What if Howard Roark was black?

[Peter]

RobinReborn wrote: Maybe one potential customer refuses Roark based on race and he figures out a way to get around discrimination and then speaks out against it in one of his monologues. end quote  

Excellent. Have you seen that commercial about college where “If I only had a brain, is sung?” very inspiring. It is indicative of nothing but today, 6/1, at 11:51 both contestants on The Price Is Right are black. How did that happen? Joke.  

If Howard A and Howard B were exactly the same except for race what would be different? If they had gone to the same schools, lived in the same environments, met the same people, and formed themselves in the same way, then what would be different their everyday interactions with others as they sought architectural clients.    

Howard B would charge less for his architectural plans . . . at least at first. Read the Walter Williams column which I placed at the bottom, not for any great point but just for fun. He would also work a second job until his resume added to his business, just like Howard A in The Fountainhead, but the jobs would be lesser paying. He would not act as arrogantly, and by necessity he would be less single minded. He would be more humble around white clients in the 1940’s, and 50’s. He would need to sound respectful.

One of my earliest traumatic memories was when I was three years old and I had my tonsils out in a Navy hospital in Norfolk, or Little Creek, Virginia in the 1950’s. My anesthesiologist was a black lady. I literally questioned her credentials when she explained to me how the procedure would proceed. I am sure I bothered her, and I might have hurt her feelings. When I awoke after the operation, and tried to speak, she immediately said, “It went well and you can thank this colored lady.”    

What if Howard B became a professional architectural star, with stature in society similar to Jesse Owens, Joe Lewis, Jackie Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, Sammy Davis Junior, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, Willy Mays, Hank Aaron, Ali, Aretha, Arthur Ashe, Fats Domino, and Berry White?

It seems the list is tilted towards athletes and entertainers but I also found Archibald Alexander: Iowa-born Alexander attended Iowa State University and earned a civil engineering degree in 1912. While working for an engineering firm, he designed the Tidal Basin Bridge in Washington, D.C. Later he formed his own company, designing Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, D.C. and an airfield in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other projects. And there were many others who were rarely as well known as their white counterparts.

For all the above reasons Howard B would not be the same as Howard Roark even if he had the same education, drive, skill set, and intelligence.

Peter

Elitist Arrogance by Walter E. Williams Posted: Jun 01, 2016 12:01 AM: White teenage unemployment is about 14 percent. That for black teenagers is about 30 percent. The labor force participation rate for white teens is 37 percent, and that for black teens is 25 percent. Many years ago, in 1948, the figures were exactly the opposite. The unemployment rate of black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent, while that of whites was 10.2 percent. Up until the late 1950s, black teens, as well as black adults, were more active in the labor market than their white counterparts. I will return to these facts after I point out some elitist arrogance and moral bankruptcy.

Supporters of a $15 minimum wage are now admitting that there will be job losses. "Why shouldn't we in fact accept job loss?" asks New School economics and urban policy professor David Howell, adding, "What's so bad about getting rid of crappy jobs, forcing employers to upgrade, and having a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed by that?" Economic Policy Institute economist David Cooper says: "It could be that they spend more time unemployed, but their income is higher overall. If you were to tell me I could work fewer hours and make as much or more than I could have previously, that would be OK."

What's a "crappy job"? My guess is that many of my friends and I held the jobs Howell is talking about as teenagers during the late 1940s and '50s. During summers, we arose early to board farm trucks to New Jersey to pick blueberries. I washed dishes and mopped floors at Philadelphia's Horn & Hardart restaurant, helped unload trucks at Campbell Soup, shoveled snow, swept out stores, delivered packages and did similar low-skill, low-wage jobs. If today's arrogant elite were around to destroy these jobs through wage legislation and regulation, I doubt whether I and many other black youths would have learned the habits of work that laid the foundation for future success. Today's elite have little taste for my stepfather's admonition: Any kind of a job is better than begging and stealing.

What's so tragic about all of this is that black leadership buys into it. What the liberals have in mind when they say there should be "a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed" is that people who are thrown out of work should be given welfare or some other handout to make them whole. This experimentation with minimum wages on the livelihoods of low-skilled workers is ethically atrocious.

In the first paragraph, I pointed out that black youths had lower unemployment during earlier times. How might that be explained? It would be sheer lunacy to attempt to explain the more favorable employment statistics by suggesting that during earlier periods, blacks faced less racial discrimination. Similarly, it would be lunacy to suggest that black youths had higher skills than white youths. What best explain the loss of teenage employment opportunities, particularly those of black teenagers, are increases in minimum wage laws. There's little dispute within the economics profession that higher minimum wages discriminate against the employment of the least skilled workers, and that demographic is disproportionately represented by black teenagers.

