So far this year there has been a lot of chatter in the mainstream media about how, for the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not nominate any blacks for its Academy Awards.
Even more newsworthy was the vehemence with which many blacks opposed this decision. Their condemnation of the Academy in many cases was very public, exceedingly hostile, and bluntly racial. As a result, social media hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has made a comeback. Further, several high-profile black celebrities, such as director Spike Lee and actor Will Smith, have vowed to boycott the Oscars this year as a message to get the Academy to become more racially diverse in its award allocations.
As silly and infantile as these concerns are, they are instructive because they offer a glimpse into the surprisingly consistent way in which black elites tend to think about such matters. When discussing racial issues, nearly all of these black elites have an identical perspective: that of equality with whites. Where in law we have the ‘presumption of innocence,’ with blacks we have the ‘presumption of equality,’ or POE, for short. Of course, POE is a complete fiction. It ignores the near-universality of high black crime rates, misbehavior, and academic failure while discrediting the vastly greater accomplishments of whites. Despite its utter falsehood, however, POE has been central to the very identities of millions of blacks ever since W. E. B. Du Bois emerged over a century ago as an intellectual leader of their race in America.
The First Rule of POE is quite clear: Never violate POE.
If the facts support POE, then trumpet the facts to the heavens. If the facts don’t support POE, however, then simply ignore them or misconstrue them until they do. Either way, POE must always trump Truth.
This is essentially what is happening with the Oscars. Tim Gray of Variety sums it up thusly. “There were 305 films eligible this year. If hiring reflected the US population, Oscar voters would have weighed 150-plus films directed by women, 45 directed by blacks, 50 by Hispanics, and dozens of movies by directors who are Asian-American, LGBT individuals, people with disabilities and members of other minorities. Of course, the actual tallies were a fraction of those numbers.”
So, clearly something is wrong. According to POE, we should have numbers wildly different than the ones we’re seeing. Mr. Gray then goes on to evaluate how various people are attempting to solve this problem and what their expectations are. Never does he suggest that perhaps this uneven racial and gender distribution is the result of an unequal distribution of talent and training. To do so would be tantamount to saying that blacks are inferior actors, directors, and producers. And that, according to POE, will never do.
Why? Because POE is central to almost all political power and wealth that black elites have in this country. Without POE, there is less justification for every government initiative and agency of racial largesse that has been put into place since the Civil Rights Movement. The putative point of affirmative action, for example, is to uplift “disadvantaged” minorities that are otherwise equal to whites. This mode of thinking rose to prominence at the federal level as far back as the Kennedy administration which vowed that “race has no place in American life or law.” Since then it has become so embedded in the mainstream that most Americans can’t even imagine a time without it.
So, whenever something threatens to pull back the curtain on POE (as the Academy has done), it scares and angers the black elites who then insist that all blacks share their outrage—both as members of a privileged minority and as (presumed) equals to whites. No one likes being told they’re inferior, so it isn’t a terribly hard sell in any event.
This leads to the Second Rule of POE: Always attack those who violate POE.
Stereo Williams of the Daily Beast states unequivocally that “Hollywood is very much invested in highlighting and celebrating only the whitest of its content and creators.” He goes on to say that we shouldn’t assume that the majority white male Academy members “aren’t wholly informed by aesthetic biases—which includes race.” Basically, white men are ignorant, bigoted racists, according to Mr. Williams.
Of course, this is silly. According to The Economist, “Blacks are 12.6 percent of the American population, and ten percent of Oscar nominations since 2000 have gone to black actors.” The Economist goes on further to say, “black actors get speaking roles in rough proportion to their percentage of America’s population, according to a study of 600 top films from 2007-2013 at the Annenberg Center for Communication and Journalism.”
Clearly, Mr. Williams would rather insist (against the data) that Academy members serve a secret racial motive than violate POE himself. He also forgets that Hollywood whites (a vast proportion of them being Jews who define themselves as opposed to white identity and interests) are some of the most liberal people in the nation. According to Newsmax, in 2012, Hollywood celebrities donated more to Barack Obama than Mitt Romney by a factor of 16-to-1. As of October 2015, according to Breitbart, 90 percent of Hollywood’s $5.5 million have gone to Hillary Clinton. If these are the white people Mr. Williams wishes to condemn as racists, it makes one wonder how racist he thinks the rest of us are.
Mr. Williams then goes on to question the validity of past white Oscar winners. He chafes under the irony of recent films with black directors being overlooked except in the cases of their white supporting actors (Sylvester Stallone, Creed) or white screenwriters (Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, Straight Outta Compton). He complains rather pettily about how the wealthy black actresses who have won Oscars in the past are not getting the plum post-Oscar roles that many wealthier white actresses have been getting. Apparently, something as theoretical as the market does not play a significant role in casting according to Mr. Williams.
