Chinese Exclusion Act

You’ll often hear, in reference to current events, that the Republican Party has its origins in the anti-slavery movement of the mid-19th century.

This is, strictly speaking, true, but bowdlerized.

The best an abolitionist Liberty Party candidate ever did for president was 2.3 percent of what was then the popular vote in 1844.

The Free Soil Party was anti-slavery but only in so much as it disliked enslaved people. It got 10.1 percent in 1848.

The Know Nothing Party didn’t care for slavery but what really got it going was anti-immigrant nativism, contemporarily aimed at Irish and German Catholics. In 1856, it got 21.5 percent of the vote, still only good for third. By then, the Republican Party was competing on a slogan of “Free soil, free silver, free men.”

Abraham Lincoln won the presidency as a Republican with less than 40 percent of the popular vote four years later.

Continue reading “BOOK REVIEW: It’s a lot easier to kick someone out into the rain than fix your own leaking roof” →

Continued from racism and inequality.

HUMAN 1:
I think there is a misunderstanding on what the inequality with college is. It isn’t the cost. There are scholarships and people of color have easier access and thanks to affirmative action often easier standards to get in. The money isn’t the problem. The problem is affirmative action, scholarships, whatever, don’t do anything because they don’t address the problem of why they need to curve downward to increase enrollment in the first place. Which is impoverished environment. It is that they started out poor that put them behind. By the time college rolls around it is already too late. If we legit want to help poor people and minorities we need to get them out of poverty. The current system is useless.

That’s part of it, sure. We agree. And attending schools with the materials and funding to provide quality education, and being in a socio-economic life situation where you even can focus on doing homework instead of other concerns. Yeah, this is an issue that’s over-determined, absolutely.

But specifically with wealth, there are not nearly enough scholarships available that will cover the cost of tuition, books, housing, and other living expenses at a quality university. Continue reading “The model makes the minority” →