- My mother was raised in a Franco-American section of Fall River, MA. The Catholic Church is at the center of the Franco-American culture. While my USAF NCO Dad was seeking family housing at new assignments while I was in fifth and sixth grades, I started both school years in the same K-8 Catholic schools my maternal grandfather and uncle had attended. (I think at the time some schools were segregated by gender, e.g., my mom attended an all-girls academy through high school.) At any rate. while I was there (and this was during the years where the civil rights battles were being fought with the Church's support, the Beatles were dominating the music charts, etc.), my class' project was supporting a black family in DC. Now I didn't mind stuff like food and clothing donations, but where I drew the line was when the sister (nun) pointed out the Dad's favorite cigarette brand. I knew back then smoking was a bad habit; thank God my own Dad had quit by then (I think they both favored the same brand). I just didn't think we should enable a nasty habit. Even then, I had a sense of moral hazard.
- My best friend at OLL, RC, was Latino. I was targeting UT (Austin) for grad school in math; I had a near-perfect GPA. UT was doing a recruiting session at OLL (located in the heavily Latino SW section of San Antonio), with a significant Latino base. RC attended as my moral support; to our dismay, RC, an education major with no interest in grad school, was heavily recruited the second he entered the room; I, on the other hand, got nothing more than a split second glance. At one point, my friend pointed me out and said, "Why don't you talk to Ron? He wants to go to your school."
- We had a heavy presence of La Raza at OLL at the time. One thing they protested while I was there was the lack of Chicano representation in the faculty. There was a related government report that came out pointing, e.g., the philosophy department was all white. Well, it was a small department with two core faculty members, both religious: a Czech-American sister and an Irish immigrant priest. At the time, the few Chicano philosophy professors could get offers from almost any major American university looking to diversify their faculty.
- I still remember when my academic career was ending in a recession as a professor, despite a solid publication record and 8 years of teaching a variety of courses, I was getting filtered out of most searches, with one key emphasis was increasing the presence of female faculty in my discipline. I didn't mind competition, even with female ABD's, but I didn't even get a preliminary interview. To be honest, the single white male thing certainly didn't seem to be working in my favor.
I would say, even though I'm unambiguously a blue-eyed Caucasian, I'm different than most white people I've met. For one thing, French was my first language until kindergarten. The teacher worried about communicating with me and at one point (until they gave me an IQ test) thought about holding me back a year. My folks went completely English at home (except when they were alone), and to this day my 6 younger siblings blame me for the fact they're not bilingual. I'm not sure why the folks didn't think they could raise us bilingual like they had been raised, but I think my Mom still had memories of Anglo schoolmates ridiculing her accented English (no, you could never have known when she got married). In fact, when we lived for a year in Alsace-Lorraine, the local French women thought Mom was a Parisian by her French. When Mom explained she was American, they were in denial: "Americans can't speak French, and you do!".
Most people won't even try to guess how to pronounce my surname: typically, e.g., at hospitals or clinics, they'll say, "Mr. Ronald???????" My Dad would check on at a restaurant wait list as "Gill met". Ironically, among those who have gotten the pronunciation correct quite often have been men of color, including my latest car salesman. There are a number of French-speaking blacks (e.g., Haiti) or, say, in Cajun country, Louisiana. (Cajuns are cultural cousins of my Quebec ancestors.) One of my best friends, RJ, at UH Catholic Newman was a Cajun, and every time we met, say on a religious retreat, he came with brand new Boudreaux & Thibodeaux jokes that had me laughing convulsively.
Ironically my last academic job offer came from a historically black university near Monroe, LA. They had mismanaged my recruitment, not following up for weeks after my campus visit. I had struggled during the previous 3 years after leaving academia during a recession dealing with anti-intellectual recruiters who didn't respect academic computing. In the interim, I finally got a dream DBA position with a marketing research company (eventually acquired by Equifax). GS actually made a good offer (the best I had ever been offered in academic and about $15K more than my current employers were paying me). If they had made the offer just a few weeks earlier, I would have accepted. But at that point of time, I felt I needed a good year or two of DBA experience to fall back on if my renewed academic career stalled out again. (The job wasn't a tenured one.) I got a heart-broken letter from my prospective chair, Dr. AB, taking the offer rejection personally. It had nothing to do with her; I would have loved working for her. It was just a matter of timing. I thought they had moved on with other candidates; maybe they were battling the bureaucracy to get the offer approved. I will say that GS had the most unusual campus visit/job interview I ever experienced. Typically you're meeting administrators and area faculty and giving a research presentation. GS had me meeting with a group of students, and they were assertive and aggressive, asking me pointed questions about IT employer contacts, etc. How could I tell them not a single industry recruiter ever approached me in 8 years of university teaching? I think only one employer, Eastman Kodak, ever contacted me (while I was at UTEP) about one student, taking her first course under me, listing me as a reference without my knowledge or consent. As a junior (untenured) faculty member, you're on a publish or perish track; you don't have time to establish a lucrative consulting practice in the local community. I had struggled for 3 years to land work after leaving academia, where industry recruiters basically considered me unemployed for 8 years and whatever skills I had practiced before then probably degraded and obsolete. I thought this one particularly articulate black female student was asking very good questions, but to be frank, although I'm very articulate, I wasn't prepared for this line of questioning. It was the only time I had been interviewed by students. I had no idea how I came across and to what extent, if any, student feedback had on the hiring process.
