Some of the confusion in thinking about matters of race stems from the ambiguity in the terms that we use. I am going to take a stab at suggesting operational definitions for a couple terms in our discussion of race. Good analytical thinking requires that we do not confuse one behavioral phenomenon with another.
Let&#8217;s start with &#8220;discrimination.&#8221; Discrimination is the act of choice, and choice is a necessary fact of life. Our lives are spent discriminating for or against different activities and people. Some people shop at Wegmans and thus discriminate against Food Giant. Some students discriminate against George Mason University in favor of attending Temple University. Many people racially discriminate by marrying within their own race rather than seeking partners of other races. People discriminate in many ways in forming contracts and other interrelationships. In each case, one person is benefitted by discrimination and another is harmed or has reduced opportunities.
What about prejudice? Prejudice is a useful term that is often misused. Its Latin root is praejudicium, meaning &#8220;an opinion or judgment formed &#8230; without due examination.&#8221; Thus, we might define a prejudicial act as one where a decision is made on the basis of incomplete information. The decision-maker might use stereotypes as a substitute for more complete information.
We find that in a world of costly information, people seek to economize on information costs. Here is a simple yet intuitively appealing example. You are headed off to work. When you open your front door and step out, you are greeted by a full-grown tiger. The uninteresting prediction is that the average person would endeavor to leave the area in great dispatch. Why he would do so is more interesting. It is unlikely that the person&#8217;s fear and decision to seek safety is based on any detailed information held about that particular tiger. More likely, his decision to seek safety is based on tiger folklore, what he has been told about tigers or how he has seen other tigers behave. He prejudges that tiger. He makes his decision based on incomplete information. He uses tiger stereotypes.
If a person did not prejudge that tiger, then he would endeavor to seek more information prior to his decision to run. He might attempt to pet the tiger, talk to him and seek safety only if the tiger responded in a menacing fashion. The average person probably would not choose that strategy. He would surmise that the expected cost of getting more information about the tiger is greater than the expected benefit. He would probably conclude, &#8220;All I need to know is he&#8217;s a tiger, and he&#8217;s probably like the rest of them.&#8221; By observing this person&#8217;s behavior, there&#8217;s no way one can say unambiguously whether the person likes or dislikes tigers.
Similarly, the cheaply observed fact that an individual is short, an amputee, black, or a woman provides what some people deem sufficient information for decision-making or predicting the presence of some other attribute that&#8217;s more costly to observe. For example, if asked to identify individuals with doctorate degrees in physics only by observing race and sex, most of us would assign a higher probability that white or Asian men would have such degrees than black men or women. Suppose you are a police chief and you&#8217;re trying to find the culprits breaking into cars, would you spend any of your resources investigating people in senior citizen homes? Using an observable attribute as a proxy for an unobservable or costly-to-observe attribute lies at the heart of decision theory.
Lastly, is there a moral dimension to discrimination and prejudice? Should one be indifferent about whether he attends Temple University or George Mason University and thus makes his decision by flipping a coin? Is it more righteous to use the same technique when choosing to marry within or outside his race? Is it morally superior to be indifferent with respect to race in marriage, employment and socializing? Can one make a rigorous moral case for government coercion to determine whether one attends Temple University or George Mason University, marries outside of his race, or is indifferent about the racial characteristics of whom he employs?
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
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.

Tiger

WILLIAMS: Discrimination And Prejudice

Discrimination

Racism

You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going to have your abdominal pain.
The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, &#8220;White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.&#8221; In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.
&#8220;Below basic&#8221; is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night&#8217;s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.
In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University&#8217;s Center on Education and the Workforce &#8220;African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.&#8221; It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor&#8217;s degree in art or psychology and social work.
James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled &#8220;Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.&#8221; Agresti writes: &#8220;Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 53% of the 16,000 murder victims.&#8221; The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018. For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats.
According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, &#8220;The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.&#8221;
The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today&#8217;s discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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.