[Peter]

Here is an interesting letter (and take for this thread) from Ayn Rand’s confidante, Barbara Branden/

Peter

BBfromM@ Re: ATL: RE Godlike: (No subject) My own difficulty with John Galt is not that one COULD NOT be like him, in essence -- that is, a person of great accomplishment who embodies the Objectivist virtues, the apotheosis of the human potential -- but that in certain respects one SHOULD NOT be like him.  Galt, like Howard Roark and like Rearden, (Francisco is the exception to this) is a man who deals with people, even people whom he loves, in an almost totally cerebral way; one knows by other means that he is a man of great emotional passion, but one sees it only in his sexual encounter with Dagny. One understands deductively the passionate commitment that has driven him all the years of his strike, but one rarely hears it in his words.

I believe that the emotional repression of Ayn Rand's heroic male characters is one of the reasons that so many of her admirers came to see repression almost as a virtue and not to fight it in themselves.

Ayn Rand further buttressed this error in her male characters by having her people make remarks to the effect that they would never allow a woman they love to see them in pain. This was Rand's own philosophy; she told me that when she first had met Frank O'Connor, she did not tell him of all the miserable and mindless jobs she had to work at -- because she never wanted to face him in pain. It seemed she felt that to show her suffering to the man she loved would be the equivalent of demanding his help, even his pity. Why she believed that, I do not know. And perhaps it was all the hidden and repressed pain in her life that caused her, in later years, to talk about little except her suffering.
Barbara

[Brant Gaede]

On 6/1/2016 at 9:10 AM, Peter said:

Here is an interesting letter (and take for this thread) from Ayn Rand’s confidante, Barbara Branden/

Peter

BBfromM@ Re: ATL: RE Godlike: (No subject) My own difficulty with John Galt is not that one COULD NOT be like him, in essence -- that is, a person of great accomplishment who embodies the Objectivist virtues, the apotheosis of the human potential -- but that in certain respects one SHOULD NOT be like him.  Galt, like Howard Roark and like Rearden, (Francisco is the exception to this) is a man who deals with people, even people whom he loves, in an almost totally cerebral way; one knows by other means that he is a man of great emotional passion, but one sees it only in his sexual encounter with Dagny. One understands deductively the passionate commitment that has driven him all the years of his strike, but one rarely hears it in his words.

I believe that the emotional repression of Ayn Rand's heroic male characters is one of the reasons that so many of her admirers came to see repression almost as a virtue and not to fight it in themselves.

Ayn Rand further buttressed this error in her male characters by having her people make remarks to the effect that they would never allow a woman they love to see them in pain. This was Rand's own philosophy; she told me that when she first had met Frank O'Connor, she did not tell him of all the miserable and mindless jobs she had to work at -- because she never wanted to face him in pain. It seemed she felt that to show her suffering to the man she loved would be the equivalent of demanding his help, even his pity. Why she believed that, I do not know. And perhaps it was all the hidden and repressed pain in her life that caused her, in later years, to talk about little except her suffering.
Barbara

 

[Peter]

Barbara Branden was an excellent objectivist. I want a lover to be someone I can talk to about 99 percent of the time. The remaining one percent consists of dumb or unworthy thoughts, but nothing that is a repressed, strong, impulse. Some things are best kept on a bucket list you may never fulfill. I want to be free to express emotion as it bubbles up and not go on rants from repression. I have always enjoyed working and making money, but I never moved more than 20 miles to get a better job. I enjoyed retiring at a young age to spend more time with family and traveling, and it was great having a partner, Barbara, who is also retired. I agree with BB. I could not have been myself if I had striven to be an Ayn Rand hero.

Peter   

[BaalChatzaf]

14 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

 

If I read Barbara correctly,  Rand had a very stoic and masculine notion.   Stiff upper lip and all that....

[S_Adams]

If Howard Roark was black...he would have had darker skin than if he was white. 

I recommend to all the JACK JOHNSON documentary. Any man of ability can and will succeed. Would it have been harder or easier for Roark as a black man? The question itself presupposes a number of false premises that go to the heart of why Liberalism and in fact racism is winning the intellectual war against reason.

[anthony]

Yup. Well said.

[Marcus]

Interesting article about a real problem:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-black-entrepreneurs-downplay-ownership-bsi-20160414-story.html

If Howard Roark was black would he have to use covert tactics like the people in this article (in the year 2016 btw) to build his customer base or would he languish in obscurity and poverty?

I'd be interested in the responses to that question. And they don't have to be predictable responses.

