Should we be surprised?
President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.
"Regardless of individuals' behavior." Think about that.
To deracinate is to uproot. W. K. sends this:
That article about political correctness in the universities you linked to reminded me of David Conway's comments in A Defence of the Realm about the 'systematic deracination' of the citizens of western liberal democracies since World War Two:
Through changes in educational curricula, plus other cultural changes, most notably in public broadcasting, the cultural majorities in these societies have been made increasingly unfamiliar with their national histories and traditions. Without adequate historical knowledge of their national histories and without encouragement and opportunity to participate in national traditions, the members of a society cannot be expected to have much understanding of or affection for them.
Historically, nowhere in the world have women been better treated than in Christian nations. In his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote the first tribute in history to an ordinary woman, his mother, Monica. The Divine Comedy is highest praise of a woman ever. According to Christianity, the Virgin Mary is the greatest human being ever to have lived. Be proud of that.
The accusers during the witch hunts were overwhelmingly women.
One-hundred and fifty years ago, ninety-five percent of men didn't have the vote.
In nineteenth-century England, more novels were published by women than by men. And they wrote under their own names, contrary to the feminist myth that women were obliged to take male names.
Western literature starts with an account of men fighting over a woman. Listen to Achilles: ‘Why must we battle Trojans, men of Argos? Why, why in the world if not for Helen with her loose and lustrous hair?’And Odysseus endures all perils and resists all temptations – even immortality – to get back home to his wife. Medieval chivalric literature also testifies to the fact that women were highly esteemed.
Homosexuality
Plato made sodomy illegal in his Laws.
Poets and orators did not express longings to return to their catamites.
Adult Athenians who acted as catamites were excluded from all offices in public life, not even being permitted to address the assembly.
Dead White Males
Most great literature is written by dead white males. Postmodernists think that’s explained by ‘oppression’ and ‘privilege’, but there are good reasons for it:
Whites have the highest IQ of any race (see the cold-climate theory of IQ).
Men are disproportionately represented at the extremes of intelligence (morons and geniuses): above the IQ level of 170, the genius level, there are thirty timesas many men as women. (Again, there are evolutionary reasons for this.)
Before writers are acknowledged to be great, their work must be subjected to the test of time, which outlasts any individual's lifespan.
Christianity
William E. Lecky, an atheist, makes the following point in his History of European Morals: ‘The vast change in the status of women must be manifest to all after Christianity had superseded the unlimited license of the pagan Empire.’ He mentions:
Christianity's absolute prohibition of sexual indulgence outside marriage
The security of wives by the prohibition of divorce
The legal rights of guardianship of children hitherto reserved to men
The inheritance of widows
"There can be little doubt that reverence for the Virgin Mary has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman and soften the manners of men."
The "redeeming and ennobling features of the age of chivalry which no succeeding change of habit or belief has wholly destroyed."
Also:
Christians preached that there was no separate baptism for men and women. All were one in Christ.
Christians did not expose baby girls at birth.
Christians honoured women who defied emperors, centurions and soldiers to witness to the Faith.
Christians were the first to educate women.
Christians were the first to have separate prison cells for men and women.
Find out here.
Contemporary liberals hunt for racists the way McCarthyites in the '50s and early '60s hunted for commies, and they use their terms of opprobrium with the same sort of irresponsible semantic latitude. You could say that they are extreme semantic latitudinarians when it comes to their verbal bludgeons of choice. But a witch hunt by any other name is still a witch hunt.
Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, Cherokee maiden, diversity queen of the Harvard Lore Law School, and author of the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, is being deservedly and diversely raked over the coals. Howie Carr, White and Wrong. NRO, Paleface. Michael Barone, Racial Preferences: Unfair and Ridiculous. Excerpt:
Let's assume the 1894 document is accurate. That makes Warren one-thirty-second Native American. George Zimmerman, the Florida accused murderer, had a black grandmother. That makes him a quarter black, four times as black as Warren is Indian, though The New York Times describes him as a "white Hispanic."
In the upside-down world of the liberal, the 'white Hispanic' George Zimmerman is transmogrified into a redneck and the lily-white Elizabeth Warren into a redskin.
The Left's diversity fetishism is so preternaturally boneheaded that one has to wonder whether calm critique has any place at all in responses to it. But being somewhat naive, I have been known to try rational persuasion. See Diversity and the Quota Mentality for one example.
John Fund in Censoring Naomi Riley comments on the latter's dismissal by the The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.”
John Fund goes on to make a number of obvious points in protest of the illiberalism of contemporary liberals.
