Daily Archives: November 15, 2007

Pensacola, Race Relations

Service Station Refuses Service To Blacks

2 Comments

Sounds like something right out of the last century. But it happened last weekend right here in Pensacola, FL to a black woman. It all went down like this.

She went to get gas at a Race Track gas station near I-10 and Rt. 29 around 9:30 p.m. while they were open. There was a woman attendant there who told her through the glass window to go away, that they don’t serve blacks at night. She didn’t understand what the woman told her at first because she couldn’t hear very well through the glass and the woman was a foreigner of some sort. So the woman kept replying “What? I can’t hear you?” Something like that. The attendant then brandished a hatchet towards her, telling her to get out and leave. She did leave, but as she was leaving, a white customer came up and was served without incident.

I am not releasing the identity of the woman who was refused service, and threatened with an axe, because the course of action she may take has not yet been determined. I know her personally and have no reason to doubt what she told me, and, there was a witness.

I don’t know how prevalent a behavior this is at that gas station but for me, once is too much. If something like this has happened to you, I’d appreciate hearing about it.

Politics, Race Relations

Racial Double Standard In Full View

This incident, where a politician called a 75 yr. old Black civil rights activist “Buckwheat” is the subject of what amounts to a media blackout. Why a media blackout on such a derogatory statement? Looks like the reason is because the Louisiana State Representative Carla Blanchard Dartez is a Democrat. If she were Republican you know that Jesse Sharpton would be all over it.

Hazel Boykin, a 75-year-old civil rights activist who helped desegregate Louisiana restaurants and schools, helped Democratic State Representative Carla Blanchard Dartez get voters to the polls earlier this month. At the end of a private telephone conversation thanking Boykin for her efforts, Representative Dartez said, “Talk to you later, Buckwheat.”

Buckwheat? Where did that come from? It slimes one of my favorite TV shows growing up as a kid, Our Gang Comedy. In the context it was used, it may as well have been the n-word. The fact that it was a private phone conversation does not matter, if we are to hold Dartez to the same standard as Dwayne “Dog” Chapman. No one is demanding Carla Blanchard Dartez to resign from her seat. Mainly because no one even knows about it. We all know the mill that Chapman has been put through, including losing his job. Is this a racial double standard or a political double standard? Or both?

Project 21 chairman Mychal Massie is criticizing both the lawmaker for saying it and the media for once again appearing to take a pass on reporting about a liberal politician’s racial foible. And that criticism is well deserved.

National Center link

Politics, Whiners

Truth Is The Poor Are Getting Richer

Want to tic off a liberal who says that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? U.S. Income MobilityShow them this report from the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much “populist hokum.” The reason it will tic them off is obvious. It takes the wind right out of their class warfare, class envy sails. The reality is that over the last 10 years, the lowest quintile of working people have seen the largest percent increase in their income, 90.5%. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the highest quintile realized an increase of 10 % over the same time period.

A closer examination of that highest quintile, the upper 20% of working people, highlights even more the fallacy of the left’s argument about the rich getting richer. When you look at the top 10 percent of the highest quintile, that is to say, the top ten percent of income earners, they saw their incomes actually decline to the point where the top 1 percent, the ‘filthy rich’, were the biggest losers. Their income decreased by a whopping 25%.

The great irony is that, in the name of reducing inequality, some of our politicians want to raise taxes and other government obstacles to the kind of risk-taking and hard work that allow Americans to climb the income ladder so rapidly. As the Treasury data show, we shouldn’t worry about inequality. We should worry about the people who use inequality as a political club to promote policies that reduce opportunity.

Key findings. . .

  • There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within 10 years.
  • About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within 10 years.
  • Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996, the top 1/100 of 1 percent, only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period.
  • The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
  • Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from 1996 to 2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation.
  • The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.

WSJ Opinion Journal link
Income Mobility Study link
NewsBusters link