[Peter]

Marcus wrote: If Howard Roark was black would he have to use covert tactics like the people in this article (in the year 2016 btw) to build his customer base or would he languish in obscurity and poverty? end quote

The assumption is that many people view some people in a bad light. Must the reason be prejudice, or prejudging . . . or does the perception reflect reality? After all there is Black Entertainment Television which many people watch though it is characterized on racial grounds and there is Popeye’s Chicken, Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Jemimah’s Pancake flour which have black people as spokesperson’s or logos.    

But there is also a current commercial where a woman (who is white) is daydreaming about buying a car while a black choir is singing all around her and at one point she is in that car, as the choir gets right up to her window. That is apparently just peachy because she buys the car.

Does that reflect the reality of a group of large black faces pressing against anyone’s windshield? Bull shit. Without the singing and artificiality of the commercial that situation would generate a desire to get the hell away from a mob of thugs. I think even a black person would get the hell out of there, running over a few of the mob if necessary.

So, if someone is buying something, it is intelligent for the seller to be perceived as good. Blacks are generally viewed as less intelligent, more violent, and more likely, in business or their profession, to be sexual predators. So, show a white dude as the owner, Denzel and Morgan Freeman excepted.

Peter     

[Marcus]

I don't really respond to clowns who think singing groups of black people in a car commercial can be characterized as "thugs". You are part of the problem this thread addresses but are just too dumb to see it. Go away and stop responding.

[KorbenDallas]

16 hours ago, Marcus said:

Interesting article about a real problem:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-black-entrepreneurs-downplay-ownership-bsi-20160414-story.html

If Howard Roark was black would he have to use covert tactics like the people in this article (in the year 2016 btw) to build his customer base or would he languish in obscurity and poverty?

I'd be interested in the responses to that question. And they don't have to be predictable responses.

Marcus, I'm in the middle of rereading The Fountainhead and I think it would be impossible for Roark to have succeeded in the time period it was written in.  If it were set after the Civil Rights Movement, say in the 1970s, I think it would have been possible for him but not likely.  If it were set in 2016 he could do it much easier, he would just need to make sure he's in the right region of the US to do it.  That's using Reason to get it done, recognizing that racism exists and placing himself in an environment where he could succeed.  In fact, that's similar to what Roark did in the book's original setting (without racism, but finding a place where he could succeed).

The book would have a different theme with a black Roark if set in its original time period or sometime in the 1970s, it wouldn't be individualism vs. collectivism or first handing vs. second handing.  In a modern day setting, I think changing the main character's ethnicity to black would be a significant enough of a change that it would throw the theme of the book off as well.  It's just too much of a change and would effect theme.

[Peter]

I should go away and stop responding, Marcus??? You started a thread  about racial characteristics but you are prejudiced against a scientific, objective analysis. And would you be back here in the land of reason, reopening the dialogue, if everybody was cooing, “Oooh, puppies!?”

“Rochester!!!” Jack Benny yelled. Well, I will let you respond . . . or not . . . and I will continue to be truthful, and not PC, unless I get bored. Now that I mentioned that Honda commercial I looked at it again. Try watching it with the sound down so that the catchy, singing, ear worm is not heard. It reminds me of a bunch of Zombies trying to get at the zombie – virus - bug - free woman in the car. It is like a nightmare, with or without the sound turned off. Seriously, on a subconscious level, the images will adversely affect sales of Hondas. Run Forrest, run!

It has been well chronicled (just google the topic) that there is a social justice warrior campaign to insert actors in commercials for racial reasons. There is a campaign to show interracial couples. People who might compose 12 percent of the population (blacks) are in 50 percent of the commercials. That is not a ridiculous conspiracy theory. It is a fact. It is racism. The commercial's creators are racists with an agenda. Well, I won’t be paying any reparations or buying products that offend me because those commercials are Progressive propaganda and not because I am prejudiced against anybody for racial reasons.    

To reiterate the truth. People will always group and appraise others based on experience and learning. 3 year olds do it. Is that person known to me? If not, what do they look like? Do they look dangerous? Stupid? Are they a threat? Should I watch my back? Will I get sucker punched? Our local news might have 7 stories about crimes, and many of them are violent. 6 of the crimes always involve blacks. Even Jesse Jackson admitted that black youths walking behind him on a dark city street would scare the crap out of him. White youths, he would notice but he would not be as worried.

Recently there were riots on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Blacks again. Decent people were leaving the boardwalk and walking in the sand to avoid typical black behavior. Is that racist or simply common sense? I remember whites being just as bad during the Vietnam War, (and battle about the draft) and at spring (party) breaks, but those are special circumstances. Obama has changed general culture for the better in many ways but he has changed black culture for the worse.

