Is It Okay to Be White or Not?

Signs on campuses around the country declaring "it's okay to be white" are, unsurprisingly, "racist." 

It’s almost too easy to tweak leftist noses these days. They take themselves way too seriously, believe that their views are completely infallible, and can only seem to fall back on violence and rage when they meet any form of opposition, no matter how slight.

Take for instance a recent prank that hit several college campuses this past week. A group on 4Chan, an anonymous Internet forum, launched a campaign to post signs declaring, “It’s okay to be white.” The goal was to prove that “leftists and journalists hate white people.” The outcome would be that middle-of-the-road people would turn against the left, creating a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.”

The verdict on the outcome of the culture war is still out, but this particular campaign certainly stirred the hornet’s nest. In campuses around the country, students, faculty and administration, and in some cases entire communities melted down in what they all claimed was a racist attack against people who believe in diversity.

Harvard, Princeton, Tulane, Western Washington, Auburn, the University of Kansas and Concordia College all reported seeing the signs on campus. Dutiful lefty students and administrators tore them down wherever they saw them, and every campus announced that there would be investigations into the incidents.

Mary Womack, student body president at the University of Kansas voiced a typical response by the so-called injured masses: “I am deeply disgusted that this organized online campaign to divide university communities across the country has come to our campus. It is shameful that anyone would use these posters to promote a racist agenda.”

So it’s racist to say, “It’s okay to be white”? Does one then logically conclude that it’s not okay to be white?

Renay Johnson, principal of Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland where fliers were also found, went even further. “Our research so far has indicated that this may be part of a concerted national campaign to foment racial and political tension in our school and community,” Johnson said.

Really? A national conspiracy to create racial division at a Maryland high school?

The offended masses all claimed that the signs were meant to cause racial division. Of course, according to these students and the leftist professors who have indoctrinated them, it’s perfectly permissible to say that Black Lives Matter™, that Islam is a Religion of Peace™, and that we should be celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day™ instead of Christopher Columbus every October.

But claiming that it’s okay to be white goes against this narrative. The leftist view of the world wants to put all of society’s problems past and present at the feet of white people. For their view to have merit, it cannot be okay to be white.

The social media chair of the Auburn University Student Union, who would go only by the name Hunter, told the College Fix, a student-reported higher education website, “The overarching idea for the campaign was quite simple — post an innocent pro-white message which states a simple truth that anyone who doesn’t hate white people agrees with. … Because of this simple value statement, it is easy to identify that anyone who disagrees as prejudiced against white people. If the signs had said, ‘It’s Okay to be Black,’ anyone outraged by that wording would be labeled a racist.”

We have been living with the double standards of the leftists for quite some time. This campaign, which easily and cleverly exploits double standards regarding race, angers the Left to no end because to a rational mind, their reaction is indefensible.

The trouble is the mainstream media is not rational. It has bought and perpetuated the race-war mentality of the Left because reporters earned their degrees on the very college campuses that spew leftist hate speech and race-baiting.

Concordia College president William Craft said on Facebook, “It is indeed okay to be white — and to be black, to be brown, to be Christian, to be Muslim, to be straight, to be gay, to be conservative, to be liberal, and so on. We are stronger for this diversity of identities.”

But the Left doesn’t really want diversity. And therein lies the crux of the problem.

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Why do schools teach all about contraception - but not the joy of motherhood, asks JOANNA MOORHEAD

As a youngster, I was educated in a convent that felt like the school time forgot. It was the 1970s, but it could have been the 1950s or even the 1920s — although the nuns would have been behind the curve in both those eras.

They were thoughtful, intelligent, well-meaning women — but way out of sync with the modern world.

The future (for those of us who weren’t going to follow them into life as a bride of Christ) held just two significant events as far as the nuns were concerned: marriage and motherhood.

At evening prayer, we boarders were encouraged to think about our future husbands. By day, we were steered into what might be called domestic pursuits: cookery, needlework and piano playing.

Academic work was tolerated, but it had its place. One night at prep, the nun at the front of the classroom told me I’d done enough maths and should get on with my embroidery. ‘But Sister,’ I protested, ‘it’s my O-level tomorrow.’ Her reply: ‘Put your books away and say a prayer while you’re working on that lovely embroidery.’

Instead of focusing on exams, we were encouraged to think about the families we would one day raise, about the husbands we would find and — of course — about the babies we would give birth to.

Despite not having even heard the word ‘feminism’, the young me was outraged by all this. Surely there was more to life than pushing out babies and looking after them?

Looking back now, though, I can see that the message I was given at school about the importance of becoming a mother, outdated though it sounded, has served me well.

