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Nixon Goes to China

Under the title "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," Senator James Webb (D., Va.) says what no mainstream Republican politician would ever dare to say:

"Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

"I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

"In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived...

"Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

"Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

"The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

"The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that 'fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery...'

"In 1938...[o]f the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white)...

"Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

"Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

"Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

"Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white..."

Wow.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't quote so much while commenting so little - but, hey? what could I possibly add?

Needless to say, the PC brigades are out to get him.

Comments (28)

If Webb were pro-life, he'd be my kind of Democrat.

From NRO

I’m being charitable because surely the Democratic senator from Virginia didn’t mean to sound as bigoted as the article makes him seem. . . . Somebody, perhaps one of his congressional colleagues, needs to tell Sen.Webb to get his head out of the last, sad epoch of covert racist talk and join the rest of America in the 21st century."

There is no debating with such people. Whatever intelligence they may possess is completely negated by their ideology. Conflict is inevitable and unavoidable.

If Webb were pro-life, he'd be my kind of Democrat.

It scares the hell out of me to think that Kaine may replace him.

surely the Democratic senator from Virginia didn’t mean to sound as bigoted as the article makes him seem.

If you call for justice, you're a bigot. Modern liberalism in a nutshell.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government

That is why the "diversity" rationale has become so critically important in the defense and expansion of affirmative action.

As a side note, if he's being truly Nixonian, there must be some strategic political benefit to saying this. Is he shoring up his center-right flank? Or is he perhaps planning to retire sooner rather than later?

Diversity is when everyone thinks alike but looks different.

Liberty is when everyone is allowed to think differently regardless of whether or not they look alike.

Diversity as an end is no less unjust than unanimity as an end. Both are the enemies of liberty, since they require a cosmetic goal that liberty by its nature cannot require.

Thus, diversity is the enemy of liberty.

If I recall, Jim Webb made similar points about the plight of whites in the south in his book Born Fighting:How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. It was a good book and I learned things about the negative consequences of slavery on poor whites the effects of which continue today. If I recall, he is very sympathetic to southern whites and is annoyed at how they are perceived by the media and looked down upon by the elites. He made the point that southern whites, Scots-Irish, have fought and died for this country in greater numbers than any other group of people.

Webb writes: "government-directed diversity programs should end... Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible"


I suspect it's not possible to end diversity programs so long as non-discrimination laws and "the need for inclusiveness" can't be restrained.

Still, Webb did take a risk writing this. To my mind, his essay (and the artificial shock at NRO) is evidence that Democrats are more capable of challenging political correctness than Republicans. Democrats are protected by party spirit, favor-trading, and a presumption of good faith. If reform is possible, it must be bipartisan, so I think the country would be better off if more Democrats were like Webb, even if they can't be pro-life.

At the same time, this essay is a way for Webb to show voters he is "independent" and shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value.

The flailing George Allen campaign made a campaign issue out of Webb's opposition to women's integration into the armed services in the 1980s. This came back to bite the GOP when Bob McDonnell had to renounce his criticism of feminist issues.

Webb's Born Fighting does have many virtues, such as a consciousness of history and loyalty to "his own." I don't think any Republican Senator could have written that book, since they must pretend to be blind to ethnicity.

Of course, Webb argues that "ethnicity blindness" and self-identification as "just plain American" are also particular features of the Scots-Irish. So it may just be that Webb is more self-aware than most.

Whoops, should have read the NRO link before posting. Ponnuru was quoting the Center for American Progress in a post titled "Leftists in a Lather about Webb." I had feared NRO was playing the PC schoolmarm, and I'm glad to see I was wrong.

It was not very many years ago that I saw a document saying that African immigrants—just off the boat—actually took up a huge chunk of the Black quota in Ivy League universities.

Because no good quote should go unrepeated:

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, researchers found more than 40 percent of the Black student population at Ivy League colleges are of immigrant origin, despite comprising just 13 percent of the Black population overall. … “For affirmative action values, it’s problematic,” she says. “It is more severe in selective schools, where immigrants are more privileged in terms of admissions. [But if] diversity is what most matters, then this is interesting… but not any cause for alarm.”
Mwehehehehehe. I did not want to use Wikipedia, so I used this page.