Broken pencil

WILLIAMS: Correct Diagnostics Needed

Education

The academic achievement gap between black and white students has proven resistant to most educational policy changes. Some say that educational expenditures explain the gap, but is that true? Look at educational per pupil expenditures: Baltimore city ranks fifth in the U.S. for per pupil spending at $15,793. The Detroit Public Schools Community District spends more per student than all but eight of the nation&#8217;s 100 largest school districts, or $14,259. New York City spends $26,588 per pupil, and Washington, D.C., spends $21,974. There appears to be little relationship between educational expenditures and academic achievement.
The Nation&#8217;s Report Card for 2017 showed the following reading scores for fourth-graders in New York state&#8217;s public schools: Thirty-two percent scored below basic, with 32% scoring basic, 27% scoring proficient and 9% scoring advanced. When it came to black fourth-graders in the state, 19% scored proficient, and 3% scored advanced.
But what about the performance of students in charter schools? In his recent book, &#8220;Charter Schools and Their Enemies,&#8221; Dr. Thomas Sowell compared 2016-17 scores on the New York state ELA test. Thirty percent of Brooklyn&#8217;s William Floyd public elementary school third-graders scored well below proficient in English and language arts, but at a Success Academy charter school in the same building, only one did. At William Floyd, 36% of students were below proficient, with 24% being proficient and none being above proficient. By contrast, at Success Academy, only 17% of third-graders were below proficient, with 70% being proficient and 11% being above proficient. Among Success Academy&#8217;s fourth-graders, 51% and 43%, respectively, scored proficient and above proficient, while their William Floyd counterparts scored 23% and 6%, respectively. It&#8217;s worthwhile stressing that William Floyd and this Success Academy location have the same address.
Similar high performance can be found in the Manhattan charter school KIPP Infinity Middle School among its sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders when compared with that of students at New Design Middle School, a public school at the same location. Liberals believe integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Public charter schools such as those mentioned above belie that vision. Sowell points out that only 39% of students in all New York state schools who were recently tested scored at the &#8220;proficient&#8221; level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy tested proficient. Blacks and Hispanics constitute 90% of the students in that Success Academy.
In April 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that 57% of black and 54% of Hispanic charter school students passed the statewide ELA compared to 52% of white students statewide. On the state math test, 59% of black students and 57% of Hispanics at city charter schools passed as opposed to 54% of white students statewide.
There&#8217;s little question that many charter schools provide superior educational opportunities for black youngsters. Here is my question: Why do black people, as a group, accept the attack on charter schools?
John Liu, a Democratic state senator from Queens, said New York City should &#8220;get rid of&#8221; large charter school networks. State Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, said, &#8220;I&#8217;m not interested in privatizing our public schools.&#8221; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explicitly campaigned against charter schools saying: &#8220;I am angry about the privatizers. I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize a precious thing we need — public education.” The New York Times article went on to say, &#8220;Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city&#8217;s charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots.&#8221;
One would think that black politicians and civil rights organizations would support charter schools. The success of many charter schools is unwelcome news to traditional public school officials and teachers&#8217; unions. To the contrary, they want to saddle charter schools with the same procedures that make so many public schools a failure. For example, the NAACP demands that charter schools &#8220;cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate.&#8221; It wants charter schools to &#8220;cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.&#8221; Most importantly, it wants charter schools to come under the control of teachers&#8217; unions.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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.

Girl with library book

WILLIAMS: Should Blacks Support Destruction Of Charter Schools?

Charter Schools

I was a teenager, growing up in the Richard Allen housing project of North Philadelphia, when Emmett Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, and his brutalized, unrecognizable body later recovered from the Tallahatchie River. From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Roughly 73%, or 3,446, were black people, and 27%, or 1,297, were white people. Many whites were lynched because they were Republicans who supported their fellow black citizens and opposed the lawless act of lynching. Tuskegee University has the best documentation of lynching. It records an 1892 high of 69 whites and 161 blacks lynched. By the 1940s, occurrences of lynching fell to single digits or disappeared altogether.
At the time of my youth, today&#8217;s opportunities for socioeconomic advancement were nonexistent for black people. For all but a few, college attendance was out of the question because of finances and racial discrimination. If you were not admitted to the black colleges of Lincoln University or Cheyney State College, forget about college. I do not know of any student of my 1954 class at Philadelphia&#8217;s Benjamin Franklin High School who attended college. Though the quality of education at Benjamin Franklin is a mere shadow of its past, today roughly 17% of its graduating class has been admitted to college. The true hope for a youngster graduating from high school during the 1950s was a well-paying and steady job. My first well-paying job was as a taxi driver for Yellow Cab Company.
Younger black people today have no idea of and have not experienced the poverty and discrimination of earlier generations. Also, the problems today&#8217;s black people face have little or nothing to do with poverty and discrimination. Political hustlers like to blame poverty and racism while ignoring the fact that poverty and racism were much greater yesteryear but there was not nearly the same amount of chaos.
The out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks in 1940 was about 11%; today, it is 75%. Black female-headed households were just 18% of households in 1950, as opposed to about 68% today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage rate was slightly higher than that of whites. Even during slavery, when marriage was forbidden, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. In New York City, in 1925, 85% of black households were two-parent households. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were two-parent households.
There&#8217;s little protest against the horrible and dangerous conditions under which many poor and law-abiding black people must live. It is not uncommon for 50 black people to be shot over a weekend in Chicago — not by policemen but by other black people. About 7,300 black people are murdered each year, and not by white people or racist cops, but mostly by other black people. These numbers almost make our history of victimization by racist lynching look like child&#8217;s play.
The solutions to the many problems that black Americans face must come from within our black communities. They will not come from the political arena. Blacks hold high offices and dominate the politics in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. Yet, these are the very cities with the nation&#8217;s worst-performing schools, highest crime rates, high illegitimacy rates, weak family structure and other forms of social pathology.
I am not saying that blacks having political power is the cause of these problems. What I am saying is that the solution to most of the major problems that confront black people will not be found in the political arena or by electing more blacks to high office.
One important step is for black Americans to stop being &#8220;useful tools&#8221; for the leftist, hate-America agenda. Many black problems are exacerbated by guilt-ridden white people. Often, they accept behavior and standards from black people that they would not begin to accept from white people. In that sense, white liberal guilt is a form of disrespect in their relationships with black Americans. By the same token, black people should stop exploiting the guilt of whites. Let us all keep in mind that history is one of those immutable facts of life.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
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.