Yet today, such guidance is light years away from how most young women are raised. I doubt there’s a girl in Britain getting the sort of advice I had 40 years ago (my old school closed down more than 25 years ago, so even the nuns have finally had their day).

Because, whisper it if you will, there was more than a smidgen of common sense to their credo. Especially where prioritising babies is concerned.

For whether we like it or not, women’s fertility isn’t a given, and it doesn’t last for ever.

But that’s certainly not a message our young girls (I have four daughters) are getting. In their Personal, Social and Health Education — PSHE for short, or what once might have been called sex education — and biology classes, our children are taught plenty about contraception and how to prevent pregnancy. My youngest daughter, who’s aged 15 and revising for her GCSEs, can reel off every sort of contraception available, and then some.

But no one at her school has ever talked about something that seems to me increasingly relevant to young women today: that while it’s fashionable to leave having your children until later, it certainly doesn’t get any easier to have them as the years go by.

Babies, the underlying message seems to be, are something that can wait until you’re ready. In this landscape, fertility is somehow infinite. What no one has spelled out to my daughter at school is that there comes a point when, however much you might want to have a child, it may prove complicated, or costly, or even impossible to do so. In other words, fertility is very much finite — at least, for women.

The nuns at my school may have seemed from another era, but they knew that fertility hadn’t changed much for centuries.

Women are still best-placed to give birth in their 20s, they are still less fertile in their 30s and less fertile again in their 40s.

Women’s lives may have changed — mostly for the better, thank goodness — but their bodies haven’t.

Yet young girls today simply aren’t being taught this, which is deeply worrying. Today, I am so grateful to those nuns who taught me to think of my unborn babies — because pre-eclampsia and recurrent miscarriages blighted my fertile years. If I hadn’t been relatively prompt when trying to conceive in the second half of my 20s, my life could have been very different.

That’s not to say I didn’t give my career a moment’s thought, and thought only of babies. On the contrary.

When I had the slightly wild idea of applying to university, the nuns pursed their lips and said: ‘Are you sure you want to go down that route?’

A job, as far as they were concerned, was simply a means of treading water while waiting for the really important part of life to take off.

But I’d decided before I even got to secondary school that I wanted to become a journalist. Realising it would never cut much ice in the convent, I nurtured this ambition secretly.

When I spoke of it once to the headmistress, she said: ‘I suppose things could be worse. At least you can combine babies and writing — one doesn’t rule out the other.’

As I got older, influenced partly by the nuns’ emphasis on motherhood and partly by my own ambitions, I steered my craft with two destinations in mind. I met the man who would become my husband at university, and started to think about having children in the second half of my 20s.

Given my hopes of having four, this turned out to be a good thing — because, for me, as for so many women, pregnancy and childbirth turned out not to be the picnic I hoped they would be.

It took me ten years to have those four children.

If I had started trying to conceive my first baby three or four years later than I did (when I’d have been in my early 30s — hardly over the hill), I probably wouldn’t, given the problems that I encountered, have got past two children.

Women are leaving it later and later to start their families. Those of my generation left it later than our mothers to try to get pregnant — in some cases, much later.

In my particular case, the generation gap wasn’t that vast: my mother had me, her eldest child, when she was 24; I had my first baby when I was 29.

However, I know women whose mothers, like mine, gave birth in their mid-20s, but who didn’t have their own children until they were over 40.

That pattern simply can’t be repeated by the next generation: if my daughters wait a decade or so longer than I did, they’ll be way over the hill where conception is concerned.

Such a trend poses a secondary threat, too: making grandparents extinct, or, at least, too elderly to have any meaningful role in their grandchildren’s lives. Speaking as one whose life was completely changed by a very close relationship with a grandparent — my paternal grandmother — I’d say that’s a big pity.

My story ended happily, and I am forever grateful for that.

But a generation on, it’s my daughters, now aged between 15 and 25, who are facing the same dilemmas I did. Although I’d never have imagined myself saying this 35 years ago, when I was railing against the nuns and their outdated philosophy, I have to admit a little of that same advice is now finding its way into the ears of my own girls.

A career, I tell them, can be taken up or changed at any point between your 30s and 60s. I found new directions, and new ambitions, in my work in my 40s and 50s, and I very much hope my daughters will, too.

But the clock ticks relentlessly when it comes to our fertility. We have far less control over it than we do over our working lives.

Motherhood needs scheduling into your life as well as a career.

Teaching our children about fertility has another benefit, too, adding some context to what they think sex is for — vital in a world where so many find about it from raunchy reality TV shows such as Love Island, or from porn that’s all too accessible on the internet.

Teaching our children about fertility helps them realise that sex isn’t all about tawdry round-the-pool intrigue over who’s going to ‘get with’ who. It’s also about the reality of having children.