But Fund neglects to comment on the irony of publishing his piece in National Review Online, which recently defenestrated John Derbyshire. (My posts on Derbyshire are in the Race category.) What makes it worse is that NRO is supposedly a conservative publication. We have a supposedly conservative publication publishing a piece that criticizes The Chronicle for dumping a blogger who bravely spoke her mind and expressed some unpleasant truths that many acknowledge but few have the courage to express. But this same publication did exactly the same thing to John Derbyshire. We expect craven acquiescence to race-baiters from politically correct liberals, but not from so-called conservatives such as Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy.
Why doesn't Fund stick up for Derbyshire? (Perhaps he has in some other venue.) I could be wrong, but Derbyshire is a more substantial commentator on the passing scene than the blogger Riley.
Here: "POLICE chiefs have banned IT staff from using the word blacklist over fears it is RACIST." (Via VFR)
This sort of thing is insane, of course. And so I suspect that to argue against it is foolish: it only lends credibility to a view that ought to be mocked and derided.
But I do argue it out here. One late-night comic lampooned the 'crispy critter' tanning lady (who brought her child into the tanning booth with her) by saying that the she is so dark it's racist! That's the way to go. You PeeCee liberals are so stupid it's racist! What is the antecedent of the last two occurrences of 'it'? Don't worry, we be in PeeCee land now. We don't need to talk no sense.
Cosmologists are going to have to be careful what with their talk of black holes. Someone might take that as 'code' for 'black ho' a phrase that in PeeCee logic (and no, I'm not talking about the propositional calculus) implies that all black females are whores.
• People ascribe a stereotype to everybody in the subject group. "All Germans are efficient." "All English people have bad teeth." In fact, these researchers were not able to locate anybody who believes that a stereotype is true of all members of the stereotyped group. Stereotypes are probabilistic tools, and even the most dull-witted human beings seem to know this. People who believe that Mexicans are lazy or that the French don't wash, understand perfectly well that there are lots of industrious Mexicans and fragrant Frenchmen.
• Stereotypes exaggerate group characteristics. No, they don't. Much more often, the opposite is true. For example, the racial stereotypes that white Americans hold of black Americans are generally accurate; and where they are inaccurate, they always under-estimate a negative characteristic. The percentage of black American families headed by a female, for example, was 21 at the time of one survey (1978): the whites whose stereotypes were being investigated offered estimates of from 8 to 12 per cent. It is not true that stereotypes generally exaggerate group differences. As in this example, they are much more likely to downplay them.
• Stereotypes blind us to individual characteristics. Nope. It is not the case that when we pass from a situation where we have nothing to go on but a stereotype (cab driver being hailed by young black male) to one where a person's individuality comes into play (interviewing a black job applicant), our stereotypes blind us to "individuating traits." On the contrary, researchers have found that the individuating traits are seized on for attention, and stereotypes discarded, with rather more enthusiasm than the accuracy of stereotypes would justify. Teachers' judgments about their students, for example, rest almost entirely on student differences in performance, hardly at all on race, class or gender stereotypes. This is as one would wish, but not as one would expect if the denigrators of stereotyping were to be believed.
• The real function of stereotypes is to bolster our own self-esteem. Wrong again. This is not a factor in most stereotyping. The scientific evidence is that the primary function of stereotypes is what researchers very prettily call "the reality function." That is, stereotypes are useful tools for dealing with the world. Confronted with a snake or a faun, our immediate behavior is determined by generalized beliefs — stereotypes — about snakes and fauns. Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind's ability to make generalizations, without which science and mathematics, not to mention much of everyday life, would be impossible. Researcher Clark R. McCauley:
Standing next to the bus driver, we are more likely to ask about traffic patterns than about the latest foreign film. On the highway, we try to squeeze into the exit lane in front of the man driving a 10-year-old station wagon rather than trying to pull in on the man driving a new Corvette. Looking for the school janitor, we are more likely to approach a young man in overalls than a young woman in overalls. This kind of discrimination on the basis of group differences can go wrong, but most of us probably feel that we are doing ourselves and others a favor when we respond to whatever cues and regularities our social environment affords us.