Father and daughter

WILLIAMS: Blacks Of Yesteryear And Today

President Donald Trump is not the first president to be hated by a large segment of the American population. In more recent times, there was considerable hate for President Ronald Reagan. Even though the Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O&#8217;Neill and Reagan were polar opposites in their politics, they could be friends. Once, when Reagan confronted O&#8217;Neill about nasty things that he said about him in a newspaper, O&#8217;Neill replied, &#8220;That&#8217;s just politics, after 6 o&#8217;clock we&#8217;re buddies — we&#8217;re friends.&#8221; Politics today has become something not seen in our history. The true tragedy is that many Americans have bought into the hate, destructiveness and plain nastiness and are seemingly ignorant or uncaring about its long-term consequences for our nation.
Democrats say that if they win the presidency, they would increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court by appointing justices who would do their bidding — packing the court. One wonders whether they think that a future Republican president would simply ignore what they have done. I doubt it. A future Republican president would resort to the same tactic and appoint justices that would do his bidding. The U.S. Supreme Court would become no less than a super-legislature, subject to the will of politicians.
Last June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in favor of D.C. statehood. The measure was dead on arrival at the Republican-controlled Senate. But should Joe Biden win the presidency and bring with him majorities in the House and Senate, he would make statehood for D.C. — and Puerto Rico — a political priority. That would give the Democrats four more seats in the U.S. Senate, therefore guaranteeing them a solid majority. But would Republicans accept that without a response? What about splitting up strong Republican states, such as Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. For example, create a West Oklahoma and East Oklahoma or a North Utah and South Utah. That would give the Republicans four additional senators thereby offsetting the new Democratic senators.
You say, &#8220;Williams, dividing up states to get greater representation in the House of Representatives and the Senate would violate the Constitution.&#8221; The fact of the matter is that making Washington, D.C., a state would violate the Constitution. Article I, Section 8, clause 17 of the U.S. Constitution provides explicitly for a national capital that would not be part of a state nor treated as a state, but rather a jurisdiction under the exclusive authority of Congress, a neutral &#8220;district&#8221; in which representatives of all the states could meet on an equal footing to conduct the nation&#8217;s business.
So, far as dividing up states, Article IV of our Constitution, in part, says, &#8220;but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.&#8221;
By the way, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, who claimed that he was fighting against secession, violated the U.S. Constitution when he proclaimed the admission of West Virginia into the Union. The Virginia state legislature did not vote to support West Virginia&#8217;s secession from Virginia.
The bottom-line question is whether our nation can survive the divisions that we see today. Too many people want to blame it all on Trump. How much blame can be put on Trump for the riots, looting and, as Axios estimated, the close to $2 billion in losses from property destruction? What about the murder and shooting of civilians and law enforcement officers? What about the tearing down of monuments, not only those of Confederate generals but of Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and abolitionist Frederick Douglass?
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of today&#8217;s division is that much of it is a byproduct of our education system where young people are taught to hate our nation&#8217;s founders and founding principles. However, it is these principles, though practiced imperfectly, that have created the freest and richest nation in mankind&#8217;s history. The question is if our nation can survive the widespread anti-Trump hate.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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.

