ἢ οὐκ ἔξεστί μοι ποιῆσαι ὃ θέλω ἐν τοῖς ἐμοῖς;
Aut non licet mihi quod volo facere?
Or am I not allowed to do what I wish with mine own?Matthew 20:15
Heaven is where the innkeepers are Swiss, the cooks are French, the policemen are English, the lovers are Italian, and the mechanics are German.
Hell is where the lovers are Swiss, the innkeepers are French, the cooks are English, the mechanics are Italian, and policemen are German.
Joke told by a Dutch Professor
You know the world is off tilt when the best rapper is a white guy [Eminem], the best golfer is a black guy [Tiger Woods], the tallest basketball player is Chinese [Yao Ming, 7'6"], and Germany doesn't want to go to war [in Iraq].
Charles Barkley, 2003
I myself drive a Yom Kippur Clipper. That's a Jewish Cadillac --
stops on a dime and picks it up.Kinky Friedman, The Great Psychadelic Armadillo Picnic, A "Walk" in Austin, Crown Journeys, 2004, p.27
Tattoos are just not for me. I don't like a man all marked up.
I'm Jewish. I like 'em marked down.Joan Rivers, "Fashion Police," 8 June 2012
Elvis: Well, it's one for the money
two for the show
Three to get readyJewish Elvis: Well, it's one for the money
two for the money
Three for the moneyJackie Martling, after Elvis Presley, "Blue Suede Shoes" [1956].
The Haoles run the plantations; the Chinese run the businesses; the Japanese run the government; and the Hawaiians run for the hills.
Lebanese are the ones who can buy from Greeks
and sell to Jews and still make a profit.Lebanese saying
Hotel, motel, Patel.
Saying of hotelier at hotel association convention in Chicago, 2010;
Hindi, originally Gujarati.
"Why does the sun never set on the British Empire"?
Because God doesn't trust those English bastards in the dark!Irish joke
Why do you rarely see a Navajo trading post? Because if their kin are hungry, they'd give the stuff to their kinfolks. I admire that.
Tony Hillerman, mystery writer & University of New Mexico journalism professor, quoted in the Spring 1996 Mirage, the University of New Mexico Alumni magazine; of course, giving inventory to your relatives puts you out of business.
Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation. And DC keep talking about, “We a resilient city.” And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.
Trayon White, Sr., District of Columbia Councilman (D, 8th Ward), and former D.C. Board of Education Member, 16 March 2018
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.
Jesse Jackson
In a 1999 article, "Capital Cabbies Salute Race Profiling," James Owens writies, "If racial profiling is racism, then the cab drivers of Washington D.C., they themselves mainly blacks and Hispanics, are all for it. A District taxicab commissioner, Sandra Seegars, who is black, issued a safety-advice statement urging D.C.'s 6,800 cabbies to refuse to pick up 'dangerous looking' passengers. She described 'dangerous looking' as a young black guy... with shirttail hanging down longer than his coat, baggy pants, unlaced tennis shoes."
The Pizza Marketing Quarterly carried a story of charges of racial discrimination filed in St. Louis against Papa John's pizza delivery services. Papa John's district manager said she could not and would not ask her drivers to put their lives on the line. She added that the racial discirmination accusation is false because 75 to 85 percent of the drivers in the complaining neighborhood are black and, moreover, most of those drivers lived in the very neighborhood being denied delivery service....
Here's my question: Is the racial profiling done by cab drivers, pizza deliverers or Jesse Jackson a sign of racism or economizing on information costs?
Walter Williams, "Is racial profiling racist?" August 19, 2009
They [the Chinese] are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.
Mark Twain, in Roughing It
Here is the ethnic breakdown of acceptance for next fall's Stuyvesant freshmen class: 9 black students, 24 Latinos, 177 whites and 620 Asian-Americans. Although the numbers were slightly different at the other two high schools [Bronx Science & Brooklyn Tech], the ethnic mix is roughly the same...
For some, the specialized-high-school test itself is clearly racist...
Yet some Asian children with high scores come from immigrant homes where English isn't the first language. This raises the question of the importance of culture -- and the strong emphasis on hard work and higher parental expectations at home that make it possible to thrive academically.
Warren Kozak, "Call Them Tiger Students. And Get to Work," The Wall Street Journal, Friday, April 5, 2013, A13, color added. Academically and economically successful ethnic minorities, from Jews to Vietnamese, explode the thesis of the Left that academic or economic failure is always the result of discrmination, racism, Western cultural bias, and other forms of (capitalist) "oppression." This is an embarrassment whose challange and falsification of politically correct ideas is carefully evaded in public debate, by people who also hold minority students hostage in violent and failing public schools, while directing various bogus charges at charter schools and the use of school vouchers, which give students and their parents choices and alternatives.