Taken verbatim from John Derbyshire, Stereotypes Aren't So Bad
'Racism' and 'racist' are words used by liberals as all-purpose semantic bludgeons. Proof of this is that the terms are never defined, and so can be used in wider or narrower senses depending on the polemical and ideological purposes at hand. In common parlance 'racism' and 'racist' are pejoratives, indeed, terms of abuse. This is why it is foolish for conservatives such as John Derbyshire to describe themselves as racists while attempting to attach some non-pejorative connotation to the term. It can't be done. It would be a bit like describing oneself as as an asshole, 'but in the very best sense of the term.' 'Yeah, I'm an asshole and proud of it; we need more assholes; it's a good thing to be.' The word has no good senses, at least when applied to an entire human as opposed to an orifice thereof. For words like 'asshole,' 'child molester,' and 'racist' semantic rehabilitation is simply not in the cards. A conservative must never call himself a racist. (And I don't see how calling himself a racialist is any better.) What he must do is attack ridiculous definitions of the term, defend reasonable ones, and show how he is not a racist when the term is reasonably defined.
Let's run through some candidate definientia of 'racism':
1. The view that there are genetic or cultural differences between racial groups and that these differences have behavioral consequences.
Since this is indeed the case, (1) cannot be used to define 'racism.' The term, as I said, is pejorative: it is morally bad to be a racist. But it is not morally bad to be a truth-teller. The underlying principle here is that it can't racism if it is true. Is that not obvious?
Suppose I state that blacks are 11-13% of the U.S. population. That cannot be a racist statement for the simple reason that it is true. Nor can someone who makes such a statement be called a racist for making it. A statement whose subject matter is racial is not a racist statement. Or I inform you that blacks are more likely than whites to contract sickle-cell anemia. That too is true. But in this second example there is reference to an unpleasant truth. Even more unpleasant are those truths about the differential rates of crime as between blacks and whites. But pleasant or not, truth is truth, and there are no racist truths. (I apologize for hammering away at these platitudes, but in a Pee Cee world in which people have lost their minds, repetition of the obvious is necessary.)
2. The feeling of affinity for those of one's own racial and ethnic background.
It is entirely natural to feel more comfortable around people of one's own kind than around strangers. And of course there is nothing morally objectionable in this. No racism here.
3. The view that it is morally justifiable to put the interests of one's own race or ethnic group above those of another in situations of conflict or limited resources. This is to be understood as the analog of the view that it it morally justifiable to put the interests of oneself and one's own family, friends, and neighbors above the interests of strangers in a situation of conflict or limited resources.
There is nothing morally objectionable in his, and nothing that could be legitimately called racism.
4. The view that the genetic and cultural differences between races or ethnic groups justifies genocide or slavery or the denial of political rights.
Now we arrive at an appropriate definiens of 'racism.' This is one among several legitimate ways of defining 'racism.' Racism thus defined is morally offensive in the extreme. I condemn it and you should to. I condemn all who hold this.
It is well known by now that NRO has cut its ties with John Derbyshire ('Derb') over the latter's publication in another venue of The Talk: Nonblack Version. Both Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy have commented on this severing of ties and both sets of comments are unbelievably lame. Here is the substance (or rather 'substance') of McCarthy's response (numerals added):
[1] We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal decency toward every person — no matter what race, no matter what science tells us about comparative intelligence, and no matter what is to be gleaned from crime statistics. [2] It is important that research be done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what it tells us. [3] But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in various situations — or for calculating fear or friendship based on race alone. [4] To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the aspiration of e pluribus unum.
Ad [1]. Well, don't we all (including Derb) believe in the equal dignity of human persons regardless of race, creed, national origin, sex, age? Is McCarthy suggesting that Derb rejects this principle? But of course equality of rights is not the same as empirical equality. That people are not empirically equal is a factual claim in two senses of 'factual': it is a non-normative claim, and it is a true claim. That people have equal rights is a normative claim. The non-normative and normative claims are logically independent. One cannot infer empirical equality from normative equality. More importantly, one cannot infer normative inequality from empirical inequality. For example, human infants are pretty much helpless, but this fact does not detract from their equal right to life. Women are on average shorter than men, and less muscular, but these facts do not detract from their status as persons, as rights-possessors. 90 year-olds tend to be more frail than 60 year-olds, but this fact does not entail that a 90 year-old is less of a person, has a lesser normative status, than a 60 year-old.
Ad [2]. Who could disagree with this bromide?
Ad [3]. It is in his third sentence where McCarthy ascends into Cloud Cuckoo Land. Suppose it is a fact that "Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery." A fact is a fact. There are no false facts, and there are no racist facts. There are racial facts (facts about race), but a racial fact is not a racist fact. Now suppose I encounter at night, in a bad part of town, an "individual person" in McCarthy's phrase whom I do not know, a person who is young, male, black, and dressed gangsta-style. His dark glasses prevent me from seeing his eyes and judging his sobriety. His deep pockets might conceal a pistol. Would I be justified in using statistical common sense and avoiding said individual? Of course. The guy might be harmless, but I do not know that. I do know that he fits the profile of an individual who could cause me some serious trouble. Common sense dictates that I give him a wide berth just as I would with a drunken Hells (no apostrophe) Angel exiting a strip joint. There are no black Hells Angels, by the way.