I was born and raised in an integrated military. I can recall my Mom talking about the Underground Railroad (i.e., supporting fugitive slaves). My best friend while Dad was stationed in France (fifth grade) was Henry, a black military dependent. I attended high school in a heavily Latino Texas border city suburb. I've asked out black and Latina women. A couple I befriended at UH Catholic Newman had a mixed marriage (he was a white postal worker and she was a talented black Christian group lead singer; I can still remember Dan emotionally discussing privately with me how his own parents refused to acknowledge Jane and even their own grandchildren). My closest junior faculty friend during the year I was a visiting professor at Illinois State was an African immigrant. My first government point of contact while working as a contractor at the regional EPA lab in Chicago was a black woman (who, interestingly, came from Sumter, SC, where I had attended junior high at a local AFB). While I worked for Oracle Consulting, I worked for 6 months on an Oakland city project where the IT manager and city DBA I worked with were black as was a fellow consultant I mentored on a project for the state of Oklahoma. The contractor boss I reported to at USPTO was the black company president. On two of my most recent contractor gigs, I've worked with black DBAs, one in a leadership role. I've lived in integrated apartment complexes, sometimes with a black family next door. I don't really discuss family in my posts, but one of my nieces is in a mixed marriage, and they have 5 beautiful kids. I've already explained how I had applied to teach at a historically black university, reporting to a department chair who was a woman of color. People of color have served as professional references. The conventional "progressive" smear of racism is inconsistent with my life experience.
I rarely discuss politics in my professional and personal life (I obviously have a blog and social media accounts; my relatives don't really discuss politics with me, but 2 or 3 nephews have told me they have nuanced pro-liberty leanings, agree with some things I write, disagree with others). I have issues with the diversity industrial complex. I think quotas and policies like contract set-asides are counter-productive; the government is very bad and inefficient at picking winners and losers. LBJ's War on Poverty did not improve on a preexisting trend of declining poverty in the private sector, but some of the policy initiatives had an adverse unintended effect on the stability of urban black families and, if anything, promoted a perpetual underclass dependent on government assistance. Combine that with abysmal public schools, limited employment opportunities, and criminalization of the underground economy (e.g., the War on Drugs), and we see a vicious cycle of despair, where a disproportionately high percentage of black youth and men have a criminal record, which erodes already slim employment prospects.
We have seen tragedies play out in two notorious cases: Eric Garner and George Floyd, who died unnecessarily while in police custody. Eric Garner was arrested over selling "loosies", single cigarettes which New York and other high-taxing states see as a workaround (buying cigarettes in states with lower taxes and arbitraging the cost differential), a victimless crime. In Floyd's case, he was accused of (knowingly?) using a counterfeit $20 bill in making a purchase at a convenience store.
I'm not going to go deeply into policies here, other than to note some position we libertarians and conservatives have staked out, including but not restricted to:
I rarely discuss politics in my professional and personal life (I obviously have a blog and social media accounts; my relatives don't really discuss politics with me, but 2 or 3 nephews have told me they have nuanced pro-liberty leanings, agree with some things I write, disagree with others). I have issues with the diversity industrial complex. I think quotas and policies like contract set-asides are counter-productive; the government is very bad and inefficient at picking winners and losers. LBJ's War on Poverty did not improve on a preexisting trend of declining poverty in the private sector, but some of the policy initiatives had an adverse unintended effect on the stability of urban black families and, if anything, promoted a perpetual underclass dependent on government assistance. Combine that with abysmal public schools, limited employment opportunities, and criminalization of the underground economy (e.g., the War on Drugs), and we see a vicious cycle of despair, where a disproportionately high percentage of black youth and men have a criminal record, which erodes already slim employment prospects.
We have seen tragedies play out in two notorious cases: Eric Garner and George Floyd, who died unnecessarily while in police custody. Eric Garner was arrested over selling "loosies", single cigarettes which New York and other high-taxing states see as a workaround (buying cigarettes in states with lower taxes and arbitraging the cost differential), a victimless crime. In Floyd's case, he was accused of (knowingly?) using a counterfeit $20 bill in making a purchase at a convenience store.
I'm not going to go deeply into policies here, other than to note some position we libertarians and conservatives have staked out, including but not restricted to:
- school choice, including private school, charter schools, and homeschooling
- lowering occupational licensing hurdles
- ending the prosecution of victimless crimes, including the War on Drugs
- repealing qualified immunity
- tax-advantaged local area investments
- lowering costs and obstacles to entrepreneurial activities, including things like food trucks.
We welcome the recent steps towards criminal justice reform, but we have quintuple the relative global incarceration rate and of these unconscionably high numbers, a disproportionate number of these are blacks, who account for roughly 13% of the American population. We need to repeal a vast number of laws, especially those affecting urban black communities, like drug offenses, where a disproportionate number of blacks are incarcerated. We also need to end some pet preferences of "law and order" conservatives with "get tough" policies like minimum sentences and "three strikes".
I don't like GOVERNMENT (not private) social welfare and affirmative action policies, which I think have harmed, not helped blacks. I will simply refer interested readers to the work of prominent black economists, like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
Personally, I have evolved. There was a time where I found the construct "black lives matter" somewhat inconsistent with the color-blind intent of the post-slavery 14th Amendment. "All lives matter": true enough. But it's hard to argue that the black population has been treated the same, especially by government, federal, state or local. The fourteenth amendment was laxly enforced for nearly a century. It seems every day some stupid regulation, like one over baggy pants, is passed, which targets especially blacks. We have political obstacles in the way of people of color. We have a moral responsibility to fix a government and bad public policy which disproportionately targets the black community.
It's also time for blacks to push back against paternalist Dem "progressive" leadership which has failed most urban communities but thinks are owed political loyalty. Make no mistake: schools are still failing, employment prospects are still challenging, and young black people are still being imprisoned. We can say "black lives matter" not by targeting Confederate and other statues (which don't do a damn thing for most black people but are a Dem version of "wag the dog"), but by providing political reforms, like some of the ones I discuss above.