Harvard, you see, uses a purely subjective "personal rating" that consistently finds Asian students have less interesting personalities than kids of other ethnic groups. That's right: It's an elaborate charade to "scientifically" declare Asians to be ... boring.
The data plainly show that a race-blind process would admit roughly twice as many Asian kids. Still, Harvard insists it doesn't discriminate -- though it has failed to show why, as the law requires.
Harvard's brahmins plainly think they're doing right -- but so did their forbears a century ago, when the quotas were keeping Jews out. The discrimination is just as wrong now as it was then.
"Standing Up to Racism," The New York Post, September 1, 2018, p.16; the practices of Harvard have been exposed in discovery for a civil rights lawsuit against Harvard by Asian students denied admission. The discrimination is so blatant that the plaintiffs have asked for summary judgment in the case, which otherwise will go to trial in the Fall of 2018.
While "Asian" is usually used to mean people of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese ancestry, for Harvard and other schools it may also include people from India, Thailand, and other South-East Asian countries, if not Iranians, Afghanis, and Arabs. In the United States, according to census data, people of Indian ancestry now have the highest family income of any ethnic group.
On October 1, 2019 the biased, bigoted, and dishonest federal judge Allison D. Burroughs, whose name should live in infamy, ruled in favor of Harvard, accepting the fraudulent "personal rating" used by Harvard and so agreeing that Asian students indeed have "less interesting personalities" than other students -- like Jews before World War II. The blatantly racist
of the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this judgment. The case is headed for the Supreme Court, which has not unambiguously prohibited racial discrimination in admissions, despite the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Yale University, on the grounds of discrimination against Asians, filed by the Trump Justice Department has been dropped by the Biden Administration; and the admission tests used by the New York City Public Schools, and other school districts, for their elite, advanced high schools, have been dropped, because Asians were doing too well on them and were being admitted in "disproportionate" numbers. The tests were dismissed, of course, as reflecting "white supremacy." See here.
Why do you want to go picketing and boycotting some cracker,
begging him for a job?Malcolm X
All stereotypes are true.
Bill Maher, "Politically Incorrect"
It may be thought that I am prejudiced. Perhaps I am.
I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, 1869
Four Europeans go hiking together and get terribly lost.
First they run out of food, then out of water.
"I'm so thirsty," says the Englishman. "I must have tea."
"I'm so thirsty," says the Frenchman. "I must have wine."
"I'm so thirsty," says the German. "I must have beer."
"I'm so thirsty," says the Jew. "I must have diabetes."Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke, Making Jewish Humor, Princeton University Press, 2013, p.1
[Those] who are looting, those aren't real black people; those are scumbags. The real black people, they're not out there looting. I just watched a great story on CNN where a bunch of folks, really amazing folks, wouldn't let them burn down an establishment; it was a great story... But unfortunately, the way the media portrays a lot of black people, we only put the negative black people on television, Mike. We don't put the good hard-working black people. That's what I said and that's what I meant. There's a perception among some black people that if you're not a thug or a hood rat, you don't wear your pants down by your asses, you're not black enough. And they're always holding us back, plain and simple. And I ain't shutting up and I ain't backing down.
Charles Barkley, 2014, about the riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
In its official glossary, the University of Central Florida designates “male, white, heterosexual, financially stable, young-middle adult, able-bodied, Christian” as oppressors.
"The DEI industry really isn’t about diversity, equity OR inclusion," The New York Post, May 21, 2023. This "university" goes for the discrimination trifecta here, targeting sex, race, and religion, and more. This tells us a lot about whoever wrote and approved this "glossary," since they are obviously vicious ideologues who don't belong in education at any level. That probably means the whole administration at Central Florida. Men, especially white men, and Christians, are already getting the drift that Amerian "higher education" is a "hostile environment" for them.
Have you ever been to Hamburg's Stadtpark? They call it the "green heart" of the city, over 350 acres of woods and lakes and meadows, playgrounds and sports fields and concert stages, plus Germany's largest planetarium. It's also a great place to rape someone.
