students" to
succeed academically and professionally on a number of
occasions.
|11.5.06 @ 7:46PM|#
Why do opponents of affirmative action rarely, if ever, bring up student athletes and legacy admits. In my experience, affirmative action candidates tend to be better qualified on average than these two groups.
D.A. Ridgely|11.5.06 @ 8:08PM|#
Mo:
First, it isn't true that affirmative action foes rarely, if ever,
make the comparison. I used to make it all the time, opposing
both.
Over the years, however, I've decided that student athlete
admissions are like certain other preferences for what I consider
legitimate student body diversity concerns (e.g., musicians). If
the school wants a winning team or a good orchestra, well, that's
the price it pays. By contrast, giving the black upper-middle class
son of a suburban lawyer preference over the white working class
daughter of a rural mechanic, assuming roughly comparable academic
qualifications, makes no sense to me.
My sense is that most state schools do not give more than
tie-breaker preference to legacies, if that. Private schools,
dependent upon greater private financial support, admit legacies
for that reason.
thoreau|11.5.06 @ 8:33PM|#
By contrast, giving the black upper-middle class son of a
suburban lawyer preference over the white working class daughter of
a rural mechanic, assuming roughly comparable academic
qualifications, makes no sense to me.
It doesn't make much sense to me either, but I've never seen any
numbers to indicate just how common or rare such preferences are.
Maybe I've just been obtuse, and the numbers are frequently cited,
or maybe it's one of those things that nobody wants to talk about
because it would mean admitting just how low the stakes are in this
highly emotional debate.
(And yes, I know, a meaningful presentation of statistics wouldn't
give us something simplistic like "Melissa Jones, daughter of a
white janitor, was denied admission in favor of Michael Johnson,
son of a black surgeon, even though Jones had higher test scores."
But we could look at the demographics of the admitted students with
the lowest grades or test scores or whatever, and compare with the
demographics of the rejected students with the highest grades or
test scores or whatever.)
|11.5.06 @ 8:40PM|#
Just to demonstrate how "with it" the Weakly Standard
folks are, I'm pretty sure that "Franklin" hasn't been a legitimate
(as if there were such a thing) stereotypical African American name
for at least 2 or 3 decades.
What a bunch of tin-eared dinguses. They might as well have used
"Roosevelt" or "Kareem."
It's like the jewish kid in Porky's said, "You know, you're too
stupid to even be a good bigot!"
|11.5.06 @ 9:47PM|#
D.A.
Maybe you've made those arguments, but all the hand-wringing over
the Michigan case never said anything about legacy admissions. For
all the pissing and moaning over academic standards (I agree
athletics and musicians are a different beast), the status of
legacy admits are primarily brought up by liberal supporters of AA,
not by AA opponents.
I've been working with the head of my (private) university's
strategy and they have multiple baskets set aside. They have
diversity slots, socio-economic slots, legacy slots, athletes,
etc.
And while it may seem silly to make racial diversity a factor, when
the minorities are likely to come from the same socio-economic
strata, my experience the past couple of years in a lily white
university environment has made the value of a diverse student body
readily apparent to me. If anything, being in school with rich
black kids may teach some of the more sheltered kids that you don't
need to clutch your purse everytime you see a black person.
|11.5.06 @ 10:48PM|#
There's a big difference between preferences based on athletic ability or "legacy status" and preferences based on race -- namely, it's illegal to discriminate against someone because of his/her race. When colleges use affirmative action to prefer applicants of one race, the colleges are by definition discriminating against other applicants because they are not members of the preferred race.
dhex|11.6.06 @ 12:52AM|#
somewhat unrelated, but i found out the other day that some of the CUNY schools have a category for italian-american still on the roles when considering extra information for student admission.
|11.6.06 @ 1:59AM|#
Isn't Franklin the token black character in the Peanuts
comic strip?
Yes, but honestly, the first Franklin that came to my mind was Gob
Bluth's puppet.
|11.6.06 @ 2:03AM|#
Bill Kristol,
You're an idiot, and it's only the fact that you're actually not a
conservative that keeps you from being an embarrassment to
us.
As penance, promise you won't propagandize for any more wars that
are needless and aren't in America's interest.
|11.6.06 @ 5:49AM|#
Sorry, Rick. Irving Kristol is a neo-con. As a "neo-con
narrowback", Bill is just a plain vanilla conservative. He's a
legacy, if you will. That he's long been lost to the dark side of
"national greatness conservatism", invoking TR as easily as Ronald
Reagan, even as he should be admitting that he actually follows the
statist interventionism of that dolt, Woodrow Wilson, hasn't been
in doubt for a long time.
Still more proof that "conservative" and "enemy of big government"
have well and truly diverged.
Kevin
D.A. Ridgely|11.6.06 @ 8:48AM|#
Mo writes: If anything, being in school with rich black kids
may teach some of the more sheltered kids that you don't need to
clutch your purse everytime you see a black person.
