Ben Siders responds:


I believe their actions were straight up traditional racism against a
black man.

How?

Charlie Self


He was treated differently because of his race. That's racism. His
incompetance and bad behavior were overlooked. "He's black! What do you
expect? We can't fire him for it!" That's racism.

Nah. That's fear of legal recourse on the part of the firee. Incompetence
should always be a fear-free factor in a firing, but it hasn't been for 20 or
30 years, at least, and not only in racial cases.

Prejudgices and stereotypes aren't okay
if they're positive ("Japanese people are math wizards!", "Black guys play
basketball well!", "Jews are good with money!"). Neither is racism not
racism if it benefits the victim of it.

It's called affirmative action, and has been around since LBJ. Prejudice has
been around since the day someone noticed another person had brown eyes and his
eyes reflected blue from the pool in front of them: blue eyes are icy, killer's
eyes. That bull**** was wandering around full blow in the '30s and '40s and
probably earlier.

They
didn't do him any favors, although he does seem to be capitalizing on his
15 minutes pretty well (and I applaud him for it).

Sorry, but in my opinion he's a scamming shammer who should be ashamed of
himself. Instead, he'll make megabucks at least for a short while, until the
crappy work habits he's formed catch up with him.

The NYT goofed, but I'm not sure whether the goof was in hiring an unqualified
person because he was black, or in letting him run with too little supervision
because he was black. Either way, it was a bad thing, and he took advantage of
the situation because he was lazy, incompetent or both. Or he thoght he was
pulling a ****ty and getting away with something.

The human condition. Got not much at all to do with race, other than the human
race. People with poor attitudes do it a lot, thinking they're screwing the
other person, company, whatever. Good cure for that: a tour through Parris
Island. That's a 12-14 week course that will change a person's life.

Charlie Self

"The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating
plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants."
George W. Bush