So a fifteen-year-old girl gets dragged into the bushes by a gang of four "youths." They rape her, and take the trouble to film themselves doing so. Because, after all, if you gang-rape someone, you want to have something to show to the lads who weren't able to make it. When they're sated and push off, the girl gets to her feet and staggers away only to run into five more chaps, who rape her all over again. And film it all over again, in what by now is enough video for a full-length feature -- over two-and-a-half hours. That's getting close to Lord of the Rings -- and with a cast to match: the semen of nine different men was found in and on her body. And from all over the map: Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Montenegro, Poland, Armenia... That's a lot of diversity: it's like the UN General Assembly of semen... although officialdom was at pains to characterise most of the rapists as "German," with two said to be of "uncertain nationality." There's a lot of that about.
The rape of a schoolgirl is a terrible thing -- especially for the guys. As the eminent lady psychiatrist assigned to the case, Nahlah Saimeh, was at pains to explain, "a migrant background can push offenders to the margins of society" and lead to "fantasies of grandeur as an attempt to compensate for one's own misery."
Yeah, but two-and-a-half hours? That's some fantasy of grandeur.
But what do I know? On Tuesday the court rendered its verdict: Nine rapists aged between nineteen and twenty-three were found guilty, but only one will go to prison -- for two years and nine months. The other eight received suspended sentences, so walked straight out onto the streets, perhaps figuring they'd take the scenic route and have a stroll in the park. During one hundred days of trial, none showed any remorse for their victim. Why bother? As the headline on that Spiegel story has it, they're the real victims:
Täter, die am Rand der Gesellschaft leben, kulturell, sprachlich und sozial komplett entwurzelt.Offenders who live on the margins of society, culturally, linguistically and socially completely uprooted.
They don't seem that linguistically uprooted if they can form an ad hoc rape gang comprising Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Poles et al. But, if they are that uprooted (and six of them were supposedly born in Hamburg), wouldn't it have been kinder to leave them (or their parents or grandparents) back in wherever they were rooted and thus presumably less driven to "fantasies of grandeur"?
Oh, well. The Hamburg Judges' Association is concerned about... the poor girl? The lenient sentences? No, they're up in arms about criticism of the judge, which they characterise as "a direct attack on the rule of law" and worse, "marked by an anti-immigrant undertone." But I don't think young German girls will have to worry about "the rule of law" for much longer: the mitigating circumstances advanced by Nahlah Saimeh are an obvious incentive to anyone minded to get a piece of the already burgeoning gang-rape biz; they're a literal get-out-of-gaol card for anyone from a "migrant background."
And Germany -- like Sweden, France, Ireland -- has a lot of those. According to the latest figures from the Bundeskriminalamt (the Federal Criminal Police Office), 47,923 Germans fell victim to immigrant violence -- defined as violent robbery, assault, rape or murder. That's getting close to a thousand a week.
"Immigrant" in crime statistics is a term of art. As in the BBC's insistence that the Algerian stabber [who stabbed school children in Dublin on November 23, 2023] is as Irish as Val Doonican, a migrant who acquires a German passport is as Teutonic as Goethe. So, if you stab Fritz en route to your naturalisation interview and then stab Heinrich after you've signed all the paperwork, you'll be entered in two entirely separate categories. Nevertheless, the average German is four times as likely to be attacked by an immigrant as by a fellow citizen.
According to the latest rape numbers... well, tell you what, let's not even bother with common-or-garden rape. Without wishing to go all Whoopi Goldberg and start drawing distinctions about "rape rape," let's cut straight to gang rape, which the Germans define as rape by more than one perpetrator: last year, in the country's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, it was up by forty-three percent to 246 -- which is roughly one gang-rape every working day. "We can do this!," as Angela Merkel likes to say -- and she's right, if by "do this" you mean the fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school: You can do her with impunity, as that court verdict makes clear.
And this is in a country where the rape of local women by soldiers of the Soviet occupation lingered in the folk-memory for half-a-century --- because gang-rape in particular was understood as an act of war and the spoils of victory. And yet the present epidemic cannot be addressed with any honesty.
The chairman of Germany's police union thinks those latest statistics will be a game-changer: "What many have always suspected has now been proven," he says. "There is no more room for whitewashing."
But, as those German judges and psychiatrists make plain, western officialdom is too heavily invested in the whitewashing to stop now. There is a sense -- which the rape gangs certainly pick up on -- that European societies are now entirely unmanned. The most vulnerable among us -- small groups of infants in an Annecy Park [a Syrian man stabbed two adults and four children in Annecy, France, June 8, 2023] or outside a Dublin school, thousands of girls in every medium-sized town up and down the spine of England -- are routinely preyed upon by monsters. As my friend Eva Vlaardingerbroek says, "European girls are fair game. Sold out by our establishments."
