Victimhood is ’embedded in the fabric’ of the report!

Here we go again. Yet another study finds disparities between racial groups and confuses correlation with causation. A study conducted by “an anti-racist” think tank plays the herd-approved blame game: Majority white Dane County is systemically racist! Yawn.

The study asks: How else to explain that three times as many people with dark skin experience poverty compared to people with lighter skin? Attention: Epic, Exact Sciences, the State of Wisconsin, and all those bistros around Capitol Square: why are you refusing to hire black people? 

Who else but closeted Klan members discipline black students proportionately more than white kids? the study suggests. (A few years ago, 59% of the disciplinary procedures were wielded against boys, yet they constitute but 49% of Madison public school enrollment. Why are Madison schools biased against boys?)

Black people experience higher rates of hospitalization for diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure, says the former WI Council on Children & Families, now called Kids Forward. That’s your fault, Whitey! So suggests its 10-year Race to Equity Report on Dane County.

“The lack of shared prosperity that impacts Black Dane County children and families will continue to influence the amount of control, autonomy, and opportunity they have access to if racial inequity and systemic racism continues to be embedded into the fabric of the community.”

— report lead author Carte’cia Lawrence

Some day (when unicorns blow brightly colored bubbles) some outfit brimming with federal grant dollars will study why people with yellowish skin and different alphabets win all the school spelling bees.

Nary a word about personal responsibility

Like that broken clock, Kids Forward correctly notices that black people suffer “negative stereotypes and different expectations.” Madison police and our news media are trying to counter the stereotypes by not (for one example), describing the races of the four shooters at The Harmony apartment complex this week. (Call out the National Guard if the shooters were white and the victims black.)

Lacking any sense of irony, Kids Forward itself plays the different expectations game. It recommends — wait for it! — more social programs. And paying teachers more money! Not giving teachers more authority to run their classrooms. Just more money.

What Kids Forward does NOT say cries to the heavens. Go to school, listen to teacher, do your homework, learn to read, volunteer to help an old lady, put down the Glock, leave the Kia alone. Abjure substance abuse. Develop a work history. Eat right. Girls, grow up yourself before bearing children. Boys, be a father in a two-parent household!

“The Two-Parent Privilege makes the overwhelming data-based case that marriage and stable two-parent families matter monumentally to the life prospects of children — far more than the usually invoked suspects of race and gender.”

In 2019, “77% of white children and 88% of Asian children lived with married parents. The share among Hispanic children was 62%. Only 38% of black children live with married parents — a historically low share that reflects a downward trend over four decades.” 

— “The privilege hiding in plan sight“

Blaska’s Bottom Line: The “Race to Equity” report is itself the problem. The damn thing postures an entire class of people as VICTIMS utterly dependent on the tea and sympathies of their white oppressors. We must do more, wails Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway. 

Madame Mayor, haven’t you progressives
done enough harm already?