About all that institutional racism…

[Chip]

State legislatures perverting elections— pretty institutional, right?

In Three Southern States, a Legal Battle Over Political Maps

G.O.P. legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana are contesting federal orders to redraw congressional maps that disfavor Black voters. The stakes are enormous.

By Michael Wines
Sept. 21, 2023

The Republican-led legislatures of Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama find themselves backed against courtroom walls this month in strikingly similar circumstances, defending congressional maps that federal judges have said appear to discriminate against Black voters. It is a familiar position. Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway.

With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states.

Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes. Each of the cases asks the same question: whether the Republican-dominated legislatures drew maps that effectively boxed Black voters out of having a chance of electing a candidate in one additional congressional district. The 1965 Voting Rights Act bars maps that have that effect.

Many redistricting experts say they believe the cases against the states are so strong that the states are left to pursue a hail-Mary legal strategy, hoping that delays and repeated appeals will maintain the status quo as they did in 2022. “Republicans in these three states are trying to run out the clock as long as they can to use invalidated maps” in 2024, said Jeffrey Wice, a senior fellow at the Census and Redistricting Institute at New York Law School.

Some lawyers for the states, who did not want to speak publicly while litigation is pending, take issue with that interpretation. And one veteran litigator for Republicans in voting rights cases, Michael A. Carvin, said their arguments are stronger than their opponents think. Mr. Carvin, who successfully argued a major Voting Rights Act case before the Supreme Court in 2021, said he believed the states’ opponents were seeking “a dramatic change in the current redistricting plans” that higher courts were unlikely to support. “I think all the defendants have an excellent chance of prevailing,” he said.

At first blush, there is ample reason to think that the legislatures have a losing hand. One reason the Supreme Court held up the drawing of new maps last year was to await the outcome of a major challenge to the Voting Rights Act’s rules for judging bias in political maps, brought by Alabama. Alabama lost in June, when the court reaffirmed those rules by a 5-to-4 vote. Since then, Alabama has mounted what amounts to a scorched-earth defense of its maps, despite telling a three-judge panel that the state needed a new House map by October, before an early November filing deadline for candidates in congressional primary elections.

After the Supreme Court decision in June, the federal panel resurrected its 2022 order that the state draw a new House map that gave Black voters a significant chance of winning two of the state’s seven congressional districts, instead of one, in a state that is 26 percent Black. The Legislature first asked for extra time, then produced a map last month that again limited Black voters’ clout to a single House district. And when the federal judges rejected that map this month and handed its redrafting to an outside expert, the state again asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the three judges’ map-drawing order had exceeded the bounds of the Voting Rights Act.

The judges’ response, issued last Monday, was withering. They pronounced themselves “deeply troubled” by the state’s failure to draw a usable map, and “disturbed” by the resulting waste of time. “The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” they wrote. “Without further delay.”

Some experts say they see similar tactics in Louisiana, where Black residents make up 31 percent of the state population but five of six of the state’s representatives in the House are white. A federal district judge ruled last year that the State Legislature’s map very likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered a new one drawn for the 2022 elections. The Supreme Court blocked that order, but lifted its stay after its June ruling in the Alabama case. Since then, the judge in Louisiana has rejected efforts by the state’s lawyers to put off drafting that replacement map, prompting the lawyers to ask a federal appeals court to allow a delay. The lawyers say there is “just enough time” to hold a trial first to determine whether the existing map is in fact illegal; the plaintiffs, including Black voters and the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., call it a delaying tactic.

“Their strategy has consistently been to slow-walk this case, only to later announce that the time for entering relief has run out,” they wrote in a court filing last month.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama cases, Abha Khanna, said she thought the judges in those cases had made their impatience clear. She said that they had signaled that if there is relief to be had for Black voters in these states under the Voting Rights Act, “it should be in time for the 2024 elections.”

Those defending the maps say that the current jockeying is a diversion from a bigger question: whether the states’ arguments for their maps are in fact persuasive. The arguments, like the cases themselves, are complex, but many of them boil down to a single assertion, that judges who have ordered new maps are using a too-broad interpretation of what makes maps illegal under the Voting Rights Act. In both Alabama and Louisiana, for example, the states’ lawyers argue that judges are ordering the states to create precisely the sorts of racial gerrymanders that the Voting Rights Act forbids — except that in these cases, the gerrymanders favor African Americans.

In Louisiana, they argue, the judge is creating an additional district that could elect a Black representative by knitting together African American communities that are separated by a hundred miles or more. In Alabama, lawyers contend that federal judges are commanding above all else that the state create two congressional districts that give Black voters a voice — something they say defies the law’s decree that race cannot be the dominant factor in redrawing political maps.

Both states also contend that the Supreme Court ruling in June that said affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated on the basis of race should also apply to race-based redistricting cases. Many see that as a bid to win over Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. He provided the fifth vote that same month to uphold the Voting Rights Act, but suggested that his mind remained open to other arguments against it.

The question of how much race can figure in redistricting cases has been litigated for decades, and the states’ critics say the law is not just clear, but newly upheld by a conservative Supreme Court. In the past year, Alabama has challenged it four times — and lost every time.

Mr. Carvin nevertheless said the law, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that upheld it, are not as settled as some think. “The courts have made crystal clear that there’s no obligation to create majority-minority districts” — districts with a majority of Black voters — “or districts that will elect minority candidates,” he said. “It’s equal opportunity, not equal results.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/u...e=articleShare

[dneal]

Everything looks racist when you look at everything through the lens of racism.

A blue/red filter is just as explanatory as a black/white one, and it’s likely the latter is intended to disguise the former.

[Chuck Naill]

What does that have to do with the topic?

[dneal]

Ask Chip. He posted the article.

If it's on topic, then my comment offering an alternative explanation - which "debunks" the hypothesis - is right on topic.

You sure seem to be grasping lately, but I told you all your narratives were collapsing.

Have you listened to either of the black men's interviews I shared yet?

[Chuck Naill]

What Chip posted was not two anecdotal interviews. He posted something related to the topic about a systemic or institutional racism.

For every interview you find where an African American says that racism does not exist, there remains 10,000 to say there is.

[dneal]

Chip posted a NYT piece about gerrymandering.

You still ignore the elderly African American man who has studied the issue most of his adult life. He brings data, which refutes narratives, which is why you won't address it.

Cognitive dissonance.

[Chuck Naill]

The reason I haven’t is because American racism is well documented throughout known history. What Chip posted is real. What you posted in response was laughable.

It is also a common tactic for you to post anything that supports your opinions or outright misinformation. I mean, you probably believe it to be true.

[dneal]

No one is claiming there isn't racism.

What's bullshit is "institutional racism" that is targeted at blacks.

Dr. Sowell has data. You have rhetoric and anecdotes.

I'm sharing data (and mocking the ridiculous claims of the race grifters and woke morons). You're sharing opinions and misinformation.

Pick a claim Dr. Sowell makes in his interview and provide the data that shows he's wrong.

But that would be having to back up your bs, which you can't do.

"Hoo hoo ha ha", and "YouTube lol!!!" is all you have.

Pathetic.

[Chip]

Uncle Tom Sowell? Hoover Institution fixture? Like Judge Thomas, a highly-paid houseboy for the oligarchy.

Race grifters? Woke morons?

What shall I call you?

[dneal]

Uncle Tom Sowell? Hoover Institution fixture? Like Judge Thomas, a highly-paid houseboy for the oligarchy.

Race grifters? Woke morons?

What shall I call you?

Not racist.

Chip demonstrates the actual racism in the progressive wing, and the general small minded thinking.

Any data or refutation of Dr. Sowell’s lifetime of research? Of course not. Just slander and racist rhetoric.

“Uncle Tom”, from whitey’s mouth, as he says others are racist.

“Houseboy”, says the old white liberal.

Those are just terms that mean "uppity n*gg*r".

You're the racist Malcolm X was talking about.

[724Seney]

Uncle Tom Sowell? Hoover Institution fixture? Like Judge Thomas, a highly-paid houseboy for the oligarchy.

Race grifters? Woke morons?

What shall I call you?

Not racist.

Chip demonstrates the actual racism in the progressive wing, and the general small minded thinking.

Any data or refutation of Dr. Sowell’s lifetime of research? Of course not. Just slander and racist rhetoric.

“Uncle Tom”, from whitey’s mouth, as he says others are racist.

“Houseboy”, says the old white liberal.

Those are just terms that mean "uppity n*gg*r".

You're the racist Malcolm X was talking about.

THIS^^^^^^^^^^ !!

[Chip]

So you venerate rich and powerful black people who seem to hate black people in general.

No surprise, Mr. Crow.

(Harlan or Jim, whatever . . .)

[dneal]

So you venerate rich and powerful black people who seem to hate black people in general.

No surprise, Mr. Crow.

(Harlan or Jim, whatever . . .)

This is how liberal racists try to disguise their bigotry - through misdirection, deflection, and by protesting too loudly.

Sorry buddy, you already outed yourself.

Now run along and dig up another op-ed to pretend you have some actual data that discounts Sowell’s.

[Chuck Naill]

That’s a really stupid response.

[dneal]

Did you ever listen to the elderly black man?

Or are you misdirecting to conceal your racism?

[724Seney]

That’s a really stupid response.

Finally, something you know a lot about and can speak with authority!

[Chip]

Here’s why many Black people despise Clarence Thomas. (It’s not because he’s a conservative.)

John Blake, CNN
September 11, 2023

Long before he became a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas told a story at a public gathering that still sounds shocking years later. At the time, Thomas was a relatively unknown conservative who had paid his way to attend a conference of Black conservatives just before Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981. At the conference, Thomas told listeners that he opposed public assistance because it had caused his sister and her children to become dependent on welfare payments.

“She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check,” Thomas said in a remark that has since been widely quoted. “That is how dependent she is. What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check, too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.”

In 1982, Thomas was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to become chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Before that, he was an assistant attorney general in Missouri (1974-77), an attorney for the Monsanto Corp. (1977-79), a legislative assistant to US Sen. John Danforth (1979-81), and an assistant secretary for civil rights at the US Department of Education (1981-82). In 1982, Thomas was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to be chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

But a journalist tracked down Thomas’ sister and discovered that what he said about her was not quite true. She learned that while Thomas attended law school, his sister Emma Mae Martin worked two minimum-wage jobs before quitting to take care of an ailing elderly aunt. She did receive welfare checks, but their sums were paltry, and she later took another job as a hospital cook. And her children all either worked or were in school when the journalist spoke with her. One even served his country aboard a battleship during Operation Desert Storm.

Thomas’ story has taken on new meaning since ProPublica and other media outlets revealed he’s been the beneficiary of another type of assistance: The lavish lifestyle the justice has enjoyed over the last three decades has been bankrolled in part by wealthy White benefactors. Thomas disclosed last month week that Republican Texas billionaire Harlan Crow paid for private jet trips for him in 2022 to attend a speech in Texas and a separate vacation at Crow’s luxurious New York estate. Thomas also acknowledged he had “inadvertently omitted” other information in past financial disclosure reports, including a private real estate deal between Crow, Thomas, and Thomas’ family. Crow, who paid the private school tuition for a relative of Thomas he said he was raising “as a son,” also purchased the home of Thomas’ mother in a private real estate deal that allows her to live rent free.

Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse displays a copy of a painting featuring Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas alongside other conservative leaders during a hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 02, 2023 in Washington, DC. The painting was commissioned by billionaire Texas Republican real estate developer Harlan Crow, who, according to a recent ProPublica investigation, invited Thomas on many luxury vacations over a number of years. The disclosures about Thomas have set off a debate among judicial ethics experts. Critics say Crow’s largesse is part of a pattern of Thomas taking undisclosed gifts from “*fawning” billionaires who benefit from his legal decisions.

A lawyer for Thomas said there had been “no willful ethics transgressions” by the justice, and attributed the criticism to “political blood sport.” But the latest revelations about Thomas may also have another unintended effect: They should put the to rest the myth about why so many Black people have despised Thomas going back to his days in the Reagan administration, when he chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The myth is that many Black people oppose Thomas because they can’t handle his stern calls for self-reliance and his admonishments to stop looking for free stuff from White people or government programs. According to the conventional story, Black people don’t like Thomas because he is a Republican and a conservative—and because, according to Thomas in a fiery 1998 speech, he refused to be an “intellectual slave.” But many Black people don’t despise Thomas because he’s a conservative. They reject him because they say he’s a “hypocrite” and a “traitor” who hurts his own people to help himself.

Georgia State Senator Nikki Merritt is one of them. The Democrat says recent revelations about Thomas benefitting from wealthy White benefactors validated what she and others have been saying about the justice for years. She was one of several Black members of the Georgia Senate who opposed a bill last year to erect a statue in honor of Thomas.

Merritt says that many Black people don’t have a problem with conservatives or Republicans. The late Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice both served in Republican presidential administrations as Black conservatives. Both are well-respected in the Black community. But Thomas, she says, is something else. Merritt says he actively hurts his own people by consistently voting to weaken voting rights and helping to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision she says disproportionately hurts poor women of color. “Justice Thomas likes to talk about the myth of pulling himself up by his bootstraps and being resilient, yet he’s benefited from handouts from these White conservatives who have supported his privileged lifestyle,” she says. “That makes him a traitor and a hypocrite in my eyes.”

Black hostility toward Thomas has had a long shelf life, and has spilled out into the public in different ways. The NAACP opposed his 1991 nomination to the Supreme Court. Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Thomas, which came during his confirmation hearings, irreparably damaged his reputation among many Black women. When the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington in 2016, its organizers excluded any direct mention of Thomas in the exhibits. Various Black leaders have called Thomas an “Uncle Tom,” and the NAACP’s current president recently called Thomas “the worst thing” affirmative action created. It’s telling that Juan Williams, the journalist who was once one of Thomas’ most vocal defenders in the Black community, now says that Thomas must be sanctioned if the stories are true about how he allowed himself “to become captive of a far-right legal coterie.”

Armstrong Williams, a Black conservative, said that the recent criticism aimed at Thomas has degenerated into “hysterical verbal pummeling.” He said that other Supreme Court judges took subsidized trips in the past, but critics focus on Thomas because of his intellectual independence. “Their real grievance against the justice is his courageous unwillingness to shill for the liberal establishment — an insult they find especially offensive because Clarence Thomas is black and contradicts their gospel that all blacks think alike,” Williams wrote in a recent column.

One federal judge, a Republican appointee, defended Thomas against charges he was being influenced by wealthy, White donors. “Judges are just like every other human being. We have a diverse group of friends, and those friends don’t influence the way we do our job,” Judge Amul Thapar, who sits on a Cincinnati-based appeals court, told CNN in an interview.

The Supreme Court’s press office did not respond to a request seeking comment from Thomas or the high court about the justice’s actions or his relationship to the Black community. But Thomas has briefly addressed the issue, saying he followed the advice of others who told him he was not required to disclose the gifts. The justice noted that the guidelines for reporting personal hospitality were recently changed and added, “it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future.”

Thomas’ former law clerks also have defended him. Last month more than 100 of them published an open letter saying Thomas’ “integrity is unimpeachable” and describing him as an embodiment of the American dream as a descendent of enslaved people who worked his way up to the pinnacle of judicial power. They declared that Thomas’ story “should be told in every American classroom, at every American kitchen table, in every anthology of American dreams realized.”

But critics within the Black community say Thomas doesn’t practice what he preaches — and they’ve been saying this long before recent disclosures about the justice’s benefactors. Some point to his opposition to affirmative action, a set of policies designed to boost minority representation in education and the workplace. Thomas says affirmative action policies are divisive, unconstitutional and harmful to recipients. He recently voted with the high court’s conservative majority to gut affirmative action in college admissions, overturning a long-standing precedent.

But his critics say Thomas would not have made it on the high court without affirmative action. They say he was admitted to Yale Law School because of an affirmative action program and that he was nominated to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first Black justice, in part because of his race. “His entire judicial philosophy is at war with his own biography,” Michael Fletcher, co-author of Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas told CNN in 2013. “He’s arguably benefited from affirmative action every step of the way.”

Thomas has admitted that he was accepted at Yale Law School under an affirmative action policy. In his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” he wrote: “As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it. Thomas’ critics have long accused him of hypocrisy in another area: how he talks about self-reliance. The contours of Thomas’ early life are well-known. He was born in the segregated South and grew up in grinding poverty in rural Georgia. He was rescued by a stern but loving grandfather who taught him the virtues of self-reliance.

Thomas flirted with Black nationalism in college, wearing a black beret and memorizing the speeches of Malcolm X, before graduating and gradually becoming a conservative and a Republican. Thomas himself has reinforced this narrative. He often invoked stories of rugged self-reliance in his earliest interviews and in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” In 1987, Thomas said he was raised in an environment where “you had an obligation to help other people, but it didn’t come from the government.” He criticized civil rights leaders who he said were teaching Black kids that getting ahead in America was hopeless because of pervasive racism. “They should be telling these kids that freedom carries not only benefits, it carries responsibilities,” Thomas said. “You want to be free, you want to leave your parents’ house? Then you’ve got to earn your own living, you’ve got to pay your own mortgage, pay your own rent, buy your own car, and pay for your own food.”

But Thomas’ critics point to what they say are contradictions in his biography. After disclosures about the financial help Thomas received from White benefactors went public, his critics pounced. A headline from The Grio, a Black online magazine, read: “Clarence Thomas gets gifts from a white billionaire but hates white paternalism.” Another from The Nation, a self-described progressive magazine, read: “Clarence Thomas Is What He Wrongly Accuses Black Folks of Being.”

Tori Otten, a writer with The New Republic, highlighted Thomas’ criticism of his sister from many years ago, saying his comments were “particularly hypocritical, considering how often he has claimed to be against government aid and welfare.” Otten added, “But Thomas and his family have spent decades enjoying free travel, housing, and school that are only offered because he holds a powerful position in the government.”

Juan Williams, a Black journalist who says he and Thomas are friends, also criticized the justice. In a 2022 column before the disclosures about Thomas’ gifts, he mentioned Thomas’ wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, and her support of former President Trump’s attempt to reverse the 2020 presidential election results. She emailed lawmakers in Wisconsin and Arizona, asking them to “fight back against fraud” by helping overturn the vote.Williams didn’t use the word “hypocrisy” to describe Thomas. He says there are “contradictions.” “As a young man he was a Black nationalist, able to recite Malcolm X speeches,” Williams wrote. “Now, at 74, he surrounds himself with far-right white conservatives and is married to a white woman who sought to help a man viewed by most Black people as a racist — Trump — overturn a legitimate election.”

Williams, like other Black writers, notes that Thomas stands in the tradition of other Black nationalist leaders who preached self-reliance. Some of Thomas’ beliefs echo revered Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. All preached some variation of self-help and not looking to White people for deliverance from racism. Even President Obama has delivered speeches that don’t sound that different from Thomas. In a 2013 speech to graduates of Morehouse College, a predominantly Black men’s college in Atlanta, Obama said that excuses are “tools of the incompetent. . .We’ve got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there,” he said. “It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil – many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did… nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned.”

Yet Williams pinpointed in a recent Atlantic magazine essay what separates Thomas from Black nationalist leaders who preached self-help. “Thomas similarly argued that Black people could demonstrate their abilities only if white people got out of their way, and stopped pursuing programs such as affirmative action,” Williams wrote. “However, the big difference between Thomas and most Black nationalists is that he assures whites that they have no responsibility for the history of slavery and continued bias.”

Thomas has consistently ruled against civil rights programs that attempt to address the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation on behalf of Black people. He called such programs “racial tinkering.” He also has drawn a moral equivalence between schools that created programs to encourage racial diversity and White schools in the Jim Crow era that banned students of color. Thomas has said that programs designed to make up for racism are demeaning and patronizing to Black people – and unconstitutional, because the Constitution is “colorblind.”

“I do not believe that kneeling is a position of strength,” Thomas reportedly said in a 1998 speech while talking about affirmative action. “Nor do I believe that begging is an effective tactic.” He once quoted the 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who responded to the question of what the American people should do with Black people by saying, “Do nothing with us!… If the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also.”

When he worked for the Reagan Administration, Thomas said all civil rights leaders do is “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine.”

But in 1998, Thomas showed a more vulnerable side in an address before the National Bar Association, a predominantly Black group. “It pains me more deeply than any of you can imagine – to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm,” he told the group. “All the sacrifice, all the long hours of preparation were to help, not to hurt.” Thomas’ speech was greeted with scattered boos and little applause, news reports said. The recent disclosures about Thomas’ bankrolled lifestyle have been greeted by some Black people in another way—by nodded heads and a string of “I told you-so’s.”

Merritt, the Georgia state senator, says calling Thomas a traitor and a hypocrite is fitting criticism because of the impact of his judicial decisions. “He claims he’s a Black man that cares about Black people and Black causes, but every action that he has taken has done nothing but harm Black people,” she says.

So maybe now the myth about why Black people oppose Thomas will finally die. For many Black people, the speech that Thomas gave about his sister was not an aberration but the start of a pattern: Thomas projects onto Black people what he refuses to see in himself. As one critic said: "Thomas, not his sister, is the “true welfare queen.”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/polit...cec/index.html

[dneal]

Didn’t take long.

Op-ed’s pretending to speak for an entire group aren’t evidence of institutional racism. They’re just moral cover for racist white liberals.

[Chuck Naill]

No doubt that some black people benefited from being black, but this isn’t systemic racism, it is the result of it and an attempt to correct the problem.

Seeing a black woman with many children is no different than seeing Hispanic women with many children. It you saw a white woman with several children, would you think she’s on Welfare or benefitting from government programs? If people are honest, they will understand the point even if a white woman with many children are often seen as being less of a woman.

For some Americans, when they see the children they think these people are benefiting from their tax dollars. Who thinks if welfare ended we would get a tax break? It’s the same with student loans, some think some people are getting something free for which they have to pay.

I heard a young white woman benefitting from a ministry say, “ if they (Hispanic people) can’t afford diapers they shouldn’t be having so many children”.

I heard a pastor talking about other people actions as a sin. What about him? If the church requires a gay man to be without sun, shouldn’t the pastor be held to the same. Maybe Jesus had another option. Prejudice is just fear. The symptoms of fear are many.

[dneal]

More anecdotes.

Did you listen to the elderly black man who has actual data?