An Analysis of Urban Libraries Race Scamming Article

Executive Summary

• There are now enormous quantities of articles that provided entirely one-sided race-scamming explanations of “racial equity.”
• We analyze one by Urban Libraries.

Introduction

Racial equity articles have taken over websites, each providing some degree of race scamming and providing a very one-sided view. This article will evaluate an article of this type by Urban Libraries called How Eliminating Library Fees Advances Racial Equity.

Our References for This Article

See this link if you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles at this link.

The Urban Libraries Article Authors

Here are the titles of the two authors of this article.

Katherine Carter
Senior Program Specialist, Race, Equity, And Leadership (REAL) Initiative, National League of Cities

Denise Belser
Program Director, Economic Opportunity and Financial Empowerment (EOFE), National League of Cities’ Institute for Youth, Education, and Families (IYEF)

These are very long titles. And they both translate in a more truncated fashion to “race scammers.” These two women are paid to push for benefits for blacks. There are tons of these positions, mostly held by blacks, but also Hispanics. They are good jobs if you can get them. However, I don’t think your resume will be accepted unless you are black or Hispanic.

The Article from Urban Libraries

Rethinking Library Fees
In the midst of this public health crisis, having access to library resources is a priority. Local leaders are encouraging residents to explore e-books and digital e-audiobooks during this time of social distancing. However, many individuals are fearful to utilize library resources because they have unpaid late fees. Research shows that communities of color are more likely to be impacted by unpaid library fees and are grappling with a higher percentage of suspended library cards. This is a growing concern for many municipal leaders who want better ways to engage and support community residents.

First, there is a lumping together of different groups in this quote.

“People of color” is a euphemism for non-white. I don’t see why they simply don’t say non-whites. And when a black person uses the term “people of color” they try to make a common cause with other non-whites, but what they mean is their race. So “person of color” means blacks  — to a black person (normally they do not care about say Hispanics) and to a Hispanic person they mean Hispanics and don’t much care about blacks. Blacks and Hispanics have no particular affinity for one another — however, they will use a more general term if it can be used as a cudgel against whites and for race scamming purposes.

And these authors, who are black might be surprised to learn that there are many poor whites and whites are not the highest-earning group. Asians have a lower poverty rate than any other group in the US.

The article continues.

Non-Hispanic Whites made up 59.9% of the total population but only 41.6% of the population in poverty. Asians made up 6.1% of the population and 4.3% of the population in poverty. – US Census

So while whites have a lower poverty rate than blacks or Hispanics, they have a higher poverty rate than Asians. When these authors are talking about “people of color,” is she including Asians or excluding Asians. The topic is never brought up. I have read a number of articles like this, and not once have I seen that article observe either the gap in income and wealth between Asians and whites much less Asians and blacks and Hispanics. And there is another issue — Asians are far more discriminatory than whites. Indias, who are categorized as Asian engage in extreme discrimination which I cover in the article How Indian IT Workers Discriminate Against Non India Workers. Indians are taking the jobs of non-Indians, they have rigged the H1-B program so that a large number of non-Indians are literally fired from their jobs through a process called outsourcing which I cover in the article How IT Outsourcing Firms Reduce Wages By Moving the H1-B Indian Worker Back to India. And whites cannot do anything about this because discrimination laws in the US only protect non-whites from white discrimination. There are Indian companies in the US with roughly 98 to 99% of their employees as Indian, and no one says anything.

Therefore, there is ample evidence that discrimination and cheating are more common among Asians than whites, and that therefore their higher-income has less to do with their skills and value add than this cheating (which is part of the Indian culture). However, no one apparently has told black and Hispanic authors that whites are no longer the highest income earning group in the US.

The whole argument is that whites are so racist towards non-whites, but why do Asians do better than whites in a country founded by whites? None of these types of race-scamming articles ever explain that Asians do better economically than whites. Why is that?

The article continues.

In 2019, the poverty rate for the United States was 10.5%, the lowest since estimates were first released for 1959.

Poverty rates declined between 2018 and 2019 for all major race and Hispanic origin groups.

Two of these groups, Blacks and Hispanics, reached historic lows in their poverty rates in 2019. The poverty rate for Blacks was 18.8%; for Hispanics, it was 15.7%. – US Census

Notice the significantly higher average income of Asians versus Whites.