He also exposes himself to be as racist as the people he condemns with the following sentence: “Maybe old white men don’t know sh*t about new, black cinema.”
In this, Mr. Williams follows the Third Rule of POE: Never presume the equality of people who violate POE.
Marlow Stern, also of the Daily Beast, has proposed that since the Academy is majority white (94 percent) and its members are on average 63 years old, we should force its racial integration and kick out anyone who is over 65. Stern writes, “The Academy not only needs to diversify its leadership, but should also institute a cut-off age of 65 for members whose tastes no longer reflect the current zeitgeist.”
So, if you oppose POE, you soon may lose the right to vote on the Oscars. Sure, it’s hypocritical to propose inequality in the name of equality. But Stereo Williams, Marlow Stern, and many others these days possess a stout, honey badger-like disregard for their own hypocrisy. They’re playing by the rules of POE, you see. So it’s all good.
Mr. Williams and Mr. Stern complain about much more in their articles. When you embrace POE, there’s always more to complain about. Folks such as these will never be happy until that euphoric, far-in-the-future day when racial equality becomes so self-evident it no longer needs to be presumed.
Indeed, for the proponents of POE, POE is always coming, but it will never come. It takes on a theoretical, Trotskian inevitability which can be hastened only through activism, and the nastier, the better. But they have become so enamored with POE as a means to an end that they will never admit to reaching the Promised Land. In the Promised Land, they will no longer have a need for POE, you see.
“It is 2016 now,” says the giddy pro-POE-nent. “By 2020, we should expect more equality than we have today, and even more by 2030. But if we start agitating furiously right now, maybe we will get in 2020 what we would have gotten in 2030 without agitating. And then we can start complaining about how more light-skinned blacks are being nominated than dark-skinned ones. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Here is how I predict this will play out according to the tenets of POE: The Academy will stick to its guns for another few years, but the outrage will continue to escalate. Eventually, Academy members will tire of being called racists and will cave under the pressure—they are liberals, after all; this is what liberals do. These are people who already sympathize with POE in their own naïve way and adhere to it whenever they can. So, in a sense, they are being ideologically inconsistent if they don’t cave. Further, this being Hollywood, we are not talking about the most incorruptible people in the world. Tinseltown has had more than its share of sleaze since its inception. So the Academy’s steadfastness to objective quality is shaky at best. It won’t take much to turn its hand.
What will this mean? It means that studios will make it policy to overlook a number of “white” films each year in order to greenlight Oscar-worthy “black” ones, regardless of the quality of the scripts. It means that directors will be required to cast black actors in prominent Oscar-worthy roles, regardless of the quality of their auditions. Finally, it means there will be a new rule, unwritten or not, in the selection process for the Oscars: nominate at least one black and one other nonwhite in as many categories as possible, regardless of the quality of their work.
This takes us to the fourth and final Rule of POE: Always ignore the consequences of POE.
If the overall quality of Hollywood films depreciates even more thanks to POE, so what? Remember, POE is about e-quality, not quality.
Does this sound familiar? It should. It is essentially anti-white racial discrimination, otherwise known as affirmative action. As Steven Farron has shown in his excellent The Affirmative Action Hoax, affirmative action degrades any institution in which it appears by placing people with common abilities into positions where uncommon abilities are required. However, where the affirmative action Farron discusses stems mostly from the social engineering ambitions of the government and other influential elites, the changes that Mr. Williams and others are calling for comes from the people. A people willing to scream, shove, bully, and intimidate to get what it wants. That they are being every bit as racist and oppressive as those about whom they complain means little to them. That they intend to reduce the overall quality of our culture with their proposed changes, means even less. This is, essentially, how civilizations begin to die.
In one of the creepier moments in literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in his short story The Fall of the House of Usher notices the intricate decrepitude of the aforementioned house, which, from a distance seems structurally sound. The narrator notes the “wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones.” He also notices an ominous crack along the house, zigzagging from its rooftop down to its foundations and into a nearby lake.
Without even reading the story, we already know what’s going to happen with that crack. Poe tells us as much in the story’s title. The house of Usher is going to fall, both literally and figuratively, and that crack is going to become the fault line. And when the house does finally split in two, it’s going to be terrifying. POE is the modern equivalent of that crack, except that the house in which it now resides represents Western Civilization. It divides us and further weakens the structural foundations of our already decaying culture.
And, how exactly, is POE weakening us?
Well, on a superficial level, it would seem that POE abandons many of the classical ideals that made Western Civilization great to begin with, namely Truth (Rule One), Freedom (Rule Two), Democracy (Rule Three), and Beauty (Rule Four). To be sure, by presuming equality where there is none, POE is doing this. But to end our reasoning here would be naïve.
