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THE VIEW FROM HERE - When one was born in the US during the Holocaust and participated in the beginning of President Johnson’s Poverty Program, one’s experiences help to explain today’s pro-Hamas Anti-Semitism at our elite campuses. Originally, the President Johnson’s War on Poverty was open to all Americans of every race, creed, color, and national origin. VISTA and Upward Bound, for examples, had whites, Asians, Black, Mexicans, etc. The War on Poverty, as the name implies, was based on economics untinged by racism.
The philosophy was that any American who had missed out on opportunity should have extra chances. That’s why there were Poverty Programs for Appalachia and the Upward Bound at the Claremont Colleges in California had Whites, Asians, Blacks and Mexicans.
America’s Core Values
From the outset of the American experience, individual inalienable rights were the central value around which country was oriented. All group rights systems such as British Peerage were forbidden. Colonists who did not adopt this public ethos were no longer welcome. Those British subjects who preferred the monarchy went back to Great Britain or north to Canada. Inalienable rights had zero to do with race, or ethnicity or religion. As George Washington advised in his famous 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport RI, don’t thank me for your station in America. In this county, each individual has his own right and no “tolerance” from anyone else is required. See Founders OnLine The prototype for our rejecting group rights based on ascriptive status was the US Constitution’s ejecting religion from the State. At that time, the pernicious influence of any religion gaining control of the state was more feared than those who wanted to institute Peerage. Hence, we have what is termed Separation of Church and State.
While the Poverty Program began life based on the values of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, it was quickly perverted into a mass patronage program based the old ward heeler system in large cities. Affirmative Action was quickly becoming a quota system where only numbers counted; merit was not only irrelevant but was shunned. The Dems lifted the political patronage of Jobs in Return for Votes to the national level.
In the early 1970's, I attended a meeting of the heads of the major retail chains, such as Robinson’s and May Co., where they discussed the trouble they were having with Affirmative Action. Each chain had instituted Affirmative Action programs where they would help those, who had been left out of the opportunity structure, with programs to master the skills necessary to handle jobs within the retail trade. (Such job training was part of the War on Poverty but had fallen out of favor.) Rather, the Feds had been threatening to sue the stores unless they actually hired more minorities as full-time employees without regard to ability. The flip side was that every White person hired counted against the quotas. The stores had adopted two strategies: (1) Hire qualified Blacks and Mexicans away from each other by paying higher salaries, and (2) hire more Asians who were already qualified. (Affirmative Action soon dropped Asians since businesses were loading up on Asians.)
At the meeting, the retail executives made two decisions; (1) Stop raiding each other for qualified Blacks and Mexicans; each store was losing as many as they were gaining, and (2) Treat Affirmative Action like a tax where each store had to bear the extra cost of having unqualified employees. Colleges made a similar adaptation.
As Wokeism declares today, the orthodoxy became that all problems were due to White racism. Teaching White values like hard work, education, postponement of gratification was labeled racist. Worst yet, EECO programs did not prepare minorities to compete. The Great Society became a racist numbers game to force minorities into schools and businesses on the theory that the minorities would vote Dem. Also, underlying these programs was the belief that Blacks and Mexicans were inferior, and if the minorities first had to undergo remedial educational programs to enhance their merit, they would fail. In addition, handling out jobs now would bring in votes now.
In response, I felt it was necessary to explain the harsh political philosophy of America. America behaved vicious fraternity hazing where each new group was treated like trash until it fought its way into acceptance. The deal in America: Each person could be whatever they wished in private, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Germans, etc, but in public everyone had to adopt the values of inalienable rights for each person no matter how much one may dislike other groups.
In the late 1700's, Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers knew that extending individual inalienable rights to Blacks would be hard. Thus, Jefferson inserted the emphatic word “equal”into the Declaration: that “all men are created equal . . . with certain inalienable rights.” Jefferson altered Locke’s Life, Liberty, and Property to Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness to deprive anyone from later saying that Blacks did not have inalienable rights because slaves were property. Nonetheless, the Dred Scott Decision, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), made that claim anyway.
