The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: March 12, 2010
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Father’s commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 11 to 4, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting for the curriculum, and four Democrats voting against. ...
Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians were interned in the United States as well as the Japanese during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
Showing posts with label conservative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservative. Show all posts
Friday, March 12, 2010
Thursday, September 17, 2009
White conservatives say it's their turn for empowerment
latimes.com
Are Obama's policies fueling the angry protests, or is race part of the equation?
By Robin Abcarian and Kate Linthicum and Richard Fausset
September 17, 2009
Reporting from Los Angeles and Atlanta
Last weekend, Cindy Wilkerson, a 44-year-old former social worker, helped organize three busloads of protesters who rode from Mississippi to Washington for the big protest targeting President Obama and his policies. The passengers, all white, wore T-shirts identifying themselves without irony as "Freedom Riders."Decades ago, that phrase evoked something quite different. It was bestowed on the predominantly black and white activists who traveled to the Deep South to challenge segregation -- and were sometimes met with hostility and violence."We were riding for freedom," said Wilkerson. "For the freedom of Mississippians and all Americans. . . . The consensus is that this is not a left-wing government, but that this is more of a Marxist [government], you know?"The Age of Obama has brought many things to the American scene -- none more important than the proof that skin color is no barrier to success. But for some white Americans, it has also helped crystallize a sense of dislocation, anger and powerlessness.Some, like Wilkerson's group, have even adopted the language and techniques used by blacks, women, Latinos and gays in their civil rights struggles. But some analysts ask: Is this white victimhood? Strident TV host Glenn Beck of Fox News Channel tapped into the feeling this summer when he accused Obama of having "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."For some, it was reinforced by the sight of a New Haven, Conn., firefighter telling senators that the Latina judge Obama had nominated to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, had discriminated against him in an appellate case because he is white. Or Obama condemning the arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white police officer."White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to," wrote commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in response to Obama's speech on race during the 2008 campaign. "This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard." Among the grievances: affirmative action provisions that "advance black applicants over white applicants."Wilkerson complained that Saturday's protest did not win sufficient media coverage. "It's like we are the forgotten people," she said. She says she believes the movement is not about race -- a black man, she said, helped design the Freedom Riders T-shirt -- nor victimization, but about legitimate disagreements with Obama's policies.Ron Walters, an emeritus professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland who was a campaign manager for the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1980s presidential bids, has written that today's anti-tax "tea party" protests and heated town hall rhetoric are reminiscent of the conservative resurgence of the 1970s. That movement was driven in part by racial hostility and the ability of its leaders to convince white followers that they were victims. (The years after the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act saw court-ordered integration of schools and the adoption of affirmative action programs.)"Now that's precisely what we have today," Walters said Wednesday. "In terms of many people who lost the election feeling disempowered and disenfranchised. The movement of conservatism is dethroned. People are feeling, therefore, resentful about that and determined to demonstrate that resentment in ways that intimidate people, quite frankly."
Full Story: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-white-victimhood17-2009sep17,0,2618101.story?page=2
Are Obama's policies fueling the angry protests, or is race part of the equation?
By Robin Abcarian and Kate Linthicum and Richard Fausset
September 17, 2009
Reporting from Los Angeles and Atlanta
Last weekend, Cindy Wilkerson, a 44-year-old former social worker, helped organize three busloads of protesters who rode from Mississippi to Washington for the big protest targeting President Obama and his policies. The passengers, all white, wore T-shirts identifying themselves without irony as "Freedom Riders."Decades ago, that phrase evoked something quite different. It was bestowed on the predominantly black and white activists who traveled to the Deep South to challenge segregation -- and were sometimes met with hostility and violence."We were riding for freedom," said Wilkerson. "For the freedom of Mississippians and all Americans. . . . The consensus is that this is not a left-wing government, but that this is more of a Marxist [government], you know?"The Age of Obama has brought many things to the American scene -- none more important than the proof that skin color is no barrier to success. But for some white Americans, it has also helped crystallize a sense of dislocation, anger and powerlessness.Some, like Wilkerson's group, have even adopted the language and techniques used by blacks, women, Latinos and gays in their civil rights struggles. But some analysts ask: Is this white victimhood? Strident TV host Glenn Beck of Fox News Channel tapped into the feeling this summer when he accused Obama of having "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."For some, it was reinforced by the sight of a New Haven, Conn., firefighter telling senators that the Latina judge Obama had nominated to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, had discriminated against him in an appellate case because he is white. Or Obama condemning the arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white police officer."White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to," wrote commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in response to Obama's speech on race during the 2008 campaign. "This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard." Among the grievances: affirmative action provisions that "advance black applicants over white applicants."Wilkerson complained that Saturday's protest did not win sufficient media coverage. "It's like we are the forgotten people," she said. She says she believes the movement is not about race -- a black man, she said, helped design the Freedom Riders T-shirt -- nor victimization, but about legitimate disagreements with Obama's policies.Ron Walters, an emeritus professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland who was a campaign manager for the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1980s presidential bids, has written that today's anti-tax "tea party" protests and heated town hall rhetoric are reminiscent of the conservative resurgence of the 1970s. That movement was driven in part by racial hostility and the ability of its leaders to convince white followers that they were victims. (The years after the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act saw court-ordered integration of schools and the adoption of affirmative action programs.)"Now that's precisely what we have today," Walters said Wednesday. "In terms of many people who lost the election feeling disempowered and disenfranchised. The movement of conservatism is dethroned. People are feeling, therefore, resentful about that and determined to demonstrate that resentment in ways that intimidate people, quite frankly."
