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We missed an article on the 50th of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, American race relations scholars, try to understand why leaders of the African American community are so negative on the prospects for racial harmony in our country. Their classic volume, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, can be purchased here.
Black voices of gloom are a staple in reporting on race. “Dreams unfulfilled” is how the Washington Post describes the racial landscape as the nation approaches the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s electrifying address delivered from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The reporter found blacks who had witnessed the speech half a century ago. “I had hoped when I was a young man that we’d see a lot of progress by now,” said Donald Cash, a D.C. resident who is now 68. “But I think we’re going backwards,” he declared.
There will be commemorative weeklong events, as there should be. A march on Saturday, August 31, is billed as “National Action to Reclaim the Dream.” In retrospect, was Dr. King’s dream just wishful thinking, bound to disappoint? “We cannot walk alone,” he said. The destiny of blacks and whites is inextricably intertwined. But how to walk together? Sobering numbers from a recent PewResearchCenter survey suggest an enduring racial chasm. Seventy percent of blacks believe they are treated less fairly than whites in dealings with the police. Almost as many (68 percent) distrust courts. Fifty-four percent perceive inequality in places of work, and 51 percent in the public schools. Forty-eight percent doubt the fairness of the electoral system, and 44 percent think the stores and restaurants they patronize are unfair to them because of their race.
Racial optimists that we have long been, we find these numbers staggering. Evidently, blacks believe they don’t get a fair break anywhere — a conviction hard to understand for those of us old enough to remember the days of brutal subjugation of blacks in the South and of a North where de facto segregation was everywhere apparent. …
One amusing anecdote in the Thernstroms’ book was the story of a rural Georgia county who at the advent of the auto, considered having two road systems – one for whites and one for blacks. A good illustration of the actual hardships visited on blacks was the Negro Motorist Green Book published by a Harlem letter carrier on what establishments would accommodate blacks. WaPo had the story.
African Americans traveling to the nation’s capital on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington will need little more than a GPS device to find their way. But 50 years ago, they might have needed a book to navigate through the racial prejudice of the times.
During the Jim Crow era, laws restricted black Americans from patronizing gas stations, restaurants and hotels.
So Harlem-based letter carrier Victor Green published the “Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” in 1936, when travel was not only inconvenient but embarrassing and potentially deadly.
“The Green Book,” as it came to be called, was a game changer, with its listings of black-friendly establishments.
“It was like the African American AAA Travel Guide,” said writer Calvin Ramsey, who wrote a play and a children’s book about the publication.
“To most people, Washington, D.C., is technically a Southern city,” Ramsey said. “But for people in the South, going to the march was ‘going north.’ People going by car or bus relied on the Green Book.” …
Forbes OpEd on the California opportunities in fracking.
… In the 1960s, when our oil production was at its height, the California economy was the envy of the nation. While production now is half what it once was, the state’s well-being still benefits greatly from oil, whether in Bakersfield, Long Beach, or even Beverly Hills, where oil pumps hidden inside large buildings create prosperity by the barrel.
Why has oil production halved? The same reason that our economy has become a nightmare—political policies that make it practically impossible to do business in California. When I asked Dr. Andrew Kleit, professor of Energy and Environmental Economics at Penn State University, about California’s woes on a recent podcast, he responded, “California has very challenging environmental regulations . . . you simply can’t build new things.”
Thus, we find ourselves in desperate but well-deserved straits. If it weren’t for our weather, who knows how many more productive businesses would have fled?
California urgently needs what it has lost all right to ask for: some breakthrough industry to set up shop here and somehow create trillions in wealth and millions of jobs.
And yet the oil industry is proposing to do exactly that—through revolutionary shale oil technology. …
Mark Steyn on the failure of Muslim culture and the neverland where we cannot speak of that failure.
In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.
Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than TrinityCollege, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”
None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.” …
Along comes Breitbart with an illustration of Muslim backwardness.
A stork once detained by Egyptian authorities on suspicion of being a winged spy has been found dead.
Mahmoud Hassib, the head of Egypt’s southern protected areas, said Saturday that local residents found the dead bird on an island in the Nile, south of the ancient city of Aswan.
In August, a local resident found the stork in Egypt’s Qena governorate, some 450 kilometers (280 miles) southeast of Cairo. Both he and police were suspicious of the European wildlife tracker found on it. Authorities later let the bird go.
However, controversy trails the bird into death. An Egyptian wildlife organization claimed on its Facebook page the bird was “eaten by local villagers.” Hassib denied that the bird had been eaten, though he didn’t know an exact cause of death.