Trump

WILLIAMS: Is Getting Trump Worth It?

2020 Election

Donald Trump

The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it.
In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson&#8217;s tweeting that he supports &#8220;citizen soldiers&#8221; in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill&#8217;s School of Information and Library Science declared that &#8220;they have deputized all white people to murder us.&#8221;
Jesse A. Goldberg, professor in the English department at Auburn University who teaches classes in African American literature, American literature and composition wrote a now-deleted post on Twitter, &#8220;f—- every cop. Every single one.&#8221; Goldberg added, &#8220;The only ethical choice for any cop to make at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit.&#8221;
Eddie Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor and chairman of the Department of African American Studies said that when it comes to policing in America &#8220;Black people still live under the slave codes.&#8221; Glaude&#8217;s tweet came in response to news that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Glaude added:
&#8220;Placing shackles around the feet of Jacob Blake amounted to a physical reminder that he was still, no matter the protests, a n——r in the eyes of these policemen.&#8221;
New School professor Richard Wolff has called for the abolition of grades. He claims they are not only unfair to students, but also that they are a means of propping up capitalism, and as such, academia would be better off doing away with grading entirely. He went on to say: &#8220;Grading takes up much of my time that could be better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students.&#8221; Administering grades to students has &#8220;little educational payoff&#8221; and &#8220;disrespects (students) as thinking people.&#8221;
Wichita Falls, Texas, station KFDX-TV reported that Midwestern State University far-left philosophy professor Nathan Jun wrote on Facebook, &#8220;I want the entire world to burn until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician.&#8221;
Vanderbilt University scientist Heather Caslin Findley says that &#8220;white supremacy, racism, and prejudice&#8221; are perpetuated by the concept of &#8220;academic freedom.&#8221; She added, &#8220;I hope there are a lot of circles in academia having a serious conversation on how &#8216;academic freedom&#8217; upholds white supremacy, racism, and prejudice.&#8221; Findley also addressed past violent riots, writing that she was initially opposed to the 2015 Baltimore riots and was worried for the police officers but changed her mind. She said: &#8220;I was scared for the fires, for the rioting, for the storefronts that would need to be rebuilt. That was my &#8216;protest differently,&#8217; &#8216;all lives matter,&#8217; and &#8216;blue lives matter&#8217; moment. I was wrong and I was called out.&#8221;
In the wake of financial problems, many colleges are crying broke and want government bailouts, but they have enough money to hire costly diversity people. For example, University of Pennsylvania pays its chief diversity officer more than $580,000 a year. University of Michigan pays it vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer $385,000 per year. Other universities around the country pay their chief diversity officers annual salaries of $200,000 and up.
Many university professors do not buy into the gross academic deception that has become part and parcel of today&#8217;s college education today. They are too busy with their own research to get involved with campus politics. Rather than being on the committees that run the university, they concede the turf to those who are willing to take the time. Often those who are willing to take the time are not necessarily the most talented people but people with a political agenda to change what has been traditional college education. But all is not lost. Taxpayers, parents and donors who foot the bill can have a significant impact if they would stop being lazy and find out what is going on at our colleges. And, if they do not like what they see, they can snap their pocketbooks shut.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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.