It would be naïve to think that this “problem” can be fixed by a simple attitude or policy adjustment. For example, Andrew Gruttadoro of Complex.com believes the solution lies in Hollywood studios’ being forced to offer more opportunities for minority players. In a similar vein, director Steven Spielberg believes that the Academy itself should open its membership up to greater diversity.
Both of these vague and well-meaning yet coercive approaches are naïve because they assume that (a) diversity is necessarily a good thing, and (b) black people don’t need POE to achieve it. All black Hollywood players need to do, according to Mr. Gruttadoro and Mr. Spielberg, is send more scripts to the studios and more applications to the Academy, and diversity will naturally increase over time.
But these approaches ignore how effective POE has been for black people. With all the success they have had in the past 50 years getting things simply by demanding them, why would they abandon POE? Why would they not insist that the Academy cave to their demands right away? These approaches also assume, quite risibly, that blacks (or, at least, today’s blacks, as led by today’s black elites) could somehow be moved by reason alone to abandon POE. And they will never do that.
(It’s actually quite amusing to imagine Spike Lee saying to Stephen Spielberg, “Well, Gosh, Mr. Spielberg, I think I will attend the Oscars after all. Your arguments are just so consistent.”)
More importantly, Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Gruttadoro miss the boat on the Oscars because they ignore the reason why blacks must presume themselves equal to whites to begin with. It is because they are not equal. This inequality is not merely social or economic, it is fundamentally genetic (J. Phillipe Rushton lays out this case in his classic Race, Evolution, and Behavior. More recently, Nicholas Wade argues this effectively in A Troublesome Inheritance). Blacks are simply less capable of making great art than whites, and so it stands to reason that they would less often be nominated for Academy Awards. They are also manifestly less capable than whites in all fields except for the three in which they possess the most genius: sports, music, and dance. This is why, when outside these fields, they cling to POE and ignore Truth, Beauty, and the like. Without POE, they have less than they have with it.
So, why should we care about the Oscars when POE has already infiltrated so many other, more important, institutions such as the university system, education, law enforcement, the military, and government? Because we have to start patching up that crack somewhere. Why not the Oscars? If they care so much about it, so should we. Except where they have four Rules of POE, we need only one:
Resist POE always and everywhere.
If blacks want credit for something, they should earn it. And if they can’t earn it, they should accept it like 99.99 percent of the rest of us who will never win Academy Awards. In either case, they should reject POE for the insidious sham that it is. Or one day they will find the house which they helped destroy falling in pieces all around them.
The%20Academy%20Awards%20and%23038%3B%20the%20Presumption%20of%20Equality
Share
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
Related
-
The Muslim Rape Gang Epidemic
-
America’s Thermidorian Reaction
-
(((Hollywood Types))) Upset They’re Not Included in Academy Awards Diversity Quota
-
TDS-Afflicted Celebrities Run Their Mouths
-
A Canadian Direct-to-Video Coming-of-Age Film with a Warning
-
Remembering Arthur Jensen
-
The Ideological Enforcement Industry
-
Knut Hamsun’s Victoria
13 comments
I was right there with you until you asserted that democracy was one of the things that made Western civilization great.
This article, with the phenomenon it describes, raises the question: is the Academy something we even want to preserve in its current form? Wouldn’t it be better to spend our time and effort on parallel institutions?
“They are also manifestly less capable than whites in all fields except for the three in which they possess the most genius: sports, music, and dance.”
They are still manifestly less capable than whites in all three of these categories. They are only more capable than whites in some sports, not all. They are more capable than whites to keep rhythm but not to write beautiful music. Thirdly, compare the blacks’ most notorious form of dancing (twerking) to the whites’ more gracious and beautiful ballet.
They also excel in creating catch-phrases.
“Runners, jumpers, singers, drummers — and robbers and rapers — they surely are, and good ones. Students, executives, great creators, intellectuals, etc., pure Blacks are NOT — even though our liberal establishment and the Jews never tire of parading Negro inanities and trash as ‘literature’ and ‘art.'” — George Lincoln Rockwell, White Power
I noticed an outstanding example of this trend several years ago. I was in a sports bar somewhere and the program that was being aired was a list of the best receivers in the NFL. I think Steve Largent of the Seattle Seahawks was about number four. Before the white female host started discussing Largent she prefaced the discussion with something like this, “Now there are some white receivers that belong on this list because of their achievements.” She was actually apologizing for there being a white receiver on the list. You should have seen the booing and hissing of the blacks in the audience. It is not just about “presumption of equality” it is about erasing every vestige of white achievement all together. If you look at any list of the greatest NBA basketball players of all time you will only see Larry Bird listed and someday he won’t even make the list. A few weeks ago Kareem Abdul Jabbar made an attack on Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks (they had won the NBA championship in 2011) saying that he had never been dominant. The fact that the Mavericks had won their championship with a dominant white was just eating away at Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s mind; it was driving him crazy. Blacks have no notion of meritocracy, it is about hatred and the lust to destroy the white race. Whether it be Confederate Civil War statues, the Oscars, sports lists, renaming streets, trails and parks, blacks are bent on destroying every last vestige of white history.