And if, as in Dublin or Romans-sur-Isère [where two people were killed by a Sudanese refugee, April 4, 2020] in recent days, "far-right elements" are minded to object, the state cracks down on them far harder and faster than it does with the gang-rapists of that poor fifteen-year-old. Because they're the real problem, aren't they? In Limerick, Fianna Fáil councillor Abul Kalam Azad Talukder says the Dublin rioters should be "shot in the head."
Oh, they would be if the authorities thought they could get away with it, Councillor. In the meantime, the Irish government is content to pass an anti-speech law that will decrease further the likelihood of being able to talk openly about migration, crime or any other public policy that matters.
So I'll take a bit of much needed righteous anger from those fellows on the street any day over a ruling class that demands we sacrifice our innocents on the altar of multiculturalism. And I would welcome a little more such righteous anger when the alternative is a "justice" system that in Germany marches ever closer to making explicit its disregard for the victims of the state's mad experiment: You can't make a diversity omelette without breaking a few chicks. To modify the apocryphal advice of Queen Victoria or Lady Hillingdon, lie back and think of the multiculti utopia.
Such a society does not deserve to survive. And, indeed, will not. Our present official delusions are a mere interlude.
Mark Steyn, "Diversity Rape of the Day, Diversity Deathwatch," December 1, 2023.
Mind, like parachute, only function when opened.
Charlie Chan
That prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination, against anyone for any reason, but especially concerning ethnic groups, races, or the sexes, are bad things is today a truth of public discourse that is never questioned by anyone considered socially, morally, or politically responsible. Never questioned in public, that is; for the guilty secret of all, whether liberals or conservatives -- indeed even among the widely acknowledged victims of prejudice and stereotypes -- is that, in private, prejudices and stereotypes are usually harbored about someone. And virtually everyone, whether right or left, black or white, and whatever they think, feel, or say, practices some kind of discrimination about someone.
Perhaps the most irrepressible manifestation of that guilty secret may found in the ethnic, racial, or sexual jokes that regularly surface, like a trickster god, to embarrass indiscreet politicians and to offend those at whose expense the jokes are made. It is not surprising that we often hear, or hear of, repeated campaigns of moral exhortation against harboring or practicing such attitudes. Certainly we don't like the idea of being judged ourselves according to some stereotype of a group that we may belong to. It is then easy to say that people should always be judged as individuals and never as members of a group. But we must consider carefully whether that noble determination is even possible, let alone whether it is a requirement of morality, let alone of prudence. Keeping in mind that it cannot be a moral obligation to believe anything in particular [see "Judicial Moralism"] -- but only to conscientiously attempt to rationally discover the truth -- we must ask what it is about prejudices, stereotypes, and discrmination, if anything, that does violate moral duty.
"Prejudice" in etymology and in usage means what it literally says: to "judge before" (praejudicare), i.e. before something that should or could be taken into account in the making the judgment has been taken into account. In its negative senses, "prejudice" implies an irrational and irresponsible lack of consideration of the things that should and could be considered [note]. Our question, then, must be about what is in fact irrational and irresponsible; and the first point must be that "pre-judgment" is not only often necessary but is actually indispensable for ordinary life.
Learning from experience would mean absolutely nothing if it did not give us some knowledge in advance about things that we are going to face. If we had to start each experience with a completely blank mind about the things that we are experiencing and what we can expect from them, we would never accomplish much of anything and would probably get killed in short order. It is always a big help to have knowledge in advance that some things are dangerous, and most ordinary knowledge of this nature we don't think twice about: stepping in front of a moving car is something we avoid because we have previously gathered that moving cars can hit, injure, and kill us. This is indeed a "prejudice" about moving cars, but it is not irrational, and we could hardly call it bigotry.
The two sorts of things than can be judged in advance are kinds and individuals. These two sorts of judgment go together. It is because kinds are judged that individuals come to be judged as members of their kind. Some kinds of things have qualities that necessarily characterize every individual of the kind; but other qualities may simply characterize most but not all individuals. Thus, not all pit bulls are vicious, but a large enough number of them are that anyone would be wise to be careful around them. In some cosmic sense that may not be fair to the many inoffensive pit bulls, but it is both reasonable and prudent behavior for people who cannot know in advance the good qualities of some individual pit bull. Generalizations about such kinds measure the probability of an individual being a certain way. A individual of the kind may in fact not be that way, but prejudging some strange individual on the basis of good probabilities about the kind is simply the rational use of our previous experience. A prejudice is not necessarily always adverse to the individual -- people with good experiences of Doberman Pinschers may find themselves attacked if they are incautiously friendly with one that turns out to be vicious.