Graduation hats

WILLIAMS: Disgusting Professorial Teachings

Academia

Police

During slavery, many black women, often in a forcible union with a white man, bore mixed-race children. Based on their percentage of white blood, they were deemed &#8220;mulattos,&#8221; &#8220;quadroons,&#8221; &#8220;octoroons&#8221; or even &#8220;hexadecaroons.&#8221; Depending on skin color, they could pass as white and avoid the gross racial discrimination suffered by their darker skinned brothers and sisters. This was portrayed in a 1949 motion picture titled &#8220;Pinky&#8221; that highlighted &#8220;passing&#8221; for white.
Now the tables have been turned with some white women claiming they are black. For years, Rachel Dolezal claimed that she was black. As a result of her deception, she became president of the Spokane, Washington, office of the NAACP and an instructor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University. Her two white parents outed her.
Just recently, Jessica Krug, George Washington University professor of history, who for years claimed that she was black, confessed that she was white. Her faculty bio listed her as a scholar in African American history, imperialism and colonialism. Krug, in a fit of contrition, apologized for her &#8220;continued appropriation of a black Caribbean identity.&#8221; She confessed: &#8220;I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech.&#8221; After Krug&#8217;s confession, she resigned from the GWU faculty.
An Indianapolis activist for Black Lives Matter, Satchuel Paigelyn Cole, born to two white parents, has admitted to pretending to be black for years. CV Vitolo-Haddad, a graduate student at UW&#8217;s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, after faking her race, has resigned from her teaching position and stepped down as co-president of the school&#8217;s chapter of the Teaching Assistants&#8217; Association. One cannot be sure about race these days because of &#8220;blackfishing,&#8221; a trend in which people alter their appearance to present themselves as black.
Dolezal, Krug, Cole and others are not the only white women who have benefited from racial fakery. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, sometimes called &#8220;Pocahontas,&#8221; claimed that she was of Cherokee Indian ancestry. That helped her land a job at diversity-hungry Harvard University as a professor of law and was paid $400,000 to teach two courses. She described herself as a minority in the Harvard Law School directory and claimed that her great-grandfather was Cherokee. Not only was her great-grandfather not a Cherokee as she claimed but he was a white man who boasted of shooting a Cherokee Indian.
By the way, if as it has now become acceptable to call oneself a woman, when one has the anatomical equipment of a male, then why isn&#8217;t it okay to claim that one is black, Latino or Asian when one is really Caucasian? According to the U.S. Bureau of Census, people self-identify their race or ethnicity.
Personally, I do not hold Dolezal, Krug, Cole, Warren or other undiscovered university professors at fault for racial fakery. I am guilty of the same during my troubled time in the Army. In 1960, landing in Incheon harbor in Korea, I tried to fake my race. Arriving soldiers were required to fill out a form containing information such as blood type, religion and next of kin. I checked off &#8220;Caucasian&#8221; where it asked for race. A chief warrant officer, in charge of inspecting the forms noticed the entry and told me I should have checked off Negro. I told him that if I put down &#8220;Negro,&#8221; I would get the worst job over there. The warrant officer probably changed the designation.
Some years ago, I declared myself a springbok trapped in a human body. A springbok is a highly agile, cute, deer-like animal that resides in southern and southwestern African. Some people suggested that I suffered from a condition known as species dysphoria, in which one thinks he is a wild animal trapped in a human body. Species dysphoria is similar to gender dysphoria, a condition in which a person believes he is a woman trapped in a male body or a man trapped in a female body.
Psychological counseling was recommended, which, in my opinion, is nothing less than animal phobia. One might ask, &#8220;Williams, why in the world would you want to call yourself a springbok?&#8221; The reason is quite simple. There is nothing in the Internal Revenue Code that says springboks have a federal tax obligation. If IRS officials were to demand that a springbok pay taxes, they could be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecution and reported to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
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.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Springbok

WILLIAMS: Racial Deception

Race

The violence, looting and mayhem that this nation has seen over the last several months has much of its roots in academia, where leftist faculty teach immature young people all manner of nonsense that contradicts commonsense and the principles of liberty. Chief among their lessons is a need to attack free speech in the form of prohibitions against so-called hate speech and microaggressions. Here are examples of microaggressions: &#8220;You are a credit to your race.&#8221; &#8220;Wow! How did you become so good in math?&#8221; &#8220;There is only one race, the human race.&#8221; &#8220;I&#8217;m not racist. I have several black friends.&#8221; &#8220;As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority.&#8221;
It is a tragic state of affairs when free speech and inquiry require protection at institutions of higher learning. Indeed, freedom in the marketplace of ideas has made the United States, as well as other Western nations, a leader in virtually every area of human endeavor. A monopoly of ideas is just as dangerous as a monopoly in political power or a monopoly in the production of goods and services.
We might ask what is the true test of a person&#8217;s commitment to free speech? The true test does not come when he permits people to say those things he deems acceptable. The true test comes when he permits people to say those things that he deems offensive. The identical principle applies to freedom of association; its true test comes when someone permits others to voluntarily associate in ways that he deems offensive.
While free speech has been under attack, we are beginning to see some pushback. More than 12,000 professors, free speech leaders and conservative-leaning organization leaders have signed &#8220;The Philadelphia Statement.&#8221;
The 845-word document says in part: &#8220;Similarly, colleges and universities are imposing speech regulations to make students &#8216;safe,&#8217; not from physical harm, but from challenges to campus orthodoxy. These policies and regulations assume that we as citizens are unable to think for ourselves and to make independent judgments. Instead of teaching us to engage, they foster conformism (&#8220;groupthink&#8221;) and train us to respond to intellectual challenges with one or another form of censorship. A society that lacks comity and allows people to be shamed or intimidated into self-censorship of their ideas and considered judgments will not survive for long. As Americans, we desire a flourishing, open marketplace of ideas, knowing that it is the fairest and most effective way to separate falsehood from truth. Accordingly, dissenting and unpopular voices — be they of the left or the right — must be afforded the opportunity to be heard. They have often guided our society toward more just positions, which is why Frederick Douglass said freedom of speech is the &#8216;great moral renovator of society and government.'&#8221;
The recognition of the intellectual elite attacking free speech is not new. In a 1991 speech, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: &#8220;The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.&#8221;
Tyrants everywhere, from the Nazis to the communists, started out supporting free speech rights. Why? Because speech is important for the realization of leftist goals of command and control. People must be propagandized, proselytized and convinced. Once leftists have gained power, as they have in most of our colleges and universities, free speech becomes a liability. It challenges their ideas and agenda and must be suppressed.
Attacks on free speech to accommodate multiculturalism and diversity are really attacks on Western values, which are superior to all others. The indispensable achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights that are not granted by government. Governments exist to protect these inalienable rights. It took until the 17th century for that idea to arise and mostly through the works of English philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. And now the 21st century campus leftists are trying to suppress these inalienable rights.
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.

