Discrimination exists. That sucks. But we need to look at every claim of discrimination with a skeptical eye. There are way too many people around with delusions of grandeur trying to make a buck off of being the next civil rights hero when, in reality, they are whackadoos who want to blame other people and discrimination for their problems with getting along in society.
Martin Luther King is possibly be the greatest American of all time..... what progress we have made thanks to him. But then we got Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and civil rights became a business and a means to self-glorification. Have they done good things? In places. But they have also corrupted the civil rights movement by making discrimination complaints a profitable enterprise and many people are now activists purely for the power, self-esteem and money. They will exaggerate, embellish and flat out lie to empower themselves all the while fooling themselves into thinking that this is acceptable because of the injustices of the past.
We should be embarrassed by how blind we were to the scam some of these hucksters were running at the turn of the 21st century. The Pigford settlement is a glaring example, but only one.
In the late 1990's Noam Chomsky acolyte and militant black activist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo successfully led a small cabal of "discrimination victims" conned the American media and congress into thinking that racism and discrimination was a rampant and serious problem in the Clinton administration's EPA. Think about that for a second. A more politically correct and liberal organization could hardly exist in America than the Clinton Era EPA and yet they had a discrimination problem?
It led Republicans including James Sensenbrenner and Mark Sanford to chew out and embarrass do-gooder EPA chief Carol Browning on Capitol Hill. How crazy is that? Just think about it. Hardcore conservative republicans bagging on Clinton's EPA and, in fact, Miss Browning herself, for being racist!
Read Driving Miss Browner- CounterPunch. It gives a good spread of civil rights complaints at the time. All of these are very troubling. Only some are credible. Whoever committed real acts of discrimination deserved to have their ass handed to them. What happened at the Foster/Wheeler yards seems well documented and I hope justice was served. Other complaints just seem too downright crazy to believe. Complaints of secret service agents shooting at targets of Martin Luther King and Al Gore just brushing them off? I'm not buying that one.
There is a difference between discrimination and perceived discrimination. In this era, we started to reward people who claimed racism even though none existed simply because they perceived they were being discriminated against. In fact, many of these cases, the "racist" is actually the "victim". Well meaning even liberal/"progressive" people got accused of discrimination by people who were so race/gender obsessed that they saw race/gender in every single thing.
The accusations of racism that Coleman-Adebayo and other bullshitters threw out there stuck so hard that they made her a hero and congress even passed a law that George Bush signed in 2002: The No Fear Act. Her testimony at the passage of the act is here. She now has a book called No Fear and is the leader of the No Fear Coalition.
On the surface, it seems like a good law. Someone who is being discriminated agains should obviously have the right to file a complaint and have it heard. The reality is that the kind of discrimination being alleged is rare and people were already protected by the civil rights act. What the act really allowed was for race hustlers to claim racism at every step and turn without fear of recrimination. They could sue their respective agencies to their heart's desire and try to make a buck without fear of ever being fired. If there was no racism proven in court, they still get to keep their jobs because they perceived racism.
Everything I have seen has shown me that Coleman-Adebayo has always been a race obsessed activist. She came to the EPA to be an activist, but that is not the role of the EPA. The EPA is there to enforce law, research and make suggestions for new law and to consult other nations and agencies on how to better protect the environment.
She was alerted to the problems in the Vanadium mines in South Africa and took it upon herself to champion the cause. It seems like a noble cause, but protesting how other countries conduct their business was not in her job description. Her attitude and sense of entitlement that she could do whatever she wanted at her job alienated her from her coworkers who found her increasingly impossible to work with. That's why she had a complaint against the EPA.
From what I can tell, she won a discrimination lawsuit with testimony about three particular things.
1. A colleague welcomed her to a meeting as an "honorary white male". I am confident that this statement came not as a statement of hate, but as an uncareful self-effacing joke from a liberal whose white guilt made him feel uncomfortable with the fact that so many people at the table were not minorities. Nevertheless, Ms. Coleman-Adebayo was able to manufacture this into a 6-figure settlement.
2. She had a meeting where she inferred the word "uppity" where the word was not used.
3. People mocked her sarcastically as the Rosa Parks of the EPA behind her back. In retrospect, this certainly seems like a fair assessment and she has identified herself as a Rosa Parks figure. Unfortunately, the racial content of having a laugh about Rosa Parks seems to be the fact that sealed the deal, at least if you consider what she says about the importance of the testimony of Jon Grand.
Who else complained along with Ms. Adebayo? A Chicago man who Browner liked so much that after he drove her around once, she requested him again. He decided that this was a "Driving Miss Daisy" scenario and complained about discrimination. A woman, Anita Nickens, who was asked to clean the bathroom and did so, only to cry about it the next day because she perceived she was asked to do it because she was black. Ummm.... maybe she was just lowest on the totem pole or the last one who used it who made a mess? If EPA employees really asked her to clean the toilet because she was black, obviously those people should have been fired... but do you really think that that is what happened? Me neither. In total, at least 150 people filed a class action suit. Why a class action suit? Because few could win on their individual merits.
Danny Glover was supposed to make a movie about Miss Coleman-Adebayo. I wonder how that's coming along.
Look her up. Look around. Who does Ms. Coleman-Adebayo associate with now. Kevin Zeese and the Occupy movement. Does anyone who worked with her at EPA support her. Someone must. Only other grievance mongers looking for a paycheck support her. If EPA employees were free to speak without fear about Ms. Adebayo, I'm confident that would say that she is a complete whack-job. Unfortunately, they are afraid of being called a racist and keep quiet. Go back to the WikiLeaks article and read it again. Those are clearly two people who worked with her but know the truth and are afraid to speak out. Ironic, isn't it?
I'll have more to say about all this.... particularly about Coleman-Adbayo's OccupyEPA buddies Jon Grand and Susan Morris on another occasion or another blog post.
Oleanna was fiction. So was The Human Stain, but the abuse of discrimination claims by race-hustlers and people with delusional victimhood complexes has been very real and very widespread throughout the last three decades. White guilt and political correctness were at their peak right around this time and everyone was afraid to call out delusional Marxist narcissists like Coleman-Adebayo for who they really were. Instead we rewarded them. We should be embarrassed.
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By the way, if you are a current or former EPA employee who would like to correct anything I have said, please comment. Also, if you are a current or former employee of the EPA who would have liked to say more about Ms. Coleman-Adebayo but were afraid to speak for being called a racist--- comment here as well.
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Further tidbits:
Coleman-Adebayo is simply an egotist who doesnt' want to follow the rules or work within the system. She wants to tear down the system.
Noam Chomsky on Marsha in Understanding Power
Well, the woman started presenting her dissertation proposal, and you could just see people turning pale. Somebody asked her, "What's your hypothesis?"--you're supposed to have a hypothesis--and it was that media coverage of Southern Africa is going to be influenced by corporate interests. People were practically passing out and falling out the windows. Then starts the critical analysis: "What's your methodology going to be? What tests are you going to use?" And gradually an apparatus was set up and a level of proof demanded that you just can't meet in the social sciences. It wasn't, "I'm going to read the editorials and figure out what they say" you had to count the words, and do all sorts of statistical nonsense, and so on and so forth. But she fought it through, she just continued fighting. They ultimately required so much junk in her thesis, so much irrelevant, phony social-scientific junk, numbers and charts and meaningless business, that you could barely pick out the content from the morass of methodology. But she did finally make it through--just because she was willing to fight it out. Now, you know, you can do that--but it's tough. And some people really get killed.
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