Although there is supposed to be a fallacy of reasoning called "hasty generalization," generalization is a move of reasoning about which it is often impossible to tell in advance what is "hasty" and what isn't. It is the classical Problem of Induction: if we are counting qualities, individuals, or events, how do we know when we have counted enough to make a good universal statement? There is no general answer to this. Since we can never be fully motivated in making a generalization, we must simply make our generalizations, as Karl Popper says, as conjectures. The conjectures can then be refuted if contrary cases, or enough contrary cases (when dealing with probabilities), are found, but the conjectures cannot be avoided even in the best reasoning about matters of fact. A mistaken conjecture is not a moral evil -- it is a necessarily element of learning from experience about the world.
When it comes to judging people it is tempting to think that the same rules do not apply. Making any generalizations about kinds of people strikes some as intrinsically immoral or irresponsible, whether or not the case can be made that it is irrational. The very reasonableness of conjectures about kinds of people may be the thing that seems morally offensive. It would be a strange world, however, where we must morally prevent ourselves from being reasonable; and very, very few in practice would ever restrain themselves from responses to reasonable beliefs: almost anyone finding themselves in the company of motorcycle riders sporting German helmets, swastika tattoos, scars, etc. would consider themselves in a dangerous situation. Many such bikers are actually play-acting and are no danger at all; but enough of them have such deservedly fearsome reputations that, considering the possibilities (if not the probabilities), caution is truly called for.
Indeed, few would want to claim that ethnic groups actually are all the same in all their qualities. Ethnic and cultural pride begins with the emphasis of differences and quickly progresses to claims of superiority in some respect or another. Superiority may be difficult to judge, but differences can have clear consequences for different kinds of enterprises or ways of life. Several cultures or ethnic groups are famous for being hard working -- the Japanese for one. Other groups are famous for being less hard working -- back in the 19th century the Irish were particularly notorious in that respect -- but the problem with such a judgment that has negative connotations is that some -- perhaps especially the Irish -- might feel that it should not be made just because it is negative. Perhaps we should just believe the best of everyone and discount every impression we ever get of a group having qualities that could be counted as negative. That would have been a foolish attitude in the extreme if it had been applied on hearing, for instance, that the Mongols were about to arrive. Whatever people are like, they really are that way, regardless of whether their qualities are good or bad. No sensible person would dream of continuing to trust someone repeatedly found to be dishonest just because our negative generalization about that person's individual character might be in error. With groups our hesitation may follow from the near certainty that not every individual of the group is going to have some particular quality, but our knowledge (or reasonable conjectures) from experience would be useless if it was not unknown individuals to whom it was applied by us.
The tough case comes when we examine what was reasonable for a 19th century employer to do in hiring, if he had a choice between taking Irish workmen or, say, Italians. The Irish had the reputation of being heavy drinkers, lazy, unreliable, troublesome, violent, and dishonest, unlike the generally hardworking, honest, and reliable Italians. An employer who wanted to minimize the trouble he had to expend on the process of hiring could, and often did, simply exclude Irish workers from consideration. "Irish need not apply" was common enough in employment advertising. This certainly seemed unfair to honest and hardworking individual Irish workers. It also seemed unfair to those who fit the stereotype perfectly. In evaluating what was reasonable for the employer, however, the first question must be whether the stereotype, as a principle of probability, was true: And as far as we can tell from the historical record the stereotype was true.
Half of all persons arrested in New York City in the 1850's were Irish, a considerable "over-representation" of their share in the population. The police found themselves filling police vans with Irishmen so often that the vans were nicknamed "Paddy Wagons," after the "Paddies," i.e. the Irish. It is not difficult to imagine the furor today if the police named their vans with colloquial references to the ethnic groups most often arrested. But before we become too sympathetic over a vision of the poor Irish hassled by the police, we should note that the worst riots of the 19th century more often than not involved Irish workers attacking competing workers of other ethnic and racial groups. In San Francisco the Irish attacked, and murdered, Chinese workers. One of the bloodiest days in American history occurred in 1871 when 51 deaths resulted from (Catholic) Irish attacks on (Protestant) Scotch-Irish, who were not slow to fight back. The worst riot of the century was the New York Draft Riot of 1863. That riot is often portrayed as resulting from righteous indignation at the inequities of the Civil War Draft Law. Inequities and indignation there may well have been, but the riot quickly became an all out murderous assault by Irish on blacks, even on black children, since the Irish mostly just didn't want to fight a war to free slaves, a common sentiment among Northern Democrats. A dishonest attempt to conceal this occurs in Martin Scorsese's movie Gangs of New York [2002], where all the racism is blamed on the Know Nothing xenophobes, but the story undercuts its own dishonesty when with historical accuracy the Irish are shown attacking blacks.
