Racism by the Numbers

The trouble with racism today is mostly in the averages. Specific instances add up over a population but are not evidence in and of themselves. Back in the day I took the Chinese view living day-to-day: expect the worst and hope for the best. Take the cops. I’ve had cops let me go when technically driving recklessly and I’ve had them follow for me for driving while black. I’ve had them give me a break on a speeding ticket because I was clearly distraught over a breakup and I’ve had them disrespect me and my wife in the street just to be a$$holes with power. These instance prove little unless you can see how they fit into the larger picture. 

Conservative racism deniers hate looking at the larger picture because a) it bucks their narrative and b) they refuse to take personal responsibility for the world they live in. (Ironic coming from the personal responsibility crowd.) They focus on instances saying they prove nothing. True. Halfway. Half truths are whole lies. That’s the game you have to play in when pushing for racial justice. Which is why I point to polls and studies. Evidence of the larger picture, reproduced PATTERNS, that put these instances in context. I’m a numbers guy by nature so this keeps me confident and grounded in reality.

So I get versed on the numbers. Understand the studies. Don’t get into shouting matches with falsely equivalent counterclaims. Answer myths with facts. Meet belief with morals. Crush stupidity with evidence based knowledge.

One Time

Just about all of my black male friends know what this kind of racial attack is from personal experience. I am no exception.

Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D. – NYTimes.com:

For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Just about all of my black male friends know what this kind of racial attack is from personal experience. I am no exception.

It Wasn’t Me

Ron Paul was quite the racist and still is since he hasn’t the integrity to apologize for it written in his name. Only repentance brings redemption.

Ron Paul’s Shaggy Defense:

Racism, like all forms of bigotry, is what it claims to oppose–victimology. The bigot is never to blame. Always is he besieged–by gays and their radical agenda, by women and their miniskirts, by fleet-footed blacks. It is an ideology of “not my fault.” It is not Ron Paul’s fault that people with an NAACP view of the world would twist his words. It is not Ron Paul’s fault that his newsletter trafficked in racism. It is not Ron Paul’s fault that he allowed people to author that racism in his name. It is anonymous political aids and writers, who now cowardly refuse to own their words. There’s always someone else to blame–as long as it isn’t Ron Paul, if only because it never was Ron Paul.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Ron Paul was quite the racist and still is since he hasn’t the integrity to apologize for it written in his name.  Only repentance brings redemption.

The Problem is Ignorance

Even when the odds are stacked against them and they are ill equipped to meet the challenge, it’s still their fault.

 

If I Were A Poor Black Kid – Forbes:

“President Obama was right in his speech last week.  The division between rich and poor is a national problem.  But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality.   It’s ignorance.  So many kids from West Philadelphia don’t even know these opportunities exist for them.  Many come from single-parent families whose mom or dad (or in many cases their grand mom) is working two jobs to survive and are just (understandably) too plain tired to do anything else in the few short hours they’re home.  Many have teachers who are overburdened and too stressed to find the time to help every kid that needs it.  Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids.  Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

Technology can help these kids.  But only if the kids want to be helped.  Yes, there is much inequality.  But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.”

(Via Forbes.)

Mr. Marks is exactly right the problem is ignorance.  His.  Its willfulness especially.  I don’t doubt his heart is somewhere near the right place, but seriously.  His entire argument boils down to this:  Poor black kids “don’t have the brains to figure this out for themselves” just like his presumably white middle class kids.  Further, they don’t have adults with the resources to help them.  So even when the odds are stacked against them, and like all children, are ill equipped to face these challenges alone, it’s still their fault they struggle.  You gotta love conservative ideology for it’s ability to engender doublethink.  Orwell would be impressed.

 

New York’s Foulest

The Gang in Blue.

New York’s Foulest:

It’s very difficult for us to grasp the notion that cops are human beings, subject to the same racial biases and flaws of other human beings. This is not a plea for mercy on their behalf. It’s a plea for understanding that abuse will happen. A gun and a badge do not confer a “great soul.”

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Amen.  If they didn’t try to squeeze over two million people on a road that can safely handle half that, we would have most of the real issues in the first place.

I Feel Like A Black Republican, Too

TNC, quotes a commenter named David White who must have been channeling me.

I Feel Like A Black Republican:

You know, normally something this stupid wouldn’t bother me, but this story really gets under my skin. If they can try to paint Common as a ‘dangerous black man,’ what black man is immune? If they think Common is vile, then I know they have no use for my black ass. Common is beyond the pale, Michelle Obama hates whitey, Eric Holder is protecting the New Black Panther Party, Shirley Sherrod is discriminating against white farmers, Barack Obama is giving reparations to black people? Conservatives, do you realize how stupid this sounds to black people?

…But shit like this is what prevents me from even getting to the point where I’d give their policies a fair hearing. And I know there are some Republicans and conservatives here, and I say that you have no chance of getting any kind of support from black voters as long as the leaders of your party are pulling these kinds of stunts.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

Faux News is Complete Bull!@#$

Jon Stewart ethers Faux News:

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www.thedailyshow.com
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The Racism of Frame

Wow.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Racism of Frame:

On Friday I joked on twitter, the other day, that biggest problem with attempting to write smart is that you end up attracting people who really are smart. And sometimes they write in to tell you you’re wrong. And sometimes, In such cases, your forced to acknowledge their point.

Continue reading “The Racism of Frame”

Security Theater

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Security Theater:

“This is a good piece by Ted Conover pivoting off the arrest of the Oregon bomber, to talk about the convictions of supposed terrorists in Newburgh, New York:

These prosecutions fail the smell test, and lately the odor has washed over my own Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Last month, if you missed the news, four African-American ex-cons from Newburgh, N.Y., were convicted of plotting to bomb two synagogues here, one of them half a block from my house. The government released a photo of some of the men casing the joint that our local paper ran the day they were convicted.

One of the men in the photo is an FBI informant, Shahed Hussain. The case seems like a slam-dunk–until you learn more about him. Hussain, driving a flashy Mercedes and using the alias Maqsood, began to frequent the Masjid al-Ikhlas in down-at-the-heels Newburgh in 2008. Mosque leaders say he would meet congregants in the parking lot afterward, offering gifts and telling them they could make a lot of money–$25,000–if they helped him pursue jihad. The assistant imam said the suspicion Hussain was an informant was so great ‘it was almost like he had a neon sign on him.’ A congregant told a reporter that, in retrospect, everyone wished they’d called him out or turned him in. ‘Maybe the mistake we made was that we didn’t report him,’ the man said. ‘But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?’

Hussain bought meals for the group of four men he assembled because none of them had jobs or money. The owner of a Newburgh restaurant where they occasionally ate considered him ‘the boss,’ because he would pick up the tab. Among his other inducements were the offer of $250,000 and a BMW to the most volubly anti-Semitic plotter, the man the government says was the ringleader, James Cromitie. To drive that car, Cromitie would have needed a driver’s license–which he didn’t have.

Another supposed plotter, a Haitian, was a paranoid schizophrenic (according to his imam), which was the reason his deportation had been deferred (according to The Nation’s TomDispatch.com), and who kept bottles of urine in his squalid apartment (according to the New York Times). The last two, both surnamed Williams, have histories of drug busts and minimum-wage jobs in Newburgh. At trial the government asserted that the plot was driven by anti-American hatred. But in papers filed in court by defense lawyers before the trial began, Cromitie is quoted in government transcripts explaining to Hussain that the men ‘will do it for the money. … They’re not even thinking about the cause.’

Greenwald makes a similar critique of the Oregon case. What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat. Conover writes at the end:

This prong of our nation’s anti-terrorism strategy seems tantamount to sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people’s shoulders and whisper in their ears. One imagines that there is no shortage of Americans who, with enough money and other enticement, could be lured into crimes either ordinary or political: selling drugs or attacking gay people or racial minorities. But does dangling carrots that reward badness really make us safer? If it hadn’t been for the FBI, I don’t believe the Newburgh Four would have targeted my neighborhood, or anyone else’s.

Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically ‘prove’ the problem of violent white supremacists. And once such a war is launched, and such a unit is formed, what incentive would such a unit have to declare the war won, essentially justifying it’s own dismemberment? Indeed, there’s always a potential terrorist out there somewhere…

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

Wow.

‘Reparations’

Full Repost.

‘Reparations’:

“I’ve looked at this clip a few times where King calls Barack Obama ‘very urban.’ I don’t think ‘very urban’ is a slur for black. I think the point is that urban politicians aren’t interested in rural Americans. In this case, Barack Obama is interested in ‘rural America’ because the farmers are black, and it gives Obama a chance to prosecute his nefarious plot to award slavery reparations:

‘We’ve got to stand up at some point and say, ‘We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,” he said. ‘That war’s been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there’s no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one’s filing that claim.’
There’s a lot wrong here, but let’s stick with the obvious. In point of fact, the black farmers suit is about discrimination during the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, there is no demonstrable movement in the Obama administration, among black legislators, or even among black people to push for damages for slavery. On the contrary, ‘reparations’ is something white populists yell when they want to rally their race-addled base. So for Rush Limbaugh, the way to understand food stamps, unemployment benefits are to ‘think forced reparations.’ For Glenn Beck health care reform is not something that can be debated with facts and figures, but ‘the beginning of reparations.‘ And so it is with Steve King, that a suit brought to remedy actions taken within the last couple decades, are actually revealed as ‘slavery reparations.’
Some further thoughts: First, Beck and Limbaugh are employing a formula that has proven remarkably successful throughout American history–rallying against social investment because it might actually help a despised minority of the population. The cause of public education in the South, for instance, was long hampered by the notion that, however it might help poor and working whites, it might also help blacks too.
Second, it’s been asserted that this recent tactic by white populists to brand those who protest racism as the actual racists, is some new innovation. In fact, as I’ve said before, it’s a time honored tactic of actual racists. All one need do is read the documents of Civil War secessionists, white supremacist to the core, claiming that the real goal of ‘Lincolnism’ was to make the enslavement of whites. Or read Phillip Dray’s At The Hands Of Persons Unknown, where people who collected the fingers, toes and testicles of lynched black men claimed that they were projecting white chastity from black brutes. Rarely does a racist label himself as such.
Third, this is the same Steve King who recently asserted that Obama ‘favors the black person.’ It’s also the same Steve King who will chair the House subcommittee on immigration. Elections have consequences.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

Excellent as always.