The Town Hall
by Eric Blair  (Copyright 3/29/98 by Iron Pants & the author)

Portland, Oregon’s local ABC affiliate, KATU, has an award winning program called Town Hall.  Hosted by a fellow named Gianola, this Sunday’s edition was about racism in the state.  This exercise in analysis had perhaps six or seven whites in attendance, most of them women and all of them liberals. All but one of the rest, including an honorary host, were black liberals.  The last black was obviously the token conservative, and received the disdain from the others that a fool and a traitor to his color deserved
    After a few people delineated the various forms of racism they have experienced  in Oregon (being told a home has already been sold, having their credit card mistaken for a Food Stamp card and being ignored by sales people in stores) a black businessman said that one proof of local racism is the integration of business ownership in NE Portland.  His point was that most of the shops over there used to be owned by blacks, but by using drug activities as a tool, racist whites caused property devaluation, then bought all the businesses so they could make big profits later.
   Honest to God, the man actually said that!  This man who demands the right to move into white areas if he wishes objects to whites who move into black areas when they wish.  If he could do it, he’d probably tell them the businesses had already been sold! The Roman deity of Hypocrisy is alive and well in NE Portland.
   And, this drug conspiracy of his.  Are we to believe that the evil Oregon white community introduced drugs to NE Portland, and forced black youngsters to rob and kill to pay for these drugs in order to work a real estate scam?
   This is why I like Asians.  They rarely whine.  They move into an area, work and save themselves damn near to death while learning the local ropes, then, while demanding their kids study like demons, get out there and kick butt, business-wise.  Do Asians experience discrimination in America?  Absolutely – in every black area in the nation.  Proof that urban blacks hate Asians may be seen in television coverage of any black urban disturbance we’ve had in America in the last twenty years.  In the case of the L.A. riots, Asian stores and their owners were singled out by blacks for what Hitler would call "special treatment."
   Why do urban liberal blacks hate Asians?  Because they put the lie to the claim that  there are no free-market economic opportunities in the "hood," of course!  They succeed where blacks say white racism makes it impossible for anybody to succeed!
   And, there’s another reason.  It has to do with the constant whining of liberal blacks concerning so-called educational disadvantages faced by their children. (As if we all haven't suffered from what passes for education these days.)
   Asians – first, second or fortieth generation Americans -- are perennially the best students in America.  The best students in any school they attend in any neighborhood where they live, including those in black areas..  Using the popular liberal tool of percentile representation, in fact, regardless of where they attend public school, more Asian kids attend college than white kids!  I’ll bet that more of them graduate, too.
   The "racist decline" in university admissions in California following the elimination of quotas, was due to the superiority of Asian children in entrance exams.  White kids aren’t replacing black kids.  Asian kids are replacing black kids.  (These brilliant youngsters, quite simply some of the brightest kids of any color in the country, have been bypassed in California for decades as a result of college preferences for educationally inferior black students.)
   Sticking with the basic liberal (black or white) premise, logic demands that we therefore conclude from the above that whites are prejudiced in favor of Asian children over their own!
   Thank the African gods, Gianola didn’t allow anybody into the show who might actually contribute racist thinking like the facts listed above!  And thank the African gods that no mention was made of the fact that Ward Connerly, the man behind California’s landmark anti-affirmative initiative, happens to be black!
    (An interesting piece of information to be omitted, don’t you think?)
    Surprised?
    You shouldn’t be.  You were watching a news division program by the winner of the Edward R. Murrow award for broadcast journalism excellence.  To win that award a station must be very politically correct, which by definition means that the members of the news staff, like the editors of the old Soviet Union’s Pravda, understand that certain information is irrelevant simply because it might lead someone to an un-liberal conclusion.  Mentioning that the author of the great racist California anti-affirmative action initiative is a black man fits the above definition perfectly.
    (Television, by the by, isn’t the only award arena with that requirement.  All the arts awards are rank with this sort of bias.  I will look for the Second Coming the day a conservative author wins either a Pulitzer or a Nobel.  This year’s Nobel dramatist is an ancient Italian communist who has written some ninety plays promoting the ownership of the means of production by the state!)
   Moving on to another of this Town Hall's Oregon Racism topic-areas: African-Americans, a white female government worker said, are "over-represented" in terms of arrest rates.  This means, when translated, that what we need is reverse affirmative action (a lower quota) in this area.  The argument, of course, is that blacks are targeted for arrest based on the racist attitudes of  law enforcement officials.
   In Portland, that means Police Chief Charles Moose, who is unquestionably black.
   Hello?  Earth calling?
   If  the police in Portland (which is the largest city in Oregon) are arresting too many blacks, why wasn’t Moose’s name brought up?  And, what about his boss, Mayor Vera Katz?  Is she responsible for the policies of her police department?  Is Vera Katz a racist?  If neither one is a racist, and arrest rates of blacks are discriminatory, then both of them must be incompetent, and should be removed, right?
   Maybe the problem is that I, a white conservative male, don’t understand the definition of racism.  One black fellow on the program said racism has to do with power.  A black man, in other words, who hates a white man because he is white is not a racist because the white man has all the power.
   Let’s look at that one.  If it’s discriminatory behavior for someone with power to arrest the wrong quota of blacks, then don’t Portland’s chief of police and mayor, representing as they do positions of power, qualify as racists?  Well, so much for the "power" argument.  Let’s see.  Is racism the arrest of more blacks than whites, except in the case of black police chiefs and liberal female mayors?  (That sound ridiculous.)  Well, is a white, male, conservative chief who has the same black/white arrest ratio as a black, male, liberal chief the only racist of the two?  (That sounds even more ridiculous.)  Okay, if the white chief with the wrong percentage of black arrests works for a liberal black mayor, is the white chief a racist but the black mayor not a racist?
   Isn’t it amazing the questions with which we are left following a hour of nationally award winning television journalism?
   Liberalism, which preaches flexible application of the rules (read: against the enemy and for the friend), gleamed like a drooling idiot on a sunlit hill during this television show.  Gianola and friends eliminated even their usual sham of balance during that hour, generating a presentation based in bias, a commercial for liberal white and black viewpoints and, in the end, a demeaning moment for broadcast journalism.
   Town Hall, indeed.
   Town Joke is more like it.

                                                   -- 30 --