Round-up

1. This ABC article describes an experiment in a New Jersey deli where two "actors" "portraying" Mexicans tried to buy sandwiches with broken English, and another actor playing a racist store-clerk told them, "Get back in your pickup truck with the rest of your family." The experiment was to test how the other people in the deli, who didn't know the incident was staged, reacted.

It's easy for ABC to present their results as troubling, since some subjects seemed to approve of the racism or at least be indifferent to it. However, it is worth asking why they had to set up a situation at all. Surely if racism is as common in America as they would like us to believe, they wouldn't need to set something up; they could find examples of this kind of thing all over the place without having to provoke them.

On a good note, it's clear that the majority of people who witnessed the experiment actually stood up in favour of the victims. It's also funny that the customer who displayed the most virulent racism was.....black.

Oops.

2. Says the author of this article: "It was a surprise when the Sarasota County School District's second-highest ranking administrator charged last month that he's a victim of racial discrimination in the workplace."

Why was it a surprise? The author explains:

Nelson is black, and his employer, the Sarasota County School District, is not known for having an abundance of black administrators at high levels. And so, I would never just assume he could not be dealing with racism there, no matter that he has a plum position second only to the superintendent. Stranger things have happened. At some institutions, people have been set up to fail, and a boss could be a conniving racist who wants to make life unpleasant for anyone of the wrong color.

Only, in this case, I have trouble imagining that anyone would think anything like that about White. And that's not even the biggest problem with Nelson's charges.

They include claims like not being told about a meeting, being barred from taking an out-of-state trip and being stalled while replacing his secretary. It reads, to me, too much like an obsessed, turf-guarding bureaucrat imagining snubs at every turn. And that seems more so after reading White's responses, which shred each complaint as either factually wrong or way off base.

But even if some snub was real, it is still hard to figure how Nelson decided racism had anything to do with it. There is nothing in his memos that explain what made him think so.

It seems the desperate, manipulative lies are coming in thick and fast.

3. A gang of thugs in Basingstoke beat teenagers from the Nepalese community with baseball bats in a suspected racist attack.

There is no evidence in the article that this was racist, but I have no problem with keeping it open as an option. What bothers me, however, is this line at the end of the story:

Chief Inspector Jill Baldry, commander of the Basingstoke and Deane district of Hampshire Constabulary, said: “If during the course of the investigation the incident is discovered to have been a racist crime it will be dealt with accordingly to the highest possible standards."

What??? You mean to say that if it is found to NOT have been a racist crime, you WON'T deal with it to the highest possible standards?

I wonder whether the victims would testify that being smashed over the head with baseball bats by racists is worse than being smashed over the head with baseball bats at random.