I suspect it's not possible to end diversity programs so long as non-discrimination laws and "the need for inclusiveness" can't be restrained.

I want to speak up here in favor--as a practical matter--of something I once was dubious about in this area: Ward Connerly's Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which did pass.

Now, I want to be honest: The text of such laws just sounds like plain or garden variety anti-discrimination laws, which I think have overall had more bad effects than good. But the legislative context and history and the fact that the question on the ballot specifically referred to outlawing affirmative action programs that discriminate on the basis of race or gender have made a big difference in terms of consequences. Now, in Michigan, if you want to resist affirmative action, you have a legal text you can quote to your superiors and colleagues. That is certainly helpful.

One of the drawbacks of linking to the Corner is that it is a dead end. Would it not be fairer to link directly to the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Wonk Room and let folks read the whole thing instead of forcing inquiring minds to go through extra steps? Webb's article will probably get more play around the Innertubes next week but The Atlantic Wire has a few early links.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/When-Is-Affirmative-Action-Unfair-4446/

As I pointed out in Steve's last post, this is a class issue and those assuming that folks on the left will fall into line on a pc/diversity basis will be disappointed (unless, of course, they only read blogs on the right writing about blogs on the left instead of going to original sources).

We should bear in mind that if unemployment was south of 5% we wouldn't be having this discussion. Hence focusing on Affirmative Action when aggregate demand has collapsed is a waste of time.

A stimulus of adequate size that dealt with infrastructure and the shortfalls in state budgets would be a good start.

That being said, Webb does point out a real problem, one that goes well beyond AA. If the groups Webb discusses were relatively disadvantaged during slavery and Jim Crow then it follows that their present situation has nothing to do with AA.

As Joyner points out,

"Moreover, aside from marginal slots at elite universities, does anyone seriously think whites are being singled out for discrimination by society at large? Webb doesn’t. However, he correctly points out that “Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith..."

"While I don’t disagree with the premise, I’m not sure what policy conclusion one reaches. I fully agree and have long argued that using race as the sole criterion for policy preference should end. But, surely, we don’t want to create new categories, such as “Scotch-Irish Sons of Confederate Veterans,” for special treatment. We could target based on poverty, perhaps with some sort of regional cost of living adjustments."

"I like the concept of “enabling opportunity for all.” But what does that mean in practice? Do we Federalize education? Under our current system, which is typically funded by local property taxes, children in poor communities are trapped in poorly funded schools. That’s doubly true if surrounding communities are also poor. And this gets compounded by the fact that poor families are more likely to be single-parent families with households headed by poorly educated, young people too tired to give their kids’ education much attention and poorly equipped to do much good, anyway. How do we break this cycle through the government?"

The gut reaction expressed in the CAP release is likely due to the strangely passive parts of Webb's article like,

"The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that 'fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery.'"

"The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike."

And,

"Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years,"

Whatever the generational problems afflicting our "white Baptists" they didn't include slavery and a century of state sponsored oppression and terrorism.

Webb divides the old south into three classes. He fails to mention that his "hard-put whites", for the most part, sided with the white elites in supporting the slavery, treason and oppression that devastated the South for so long.

Due to some evolutionary quirk we humans are too often seduced by false values and blind loyalties. Had those "hard-put whites" realized their true interests lay in solidarity with the blacks instead of the white elites and had both banded together and simply eliminated those elites (or at least their power), there would be no need for this discussion.

Those "hard-put whites" voted their "values" and were loyal to race over class instead of their true interests and got royally screwed. Of course now, reflecting on the bitter fruits of that strategy, they have learned to pursue their economic interests and not be distracted by the shiny, shiny "values" hucksters... Oh.

Tell you what, Al. How about we get real, real concrete. Would you, personally, support the elimination of all set-asides in government contracting for minority-owned businesses? How about minority only scholarships to colleges and graduate schools?

As I believe that there might be an advantage to using class over race, I'll say maybe. For me this is situational; I would have to see the actual proposals and, like issues related to voting, may well depend in part on prior history.

As far as I'm concerned folks should have a broad right to distinctions on privately funded scholarships. As our upward mobility has fallen of late, I would be inclined to favor using class on publicly funded scholarships.

Your use of "all" likely indicates that this is more of an ideological issue for you than it is for me.

On another note, I am puzzled by the use of "wasp". I always took this to refer to Ivy League elite types, not poor southern whites.

Lydia writes:

"But the legislative context and history and the fact that the question on the ballot specifically referred to outlawing affirmative action programs that discriminate on the basis of race or gender have made a big difference in terms of consequences. Now, in Michigan, if you want to resist affirmative action, you have a legal text you can quote to your superiors and colleagues. That is certainly helpful."

Quite possibly this is a first step. But I see anti-discrimination policies and laws as separable from affirmative action concerns. Charges of "hostile work environment" and "inadequate diversity" sometimes use AA standards, but sometimes they don't. Burdensome forms of lawsuit-proofing, like sensitivity training and diversity offices, don't arise solely from AA.

I think I agree regarding sensitivity training and hostile work environment. Diversity offices and charges of "inadequate diversity"--well, actually, I think the "office of institutional equity" at our local university has become pretty much a fifth wheel, at least to the extent that the hiring entities like departments are knowledgeable and follow the MCRI. They have to send race and gender info. to that office when they are hiring, but there's no teeth to it. If the department is willing to stand up and point out that what is being suggested is illegal under Michigan law, the administration cannot make them make a first offer to the minority or to the woman on the grounds that they have "inadequate diversity."

Under our current system, which is typically funded by local property taxes, children in poor communities are trapped in poorly funded schools. That’s doubly true if surrounding communities are also poor. And this gets compounded by the fact that poor families are more likely to be single-parent families with households headed by poorly educated, young people too tired to give their kids’ education much attention and poorly equipped to do much good, anyway. How do we break this cycle through the government?"

There seems to be this axiom that more money = better students. Rubbish. Middle class/rich students take algebra with expensive graphing calculators and yet I and my cohorts would, in most cases, mop up the floor with them in a test of algebra and even simple math skills. The reason: we were responsible for the material, not merely responsible to the material. We had pencil and paper and we had to use imagination and ingenuity to visualize or draw graphs and do calculations. We had muscle memory. Today's rich students have the calculator do the work for them. People cheat so much, today because they have money and can afford to be lazy and because they don't know how to formulate and defend original thoughts.

Give me a class of poor but excited students and let me pit them against rich but bored students one year later. We see this all of the time in science education. It take commitment to be either a scientist or a performer, which is why so few people are going into either field. Really, how much original thought within a rigid, unforgiving system of truth do business people have to have? What many (most) students are fleeing from, today, is rigor. The rich just have better toys to substitute for their own personal involvement.

Sad to say, we do not live in a contemplative environment. If the answer doesn't come in thirty seconds, at most, most people will give up. You see this in web pages. People are just not willing to wait more than about ten seconds for their web pages to load. Back in the day when we had Textronix graphic computers, one could wait minutes for something to happen.

The reason I can do math so fast in my head (I routinely beat my students in calculating three to four digit numbers while standing at the board) is because numbers mean something more to me than just a button on a calculator. Students have a growing inability to relate to anything outside of themselves. Empathy scores are 40% lower than ten years ago (blame that, in part, on the shallowness of their relationships). Throwing more money at the situation is not going to make then relate to things outside of themselves any better. It will just increase their appetites.

What poor people lack, in the end, is a commitment, any commitment to them from the society in which they live. Monks are poor, but they managed to educate with meager resources and produce brilliant thinkers. If the parents aren't at home, then it falls to the elders and retired of the community to pick up the slack. If young people are brought into the company of the old ones at an early age, they will begin to absorb their practical experience. We discard the old so easily, today, instead of making the young pass muster with them. We have, in the deterioration of youth, today, a situation of the young learning from the young (or even younger). What do the youth know of sin and its consequences? What do the youth of today know of regret? If they will not learn from the old, they will kill them, sooner or later, since the young do not want to be reminded that they did not create nor sustain the universe.

No, there are more than enough ways to teach without money. That we have such poor results is because of a lack of imagination and a failure of nerve. Math classes, even through graduate school, rely on nothing more than a little calcium carbonate, slate, and an eraser. No one would even think to use a glitzy Powerpoint presentation. In music, no one can play the instrument for you. In any performance curriculum, the beginner always looks to the past and learns from it before he looks to the future (even Mozart had to have a father). Nowadays, most students have no use for the past and so they watch their foundations crumble as soon as life forces them to stand up.

In the end, correcting some of the injustices in society can be done either locally or globally, either by individuals or the government, but nothing can be done, no cure can be administered, until you capture the imagination of the patient. There were some telling quotes from the old black and white Outer Limits episode from a man who was, supposedly, accelerated into a man of the future (the episode was called, The Sixth Finger, for those who want to track it down). Even back in 1963 they saw what was ahead. After studying the mathematics of piano-playing and sitting down to play a Bach harpsichord work (on piano), the man of the future intones:

Amazing, isn't it, the things that endure the ravages of time and taste? This simple prelude, for instance. Bach will quite probably outlive us all... Man produces little that is lasting--truly lasting. It's understandable. Fear, conformity, immorality; these are heavy burdens. Great drainers of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy we do not create. We procreate; we do not create.

What are children doing, today, but procreating (and killing the product, afterwards). I just saw a new dating strategy mentioned in the news: see a guy/girl, give them a card. Nothing permanent, you understand. Must satisfy those impulses. Creativity thrives on restraint, on restrictions. The original Star Trek would never have captured our imagination if they could have used real electronics for their medical sensors instead of salt shakers. Poor student/people don't understand the real creativity that can be called forth within poverty. Rich people don't care, either. They can buy the creative.

Sorry to go on at such length. I once had lunch with a Nobel prize winner and he was discussing the son of one of his friends. He said he had written a letter in support of the son's admission to an elite college and that he didn't get in. The Nobel laureate said, "Well, he can apply to a lesser school. He can still learn the material, there." Learning the material, that what its about. Harvard has no superiority in writing on a blackboard, at least for undergraduates. Pretty much, calculus is calculus at Harvard or at Urban U. Its what one does with it, the imagination one brings to it, that determines if one has the right to make a next step into the future. The future does not belong to the rich or the poor, but to the imaginative.

This post is only tangential to the topic at hand, but I will end with a final quote from, The Sixth Finger:

"The human race has a gift, Professor, a gift that sets it above all the other creatures that abound upon this planet: the gift of thought, of reasoning, of understanding. The highly-developed brain. But the human race has ceased to develop. It struggles for petty comfort and false security; there is no time for thought. Soon there will be no time for reasoning, and Man will lose sight of the truth!"

The Chicken

P. S. Heat-induced brown-outs. Yea!

MC: Hurrah!

I learned math with a chalk-board, from a book written 2300 years ago (Euclid), and 400 years ago (Descartes), and 300 years ago (Newton). I have taught math in colleges and universities as well. Within the last several years, the universities have asked the teachers to supplement with graphing calculator sessions, but I have yet to see a teacher do it on more than a cursory level, and usually not at all. The problem is, you can spend class-time teaching the mechanics of the graphing calculator as a tool, or you can spend time teaching calculus concepts and theory. The teachers don't give a darn about calculator mechanics.

I remember, about 10 or so years ago, it came out that the District of Columbia taught their thousands of students at a cost of $9,000 per student, with generally poor results (measured broadly, of course: there were always some excellent students). Poor graduation rates, poor SATs, poor continuation to college. At the same time, the Washington Diocese catholic schools, teaching a similarly large # of kids in the thousands, from exactly the same neighborhoods and from exactly the same types of families, expended some $3,000 per student, and had vastly better results: high graduation rates, respectable SATs, moderately good college entrance rates. Did I mention that the DC schools had over 500 in the central administration, where the diocese had 54 central administrators.

MONEY IS NOT THE ANSWER.

Back to the main topic: Can someone pleeeease explain to me what you mean by "class" in this discussion? Please don't tell me income, 'cause I am quite sure that you don't mean that. Income is not a true class-divider in the US, not alone, that is. : there are poor-ish whites and blacks (at this point) who fit in at Harvard because they either were raised with, or learned to put on the right exterior. But when it is income-plus-this or that cultural feature that is said to determine class, you simply cannot speak about it with reliable statistics. In addition to which, as soon as you define class in today's terms of income-plus-cultural features, you identify a class that any individual person can walk away from simply by rejecting the culture and embracing another culture instead. And any class so defined cannot be a sound basis for good AA choices, because then the AA awards are based on individual selection to remain in the "deserving victim" group.

al, you seem to be a smart enough guy, but you & Joyner just totally miss the boat here. Joyner wonders "what policy conclusion one reaches." But Webb is perfectly clear on this point:

"Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs...hav[e] expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

"...many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived...

"Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

"...Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

"Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end. [emphasis added]"

Could he be any clearer?

He wants "affirmative action" confined to it's original purpose - i.e., compensation for the African-American victims of slavery & Jim Crow and their descendants. It should not apply to, e.g., newly arrived Latino immigrants, simply because they underperform whites, on average, on various socio-economic measures.

This is not a class issue. That's just your ideology talking.

Read slower. Think harder.

Perseus writes:

"Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government.

"That is why the 'diversity' rationale has become so critically important in the defense and expansion of affirmative action."

Precisely so. And the more salient the "diversity" rationale for affirmative action becomes, the more salient group differences among "whites" will become. Arkansas red-necks may find it more and more politically pressing to distinguish themselves from, say, Boston Episcopalians, or Brooklyn Jews.

Well, ain't that lovely.

Masked Chicken, have you ever considered getting a blog? I would read it.

Class probably does not correlate completely with income, depending on your definition of class. But income is rather closely correlated with opportunity.

To the extent some form of affirmative action is maintained, it should correlate with income level, and the "plus" factor being based upon individual performance - thus, income level being equal for Aff Act candidate A and B, whichever performed better gets the nod. Race should simply not be a factor.

c matt, I would probably agree with you. But what you have described is the situation with general non-affirmative-action need based scholarships. If you have performed well enough to get into the college, your need-based scholarship is determined on income need. If you haven't performed well enough to be accepted, then you don't get any scholarship money. That isn't affirmative action at all, of course.

It may not be AA, except that I would allow the income based determination to factor into the admission process itself, not just financial aid, on the basis that the less financially fortuntate may not have had the same pre-college educational opportunity (coupled with programs to help them get up to speed). In that sense, it would be different from typical need based scholarships.

They already do that: there are numerous remedial programs (at state schools, anyway) for those who can't get into the stiffer schools. Anyone who can convince an admissions office that they are, now, mature enough to try real hard can get in somewhere. Just not at Harvard.

on the basis that the less financially fortuntate may not have had the same pre-college educational opportunity (coupled with programs to help them get up to speed).

While this may be true, the real fault lies at the secondary level. Colleges should not be in the business of making up for the problems of education that came before them. In fact, if they started denying people, wholesale, who were not prepared for college, I'll bet you that even the less financially endowed communities would start bending over, backwards, to correct the problem. There are exceptional cases, granted, but lack of money is rarely the reason that people are not prepared for college.

No child left behind? Bah. Every child should be left behind until he is ready to advance. There should be no shame attached to this, however. Modern society is a slave to avoiding shame and sees the shame of the unprepared child of K - 12 education as being intolerable. Instead of removing the shame, they cover it over and let the colleges try to either remove it or keep disguising it. Until society sees that being unprepared is not shameful, in itself, since different people learn at different rates, but that being allowed to advance an unprepared student is shameful, this whole rot of discrimination based on who didn't have money growing up will continue.

I really wish that we could have something like an army of Dads (I mean real Dads) to come in and clean up the mess in most schools. All it takes is dedication to not putting up with the garbage that passes for k - 12 education, today. Primarily, it was lawyers and psychologists who got us into this mess. It may take common sense (if we can still find any) to get us out of it.

The Chicken

Except for rare occasions, lawyers don't bring lawsuits, clients do.

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