Blaska Policy Werkes

It just keeps getting crazier, the idiocies of  identity politics and its attendant race-shaming and victim mongering. 

• Who knew there was a “disparate impact” in filing nomination papers to get on the ballot in a city election?
• Who knew the Madison city clerk’s office is choking on hitherto-undetected implicit bias?
• Leave it to a professional race hustler to call out The Peoples’ Republic for its white privilege. 

“I am being told I can’t run for mayor,” Toriana Pettaway complained this week. “Always some White Supremacy BS.”

Ms. Pettaway’s evocation of long-ago Klan night riders was in response to the city clerk’s determination that she had filed 199 valid signatures to get on the ballot as a candidate for mayor when 200 are required. 

That Ms. Pettaway cannot see her own hideous racism is so very Madison these days. The lady is saying, very emphatically, that a black person cannot be expected to count to 200. Ms. Pettaway argues for lower standards — separate but unequal — by complaining that she, as black woman, is forced to collect signatures from actual residents of the City of Madison if one desires to be the mayor of the City of Madison.

Surely, this requirement is the equivalent of George Corley Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door vowing “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever.” A subtle Jim Crow law that, somehow, Mo Cheeks and Raj Shukla were able to overcome.

Ms. Pettaway teaches implicit bias

Most disturbing is that Toriana Pettaway is the city’s racial equity coordinator. The WHAT? Your Squire yields the lectern to Greg Humphrey, a good liberal Democrat, at Caffeinated Politics:

Toriana Pettaway is not only a would-be mayoral candidate but also is currently Madison’s racial equity coordinator.  If her ill-considered words when running afoul of clearly laid out criteria for nomination papers is any indicator of her tone and skill set, then I have to ask what animus she brings to her job?  If she can treat the nomination paper process in such a cavalier manner how does she navigate the work that comes across her desk? 

Of course, Ms. Pettaway teaches a course in “implicit bias.” Yeah, you’re a racist but you just don’t know it. You pass her course if you admit your guilt. Confess, Klansman!

But then, so do Alex Gee and his Nehemiah Center. “Some 650 mostly white Madisonians have gone through the class and learned how to recognize racism on a personal level,” Gee brags.

One of his graduates — twice! — is a Don Thornton. See a group of black kids poking at your parked car? Don’t call the police, he advises readers of the Wisconsin State Journal.  Just turn on a light. Thornton does not say whether calling the cops is permitted if the incipient car thieves are white. Or if flooding the crime scene with light isn’t itself a bit judgmental.

Then again, mowing your lawn is a sign of latent white supremacy, a University of Wisconsin teaching assistant lectures.

Making the numbers work

Which explains right-thinking progressives’ antipathy for keeping police in our troubled high schools. People like school board candidate Ali Muldrow, who wrote the Progressive Dane platform demanding cops out of school.

“There is overwhelming evidence that Obama-era policies … pushed schools to avoid disciplining students who needed to be disciplined. It made avoiding politically incorrect numbers more important than maintaining school safety. (Source here.)

“Put another way,” the Wall Street Journal wrote, “the administration was demanding racial parity in school discipline, regardless of who was being disruptive, which is as silly as demanding racial parity in police arrests, regardless of who’s committing crimes.”

The bigger problem with these anti-suspension crusades is that they ultimately harm the groups they are supposed to help. After New York City made it more difficult to remove troublemakers from the classroom, schools with the highest percentages of minority students were more likely to experience an increase in fighting, gang activity and drug use.

Fewer school suspensions, more chaos

Which is why Madison schools’ 82-page Behavior Education Plan was always about making the numbers work. After four years of the inscrutable BEP and dollar cost of $15 million, Madison’s public school classrooms are more unruly than ever. 

• Out-of-school suspensions dropped from 2,905 in 2013-14 to 2,521 last school year. 
• Meanwhile, “Behavior incidents” nearly doubled from 35,460 in the 2013-14 school year — the year before the BEP went into effect — to 69,279 in 2017-18. 

Ya’ think there might be a correlation? Fewer suspensions, more chaos?

Thank Baby Jesus for the Chicago Tribune editorial carried by the WI State Journal this Saturday (01-05-19):

What’s easy to forget in the focus on those who are disciplined is the effect of their conduct on everyone else. In schools that are mostly black, the victims of students who engage in violent or disruptive behavior also are mostly black. When disruptive students of any ethnicity are removed from the classroom, teachers are better able to help kids who want to learn.

By rescinding the old guidance, the Trump administration will empower local school administrators and teachers to craft and enforce discipline policies that are fair to every student. A safe school, after all, should be considered a civil right.

But the New York Times — wedded to identity politics like the Bride of Frankenstein — maintains the “law of disparate impact isn’t broken.”

Maybe not, but it keeps up, it will break America.