Number One In Poverty, California Isn't Our Most Progressive State -- It's Our Most Racist One

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/31/number-one-in-poverty-california-isnt-our-most-progressive-state-its-our-most-racist-one/#3395cc4c5cd9

 

I have been saying this for a while. Too much attention is being paid to the loudmouths. The people to whom we have to worry about are the do-gooders. Our skepticism should be towards those who are pretending to eradicate racismm

”If racism is more than just saying nasty things — if it is, as scholars like James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander and countless others have described, embedded into socioeconomic structures — then California isn’t just the least progressive state. It’s also the most racist.”

 

You might appreciate at least some of this: https://quillette.com/2018/06/05/high-price-stale-grievances/

Shellenberger is interesting in that he's a Democrat who primaried against Gavin Newsom.

 

I do agree with most of the article. If I have any disagreement it is going to be nuance. The history of slavery does have some significance to current day issues. Wealth, land, and other productive resources are transferred by inheritance, so the benefits of slavery are intergenerational. Asian Americans are being giving a raw deal when it comes to education.

 

What makes Baldwin and Coates scholars? Baldwin is a novelist and social critic whose formal education ended at 18, with graduation from Dewitt Clinton High School. Coates is an author, journalist and educator - although he spent five years at Howard University and left without a degree. He was the only child in his large family not to have a degree.

Michelle Alexander IS a scholar - Vanderbilt and Stanford Law.

The first two people are successful in their fields - but they are NOT, by definition, scholars. Call them as they are.

 

Interestingly, California is more independent than what people give it credit for. They have had a pretty good number of Republican governors while some states' governorships have been straight blue or red for decades. Going back to Reagan, all four of their Republican governors served for eight years. They've had three Democratic governors since Reagan, and one only served four years.

 

Matthew 13:12 For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whoever has not, from him shall be taken away even that he has.
Matthew 13:12 has always been a real economic phenomenon. Slaves were emancipated with no wealth so it is almost impossible for slaves and their descendants to generate any significant wealth. I believe access to affordable education is one of many ways to fix this problem. Obviously, if parents/ancestors had nothing it is very like decedents will not have the means to afford expensive education.

 

True that, but of course, Jesus was talking about spiritual knowledge there, slamming those who refused to listen to Him, saying they were basically hard ground that wouldn't bear fruit, and thus what little they had would be taken away.

 

This is true. I live in OC (Orange County, CA) and it is highly conservative. Many people assume CA is more blue than it is.
Back when President Obama was running for President, I put up a bunch of Obama signs up in my yard, and the next day they were all gone. Somebody came and took them. So, the next day I went to campaign headquarters, got some new signs, and put right back up. Other Obama supporters had there signs taken down as well. Last laugh is on me though, we got the first Black American President! Progress.

 

No doubt about what Jesus was saying. But Paul of Tarsus wanted slaves to be good slaves and to obey their masters. Matthew 13:12 is a real economic phenomenon. Ghettos get poorer; wealthy enclaves get richer. Neither pure capitalism or pure socialism is the answer. The common saying, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It even happened under Obama. Access to quality education is the key, primary, secondary, and tertiary education, not income distribution, vouchers, affirmative action, nor market forces.

 

I'm a Californian and I expect to vote 'no'. I don't see any upside in splitting the state.

This guy has been trying to get similar measures on the ballot for years. I don't have a clue what his motivation is or why he keeps doing this.

Last time he tried it, it was a proposal to split the state into five.

He employs professional signature-gathering companies. (The people who accost you at supermarket entrances and similar places to sign petitions.) The proposal to split the state into five failed after it was determined that 70,000 of the signatures were fake and the initiative was stricken from the ballot. (Apparently the fault of a signature-gathering firm, not Draper.)

One of the difficulties that I have with his proposals are his badly conceived maps. This one divides California into California, Southern California and Northern California. Each one crams together very dissimilar areas. They seem designed to have roughly equal populations, but not so as to make any cultural, political or geographic sense. See the proposed map here:

https://media.nbcbayarea.com/images/971*546/california-still-x16x9.png

Each of the proposed states is kind of absurd. 'California' consists of Los Angeles county and the central coast north to Monterey. LA county has 10 million people, so it would totally dominate and control the rest of the new 'state'. That includes Monterey, which has always been culturally and economically part of northern California. I lived in that area for many years and know that this proposal would be exceedingly unpopular in places like San Luis Obispo, which would fear becoming a colony of LA, subject to an LA agenda (which they loathe).

I currently live in the boundaries of 'Northern California', in Drapers 'Silicon Valley'. 'Northern California' seems even more incoherent than 'California', combining the exceedingly Democratic and socially liberal SF bay area with the many smaller rural counties in far northern California and the Sierra foothill gold-rush counties that largely voted for Trump. The far northern part of the state has harbored a secessionist movement for decades, proposing to create a new state of Jefferson. Draper recognzed that in his 5-way proposal, but now his new proposal has Jefferson under the thumb of San Francisco and San Jose.

Draper's current scheme might have made more sense in the 1960's, when LA was growing much faster than San Francisco and the northern California media constantly promoted the idea that the two halves of California were hugely different. But today LA and SF have far more in common with each other than either one does with much of small town rural California in the mountains and far northern parts of the state. There's a third distinct part of California too, the struggling agro-corporate San Joaquin valley from Stockton in the north to Bakersfield in the south. This is probably the poorest part of California, filled with Mexican farm workers and Anglos whose ancestors came from the South and brought the culture with them. You still hear southern accents there and encounter many Bible-believing Baptists. It's the part of California that produced Merle Haggard. If you factor in cost-of-living, this is perhaps the poorest part of the United States, rivaling rural Mississippi (which has lower incomes, but lower cost of living).

Draper seems to want to attach the central (Fresno) and southern (Bakersfield) part of the San Joaquin valley to San Diego, Orange county, Riverside and San Bernardino for some unknown reason. (While LA, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo go their own way.) What Merle Haggard's gritty Oildale has in common with Laguna Beach, La Jolla or Newport Beach escapes me. Maybe there's some method to Draper's madness, but it doesn't make much sense to me.

 

I likie that idea!

 

Small town California feels like my home town, Mayberry, North Carolina. If they are going to split California put San Francisco with Los Angeles. They are the only two places in California that can use feces maps.

 

The California Supreme Court has decided to remove the initiative to split the state in three from the ballot.

Their reasoning was that splitting the state would effectively be changing the state constitution, and the initiative hadn't qualified for the ballot properly if that was the goal.