Listen Live
Fantastic Voyage Generic Graphics Updated Nov 2023
Black America Web Featured Video
CLOSE

 

A Duke University professor has some ideas about why Baltimore exploded a few weeks back.

He says basically – this is my assessment- that blacks aren’t assimilating properly or fast enough and are being blindly lead by liberal policies that make whites rich and blacks poor.

Professor Jerry Hough was responding to a May 9th New York Times editorial called “How Racism Doomed Baltimore.”

The editorial points to decades of discrimination in housing and lending as one of the major factors that caused Baltimore’s recent unrest.

In a written response to the editorial Hough identified himself as a Duke Professor writing quote:

“This editorial is what is wrong. The Democrats are an alliance of Westchester and Harlem, of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore. Westchester and Montgomery get a Citigroup asset stimulus policy that triples the market. The blacks get a decline in wages after inflation. But the blacks get symbolic recognition in an utterly incompetent mayor who handled this so badly from beginning to end that her resignation would be demanded if she were white. The blacks get awful editorials like this that tell them to feel sorry for themselves.”

The Westchester, Harlem mention refers to an affluent suburb just north of New York City filled with limousine liberals who in Hough’s estimation gives lip service to blacks (Harlem) while living in all white neighborhoods.

The Montgomery County, intercity Baltimore reference is a similar one.

Hough is saying the white, liberals in those neighborhoods who work in finance get the stimulus money which increases their portfolios and blacks get… well, poverty.

He also wrote that quote:

“In 1965 the Asians were discriminated against as least as badly as blacks. That was reflected in the word “colored.” The racism against what even Eleanor Roosevelt called the yellow races was at least as bad. So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.”

In fairness, I have had many black guests, including civil rights leaders, express the same sentiment to me on CNN.

But here’s where Hough goes completely off the rails and loses just about everyone, writing quote:

“I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.”

Hough is not backing away from his comments.

In fact he says he believes he’s right, that he is strongly against racial discrimination and he admires Dr. King.

He also says that he is “strongly against the obsession with sensitivity and that, “In writing me, no one has said I was wrong, just racist. The question is whether I was right or what the nuanced story is since anything in a paragraph is too simple.”

Is his question about whether he’s right even worth answering?