It’s not just teachers who don’t discuss the fact that women’s fertility doesn’t go on for ever: magazines and TV programmes, too, are full of stories about women who postponed childbirth until midlife and suddenly — hey presto! — produced a child.

I’m thinking of celebrities such as Janet Jackson (aged 50 when she gave birth at the start of this year), Halle Berry (47 when her son was born in 2013), Uma Thurman (42 when her third child arrived) and Mariah Carey (41 when her twins Moroccan and Monroe were born in 2011).

While it may be true that more older women are having babies now than in the recent past, not every older woman who wants a baby gets one.

Indeed, the statistics tell a troubling story: according to research published in New Scientist, a woman wanting two children will have a 90 per cent chance of success if she starts trying at 27. If she waits until she is 38, that chance of having the children she wanted falls to 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, a woman aged 46 has a less than 4 per cent chance; and by the time she’s 50 the odds are minute or non-existent.

Practically speaking, I can see all the reasons why it might seem to make sense to wait: women who postpone childbirth have higher earnings. And while childcare is difficult for parents of all ages, it can be especially difficult to organise early in your career when money is tighter.

But the central facts won’t go away: however you look at it, women’s fertility (and men’s, but more significantly women’s) declines as they get older.

A significant proportion of women who have problems conceiving in their late 30s or early 40s would not have had problems a decade earlier — or, as with me, if they had problems, there would be time to get things fixed before their egg supply ran out.

I’m so grateful that babies were always on my radar. I knew fulfilment was multi-dimensional — and that my happiness would depend on being a mother as well as having a career.

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Gang With Suspected Neo-Nazi Links Vows to Force Migrants From Greece

A suspected breakaway faction from Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party says it is recruiting anti-migrant hit squads and has vowed to drive all migrants and refugees out of Greece.

The group, naming itself Crypteia, after a vigilante band of ancient Spartans who terrorized slaves, told a Greek news outlet Tuesday, “We will fight until the last immigrant leaves. And to that end, we will use force and violence, mercilessly.”

Crypteia claimed responsibility for an attack Friday on the Athens home of an 11-year-old Afghan boy and his family, whose apartment was pelted by rocks and beer bottles. A note was left that read, “Go back to your village. Leave.”

The boy, Amir, had drawn local attention days before the attack after having been picked to carry the Greek national flag for his school in a national day parade, only to have the privilege revoked and given a school sign to hold instead.

“I was shouting and calling for help,” Amir’s mother told local reporters. “The children had woken up, crying; they were very afraid. The children's room was full of glass. A beer bottle was on the bed. The stones kept coming, one after the other. I panicked. I didn't know what to do,” she added.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras condemned the attack, saying, “Amir, and every child in our country, deserves the right to security and Greek education, without discrimination.” State prosecutors have opened an investigation.

Europe has seen the emergence of other violent anti-migrant groups and a European Union agency reported in May 33 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans in Europe have been victims of at least one racially-motivated crime in the previous 12 months.

A network of civil rights activists, the European Network against Racism, warned recently that crimes against immigrants were under-reported and said minorities“are not targeted randomly by perpetrators.”

Recent opinion polls suggest anti-migrant sentiment is rising in Greece. The country has witnessed a surge in the past few months in the number of refugees and migrants entering the country, exacerbating already terrible living conditions in camps on the Greek islands and shelters on the mainland.

Last month, officials said the number of people arriving, across land and sea borders, had more than doubled since June, with authorities estimating that arrivals are now at their highest level since March 2016, with more than 200 men, women and children being registered every day.

Refugee flows had dropped dramatically after a landmark accord was reached between the European Union and Turkey in March 2016. In return for aid Ankara agreed to strengthen border patrols along its Aegean coast and turn back smuggler boats.

How serious a threat Crypteia poses is the subject of debate within Greek political and police circles with some saying that invoking the ancient Spartan band is nothing more than cover for a bunch of crude thugs. Others are not so sure.

Stavros Theodorakis, leader of the centrist Potami party, complains that Greece is seeing a rise of serious political gang violence across the ideological spectrum, warning, “every day there is a new target. Gangs intimidate with impunity.”

Analysts say there has been talk within Golden Dawn circles of forming secretive anti-migrant hit squads since several party leaders and lawmakers were arrested following the 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by an alleged supporter of the party. Their trial is ongoing.