A valid observation. My sense, though, is that with fairly few
exceptions, the impact of the elimination of affirmative action
would not result at this point in much of a shift in the actual
numbers of African American students at most universities. Instead,
those student given AA preference would be attending
different schools. Further, while the extent of racial
group self-segregation isn't as bad as it was ten or twenty years
ago, it is still quite high and the supposed benefits from a more
racially diverse college community are diminished as a
result.
thoreau: My guess is that viewed as a macro phenomenon the stakes
probably are not very large. That's little comfort, however, to the
individual on the wrong end of the racial preference.
|11.6.06 @ 10:20AM|#
I wish the Weekly Standard was making a joke at the expense of
people who oppose affirmative action and look down on black college
students.
"Sadly, that magazine has been quite vocal in its opposition to
affirmative action," - joe
Because anyone who thinks affirmative action is simply reverse
racism is just "unenlightened" in the Archie Bunker sense...
"and articles appearing therein have included statements about the
incapacity of 'affirmative action students' to succeed academically
and professionally on a number of occasions." - joe
If you're battling it out with other people for the bottom slots of
admission, it really wouldn't surprise me if affirmative action
students fall at the bottom of the pile. How this would be an
argument for or against affirmative action escapes me entirely.
Sounds like a red herring of an argument, at best.
"Why do opponents of affirmative action rarely, if ever, bring up
student athletes and legacy admits. In my experience, affirmative
action candidates tend to be better qualified on average than these
two groups." - Mo
That's probably the best question I've heard of. Like you, I've
never heard anyone ask this question - despite a couple of claims
on this thread to the contrary.
I also wonder why the student's financial status (and that of the
parents) doesn't deserve more weight in an affirmative action
admissions process. Surely, if the idea is to allow people "trapped
in a cycle of poverty" an opportunity to break out of it and become
a heart-warming success story that Will Smith can star in this
would be a no-brainer!
I've got no real beef with affirmative action - other than the
burden it places on universities - because of all the issues in the
U.S. this has to affect the least number of people I can think
of.
R C Dean|11.6.06 @ 11:29AM|#
Why do opponents of affirmative action rarely, if ever,
bring up student athletes and legacy admits.
Probably because admitting people because they have athletic skills
or rich parents has nothing to do with the wisdom or propriety of
admitting people because they belong to a certain race.
|11.6.06 @ 12:58PM|#
Kevin:
Sorry, Rick. Irving Kristol is a neo-con. As a "neo-con
narrowback", Bill is just a plain vanilla conservative
No way. Irving's generation of neocons were much more
pro-individual liberty than the current generation. Bill Kristol
self describes as a "neocon" and advocates a hyper-interventionist
foreign policy, especially where he judges that it will benefit the
Israeli state. That this is his, and many other neo-cons' main
focus, and that Kristol isn't a real conservative at all is
illustrated by Kristol's quote:
"I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan ...
If you read the last few issues of the Weekly Standard, it has as
much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional
conservatives. If we have to make common cause with the more
hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me,
too."
http://acuf.org/issues/issue21/040929news.asp
If there is justice, Kristol and the neocon gang will be purged
from the conservative movement cuz they so often support and
administer larger government. They are not conservatives.
ChrisO|11.6.06 @ 1:42PM|#
That 'joke' in the Standard is about the whitest jive I've ever seen. I might actually pay to see Bill Kristol attempt Ebonics, though.
|11.6.06 @ 5:54PM|#
Rick:
OK. It seems I'm a couple of years out-of-date on Kristol
fils' self-taxonomy. He used to regularly object to the
neo-con tag when I watched him babble on ABC's This Week
program, which I watch less and less these days.
As for whether he and the other warhawk neo-cons get read out of
the conservative movement, I could care less. Being a conservative
meant something to me once, when I still thought there might be
something important to conserve. Ever since I took up the
libertarian cause I've been concerned about restoring such
liberties as we have lost, and establishing the ones we've never
had. It isn't enough to defend the tattered shreds of those that
have been left to us. That it would be Kristol and his ilk, strange
fruit of a branch grafted onto the tree of conservatism from the
rootstock of Karl Marx by way of Trotsky and assorted other lefty
heretics, who would take it upon themselves to read the paleo-cons
out of their own movement does strike me as the ultimate dystopic
Bircher fantasy, though.
Kevin
|11.6.06 @ 6:41PM|#
Kevin:
...Kristol and his ilk, strange fruit of a branch grafted onto
the tree of conservatism from the rootstock of Karl Marx by way of
Trotsky.
Nice!
25 years ago, It was easy for me to use "libertarian" and
"conservative" interchangeably. It's harder now. and I have become
a hyphenated "libertarian-conservative". Of course I'm really the
former, hoping that increasing numbers of the latter will join
me.
Ever since I took up the libertarian cause I've been concerned
about restoring such liberties as we have lost, and establishing
the ones we've never had.
To borrow a slogan from the left; I'm with you in the struggle.
|11.7.06 @ 11:00AM|#
Affirmative action notwithstanding, my sense is that very
few Harvard students of any race speak and write like minstrel-show
extras.
That's only because Cornel West didn't get his way.
Site comments/questions:
Media Inquiries and Reprint Permissions:
(310) 367-6109
Editorial & Production Offices:
3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd.
Suite 400
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 391-2245