I hire people regardless of their race. A few black people are “friends of the family.” But if I do not know the people walking near me I am five times more wary of blacks. As I think I said earlier in this thread, evolutionary Biologists and Psychologists beat around the bush, but security personnel and scientists DO agree with racial profiling. Ask any cop on any beat. Blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes as an ethnic group in America. Arabs commit more hijackings. Fat men need less scrutiny at an airport. South Africa is “the rape capital of the world.” Arab emigres groped 20 thousand women in Germany on New Year’s Eve. Is there a racist factor in these observations? I think not.

Peter 

[Marcus]

A few questions Peter (I'll humor you just this one time for my own personal amusement, then back under a rock you go). The truth is, you have no clue what constitutes "science" or even the beginnings of a logical argument. It's just your biases applied to a surface level grasp of cherry-picked facts. This myopic mentality is typical of racists. Indeed it almost defines them. You are part of the problem this thread addresses. A kind of live case study. 

In what alternate universe is showing interracial couples constituting "racism"? They show one or two commercials with a white and black person and suddenly its a campaign to promote "race-mixing" right? 

Second, has there been an actual study showing that blacks make up 50% of all commercials or do you pull these numbers out of your scientific ass?

What percentage of commercials have "same race" couples? I'd be willing to bet it is over 90%. Prove me wrong.

South Africa the rape capital of the world? And you believe this, because it is black yes?

Logically, all African and majority black countries should all be rape capitals? Why are they not?

These are all important questions to answer so I can make sense of your babble. Doing so will also shed light on the racist mind for all to see and study, so answer them as carefully and thoughtfully as you are capable. Purposely evading or dodging any of them would constitute admission of wrong.

[BaalChatzaf]

10 hours ago, Marcus said:

 

What percentage of commercials have "same race" couples? I'd be willing to bet it is over 90%. Prove me wrong.

This is an invalid form of rehtorical argumentation.  The burden of proof is upon the party who asserted the proposition.  If you say you would be willing to bet on something  then  we should take you at your word.   You raised the question: "What percentage of commercials have 'same race' couples?".  That is a question and it can neither be proved or disproved.  Only declarative meaningful propositions are either true or false.  Questions are neither true nor false. 

[Marcus]

43 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

This is an invalid form of rehtorical argumentation.  The burden of proof is upon the party who asserted the proposition.  If you say you would be willing to bet on something  then  we should take you at your word.   You raised the question: "What percentage of commercials have 'same race' couples?".  That is a question and it can neither be proved or disproved.  Only declarative meaningful propositions are either true or false.  Questions are neither true nor false. 

The burden of proof is on he who made the initial claim. That is, a vast "conspiracy" to promote interracial couples in the media. Thus, you are wrong. Extraordinary claims as such, require extraordinary evidence.

Now, allow the fool to make his answers.

[Peter]

I am finally seeing some Indians or Asians in commercials now. How many adopted Asian kids have you noticed? Cheerios nearly always features black kids or adults nowadays. Trends are indicative of some *thing* but what if the trend has a propaganda or brainwashing reason for being?

But I don’t dwell on conspiracy theories Marcus. You are the racist. You started a racist thread apparently wanting validation. So your original hypothesis is to prove racism. Your desire to be black on a colorblind, typed page of the internet, IS racist.  

I am quite willing to pull a switch on you and say, I do agree that in the past, minorities were under represented in TV commercials. (I googled the notion and found a few quotes at the bottom.) And that was possibly racism and perhaps a marketing decision to bring in more sales by showing nearly zero blacks, in a more exclusive 1940 and 1950’s America. One of the quotes from below is from 1996, if I remember. What has changed since the 1990's? Why did it change? 

Now minorities are over represented. Is 12 or 13 percent of the population genetically African? Yet every ‘buddies hanging out’ commercial has at least one black cast member. Is the reason for marketing, or racist reasons? Or is it simply for reasons of a Progressive, Communist agenda without the Marxist philosophical foundation? I don’t watch British TV other than BBC America for a few shows like Star Trek TNG but I heard on the not always credible internet that nearly 100 percent of British commercials feature a black person. And Australian TV has hardly any blacks. I wonder how many whites are featured in African TV?

What would happen if a white guy or gal won the best rap song award at the Grammies? You know what happened, Marcus. What if Black Entertainment Television “BET” had white and blond models advertising products? Would there be black boycotts, hatred spewed, and riots? There is an Ebony magazine. What if there was a White Television Network, or an Aryan Times Magazine?     

Peter

Does this poll from Gallup demonstrate propaganda working?

