Biosophilia

Finding things to say

I find it challenging to find things to say on my blog. Perhaps that's because I don't like to reveal an incomplete thought, and I, sadly, don't have enough complete thoughts to say anything worthwile. Anyone else ever have trouble thinking of things to blog about?

Posted by Courtney Huntington at 7:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What Black Culture Needs

The following article is reprinted from the Investor's Business Daily.

We Apologized At Gettysburg

Reparations: The nation’s fourth largest bank has been forced to apologize for something it never did and asked to provide compensation on behalf of people who no longer exist. The price for slavery was paid long ago.

Back in 2002, Chicago passed a politically correct ordinance requiring any company contracting with the city to disclose any past ties to slavery or to the slave trade. The theory was that everything from minority unemployment to street gangs to school dropouts is the “legacy of slavery,” so it’s time for those who profited from it to ante up.

Since Wachovia Corp. is a partner with a Chicago community development corporation to build low-income public housing, it was expected to comply. Research determined that First Union Corp. . . .

with which Wachovia merged in 2001, and the South Carolina National Corp., which joined it in 1991, had absorbed other companies that once upon a time owned slaves or had accepted slaves as collateral on mortgages and loans.

This is interesting, if convoluted. But it doesn’t explain why Wachovia stockholders, depositors and customers must pay or apologize for something none of them had anything to do with. Looting the savings of people who had nothing to do with slavery is not justice; it’s a new injustice that will breed resentment, not racial harmony.

Yet guilt-ridden Chairman and CEO Ken Thompson felt compelled to say, “I apologize to all Americans, especially to African Americans and people of African descent,” and promised an unspecified financial contribution to benefit the descendants of slaves.

When the ordinance was adopted, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley said: “It will demonstrate how much of the nation’s wealth was created by the sweat and blood of slavery. We’re paying everybody around the world. Why can’t we pay our own citizens?”

The problem is that people who never owned slaves are being asked to pay money to people who never suffered from slavery. As for “sweat and blood,” just where does a Civil War fit in? Fought in part to end slavery, it killed about 620,000 soldiers, more than all our other wars combined.

Success in life should be the result of hard work, not racial blackmail. In the case of Holocaust survivors and Japanese Americans interned during World War II, we were able to identify the actual people who suffered crimes within our lifetime, or their immediate descendants. We did not simply select an entire ethnic group and demand that those who committed no crime pay it money.

Will reparations magically reduce the percentage of black children born to unwed mothers? It is the lack of a father in the home, not the legacy of slavery, that is a powerful indicator of poverty and crime, and nearly 70% of all black children are born out of wedlock. As recently as 1965, nearly 70% of black children had two parents. So how is this growing tragedy the “legacy of slavery”?

Blacks are suffering from the legacy of a welfare system that encouraged black males to abandon their families and their responsibilities and then rewarded illegitimacy with a check. They are suffering from a legacy of an educational system that continues to imprison blacks and other minorities in failing schools with opposition to school choice and school vouchers.

Is it the fault of slavery that minority kids don’t stay in school, don’t learn to read or do basic math, don’t graduate, don’t even take books home to do their homework lest they be accused of “acting white”?

What black Americans need are stable families, vouchers and school choice, not reparations and apologies.

Posted by Courtney Huntington at 9:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New Plans at ULM

The University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM) has announced plans to transfer departments such as Aviation and Construction to the College of Business Administration (CBA).

I think this is a good move. Part of the reasoning behind the move is that so many aspects of aviation and construction--as well as the other departments being tranferred--are business-related. They have until now been part of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), which is where they seem most comfortable, at first glance. It could be argued easily that they are most more science-related than business-related, and I would agree with this statement outside this context. My response is that all aspects of business and of the CBA are by nature connected to either the arts or the sciences and, therefore, should be part of the CAS, based on the given criteria. That is why ULM has created the CAS and designed it to include the core departments and programs; however, as long as there is going to be a CBA, I think aviation and construction should be included in it.

Posted by Courtney Huntington at 4:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack