Society

Jim Miller has interesting comments and a useful graph on American fertility rates, prompted by Lex’s earlier comments linking to Spengler. (Ah, what mazes we weave.)

Update: Instapundit links to a lengthy discussion on this topic by Phillip Longman, “The Return of Patriarchy” in Foreign Policy.

Tiger Woods isn’t the only celebrity to be tired of people trying to pigeonhole him in one race or another, or to even make a big stink about the color of his skin. Morgan Freeman recently spoke out, somewhat, on the manic obsession that our society makes of race and color:

“You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” to air Sunday (7 p.m. EST). “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.”

Black History Month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Woodson said he hoped the week could one day be eliminated — when black history would become fundamental to American history.

Freeman notes there is no “white history month,” and says the only way to get rid of racism is to “stop talking about it.”

The actor says he believes the labels “black” and “white” are an obstacle to beating racism.

“I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man,” Freeman says.

I guess now that blacks have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures, albeit in a rather contrived showing a couple years ago (which is not to say that Denzel Washington didn’t deserve the award), that’s just one less milestone to conquer. (By the way, doesn’t anybody think it’s rather nice, and rather interesting, that a black man got to go to space before one got an Oscar? I’ve been informed that Sidney Poitier won an Oscar for his role in Lilies of the Field in 1963, twenty years before Guion “Guy” Bluford became the first African-American in space. The first black man in space was Cuban Colonel Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendez aboard a Soviet mission in 1980.)

Without saying that racism is solved (which, so long as people are human, will never be definitively “solved”), I do believe that this is another step toward Dr. King’s dream that someday, people will be judged “not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

Still, while we’re using labels, can we please stop insisting calling blacks “African-Americans”, and insisting that folks like Charlize Theron cannot be called “African-American” simply because she’s white.

By the way, Mr. Freeman, for your words, and for your wonderful work in motion pictures, you are the man!

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Jim Bennett posts some characteristically insightful thoughts on assimilation. I hope that his tag line catches on.

UPDATE: Commenter Brock credits the title phrase to Wretchard of The Belmont Club.

UPDATE2: Jim Bennett says he came up with the phrase on his own and has been using it since around 2001, which is before The Belmont Club existed as a blog. My search of Belmont Club’s last two sites turned up no instances of the phrase, but it’s possible that I didn’t search competently. It’s also possible that Wretchard came up with the phrase independently or that he read it first in one of Jim’s pieces. Either way, it’s a great line.

The collapse of Bolshevism deprived the panoply of fellow-travelers of the paradaisal vision they needed to function. To make it from one day to the next. The Worker’s Paradise functioned as the Opiate of the Moonbats, vacuuming the truly insane from society and placing them in the custody of relatively functional cult leaders like Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot. Now that these worthies are gone, their former wards have all crawled out of the snakepit.

-Wretchard (in the comment section of this post)

This is tragic and serves as a reminder that the human costs of mass evacuations are not always less than those of hurricanes. Public officials should not treat mandatory evacuation as the safe option when hurricanes approach. Not that officials aren’t usually conscientious. However, post Katrina, “must evacuate” is in danger of becoming the politically safe buzz-meme WRT hurricanes, and it is unwise to assume that evacuation is always the safe option. There are often no safe options.

I find more fault with the press in this regard than I do with politicians. The media have become hysterical in their treatment of hurricane risks. Drudge has been particularly bad.

(A previous post on related topics is here.)

UPDATE: Via Instapundit comes this thoughtful post about evacuations and media hysteria. The author says that for many people in Houston there is no need to evacuate, and that the media, by making no distinction between risky low-lying areas and everywhere else, are panicking people, exacerbating road congestion and making the area-wide situation much worse than it has to be. That’s right. Waves and flooding are the big killers in hurricanes. While people who are near the ocean and in low-lying areas should consider leaving, for people who are already inland and on high ground it may be reasonably safe to weather the storm at home or in a robust larger building.