Don’t Look At This Graph!

Race scamming articles don’t want this graph to be seen. Instead, they prefer a simple story that all people of color are oppressed in the US — and oppressed by whites. Jews have an even higher average income than Asians. However, for some reason, Jews are never called out for oppressing anyone. In fact, if you even utter a word about Jews or how much money Jews have you are branded an anti-semite, but whites can be critiqued until the cows come home. It is impossible to call someone “anti-white.” There is no term called “Jewish privilege” or “Asian privilege.” All race scamming is directed at whites. 

The article continues.

Overdue library fees often represent a very small fraction of a library’s operating budget, yet disproportionately affect communities that have income insecurity or individuals with low incomes. Late fees add up and become insurmountable for some families when forced to choose between paying the fee or buying food.

I am not a librarian, but fees are designed to create an incentive to bring books and library materials back to the library. Because blacks and Hispanics generally are less responsible, I also can presume that they have higher than average library fees. Therefore, because blacks and Hispanics can’t follow the rules, this black author would like library fees to be eliminated. This is very standard logic for black authors.

Bring BLM to the Library?

This is reminiscent of the push by BLM that because blacks have so many problems following laws, police departments should be abolished.

• Blacks also consistently score very poorly on IQ tests, so blacks have called for the abolishment of IQ tests (they are racist, even though Asians do better than whites on them).
• Because blacks perform poorly in math, there have been calls that math may itself be racist. Critical Race Theory proposes that 2 + 2 can be 5 and that saying its four comes from a very white-centric place that restricts learning for “people of color.” Math has also been called a tool of oppression.

If you see a pattern, anything blacks don’t do well in must be racist. But this logic, I am now claiming that the NBA is racist against whites and Asians and should be abolished.

Furthermore, the claim is that the fees disproportionately affect communities with income insecurity — but I doubt these authors are talking about whites — representing 41% of the poor in the US.

Finally, it is doubtful that the actual decision is between paying library fees or paying for food. Even the poor have several things they spend money on that are less important than food. This claim is ludicrous and is pearl-clutching at its finest.

The article continues.

For many, this is a reminder of past injustices within public institutions.

This is a bit overly dramatic. Now library fees are triggering blacks and making them think of what exactly? Lynching? Slave patrols? Separate drinking fountains?

The injustice is a bit vague, perhaps because calling out the specific correlation would be ridiculous. This is a bit like when Angelina Jolie claimed that Brad Pitt’s behavior versus their children constituted a “human rights abuse” but then refused to specify what Brad Pitt did.

When your claim is weak or fake, it’s better to stay nonspecific.

The article continues.

History of Race in Libraries
There is a legacy of systemic racism in our public institutions such as hospitals, schools, courts and even libraries, laying a foundation of historical inequity which continues today. In the mid-1800s, African-Americans were prohibited from using libraries or participating in literacy activities. During the Jim Crow era, southern towns designated libraries for black patrons with materials that were worn out and outdated. Other libraries segregated entrances and reading rooms for black and white visitors and, in many locations, no library services were available for people of color.

Yes, that is true. But there are also some good reasons for this. Even today, when there are even a few, much less many blacks, in a library, that library becomes unruly. Blacks use it as a social club and physically threaten those that tell them to be quiet. Race-scamming articles like this always miss the point or pretend to be ignorant that blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics don’t act like whites.

Every place blacks congregate has problems. The businesses in Miami hate it when blacks come and require the police to enforce curfews, which are just targeted at blacks. Blacks do not have a reverse Jim Crow law in Miami, but they don’t need to. Whites don’t want to be in Mami when the blacks come in mass. Without Jim Crow/Redlining/Curfews, those areas are ruined by the blacks. Things like redlining were critical to preventing white areas from being taken over.

Atlanta is one of the only cities in the US with a substantial black population that has not succumbed to that population (as have Detroit, Birmingham, East St Louis, etc..). However, the way they did it was by a “racist” policy of segregating the city. Liberals constantly decry how bad segregation was, but the part that is missed is what happens when you don’t have it. If the US were to become unsegregated, it would lead to massive conflict. The US is not a melting pot, it is a country with very high non-white immigration and high population growth of the non-white population. The average age of whites is 59 years old, and the country is marked by consistent white flight. One can say what a terrible person I am for writing this but the problem is, whites demonstrate by where they choose to live that they agree with my observation.