Not only civil war statues.
https://cbsboston.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/columbus2.jpg
“Because we have to start patching up that crack somewhere. Why not the Oscars?”
“If blacks want credit for something, they should earn it. And if they can’t earn it, they should accept it like 99.99 percent of the rest of us who will never win Academy Awards. In either case, they should reject POE for the insidious sham that it is. Or one day they will find the house which they helped destroy falling in pieces all around them.”
I agreed with this article until the last two paragraphs. I am not interested in repairing a system that has failed whites. I want to destroy this system. I want to create white countries that specifically cater to white interests and sensibilities. I do not want to bring blacks and other non-whites to their senses.
1. So Jews are “racist” too… Hmm… Who would have thought?…
2. Hollywood… The teacher of humankind! Almost all that humanity knows about vampires, ghosts, dinosaurs, Nazis, Blacks, NY taxi drivers, ETs, Superman, King Kong, French kissing, how guns look and how to use them, how good-looking are British actresses, how smart are German Americans (and how odd they look), happy ending, and so many other wondrous things, it owes to it. Thanks.
3. When everybody jumped from their seat at Lady Gaga’s performance of “Til it happens…”at the Oscars it came to my mind the standing ovations Ceausescu received after every pause in his speech…
Bottom line: the blacks are now turning against their enablers in the known traitor classes (Hollywood, parts of academia, etc.).
What does a jewish or white liberal (or anybody else who refuses to openly acknowledge the elephant of the black question) do with the knowledge that they are next? That giving away free stuff is never going to work? That blacks actually want to replace them in the directors’ chairs, in the university offices?
Well deserved to see the beasts turn against their coddlers. We all sit down to a banquet of consequences sooner or later. I for one relish in it.
Pace James Burnham and “The Machiavellians:” there are no struggles for equality, there are only struggles for power. Blacks (or their string pullers) have framed the Civil Rites struggle in terms of “equality” to morally disarm their white foes. After all, who can be opposed to “equality?” It’s one of those great big shining abstractions like freedom, peace and free college tuition for all.
But the actual content of “equality” involves an Orwellian redefinition of terms. In the usage of Presumption of Equality (POE) it means not judging by the content of one’s character acting in front of behind the camera. Rather, it means judging by the color of one’s skin; i.e., what a generation or two ago might have been termed (horrors) “racism.” What POE wants is to not merely get those Oscar statuettes into trophy cases, but put blacks in a position where they can dictate policy to Hollywood.
Of course, to blacks “Civil Rites” has always been a racial struggle. Since white people have been foolish enough to buy into the con game, then why shouldn’t blacks demand even more power? Certainly they will not be denied by the ideologues of today’s liberalism. But there’s a real dilemma when it comes to film making. Hollywood is driven by the bottom line. You can place any number of black film makers in charge of the show, but if they can not “put butts in seats” (or these days, make DVD sales) then the system will collapse upon itself.
Ultimately, the only way the POE racket can be defeated is by denying its premise–i.e., equality. And then white people fighting for their own rights–and power.
The other night I happened to see “Bridge of Spies,” with Tom Hanks brokering the exchange of a captured Soviet agent for US pilot Francis Gary Powers somewhere in the Cold War. Let’s put aside any politics the movie might have had and just look at the characters.
They were all white.
There’s a white American lawyer (Hanks), white communist and CIA agents, white Soviet commissars, white East German bureaucrats, white cops on the beat, an archetypal white 1950s family…all white people! This is all the more apparent since the movie’s events are happening at the same time as the Civil Rites struggle in the USA. Yet we do not see as much as a “token” minority in any speaking role, nor any sign of a TV broadcast on MLK, jr.
And the all-white cast creates a great dynamic. We see white people engaged in various clashes of ideology, debating constitutional issues, and performing assorted heroics without having to waste time dealing with “issues of race.” Hanks’ speech re the thing that makes us all Americans (the Constitution) takes on a different meaning when it is applied to Irish, Germans and perhaps even Russians–without having to figure in assorted third worlders.
I’ve noticed the same thing in other movies from the last several decades where the cast is all-white or mostly so: “The Untouchables,” “Public Enemies,” “To Live and Die in LA,” heck, even “Star Wars: A New Hope.” When a bunch of white people get together, they create something really great. It’s especially so more today when making a movie may be one of the few fronts remaining for the creation of that Mannerbund.
This is something that needs to be further examined…
The double entendre in the term “presumption of equality” is very apt. Presumption indeed!
With regard to Blacks, one should apply, not the presumption of equality or the presumption of innocence, but rather the presumption of insolence.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment