A game with only one card: the race card

The Sunday New York Times is awash with lamentations about the Shirley Sherrod affair. For those of you who have been sojourning in Antarctica, this is about a black bureaucrat who was wrongly fired from her job by the Obama administration. Once again the Great White Guilt Machine has been cranked up full force. Suitably awed by its deployment, we are all supposed to don, once again, sackcloth and ashes, knowing all the while that in a few more weeks we will be asked to wear this unseemly costume once again.

Whatever any white person says about race, it is wrong. Yet we are supposed to have a “conversation” about the matter. How can one have any sort of conversation if meaningful exchange is barred?

Quite a few years ago I concluded that this exercise is useless. I do not feel guilty about race and I am disgusted with others who say that I must. Screw them all.

Moreover, every day gay and lesbian service people are discharged from the armed forces under the malign influence of DADT. Obama and his operatives promised to do something about this evil--but so far they haven’t. It has been left to the Log Cabin Republicans, of all people, to bring suit about the matter.

And of course in the real world people get fired for all sorts of reasons. When I was a young scholar I was discharged from an Ivy League university. This was not just. But instead of grieving I went out and found a better job.

Right now there is a case of just firing. For some time now, Michelle Rhee, the courageous DC Superintendent of Schools, has been seeking to take control of that disastrously underperforming school system. On Friday Rhee announced that she has fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor appraisals under a new evaluation system that for the first time holds some educators accountable for students’ standardized test scores.

“Every child in a District of Columbia public school has a right to a highly effective teacher — in every classroom, of every school, of every neighborhood, of every ward, in this City,” Rhee said in a statement, announcing the first year of results from the revamped evaluation, known as IMPACT. as “That is our commitment. Today . . . we take another step toward making that commitment a reality.”

As the story in the Washington Post indicates, dismissals for performance are exceedingly rare in D.C. schools — and in school systems nationwide. Friday’s firings mark the beginning of Rhee’s bid to make student achievement a high-stakes proposition for teachers, establishing job loss as a possible consequence of poor classroom results.

The Washington Teachers’ Union said Friday that it will contest the terminations. Of course. The union is doing everything it can to keep these drones from being fired. Countless numbers of children, most of them African American, are harmed by the poor performance of these teachers. If one wants to make a meaningful change it would be to pass legislation abolishing the teachers' unions. That will not happen because teachers are a bulwark of the Democratic Party.

Which case, the Shirley Sherrod one or the DC teachers one, is more important for our country? The answer is obvious. But our “quality” media, headed by the New York Times, doesn’t think so. It is too busy reenacting the endlessly satisfying (to itself) Passion Play of black grievances and “insensitive” whites.