This focus has been on blacks, but Hispanics also ruin areas. But it’s more than that. Even if I liked what Hispanics did with areas, there is no place for me in them. Hispanics do not care to make their areas hospitable to anyone but other Hispanics.

There is not as single a desirable Hispanic area in the entire US. They all follow the same pattern. See my article What Happens When Hispanics Take Over a US Area, for some great quotes on what has happened to New Mexico.

Do Blacks and Hispanics Must Use White Libraries?

Neither the black nor Hispanic cultures are reading cultures. So while blacks may have been restricted historically from using white libraries (no one was stopping blacks from starting their libraries, but blacks and Hispanics can’t do that — the library will fall apart.) Blacks and Hispanics need to access white libraries.

I looked into some statistics and found there are over 7,000 libraries in Mexico. How is that possible. How can there be that many libraries and the intellectual output of Mexico be so low? A country with an even larger population than Mexico with 206,000, Nigeria has only 316 public libraries. That is shockingly low. It is also curious to see the following statistics.

• Hispanic adults (38%) are more likely than Black (25%) or White adults (20%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months. – Pew Research

That is amazing to me that blacks are only five percentage points more likely to have not read a book in the past year. However, that may not be a good indicator of relative reading frequency.

Lets Consider Starbucks

Starbucks is a prototypical white environment. It’s based upon being clean, good quality construction, and a pleasant atmosphere. However, if you go to a Starbucks in a Hispanic area of the US, they are terrible. I visited one in Northridge (a Hispanic area), and I walked out after five minutes. I went to another in Lake Elsinore, and the feeling was like it was a fake Starbucks. It had a very bad feeling and was not a place I wanted to stay. Also, there were no power outlets in that Starbucks, for a reason, I do not know why, but the reason cannot be good. Starbucks doesn’t work very well in Asian environments either. I visited several in Asian areas of LA (which I can’t recall the names of), and the vibe was entirely different from a white Starbucks. First, it was very noisy, as there were large groups of Asians huddled together. Someone had stood on the toilet and had diarrhea and then figured it was not their job to do anything about it and went back to talk with their group. Like blacks and Hispanics, Asians make environments that are inhospitable to anyone, but their own in-group.

The article continues.

As the civil rights movement secured equal rights under the law for people of color, public libraries began to embrace diversity and inclusion. In New York, the Queens Library launched the New Americans Program in 1977. This first-of-its-kind initiative provided language and citizenship classes, international book collections and resources to recently arrived immigrants.

I question whether the civil rights movement, in which blacks accessed things they could never build themselves, while whites received nothing but their spaces invaded by black (and now other groups), was such a good idea. This means that whites must be willing to have the things they created ruined — as I had my high school ruined by blacks, who were bussed to the school. Once enough blacks caused enough problems and degraded the educational experience, the whites all pulled their children out of the school. When I visited a few decades ago, the school was entirely black, and in every class, I looked into it, it seemed they were watching a video and I did not see teachers standing in front of the class. That is the high school had been converted into a daycare center.

Observe that a group of whites never protest about accessing something created by blacks or non-whites. Again, there was nothing stopping blacks from making their own things. They had lower capital, but blacks couldn’t even open up simple, fresh food stores (that require very little capital and can be accomplished through a co-op) in areas with “food deserts.”

What blacks and Hispanics cannot do is amazing. There is very little easier than starting a basic healthy grocery store. It requires a truck, finding a food wholesaler (which is very close to these food deserts), and then running a store. Yet there are no black-run grocery stores of any size in the US.

The comment at the 10-minute mark about Dollar General is ludicrous. The video states that Dollar General is very intensively in “urban areas.” However, this is untrue. I have driven all around the US, and Dollar General is far more prevalent in rural areas, and most of their customers are poor whites, not poor blacks or Hispanics. Dollar General does offer horrid and highly processed food, however, the video has changed the target market of Dollar General from whites to non-whites.