Tape over mouth

WILLIAMS: The Fight For Free Speech

Free Speech

The United States Constitution&#8217;s Article 2, Sec. 2, cl. 2, provides that the president of the United States &#8220;shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.&#8221; President Donald Trump has nominated Amy Coney Barrett as U.S. Supreme Court justice who will replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Barrett currently serves as United States Circuit judge of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The 7th Circuit serves the Midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
It is now the Senate&#8217;s job to decide whether to confirm Barrett&#8217;s appointment as an associate justice on the Supreme Court. In thinking about the Senate&#8217;s criteria for making their decision, we might ask what is the role of a U.S. Supreme Court justice? A reasonable answer is to recognize that our Constitution represents our rules of the game. It dictates what is and is not permissible behavior by government and its citizens. Therefore, a Supreme Court justice has one job and one job only; namely, that of a referee.
A referee&#8217;s job, whether he is a football referee, baseball umpire or a Supreme Court justice, is to know the rules of the game and to ensure that those rules are evenly applied without bias. Do we want a referee or justice to allow empathy to influence their decisions? Let us answer this question using this year&#8217;s Super Bowl as an example.
The San Francisco 49ers have played in seven Super Bowls in their franchise history, winning five times. On the other hand, coming into the 2020 game, the Kansas City Chiefs had not won a Super Bowl title in 50 years. In anyone&#8217;s book, this is a gross disparity. Should the referees have the empathy to understand what it is like to be a perennial loser, not winning a Super Bowl in five decades? What would you think of a referee whose play calls were guided by empathy or pity? Suppose a referee, in the name of compensatory justice, stringently applied pass interference or roughing the passer violations against the San Francisco 49ers and less stringently against the Chiefs. Would you support a referee who refused to make offensive pass interference calls because he thought it was a silly rule? You would probably remind him that it is the league that makes the rules (football law), not referees.
Supreme Court justices should be umpires or referees, enforcing neutral rules. Here is a somewhat trivial example of a neutral rule from my youth; let us call it Mom&#8217;s Rule. On occasion, my sister and I would have lunch in my mother&#8217;s absence. Either my younger sister or I would have the job of dividing the last piece of cake or pie. Almost always an argument would ensue about the fairness of the cut. Those arguments ended when Mom came up with a rule: Whoever cuts the cake gives the other person the first choice of the piece to take. As if by magic or divine intervention, fairness emerged and arguments ended. No matter who did the cutting, there was an even division.
This is what our society needs — the kind of rules whereby you would be OK even if your worst enemy were in charge. Despite the high stakes of bitterly fought football contests, most games end peaceably, and the winners and losers are civil. It is indeed a miracle of sorts that players with conflicting interests can play a game, agree with the outcome and walk away as good sports. That &#8220;miracle&#8221; is that it is far easier to reach an understanding about the game&#8217;s rules than the game&#8217;s outcome. The same conflict-reducing principles should be a part of a civilized society.
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.