Over the decades violence often flared between Irish neighborhoods and those of other ethnic groups like the Italians, Jews, or Chinese. That violence was not, as Marxists always like to say, due to the conditions of capitalism or of poverty, because the other groups were equally poor but rarely fought with each other. Time and again the common correlate of the violence was the participation of the Irish. An employer thus had every reason to be concerned about Irish workers, not only because they generally weren't very good workers but also because they didn't get along with workers from other ethnic groups. In that regard the greatest irony is what happened when the Irish eventually found something they excelled at: politics. With political success, Irish politicians filled municipal patronage jobs, like the police and fire departments, with Irishmen. Thus "Paddy Wagons" came to be driven by the Irish, rather than filled with them, and the new stereotype of the Irish policeman began to loom larger than the old ones in everyone's view of the Irish community [note]. Even the "first responders" to the World Trade Center attack in 2001 seemed to still disproportionately feature Irish Catholics. Such jobs in fact did not help most of the Irish community. Prosperity for most Irish Americans slowly came from general assimilation and acculturation.
The differences between Irish Catholics and Protestants produce other ironies. The Scotch-Irish initially were more prosperous than the Catholics, but then they moved on to farming communities in Appalachia (from West Virginia down to Eastern Tennessee) and the Ozarks (Arkansas and Missouri). In the Civil War, the Unionist sentiment of all these places was of some national importance -- indeed, it split West Viriginia off from the rest of Virginia and moved Andrew Johnson, from Eastern Tennessee, to prominence in the Union cause -- a man who is variously said to be of Scotch-Irish, Scottish, or English derivation. But then, as Irish Catholics, who had largely remained in urban populations (and became infamous as anti-War and pro-Southern Democrats, culminating in the racial Draft Riots of 1863 in New York City), acculturated and began to enter the American mainstream, the Scotch-Irish began to fall behind and stagnate in lives of marginal agriculture in their remote geography. In time, Appalachia and the Ozarks became bywords of poverty, backwardness, incest, ignorance, bad teeth, and self-destructive behavior, while Nativist sentiment against Irish Catholics finally seemed to evaporate with the election of John F. Kennedy as President in 1960.
The "War on Poverty" in the 1960's usually included Appalachia, as well as urban ghettoes, among the places its programs were directed. While the programs in general failed, Appalachia curiously dropped out of most continuing discussions of poverty in America. After a while, one would think that only the urban poverty of racial minorities was a problem. Yet Appalachia remained pretty much as it was, sustained by welfare and Federal spending (directed to West Virginia by long time Senator Robert Byrd), which tend to perpetuate traditional conditions. The Scotch-Irish, to the extent that they can be identified, remain one of the poorest ethnic groups in the United States -- yet this is never noted or discussed in the press or public discourse, perhaps because such an issue would serve no political agenda of racial grievance or victimization. Since this is my own ethnic group, where names like "Kelley" and "Ross" come from, I grew up hearing about conditions back in Arkansas. I can only laugh at the leftist discourse of "white privilege," and I am eager to accuse academics ignorant of the Scotch-Irish of "oppressing" me and my people.
While urban poverty continued to be blamed on racial discrimination, there are countless cases around the world where cultural differences between populations of like race, language, and even religion produce very different economic outcomes. Irish Catholics and Protestants, of course, differed in religion as well as in economically relevant cultural characteristics. But in India, in a case where race, language, and religion were identical, economic outcomes were very different between the Telugu speakers of the Princely State of Hyderabad and those of the British possessions along the coast. If there were any differences in economic capacity, the Marxist might imagine that the Telugu oppressed by British colonialism would be worse off that those living semi-independently in Hyderabad. Just the opposite was the case, as became apparent when all Telugu speakers were united in the State of Andhra Pradesh in modern India. The Hyderabadis were soon complaining that immigrants from the coast were taking over the economy of Hyderabad. They wanted laws that would discriminate against the coastal people, and eventually they got them.
