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Knoxville Focus

November 15, 2021

I’ve been to South Africa three times to bow hunt. The first time I landed in Johannesburg I did not feel like I was returning to my homeland (since my homeland is Gray, GA). When I land in Knoxville I say to myself “home,” back to my things, to my house, to my dogs, back to where I belong. Not so in Africa. No one looks remotely like me. The only people who thought I was a native were a couple from Charlotte who asked me for directions (speaking very slowly) at the Johannesburg airport. No one came running up to me speaking Xhosa and welcoming me home as a fellow tribesman. My African tribes are much farther north. They were among the at least 100 tribal groups taken to America where they were broken up, sold and dispersed with loss of language and cultural identity. 

When you arrive in Johannesburg, there is a sign that says “11 Languages One Country.” Yet although there are 11 official languages, more than 35 indigenous languages are spoken in the country. In the airport you could see different tribes. Although the color was fairly uniform, there were very distinct differences in the features from noses and lips to differences in cheekbones and brows. When I landed in Polokwane where most of the blacks are Lesotho, the official language is Southern Sesotho. By the time I left, I could distinguish a southern Lesotho from a northern Lesotho (whose language is Sepedi).

At home it is rare to see two black people that could be identified as being from the same tribe unless they are from the same family. Clarence Thomas, Vanessa Williams, Beyonce, Nicki Minaj and Thomas Sowell do not look remotely alike. Even if you go to one city – like Knoxville – its hard to see any tribal similarity. In America, the blacks came from all over central and west Africa from literally hundreds of tribes. They were then split up, sold and then mixed with whites from all over Europe and Native Americans. The result is me. I have 10 distinct DNA strains and am only fifty percent West African.  My mother’s DNA was 32 percent British and less than 40% West African. I don’t know my father’s but I suspect it was predominately West African. Dad and his family were dark skinned. Mom and her family were fair skinned (her father could pass for white). Initially, Dad’s family did not embrace my mother because she was too white while mother’s thought my Dad was too black.

Thus, I have resisted calling myself an African-American. To me that’s denies all of my other ancestors. Don’t misunderstand, I am fiercely proud of my African ancestors. I am Cameroon, Mali and Togo. But I am also Scotch Irish, British, European, Russian, Scandinavian and Native American. I am tempted when asked on a form for my race to check all the boxes. At ESPN, one of the most woke and least tolerant networks, they suspended a sports anchor who said among other things that she was proud of her mix-race heritage and identified as both black and Italian leading her to check both the boxes of “white” and “black”. 

Some radical leftists have tried without success to pin on whites the term “European-Americans.” These are the same people who want to segregate us with hyphens: African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian Americans, Native American-Americans, and European-but-not of-Hispanic descent-Americans. Enough already. The racial/ethnic hodgepodge of American blacks like me make us uniquely American. Rather than African-American I am more correctly a Mongrel-American. However, that term will not likely gain much traction. So what am I? I am an American-American.

The Education Industrial Complex

Knoxville Focus (knoxfocus.com)

November 22, 2021

There is an old saying that all politics is local. That certainly was corroborated in the Virginia gubernatorial election. Despite the Biden Administration being a total disaster and supposedly unpopular in Virginia, the democrat candidate still had campaign appearances with Biden and Kamala Harris (who is even less popular). The inflection point in the election came when the democrat said in a televised debate that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” That comment, along with the controversy over access to girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms by boys who profess gender confusion, swung the election in favor of Youngkin, the republican. As I have written earlier, my solution to the bathroom controversy is to remove the male/female symbols from the bathroom doors and put up pictures of genitalia instead saying “if your privates look like this, then enter here.” 

Of course, the usual apologists in the media made stupid comments like “my parents shouldn’t tell my math teacher whether to teach the central limit theorem.” This assumes that the teacher knows what the central limit theorem was. No, the point was that parents should know if their children are being indoctrinated rather than taught. A great example is a liberal friend who objected to her school board adding LBGT books to the elementary school curriculum. She said at the school board meeting that she supported many LBGT issues including gay marriage but that such issues were for discussion in the home and not at school. When the board decided otherwise, she took her children out of public schools.

Schools should be tasked with teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and little else – although it would be nice if they also taught about our system of government. Yet schools are failing at these basic tasks and are not motivated to do better. If a child comes from a nuclear family with both parents college educated, then what transpires in the schools is almost irrelevant. One of my favorite professors said “I have never ruined a good student.” However, children from single parent households where the parent is not college educated face an uphill struggle. In a more rational world, the performance of our community’s children at Sarah Moore Greene and Green Magnet here in Knoxville would be cause of termination of the superintendent and system administrators. Those schools have dedicated teachers who are hamstrung by curricula and teaching method imposed on them by the Education Industrial Complex that have little to do with learning and retention. The abysmal scores go unpunished. I guess the consolation is that those scores look like Ivy League compared to those in Memphis.

Youngkin in Virginia has an aggressive education agenda. In it he states that all children are to be able to read by the third grade. Lots of luck with that one. What he doesn’t realize is that the Education Industrial Complex has no interest in teaching kids. The textbook companies, the textbook authors, the colleges of education, the teachers’ unions and the accreditation agencies all have agendas, none of which contain quality education for children. The annual convention program for the teachers’ unions reads like a socialist playbook with not a session on effective teaching. Several years ago, I was approached by a foundation to lobby for a program that emphasized reading for grades K-3.  If children cannot read by the third grade, then many are condemned to high drop out rates, incarceration and a subsistence dependent upon the government. The foundation was willing to fund a reading curriculum in our poorest performing schools. The school superintendent told me that he could not put the curriculum into the schools because it would not be approved by the state’s accreditation agencies because it “contained too much reading.” 

Given that the teachers’ unions contribute 95% of their political contributions to democrats, It is no surprise that the democrats are not interested (as a party) in educating our children and oppose virtually every educational alternative. The republicans have endorsed vouchers, charter schools and have advocated merit pay for teachers (all strongly opposed by the unions), smaller classrooms and increased funding. None of the above will work. They are all doomed to fail so long as the Education Industrial Complex is in place dictating teaching method and curriculum.

So if you are interesting in educating our children (all of our children) the only solution is to blow up the entire Education Industrial Complex. Lastly, this not solely about minority children. All of our children suffer as evidenced by the following chart. The question is why do we tolerate this abysmal performance?following chart. The question is why do we tolerate this abysmal performance?

following chart. The question is why do we tolerate this abysmal performace?