Observe that this video only briefly covers the food demanded by blacks, but glosses over it. A Stanford study which is corroborated by other studies states that only 10% of the selection of healthy food is due to access — however video rejects the research conclusion using a single black woman who simply disagrees with the study.

At the 22 minute mark, it points out that many blacks don’t want healthy food stores like Trader Joe’s to move in because it would attract “non-oppressed” individuals. This is where blacks do not want their neighborhoods to become “white.”

The following person’s experience, in the comment area of the YouTube video above, is entirely left out.

Comment #1

I’m a 32 year old black man from the hood. I was a district supervisor for undercover loss prevention for 3 years. Theft and robbery are a huge reason why these stores don’t want to come to black neighborhoods. It’s a easy but very valid excuse to not want to get involved in our communities. I did my best to prevent theft in lower income neighborhoods. I had to quit because that job is getting way too dangerous and that job wasn’t paying enough for the amount of trouble I had to deal with daily.

Comment #2

Rampant theft in the stores in those neighborhoods is why there are food deserts. No one is obligated to operate a business at a loss.

Comment #3

I grew up in the ghetto and I always saw stores getting robbed or ambulances and police parked outside. You felt like you were going to get mugged going to the store.. no wonder why stores couldn’t keep open….. oh wait, these people are wondering

Comment #4

Come to Seattle. We have 15,000 drug addicts/homeless and teh last grocery store downtown just closed due to excessive thievery and lack of police response when called. “Defund the Seattle Police” has been hurting Seattle’s poor again

Comment #5

Did you see Walmart got sued fo racial discrimination for locking up certain hair care products because of the extremely high theft-rate?

Will a WOKE video cover these topics? No. Better to pretend this issue does not exist.

The following is a video that expands on the issue of the types of food that blacks normally demand.

The government funds the creation of food deserts, but they don’t take — because neither blacks nor Hispanics demand healthy food. They reject healthy food options when they have the alternatives. Therefore, there is demand, and blacks have presented this as only an issue of supply. However, this research is never promoted. It is more convenient for blacks and the establishment media to assert without evidence that they are oppressed by food deserts that they have no control over. Because this study does not promote the food desert claim, it will be categorized as racist by blacks and establishment media entities. 

What they can do is complain about how they live in a food desert. The idea is that whites must come into undesirable black neighborhoods and provide them with good diets. They leave out that blacks live in food deserts because the black culture does not prefer healthy food.

The problem with so many race issues is that they are presented by blacks — who not only have a long term strong pattern of not knowing the history, faking history to maximize their helplessness, of leaving out important factors like blacks having access to things in white countries they would never have if they lived in black countries. As blacks and Hispanics are more involved in creating content, and as these groups have less of an interest in what is true — large amounts of false information is being put into the public domain. Furthermore, whites are often either tricked by these claims or are unwilling to publicly contradict these claims, for fear of being not PC.

What is left out of this analysis is that the overall food quality for the US has declined for all races. However, this topic is of little interest to blacks or Hispanics — the only topic of interest to them is “disparities.”

What Black and Hispanic Access to White Areas Really Means

The problem is that if blacks are allowed to access white things and white areas, they will ruin those things. This is why they were excluded from those things before the civil rights movement. The only reason that this has not yet come to a head in the US is that whites have simply moved away from black areas. However, with the rise in the black population and the dramatic rise of the Hispanic population, fewer and fewer places to move away from blacks and Hispanics. No racial group creates environments where whites can exist, and it only works in the opposite direction. Whites, for example, cannot make programs where they complain they live in “food deserts” and expect blacks or Asians to come to the rescue. Anything whites need, they are expected to create for themselves. Actually, this is fine, but blacks and Hispanics are continually proposing that whites need to provide for them.

Almost all whites agree with “civil rights,” however, virtually none of them want to live around blacks or Hispanics. As I pointed with the segregation video, the moving pattern of whites makes this clear, even if they won’t verbalize the sentiment. Whites who support civil rights need to recognize what it means: the areas whites create will be ruined by the “inclusion” of non-whites. And you will constantly be called a racist if you want to keep anything nice.

The Urban Libraries article continues.

Fines and Fees Multiply Existing Inequities
However, the practice of imposing late fees has been slow to disappear. Studies show that fines and fees exacerbate the wealth gap faced by people of color.