A far nastier problem emerged in Ceylon. Here there were Buddhist Sinhalese speakers and Hindu Tamil speakers. Conflict between the communities went back to the earliest days of Ceylon, but modern economic envy emerged after independence. The pre-colonial population of Tamils were the most economically successful group on the island, as they had the most avidly taken advantage of the modern education and economy that the British had brought. By 1956 the Sinhalese reacted against this strongly enough to begin discriminating against Tamils. After some years of peaceful resistance, a violent independence movement developed among the Tamils, which resulted in a vicious civil war that continued until at least 2009. Meanwhile, the poorest population on the island was actually Tamils also -- those the British had recently brought over to work on plantations. That there were poor Tamils as well as successful ones didn't make any difference to the Sinhalese -- although the difference between the Tamil populations is another excellent case of different economic incomes for people of the same race, language, and religion. At the same time, the differences in language and religion between Tamils and Sinhalese accompanied other cultural differences that made for different economic outcomes [cases like this are discussed by Thomas Sowell in his books Preferential Policies, an International Perspective, 1990, and Affirmative Action Around the World, An Empirical Study, 2004].
One of the oldest cases I know of large scale official discrimination to even out differences in performance between populations that otherwise do not seem very different comes from Ming China. In 1370, the first Emperor of the Dynasty, Chu Yüan-chang, who expelled the Mongols in 1368, reinstituted the great Civil Service Examinations, which had been suspended by the Mongols. In 1371, 75% of the degrees from the national examination had gone to candidates from the South of China. This displeased the Emperor, who believed, with many traditionalists, that Northerners were morally more worthy -- from the area where Chinese civilization had begun. The examinations were thus suspended until 1385, but then the geographical division of those who passed did not change. At a special Palace examination in 1397, all of the 52 candidates who passed were Southerners. Borrowing from the Josef Stalin school of bureaucracy, the Emperor had two of the examiners executed. In a subsequent retesting, all the successful candidates were Northerners.
By 1425 it was decided that places in the national examinations would be reserved by region, with 35% for the North, 55% for the South, and 10% for some places in the middle. This extraordinary provision was imposed on a nation that to us may seem to be uniform in race, language, and religion. But clearly there were cultural differences, and these were not merely of an economic character. The Chinese Civil Service Examinations did not test economic susccess or even mathematics or engineering. It was all based on the literary culture of the Classics of Confucianism. In our own time when "Asians" are generally expected to do better on IQ tests, and in mathematics and science, it is extraordinary to see that Southern Chinese of the Ming Dynasty apparently enjoyed a marked advantage in literary culture over the Northerners, to the point where "affirmative action" or "reverse discrimination" was imposed by the Government in favor of the Northerners. Of course, there was nothing "reverse" about this. Chu Yüan-chang was probably as perplexed as anyone why such a difference had emerged between North and South [cf. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire, Harvard, 2010, pp.36-37].
All these examples, from the Irish in America to the regional Chinese in China, demonstrate that there is no necessary connection between economic success and racial differences or discrimination. Indeed, the success of Jews in various places, and of Chinese and Indian immigrants similarly, demonstrate that lack of political power, and even the presence of official discrimination and legal disabilities, may not prevent talented and entrepreneurial minorities from dominating the economy of places with poorer and hostile majorities. Yet today we have American law that is based on the premise that, in the absence of irrational discrimination, economic outcomes between ethnic groups will all be the same. Employers will be forced to be "rational" because they will not be allowed to discriminate according to ethnicity or "national origin" in their hiring.
A justification for this, perhaps, is that it gives all individuals the right to prove themselves and not to be judged by the stereotype, whether accurate or inaccurate, of their ethnic group. This prohibition, however, forces an employer not to use their knowledge in a reasonable way. It forces them to hire irrationally, not rationally, regardless of all their experience, and to deal with all the trouble that they know they could have avoided. Such things have costs [note]. An employer may even be forced, as is increasingly the case, to hire from certain ethnic groups in order to avoid even the appearance of discriminating, since the law has tended to shift the burden of proof to the employer that he is not discriminating if his work force is not "representative." Extra workers then may have to be hired to make up for the inefficiency or unreliability of workers that an employer would not have hired on his own judgment. Such costs are born, not only by the employer who has a less efficient business, but by the workers, who may be paid less because there are too many of them and the business is less profitable, and by the public, who may have to pay more for products of lower quality. Everyone loses, and it is not clear how the indulgence of persons who can blame everything on discrimination and nothing on themselves will ever reform them or enable them to succeed in anything but positions that only cause justifiable resentment and dislike in others -- especially among employers and coworkers, who know the facts the best but who are the least likely to be believed by outsiders whose own stereotypes of the suffering victims prejudice their judgment.