SCOTUS building

WILLIAMS: Supreme Court And Rules Of The Game

Amy Coney Barrett

Supreme Court

Seventeenth-century poet and intellect John Milton predicted, &#8220;When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation.&#8221; Gore Vidal, his 20th-century intellectual successor, elaborated saying: &#8220;As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate.&#8221; Sloppy language permits people to get away with speaking and doing all manner of destructive nonsense without being challenged.
Let&#8217;s look at the concept of &#8220;white privilege,&#8221; the notion that white people have benefited in American history relative to, and at the expense of, &#8220;people of color.&#8221; It appears to be utter nonsense to suggest that poor and destitute Appalachian whites have white privilege. How can one tell if a person has white privilege? One imagines that the academic elite, who coined the term, refer to whites of a certain socioeconomic status such as living in the suburbs with the privilege of high-income amenities. But here is a question: Do Nigerians in the U.S. have white privilege? As reported by the New York Post this summer, 17% of all Nigerians in this country hold master&#8217;s degrees, 4% hold a doctorate and 37% hold a bachelor&#8217;s degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau&#8217;s 2006 American Community Survey. By contrast, 19% of whites have a bachelor&#8217;s degree, 8% have master&#8217;s degrees and 1% have doctorates.
What about slavery? Colleges teach our young people that the U.S. became rich on the backs of free black labor. That is utter nonsense. Slavery does not have a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed in most of the North. I doubt that anyone would claim that the antebellum South was rich, and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was outlawed: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Speaking of holding people accountable for slavery, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. There would not have been much black slavery in the U.S., and the western hemisphere in general, without Africans exchanging other Africans to European slave traders at the coast for guns, mirrors, cloths, foreign alcoholic beverages and gold dust. Congressional Democratic lawmakers have called for a commission to study reparations, but I have not heard calls to hold the true perpetrators of American slavery accountable. Should we demand that congressional Democrats haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Muslim states before Congress to condemn them for their role in American slavery and demand they pay reparations?
Some of the greatest language mischief is related to terms such as racial &#8220;disparities,&#8221; &#8220;gaps&#8221; and &#8220;disproportionality.&#8221; These terms are taken as signs of injustice that must be corrected. The median income of women is less than that of men. Black and Hispanic students are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students. There are other race disparities and gaps all over the place. For example, blacks are 13% of the population but 80% of professional basketball players and 66% of professional football players, and on top of that, they&#8217;re some of the most highly paid players. To be consistent with leftist ideology, those numbers seem to suggest that there is some kind of injustice toward Asian, white and Hispanic basketball and football players. But before we run off thinking that everything is hunky-dory for black players in football, how many times have you seen a black player kick an extra point in professional football?
What should be done to address these and other gross disparities? How can we make basketball, football, dressage and ice hockey, classical music concert attendance, not to mention incarceration, look more like America? In general, we should ignore disproportionality. There is no evidence, anywhere in the world, suggesting that people sort out in any activity according to their numbers in the general population.
The best thing that we can do is clean up our language. That will have the added benefit of straightening out our thinking so that we do not permit leftists to get away with making us feel guilty and believing in utter nonsense.
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.

Speech bubble

WILLIAMS: Language And Thought

Leftism

White Privilege

Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He has just published &#8220;The Devil and Karl Marx,&#8221; a careful look at the diabolical side of Karl Marx. The book has come out during an important time in our history since so many Americans, particularly our youth, have fallen for the seductive siren song of socialism taught to them by the academic elite.
&#8220;The Black Book of Communism,&#8221; edited by Stephane Courtois details the Marxist-Leninist death toll in the 20th century. Here is the breakdown: USSR, 20 million deaths; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; North Korea and Cambodia, 2 million each; Eastern Europe, 1 million; and about 3.5 million in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan. These figures understate those detailed by Professor R.J. Rummel in &#8220;Death by Government.&#8221; He finds that from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Communist China&#8217;s Mao Zedong regime was responsible for the death of as many as 78 million of its own citizens.
The world&#8217;s intellectual elite readily focus on Adolph Hitler&#8217;s murderous atrocities but ignore those of the world&#8217;s socialists. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country. They often marched around singing his praises and waving his little red book, &#8220;Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.&#8221; President Barack Obama&#8217;s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.
Whether it&#8217;s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children&#8217;s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined. Today&#8217;s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. Keep in mind that one does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one must believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.
Kengor highlights another feature of Marx ignored by his followers. This feature of Marxism should be disturbing to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who said that she and her fellow organizers are &#8220;trained Marxists.&#8221; I wonder whether she shares Marx&#8217;s views on race. Marx&#8217;s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, was viewed as having Negro blood in his veins. Marx denigrated him as &#8220;Negillo&#8221; and &#8220;The Gorilla.&#8221;
Marx had similar hate for Jews. He referred to his fellow socialist labor organizer Ferdinand Lasalle as a &#8220;greasy Jew,&#8221; &#8220;the little kike,&#8221; &#8220;water polack jew&#8221; and &#8220;Jewish n——r.&#8221; In 1844, Marx wrote an essay titled &#8220;The Jewish Question&#8221; in which he asks, &#8220;What is the worldly cult of the Jew?&#8221; His answer: &#8220;Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money.&#8221;
Down through the years, leftists made a moral equivalency between communist/socialist totalitarianism and democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, &#8220;Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.&#8221; Walter Duranty called Stalin &#8220;the greatest living statesman &#8230; a quiet, unobtrusive man.&#8221; George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao&#8217;s China and praised Mao Zedong and the Chinese economic system. Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter&#8217;s China expert, complained that &#8220;America is doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,&#8221; and urged us to &#8220;borrow ideas and solutions&#8221; from China.
Kengor does a yeoman&#8217;s job of highlighting the evils of Marxism. The question is whether Americans will heed his lesson or fall prey to the false promises and live the horrors of socialism. By the way, while Sweden and Denmark have a large welfare system, they have market economies — not socialist economies, as some leftists claim.
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.