Does that mean that I don't consider the black man or the biker to have rights equal to mine? No. It means that I understand that we are not mere rights-possessors or Kantian noumenal agents, but also possessors of animal bodies and socially formed (and mal-formed) psyches and that these latter facts induce empirical inequalities of various sorts.
Am I drawing an a priori conclusion when I avoid the black guy? Of course not. My reasoning is a posteriori and inductive. I am reasoning from certain perceived facts: race (not skin color!), behavior, dress, location, time of day, etc. to a conclusion that is rendered probable (not certain) by these facts. And note that in a situation like this one does not consider "race alone" in McCarthy's phrase. If I considered "race alone" then there would be no difference between the dude I have just described and Condoleeza Rice.
Is my inductive reasoning and consequent avoidance behavior morally censurable? Of course not. After all, I have a moral duty to attend to my own welfare. (See Kant on duties to oneself.) If anything, my reasoning and behavior are morally obligatory. And I am quite sure that Andrew McCarthy would reason and behave in the same way in the same circumstances.
Ad [4]. What McCarthy is saying here is nonsense and beneath commentary. But I will point out the tension between calling for a "pluralistic society" while invoking the phrase e pluribus unum, "out of many, one." One wonders how long before McCarthy cries for more "diversity."
The Pee Cee conservative is an interesting breed of cat. We shall have to study him more carefully.
Here:
The liberal narrative about the [Trayvon Martin] case is now destroyed; it had nothing to do with finding out the truth, whether a trigger-happy vigilante murdered Trayvon Martin, or a desperate neighborhood watchman saved his head from being pounded to smithereens by pulling out a gun and shooting his assailant, or something in between. The narrative instead was solely concerned with taking a tragic shooting case and turning it into more fuel for a fossilized civil rights industry (since the case broke, dozens of violent crime cases of blacks against whites and Asians are splashed over the news, enraging readers and escaping liberal commentary). All we know now is that the “narrative”—a preteen shot “like a dog” while eating candy by a white “assassin” who uttered racial epithets and was never even touched by the victim, only to be let go by a wink-and-nod police force—is false.
I think it will be very hard to get a second-degree murder conviction, given the absence of racial malice on the tape (the narrative’s “coons” and NBC’s version of Zimmerman on his own volunteering “he’s black” are now inoperative), eyewitness accounts of the fray, and the clear injuries to Zimmerman. Instead, the authorities will hope that by inflating the indictment, by airing the facts, and by making Zimmerman testify, tensions will ease–and so when he is acquitted or a judge throws out the case, or a lesser count is pressed, riots will fizzle.
[. . .]
Perhaps before the second-degree-murder charge is thrown out, the prosecution can so entangle Zimmerman in testimony that they can recharge him with perjury or conspiracy and then plea bargain him down to a year or two. The case is now not concerned with justice, but with politics, defusing threats of violence, and salvaging the careers of so many who so foolishly rushed to judgment.
Even Jesse Jackson does it! This following is excerpted from the NYT piece, The Color of Suspicion (emphasis added)
Why a Cop Profiles
This is what a cop might tell you in a moment of reckless candor: in crime fighting, race matters. When asked, most cops will declare themselves color blind. But watch them on the job for several months, and get them talking about the way policing is really done, and the truth will emerge, the truth being that cops, white and black, profile. Here's why, they say. African-Americans commit a disproportionate percentage of the types of crimes that draw the attention of the police. Blacks make up 12 percent of the population, but accounted for 58 percent of all carjackers between 1992 and 1996. (Whites accounted for 19 percent.) Victim surveys — and most victims of black criminals are black — indicate that blacks commit almost 50 percent of all robberies. Blacks and Hispanics are widely believed to be the blue-collar backbone of the country's heroin- and cocaine-distribution networks. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 make up 1.1 percent of the country's population, yet commit more than 28 percent of its homicides. Reason, not racism, cops say, directs their attention.
Cops, white and black, know one other thing: they're not the only ones who profile. Civilians profile all the time — when they buy a house, or pick a school district, or walk down the street. Even civil rights leaders profile. ''There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life,'' Jesse Jackson said several years ago, ''than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.'' Jackson now says his quotation was ''taken out of context.'' The context, he said, is that violence is the inevitable byproduct of poor education and health care. But no amount of ''context'' matters when you fear that you are about to be mugged.