Of course, anti-discrimination laws are not often thought of as ways of forcing employers to behave irrationally. They are thought of as ways to prevent employers from behaving according to mere bigotry. They are even thought of as ways of preventing employers from behaving irrationally by excluding irrelevant considerations, e.g. ethnic bigotry, from their business decisions. Ethnic stereotypes that are not based on any experience or real knowledge of their subjects are mere bigotry, and there is plenty of that in every human community. But these views of the anti-discrimination laws tend to assume that all ethnic prejudice or stereotypes are bigoted and irrational, and that is simply not the case. On the other hand it would be far too much trouble, and too fallible, to take things on a case by case basis and try to determine which stereotypes are accurate and which are not. It would be very odd to have the United State Government, say, making official pronouncements about the moral and social virtues and vices of various ethnic groups. That would certainly offend everyone and please no one. The alternatives consequently are either to leave employers alone, to be rational or irrational as they wish, or to force them to bear the costs of inflexible non-discrimination on the principle that the costs overall to society may be less than the costs of allowing bigotry.
That is the question: what are the costs? We should no longer assume that anti-discrimination laws as such are merely a great unequivocal expression of moral virtue. The costs are there, and our evaluation must be about who bears those costs. For employers who are allowed to discriminate according to standards that may be bigoted or irrational, they are the only ones who bear the costs; for it is their business that will suffer from its irrational rejection of valuable human capital and their competitors' businesses that will benefit from their more rational use of the workforce. The worst evil of capitalism in the eyes of many -- opportunism -- thus becomes the wedge that breaks irrational discrimination; and no one was more shrill and self-righteous in their condemnation of capitalistic opportunism than Southern segregationists who didn't like the way that market forces benefited black workers at the expense of white ones. Thus, in the South, more and more laws were needed to enforce segregation by limiting the free market [note]. On the other hand, where such laws are formulated with the opposite purpose, of eliminating bigotry by eliminating all discrimination, rational or irrational, the costs are born by everyone, to the detriment of everyone, including those who are supposed to benefit in particular, just as under segregation.
Capitalism is a series of experiments ("creative destruction"), and such laws badly taint the experimental conditions of the market. The result is that the rational thing to do for an employer is to evade the blindness imposed by the law as much as possible. The market becomes distorted and comes to reward the businesses that can function the most efficiently by breaking the law. The great danger of that, of course, is that businessmen may assume that the anti-discrimination laws really are unequivocally moral, even while they find out that the laws impose serious costs and inefficiencies. Their conclusion that the laws exist to be broken may then be extended to all laws and moral principles, meaning that they may lose their scruples against fraud and violence in carrying out their businesses. That may be just another social cost of such laws.
The Injustice and Tyranny of Anti-Discrimination Law
Religious Morality and Discrimination
"Haole" in Hawaiian originally meant "foreigner," e.g. Tahitians. Now it usually means "Anglos" or "mainlanders" (cf. Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary, University of Hawai'i Press, 1973, p. 55)
A folk etymology interprets the word as meaning "without" ['ole] "force or energy" [hao], which was applied as a disparaging reference to Protestant missionaries. However, the form of the word would have to be "hao'ole," not "haole"; and its use antedates the period when Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawai'i. In fact, Protestant missionaries were welcomed, not disparaged, since King Kamehameha II had already abolished the kapu system and disestablished the old religion before the missionaries had even been heard of. The missionaries were disconcerted that the Hawaiians wanted to convert to Christianity before they had been properly instructed in the Faith.
Return to Ethnic Prejudice, Stereotypes, Discrimination, and the Free Market
Return to How to Pronounce "Hawai'i"
For instance, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines a "bigot" as "one obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion."
That particular avenue of advancement for ethnic communities, through political patronage, eventually was closed off. As patronage jobs were regarded as a kind of corruption, civil service systems removed most municipal employees from the sphere of political reward and punishment. While the abuses of political patronage were monumental, it did have the virtue of being responsive to political power, which the civil service bureaucracy often is not, and of providing opportunities for groups, like the Irish, that did better at politics that at other things.
In economics these are called "knowledge costs." To know what an individual is like, as an individual, takes a great investment of time and effort. Sometimes even people who are married to each other can be surprised about what the other is "really like." In business it is impossible to make that kind of investment in judging an individual who is a job prospect. Some general features must be used to judge individuals, whether these are college degrees, training certificates, grooming, dress, or ethnicity. Even degrees and certificates provide no certainty about prospective employees. Our question is whether ethnicity provides relevant information as much as other things.
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Discrimination, and the Free Market, Note 1Ethnic Prejudice, Stereotypes,
Discrimination, and the Free Market, Note 2Ethnic Prejudice, Stereotypes,
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Discrimination, and the Free Market, Note 4