What about whites? I already showed how 40% of the population that is poor is white. But again, to these authors who are black, they could not care less. To them, the only people who are poor who matter are “people of color,” and for them, black.

Furthermore, the quote does not answer the question of what is to be done if fees are not imposed. What is to stop the borrower from simply never returning the book? The authors have not thought that far ahead, just like how BLM did not consider what happens after police departments are abolished.

Secondly, the authors deceptively combined fines and fees to exacerbate the wealth gap. However, what percentage of these “fines and fees” are library penalties? It is far more likely that usurious interest rates are much more of a factor, and that issue should be addressed and is far more critical than trying to eliminate library fees.

The article continues.

According to the Aspen Institute, Black and Latino households have less debt than white households. However, because of inequalities in income and greater access to wealth in white households, the ability for Blacks and Latinos to repay debt is often drastically reduced.

Are these authors missing a few groups? Because the Aspen Institute also shows that whites have less access to wealth than Jewish and Asian households. Why are these authors not observing this discrepancy?

The article continues.

Debt can curtail future opportunities because of the long-term effects on credit scores and background checks. This in turn makes it more difficult to secure quality employment or housing, increasing the likelihood that future financial burdens will be met with unsecured debt, such as payday lending or high interest credit cards.

Yes, this is true of whites versus Jews and Asians. Oh wait, is that what these authors are referring to?

The article continues.

Increasingly, libraries are eliminating fines and fees, even before the onslaught of COVID-19. Fees are imposed inequitably and shown to be ineffective in eliminating past-due returns while disproportionately affecting communities of color.

And let’s not forget whites!

But again, there is no plan here for addressing what happens to people that never bring back books. Perhaps if the borrower is white, they should pay a fee, but people of color (not including Asians) should not pay library fees.

The article continues.

Embracing Equitable Policies and Reforms
Municipalities can identify and advance reforms to create more just and equitable library systems. Reforms may include eliminating late fees, prohibiting juvenile and children fines, capping the maximum charged from fines and fees and ending suspended library cards for unpaid fees.

Ok, now this quote is interesting. Why is “prohibiting juvenile and children fines” an issue for these authors? Hmmmmm….could it be that blacks and Hispanics, but more so blacks as they are so unruly, receive the majority of juvenile and children fines? Yes that seems quite likely.

The libraries need to restrict unruly behavior (most likely, these authors will call this Jim Crow), and they have settled on fines. So again, the adjustment is not for black children to behave better. It is to eliminate the penalties, which will further degrade the experience offered by libraries that have blacks in them. This is the same pattern as observed before — if “people of color” cannot follow the rules, then those rules need to be removed. And this is all in the name of “equity.”

The article continues.

As libraries nationwide go fine free, local leaders are scrutinizing other fine and fee structures that are unfairly penalizing residents. Cities such as San Francisco, Calif., and Chicago, Ill., are at the forefront of “right-sizing” penalties using “ability to pay” guidelines and applying best practices to abolish unnecessary and inequitable fees.

Further reforms are underway in cities like Saint Paul, Minn., which stopped charging fines for overdue books and other items in 2018. As the first city in the state of Minnesota to eliminate late fees, Saint Paul set the example for other city departments statewide which are now examining other fees, such as snow emergency towing and impound fees, for possible “quality of life” code violations.

This is ludicrous because library fines are so small already.

Conclusion

This article is utterly brainless race scamming. It is also incredibly dishonest and leaves out the implications of what removing library fines would do. All of these race scamming articles follow a similar pattern: using a series of false assumptions and leaving out critical information to make their case.

As “people of color” take over more and more areas of the US, they will enforce these types of unthinking ideas, which are a significant part of degrading these areas. That is, their ideas do not enhance the items they take over but undermine them.

Blacks and Hispanics have had ample opportunities to improve (actually forget improve and let’s go with maintain) areas they have taken over. Yet it has never occurred in the history of the US. Outside of the US, where blacks have taken over the management of countries like Zimbabwe and South Africa, and not only have they not improved those countries, but in a brief period, they have run those countries into the ground. And curiously, much of the race scamming articles on the internet read very much like the material published by the ANC in South Africa and by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Given their track record, it is not at all clear that they have some special knowledge that whites need to listen to. Really? On what basis?