Full Story: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-white-victimhood17-2009sep17,0,2618101.story?page=2
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of Race to Promote Integration
8-06-07
The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of Race to Promote Integration
http://hnn.us/articles/41501.html
By Nancy MacLean
Chief Justice John G. Roberts reversed a half-century of precedent and progress on civil rights with his decision on school desegregation. That was the prerogative granted him by the President and the party who entrusted him to shift the Supreme Court to the right.
But no one should grant Roberts a free pass when he says "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. " His opinion has its lineage in a well-documented conservative strategy to hijack civil rights rhetoric to roll back advances toward substantive equality.
Roberts's decision, which denied local communities the right to choose race-conscious methods, is replete with quotable phrases from the lexicon conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and then carried into the nation's courtrooms through their various legal societies.
Roberts claimed to be upholding the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education. Yet the conservative movement that put him on the bench bitterly opposed the Brown decision and has fought every serious civil rights initiative since.
The year after Brown, 1955, as Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott to victory, William F. Buckley, Jr. launched the National Review to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." It is no secret that Roberts has worked with the Federalist Society and other conservative legal organizations favored by the National Review.
"National Review was part of a larger movement that created institutions which shaped and trained several thousand young conservatives," as Irving Kristol has written, "to go into the Republican party and take control of it." Scholars, too, cite the magazine's founding as the start of the movement that brought Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House. Reagan and Bush, in turn, appointed the justices who drove the recent school ruling.
So how did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in the formative years, called the high court's decision a "rape of the Constitution."
To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley and Meyer forged an alliance with the intellectual architect of "massive resistance," James Jackson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick's agitation against school desegregation as editor of the Richmond News Leader earned him praise as "one of the South's most talented leaders" from the Mississippi-based white Citizens' Councils then working to crush the civil rights movement.
Buckley traded mailing lists with this avid white supremacist organization in 1958, assuring its leader that "Our position on states' rights is the same as your own." Indeed, it was. What made "the White community" in the South "entitled" to use any means necessary to keep blacks from voting, Buckley had editorialized the year before, was that "it is the advanced race" so its "claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage."
Northerners like Buckley and Meyer allied with southern segregationists not only from racism, however, but also from shared conservative convictions, not least what they called the "original intent" of the Constitution. The pioneers of this tradition were defenders of slavery in the antebellum era and its apologists thereafter. They used their peculiar readings of the Constitution to limit what democratic government could do for its citizens, an approach embraced today by the Federalist Society and the conservative block on the Supreme Court.
Buckley and his allies fought the quest for social justice at every turn. They urged the defeat of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and every measure to promote true fairness thereafter. National Review warned that the Civil Rights Act "would undermine the most precious rights of property." "The whole basis of individual liberty is destroyed," it insisted, when "the citizen's right to discriminate" is denied.
Yet the civil rights movement so altered American culture that even conservatives learned they must update their sales pitch. They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol, who in 1964 warned Buckley of the "political folly" of arguing against school desegregation "in terms of racial differences." Buckley and his allies wisely dropped the racial rationales and most now say that they regret their earlier arguments.
But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight social justice, conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of rhetorical jujitsu. They seized the civil rights movement's greatest strength--its moral power-to defeat its goals. They complained less and less that civil rights measures violated property rights, aided communists or elevated racial inferiors. Instead, conservatives claimed that civil rights measures themselves discriminated.
"I am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic than the Pope," Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered phraseology. "If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex," intoned the outspoken enemy of civil rights, "well, then, it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex."
The former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true advocates of fairness. They framed "the egalitarians," in Kilpatrick's words, as "worse racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern bigots." Color blindness, conservatives had come to see, offered the most promising strategy to defeat the push for equality.
Stealing civil rights language for rhetorical jujitsu attacks on the civil rights movement was a calculated strategy. In its 1981 Mandate for Leadership for the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation explained: "For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil rights field has been for control of language," particularly words such as "equality" and "opportunity." "The secret to victory, whether in court or in congress," it advised, "has been to control the definition of these terms."