Affirmative Action rejected our core values so that the group to which one belonged was more important than the individual. Either schools and businesses reflected the required percentage of minorities, or they could be defunded or sued. The Feds threats resulted in drastically reducing requirements for minorities. They were given the simplest jobs so that they could adequately perform. Schools provided EEOC classes where the level of education was atrocious. Schools could not afford to lose a single student. It was similar to how the LAUSD was recently caught forcing teachers to mark absent students “present” so that LAUSD would receive more money from the state. Affirmative Action forced a type of segregation in colleges and universities where the minorities received an inferior education. That was OK as long as the minorities voted Dem.
The Great Society Caused Great Harm
The Black community and the Mexican community were harmed in different ways. The Blacks had extensive experience with American lethal fraternity initiation mode where Blacks were often lynched for trying. Nonetheless, they had fashioned some strong Black cultural institutions, sometimes with the help of others, such as with the NAACP, and at other times by themselves, e.g., the Black churches. As a result, the Blacks had become America’s premier group at Overcoming. Today, Wokeism portrays Blacks as hapless victims in dire need of reparations due to slavery. [BTW, the Dems base reparations on slavery so that they can cut out the Mexicans who were also subjected to invidious discrimination including the United States’ stealing trillions of dollars of land.]
Mexicans, on the other hand, had been culturally indoctrinated by two authoritarian institutions, i.e., the Spanish monarchy and its successor governments and the Roman Catholic Church. They had no centuries long tradition of self-government. Setting aside the highly educated Californios, most of the poorer Mexicans in California were from Zacatecas and other rural areas. The Affirmative Action Quotas were devastating as the Mexicans were merely passed on and on so that schools would get their federal money. As laborers, Mexicans fared better as they were good workers, but low skilled jobs did not result in the education necessary to enter the professions.
I knew one extremely intelligent Mexican teenager from the Pomona Valley with a fantastic personality and movie star looks who got caught up in the 1960's racist Great Society. He was even elected President of his law school, but the so-called liberals took him to so many places, introduced him to so many people, and the school gave him such gut courses that he never could pass the State Bar Exam. The Bar passing rate for Mexicans for years was abysmal. I lived in the barrio, and for a few years, I taught in schools with Mexican students. The matrix IQ tests of the times were correct; as a group, Mexicans were smarter than Whites. In my experience, conservative White racists in places like Montclair, CA, intentionally forced the Mexicans into non-academic courses and liberal Whites racists did the same thing at the college level.
The Role of Speaker Pelosi
The racism of Affirmative Action morphed into today’s racist anti-White anti-Semitic Wokeism with the help of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with her polarized Identity Politics, which is now generally known as Woke DEI. The pitch is the same as in the 1960's and 1970's, vote for us and we will guarantee you a job. The underpinning ideology is that the world is dichotomized into two groups: (1) the evil Oppressors, Whites and Jews, and (2) the good Oppressed, all minorities. As Pelosism puts it: when the minorities are the majority of the voters, they will replace the Whites. Jews, although a minority, must be placed in the Oppressor category for Wokeism to work. As a result, colleges have been teaching that Israel and Jews are evil and need to be destroyed. Wokeism is the new Nazism . The Charlottesville chant, “Jews shall not replace us,” was in response to Pelosi’s threats to replace Whites with Blacks, where clever Jews orchestrate the replacement.
Pelosi and other feds have been forcing racist Wokeism on colleges in the same way they forced Affirmative Action on colleges. As a result, colleges have been compelled to teach gargantuan falsehoods about Israel in particular and about Jews in general. In reality, Jews are the indigenous people in Israel who have been there well over 3,000 years, but in Wokeism, they become are colonizers. In fact, the Palestinians are the colonizers. Where do pro-Hamas Christians think Bethlehem was located? Have they forgotten that Jesus was Jewish? Where does the Bible mention the Palestinians? Israel has accepted every two-state solution giving up much of the original homeland, while the Arabs have rejected every two-state solution in preference to a one state solution which has only dead Jews “from the river to the sea.” Anti-Semitic Wokeism is built on outright lies. In return for federal money, the universities have been not only excluding Asians, but have been teaching anti-Semitism for years.
What does a kid born in 2000 know about Nazi Germany? Nothing. What do 90% of his professors born in 1970's to 1990's know? Nothing. Wokeism has no room for those of us who were born during the Holocaust and who’ve witnessed the systematic rise of racist Wokeism, whose prototype is German Nazism. Youth have to be taught racism, and it is clear who has been teaching our children to be viciously self-righteous bigots.
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected].)