At a closed-door summit in Washington between police chiefs and black community leaders recently, the black chief of police of Charleston, S.C., Reuben Greenberg, argued that the problem facing black America is not racial profiling, but precisely the sort of black-on-black crime Jackson was talking about. ''I told them that the greatest problem in the black community is the tolerance for high levels of criminality,'' he recalled. ''Fifty percent of homicide victims are African-Americans. I asked what this meant about the value of life in this community.''
The police chief in Los Angeles, Bernard Parks, who is black, argues that racial profiling is rooted in statistical reality, not racism. ''It's not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail,'' Parks told me. ''It's the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they're going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.''
Chief Parks defends vigorously the idea that police can legitimately factor in race when building a profile of a criminal suspect.
''We have an issue of violent crime against jewelry salespeople,'' Parks says. ''The predominant suspects are Colombians. We don't find Mexican-Americans, or blacks or other immigrants. It's a collection of several hundred Colombians who commit this crime. If you see six in a car in front of the Jewelry Mart, and they're waiting and watching people with briefcases, should we play the percentages and follow them? It's common sense.''
I got wind of Derb's defenestration, and the concomitant crapstorm of Internet commentary, a little late, but I've been making up for lost time. I found this curious passage over at RedState, a self-professedly conservative website (emphasis added):
Derbyshire likes to pepper his racist rants with “facts” that generally consist of social studies that are subject to numerous interpretational biases. To me, the question as to whether these studies are accurate or correct is uninteresting and irrelevant – a central tenet of decency demands that every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his or her own merits regardless of what social science may say about any group (racial, cultural, religious or otherwise) to which he or she might belong. It is this very basis which Derbyshire rejects, and that is what makes him (and has always made him) a racist. He is not, as his defenders at the execrable Taki mag say, confronting the world with uncomfortable truths, he is proudly declaring himself to be a racist and arguing that it is correct to be racist. This, I submit, is something that all decent people should reject.
This is exceedingly curious because the author seems to be saying that Derb is a racist whether or not the facts he adduces in support of the advice he gives to his children are indeed facts. But surely there are no racist facts. A racial fact is not a racist fact. So if the facts Derb adduces are facts, then his adducing them cannot be racist. It therefore cannot be irrelevant whether what Derb calls facts are indeed facts: that is rather the nub of issue.
Here is one of the facts he adduces: Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. Here is another: Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
Now suppose that these are indeed facts. Do they justify the advice he gives his kids? Part of the advice is:
(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:
(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
It should be obvious that the facts do justify the advice. Derb is a father and he is talking to his children. Being children, they lack experience of the world and the degree of good judgment that comes from protracted encounter with the world and its ways. Caring about his children, he advises: If all you have to go on is knowledge of the mean differences, then avoid situations where there is a large number of blacks unknown to you.
There is nothing racist about this. It is excellent paternal advice. To be racist, the facts Derb adduces would have to be non-facts. It silly in excelsis to suppose that it is irrelevant whther the sociological facts Derb cites are indeed facts. (Please avoid the pleonastic 'true facts.')
The author above speaks of a "central tenet of decency" according to which every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his own merits regardless of group affiliation and regardless of what we know about the group. That too is silly. Consider the Hells [no apostrophe!] Angels. We know quite a lot about this motorcycle gang. If we were to follow the "central tenet of decency" we would have to leave out of consideration this knowledge in our encounters with members of the gang. But this would be very foolish indeed. For example, suppose all I know about Tiny is that he is a Hells Angel and what I can know by observing him at the end of the bar. (E.g., he is covered with tattoos, muscular, about 220 lbs, 6' 2" in height, and about 35 years of age.) Knowing just this, I know enough to avoid (eye or other) contact with him. For I know that if an altercation should ensue, his fellow Angels would join in the fight (that's part of their code) and I would be lucky to escape with my life.
Now unless you are a very stupid liberal you will not misunderstand what I am saying. I am not saying that blacks as a group are as criminally prone as Hells Angels as a group. I'm showing that the above decency principle is incoherent. One cannot abstract from group characteristics when all you have to go on are group characteristics and immediate sensory data.
Racism? What racism? And what do you mean by 'racist' anyway? Derb adduces some facts that bear upon race and you call him a racist? Then please tell us what you mean by the term.
In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window. Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture. In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry. Derb's free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there. And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.
Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece. If nothing else, it will hold your interest. It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation. If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal. If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent. If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy.
I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully, a second time. What is so offensive about it? Facts are facts. What's true is true. The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology. Consider this piece of advice:
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
That could use some qualification. If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid. But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting. But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town wihout feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.
So what's to take offense at?