QUOTE, Gallup, 2001. ...recent polling suggests the public thinks the nation is more
diverse than it actually is. Americans generally overestimate, to a significant degree, the percentage of the U.S. population that is either black or Hispanic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 12.3% of the U.S. population is black, and 12.5% is Hispanic. Gallup Poll
results from March 26-28, however, show that slightly less than one in 10 Americans can accurately identify that the population of either blacks or Hispanics in this country falls between 10% and 14%. The typical American estimates the percentages of blacks and Hispanics in this country to be more than twice as high as they actually are.

On average, Americans say that 33% of the U.S. population is black. In fact, a majority of Americans (56%) estimate that the percentage of blacks in this country stands at 30% or higher. As many as 17% of Americans say the percentage of blacks is 50% or greater. Only 7% accurately state that the percentage of blacks falls between 10% and 14% of the entire population. end quote

Going back a bit further, we see the possibility of white preference. The Entman-Rojecki Index of Race and the Media by Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki authors of “The Black Image in the White Mind.”

1. While Black actors are now more numerous in film, it's an open question as to how well they're being represented. In the top movies of 1996: Black female movie characters shown using vulgar profanity: 89%. White female movie characters shown using vulgar profanity: 17%. Black female movie characters shown being physically violent: 56%. White female movie characters shown being physically violent: 11%. Black female movie characters shown being restrained: 55%. White female movie characters shown being restrained: 6%.

2. Television ads now show many Blacks and eschew stereotypes. However, hidden patterns of differentiation and distance emerge on close analysis. Not surprisingly, for instance, Blacks do not touch Whites in the ads, but (unlike Whites) they rarely even touch each other, conveying a subtle message of Black skin as taboo. A hierarchy of racial preference is embedded within the casting of commercials. Consider these figures from a large prime time sample:

Of the 105 commercials for autos or trucks that showed only one race, the percentage all-White: 100%. Of the 74 commercials for perfumes that showed only one race, the percentage all-White: 98%. Of the 47 commercials for jewelry or cosmetics that showed only one race, the percentage all-White: 100%.

3. Over 70% of Black characters in the most highly rated TV entertainment shows have professional or management positions. However well-intentioned, this utopian reversal imposes a formal distance between Black and White actors, hobbling the audience's sympathetic imagination. Blacks' supervisory roles isolate their characters from close peer relationships. Among these actors, 92% of interactions with Whites are restricted to job-related tasks.
 
4. Network news tends to "ghettoize" Blacks. Increasingly, African Americans appear mostly in crime, sports and entertainment stories. Rarely are Blacks shown making an important contribution to the serious business of the nation. Sampling network news shows: Number of soundbites on foreign affairs uttered by Whites: 99; by Blacks: 1. Number of soundbites on economics uttered by Whites: 86; by Blacks: 1. Number of soundbites on electoral politics uttered by Whites: 79; by Blacks: 0. Number of soundbites on sports and entertainment uttered by Whites: 35; by Blacks: 11. Number of soundbites on crime uttered by Whites: 149; by Blacks: 24.

5. Black defendants are simply treated differently on local TV news from their White counterparts: Times more likely that a mug shot of the accused will appear in a local TV news report when the defendant is Black rather than White: 4. Times more likely that the accused will be shown physically restrained in a local TV news report when the defendant is Black rather than White: 2. Times less likely that the name of the accused will be shown on screen in a local TV news report when the defendant is Black rather than White: 2

6. "Telegenic" figures aren't always the most representative leaders. Some statistics from 1994: Black adults stating that Jesse Jackson represents Black people "very well": 40%. Black adults stating that Louis Farrakhan represents Black people "very well": 11%. Black adults stating they had "never heard of" Jesse Jackson: 0%. Black adults stating they had "never heard of" Louis Farrakhan: 22%. Stories about, or soundbites from, Jesse Jackson on ABC World News: 13. Stories about, or soundbites from, Louis Farrakhan on ABC World News: 25.

7.The media sowed discord during the affirmative action debate of the 1990s despite the considerable common ground between Blacks and Whites. Reporters often predicted affirmative action would be one of the key issues in the 1996 election because of the "rage" among Whites. Percentage of survey respondents naming affirmative action as their top priority in voting against a presidential candidate, 1996: 1%. Percentage of White men ("angry" or not) surveyed who favored affirmative action programs as is or with reforms: 61%. Percentage of White women surveyed who favored affirmative action programs as is or with reforms: 76%. Percentage of White "persons on the street" supporting affirmative action in a sample of network news: 12.5%. Percentage opposing: 87.5%. end quotes