Greece has seen a wave of hostility towards the more than 60,000 migrants estimated to be in the country with shelters and refugee squats being targeted. Civil rights activists say far-right groups have been stoking local grievances and anti-refugee sentiments. Many attacks and assaults, they say, go unreported

Greece isn’t alone in being buffeted by anti-migrant violence. German authorities say there were more than 3,500 attacks against refugees and asylum shelters in 2016, amounting to nearly a dozen acts a day of anti-migrant violence, neo-Nazis

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Judge Halts California Law Forcing Pro-Lifers to Advertise Abortions

In a major victory for free speech, Riverside County Superior Court Justice Gloria C. Trask ruled late Monday that California must not force pro-life pregnancy medical clinics to promote abortions to their clients.

California had passed the so-called “Reproductive FACT Act” in 2015, which mandated that pro-life centers post signage and inform their clients about the state’s taxpayer-funded abortions and birth control.

Monday’s ruling placed a permanent injunction on the law. It would have applied to over 200 privately funded pregnancy centers, which offer free alternatives to abortion.

Scott Scharpen, the head administrator of “Go Mobile For Life,” a mobile ultrasound unit that serves women in Riverside County, praised the ruling.

“We are thrilled with Judge Trask’s ruling, which is a huge victory for free speech,” Scharpen said.

“The whole notion of being compelled to share information with our patients about abortion availability, which is contrary to our mission and purpose, is fundamentally wrong. Lives will be saved because of this ruling.”

Pushed through on a purely party-line vote in 2015, the law has only been enforced in one jurisdiction—the city of Los Angeles—but has served as a template for other Democrat-controlled states, including Hawaii and Connecticut, to crack down on pro-life pregnancy centers that offer free services to expectant mothers.

California’s ‘Freedom of Mind’ Protection

Since the bill’s inception, pro-life advocates have argued that it tramples on the constitutionally protected rights of free speech and free religious expression.

Prior to Monday, those arguments had fallen on deaf ears. In October 2016, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—the most frequently reversed court in the U.S.—upheld the state law, dismissing plaintiffs’ concerns that it violates their deeply held religious beliefs and freedom of speech.

Pregnancy centers in the state have since appealed to the Supreme Court, which has yet to indicate whether or not to consider the case.

As pro-lifers await action from the Supreme Court, Scharpen and his legal team made their case before Trask’s court on the basis that the law runs aground of California’s 1849 Declaration of Rights, which guarantees the “individual freedom of mind.”

In her ruling Monday, Trask agreed that the Reproductive FACT Act violates free speech protections, noting that “compelled speech of a political or cultural nature is not the tool of a free government.”

Elsewhere in her decision, Trask wrote that if the state’s primary goal is to raise awareness as to the availability of its programs, it has several ways to do so, including public service announcements and even purchasing billboard space, even “directly in front of Scharpen Foundation’s clinic.”

None of those options involve running roughshod over the deeply held religious convictions held by Scharpen—who also serves as a pastor—who would have been forced to speak a government message that would have left “patients with the belief they were referred to an abortion provider by that clinic,” as Trask explained.

“Compelled speech must be subject to reasonable limitation,” Trask wrote. “This statute compels the clinic to speak words with which it profoundly disagrees when the state has numerous alternative methods of publishing its message. In this case, however virtuous the state’s ends, they do not justify its means.”

Next Steps in the Fight

While California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, will likely challenge this ruling, it remains to be seen how the decision will affect pregnancy centers’ pending appeal to the Supreme Court.

Danielle White, legal counsel for Heartbeat International—a network of pregnancy help organizations, including Scharpen’s and close to 100 more in California—said the state-level ruling will likely put the pending Supreme Court challenge into a holding pattern while Becerra fights the injunction.

Similar laws forcing pregnancy centers to post signage that denigrate their own services have been struck down in New York City and Baltimore, as well as in Austin, Texas, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Montgomery County was eventually ordered to pay pregnancy centers $330,000 in attorney’s fees.

A comparable pattern played out in Illinois this July, when a judge placed a statewide preliminary injunction on a 2016 law that would have forced medical professionals—including pro-life doctors, nurses, and pregnancy center personnel—to refer patients to abortion businesses.

“This is such an encouraging win for free speech and for the pro-life community,” White said. “We’re praying this will be a major turning point to allow clinics like Go Mobile For Life to keep their attention on reaching women who desperately need help..”

Nada Higuera, who argued the case before Trask, understands from personal experience why it’s so important to allow pro-life people to reach women facing unexpected pregnancies.

As a pregnant teen, she knew where she could go for an abortion, but not where she could go for life-affirming help.

“As a young female and defender of speech, I am thrilled to know that our work is not in vain,” Higuera said. “I’ve regrettably had an abortion. And I’ve just recently experienced the incomparable joy of having a baby.

“I wish I would have had the opportunity to visit a pro-life clinic when I was just 16 years old and contemplating an abortion.”

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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