Karl Marx statues

WILLIAMS: The Devil And Karl Marx

Communism

Josef Stalin

Karl Marx

Marxism

Vladimir Lenin

In matters of race and other social phenomena, there is a tendency to believe that what is seen today has always been. For black people, the socioeconomic progress achieved during my lifetime, which started in 1936, exceeded anyone&#8217;s wildest dreams. In 1936, most black people lived in gross material poverty and racial discrimination. Such poverty and discrimination is all but nonexistent today. Government data, assembled by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, shows that &#8220;the average American family &#8230; identified as poor by the Census Bureau, lives in an air-conditioned, centrally heated house or apartment &#8230; They have a car or truck. (Indeed, 43% of poor families own two or more cars.)&#8221; The household &#8220;has at least one widescreen TV connected to cable, satellite, or a streaming service, a computer or tablet with internet connection, and a smartphone. (Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones.&#8221; On top of this, blacks today have the same constitutional guarantees as everyone else, which is not to say that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated.
The poverty we have today is spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is an absence of what traditionally has been known as various human virtues. Much of that spiritual poverty is a result of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. When some people know they can have children out of wedlock, drop out of school and refuse employment and suffer little consequence and social sanction, one should not be surprised to see the growth of such behavior. Today&#8217;s out-of-wedlock births among blacks is over 70%, but in the 1930s, it was 11%. During the same period, out-of-wedlock births among whites was 3%; today, it is over 30%. It is fashionable and politically correct to blame today&#8217;s 21% black poverty on racial discrimination. That is nonsense. Why? The poverty rate among black husband-and-wife families has been in the single digits for more than two decades. Can anyone produce evidence that racists discriminate against black female-headed families but not black husband-and-wife families?
For most people, education is one of the steppingstones out of poverty, and it has been a steppingstone for many black people. Today, decent education is just about impossible at many big-city public schools where violence, disorder, disrespect and assaults on teachers are routine. The kind of disrespectful and violent behavior observed in many predominantly black schools is entirely new. Some have suggested that such disorder is part of black culture, but that is an insulting lie. Black people can be thankful that double standards, and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility, were not broadly accepted during the 1920s, &#8217;30s, &#8217;40s and &#8217;50s. There would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world&#8217;s most successful civil rights movement.
Many whites are ashamed, saddened and guilt-ridden by our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. They see that justice and compensation for that ugly history is to hold their fellow black Americans accountable to the kind of standards and conduct they would never accept from whites. That behavior and conduct is relatively new. Meet with black people in their 70s or older, even liberal politicians such as Charles Rangel (age 90), and Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (85), Alcee Hastings (83) and Maxine Waters (82). Ask them whether their parents would have tolerated their assaulting and cursing of teachers or any other adult. I bet you the rent money their parents and other parents of that era would not have accepted the grossly disrespectful behavior seen today among many black youngsters who use foul language and racial epithets at one another. These older blacks will tell you that, had they behaved that way, they would have felt serious pain in their hind parts. If blacks of yesteryear would not accept such self-destructive behavior, why should today&#8217;s blacks accept it?
Black people have made tremendous gains over the years that came as a result of hard work, sacrifice and a no-nonsense approach to life. Recovering those virtues can provide solutions to many of today&#8217;s problems.
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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Walter E. Williams