The Federalist Society, with which Chief Justice Roberts has collaborated and to which the Bush administration looks for judicial nominees, avidly promotes this maneuver.
That's little wonder. The president of the Federalist Society is Eugene B. Meyer, the home-schooled son of the conservative movement tactician and National Review co-editor who declared the Brown decision "a rape of the Constitution." Back when the elder Meyer wrote, conservatives were truthful about who they were and which side they took.
The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of Race to Promote Integration
http://hnn.us/articles/41501.html
By Nancy MacLean
Chief Justice John G. Roberts reversed a half-century of precedent and progress on civil rights with his decision on school desegregation. That was the prerogative granted him by the President and the party who entrusted him to shift the Supreme Court to the right.
But no one should grant Roberts a free pass when he says "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. " His opinion has its lineage in a well-documented conservative strategy to hijack civil rights rhetoric to roll back advances toward substantive equality.
Roberts's decision, which denied local communities the right to choose race-conscious methods, is replete with quotable phrases from the lexicon conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and then carried into the nation's courtrooms through their various legal societies.
Roberts claimed to be upholding the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education. Yet the conservative movement that put him on the bench bitterly opposed the Brown decision and has fought every serious civil rights initiative since.
The year after Brown, 1955, as Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott to victory, William F. Buckley, Jr. launched the National Review to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." It is no secret that Roberts has worked with the Federalist Society and other conservative legal organizations favored by the National Review.
"National Review was part of a larger movement that created institutions which shaped and trained several thousand young conservatives," as Irving Kristol has written, "to go into the Republican party and take control of it." Scholars, too, cite the magazine's founding as the start of the movement that brought Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House. Reagan and Bush, in turn, appointed the justices who drove the recent school ruling.
So how did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in the formative years, called the high court's decision a "rape of the Constitution."
To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley and Meyer forged an alliance with the intellectual architect of "massive resistance," James Jackson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick's agitation against school desegregation as editor of the Richmond News Leader earned him praise as "one of the South's most talented leaders" from the Mississippi-based white Citizens' Councils then working to crush the civil rights movement.
Buckley traded mailing lists with this avid white supremacist organization in 1958, assuring its leader that "Our position on states' rights is the same as your own." Indeed, it was. What made "the White community" in the South "entitled" to use any means necessary to keep blacks from voting, Buckley had editorialized the year before, was that "it is the advanced race" so its "claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage."
Northerners like Buckley and Meyer allied with southern segregationists not only from racism, however, but also from shared conservative convictions, not least what they called the "original intent" of the Constitution. The pioneers of this tradition were defenders of slavery in the antebellum era and its apologists thereafter. They used their peculiar readings of the Constitution to limit what democratic government could do for its citizens, an approach embraced today by the Federalist Society and the conservative block on the Supreme Court.
Buckley and his allies fought the quest for social justice at every turn. They urged the defeat of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and every measure to promote true fairness thereafter. National Review warned that the Civil Rights Act "would undermine the most precious rights of property." "The whole basis of individual liberty is destroyed," it insisted, when "the citizen's right to discriminate" is denied.
Yet the civil rights movement so altered American culture that even conservatives learned they must update their sales pitch. They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol, who in 1964 warned Buckley of the "political folly" of arguing against school desegregation "in terms of racial differences." Buckley and his allies wisely dropped the racial rationales and most now say that they regret their earlier arguments.
But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight social justice, conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of rhetorical jujitsu. They seized the civil rights movement's greatest strength--its moral power-to defeat its goals. They complained less and less that civil rights measures violated property rights, aided communists or elevated racial inferiors. Instead, conservatives claimed that civil rights measures themselves discriminated.
"I am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic than the Pope," Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered phraseology. "If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex," intoned the outspoken enemy of civil rights, "well, then, it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex."
The former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true advocates of fairness. They framed "the egalitarians," in Kilpatrick's words, as "worse racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern bigots." Color blindness, conservatives had come to see, offered the most promising strategy to defeat the push for equality.
Stealing civil rights language for rhetorical jujitsu attacks on the civil rights movement was a calculated strategy. In its 1981 Mandate for Leadership for the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation explained: "For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil rights field has been for control of language," particularly words such as "equality" and "opportunity." "The secret to victory, whether in court or in congress," it advised, "has been to control the definition of these terms."
The Federalist Society, with which Chief Justice Roberts has collaborated and to which the Bush administration looks for judicial nominees, avidly promotes this maneuver.
That's little wonder. The president of the Federalist Society is Eugene B. Meyer, the home-schooled son of the conservative movement tactician and National Review co-editor who declared the Brown decision "a rape of the Constitution." Back when the elder Meyer wrote, conservatives were truthful about who they were and which side they took.
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