Once again a liberal has trotted out ye olde horse named "No Agency" (can we get Di Blasio to ban it?)
The data suggests that, in the nation as a whole, that isn’t so. Racial profiling is real. Disparate treatment of black and brown men by police officers is real. Grotesquely disproportionate numbers of killings of black men by the police are real.
Well yeah. However disproportionate does not equal racist. I know, I know, disparate impact is one of the books of the liberal bible. If black folks suffer from something it's racist. If they excel at something (track, basketball, etc.) then it's because we are the bomb.com. Kinda like those businesses that like to privatize profits and socialize losses.
Maybe, just maybe an partial, actually predominant, reason for those dead black men via suicide by cop is because black men, unfortunately, disproportionately engage in criminal behavior that involves a weapon. That behavior often being shooting at another black man, or two or three.
Tis true.
No one denies that police officers have hard jobs, but they volunteer to enter that line of work. There is no draft. So these disparities cannot go unaddressed and uncorrected. To be held in high esteem you must also be held to a higher standard.
Absolutely. With much power comes much responsibility. But again, the DATA says that the large portion of the "disparity" is due to the disproportionate amount of crime black folks do relative to their population. Ask Newark mayor Ras Baraka if you doubt me.
But how about that citizens also owe themselves and the police a level of comity. How about black folks recognize that [unfortunately] the reason for police running around our communities in the first place is because perhaps we are fucking up when it comes to raising our sons? Not all of our sons. Not even most of our sons. But a large enough portion of them. How about holding
ourselves up to that "high" standard?
And no one denies that high-crime neighborhoods disproportionately overlap with minority neighborhoods. But the intersections don’t stop there. Concentrated poverty plays a consequential role.
Say Mr. Blow, how much crime are there in poor white communities? How much crime are there in poor Asian communities? Or how about we look at the
recent report out of California where it seems that race and not poverty is the major distinction in homicide rates.
So does the school-to-prison pipeline. So do the scars of historical oppression. In fact, these and other factors intersect to such a degree that trying to separate any one — most often, the racial one — from the rest is bound to render a flimsy argument based on the fallacy of discrete factors.
Yet people continue to make such arguments, which can usually be distilled to some variation of this: Black dysfunction is mostly or even solely the result of black pathology. This argument is racist at its core because it rests too heavily on choice and too lightly on context. If you scratch it, what oozes out reeks of race-informed cultural decay or even genetic deficiency and predisposition, as if America is not the progenitor — the great-grandmother — of African-American violence.
Funny thing about that school to prison pipeline. Way back when I was on Twitter a scholar asked his audience to provide him any documentation about a school to prison pipeline. Last I heard he couldn't find documentation of such a pipeline. And to be clear he meant that idea that schools "expect" a certain number of their students to be criminals and therefore treat them accordingly.
But if you want to talk about a pipeline then please be bright about it and recognize it's not a school to prison but womb to prison pipeline. It begins by exposing your young children to violent and sexist (misogynist and misandrist) music. It's putting them in front of TV for hours on end rather than, you know, parenting. It's having a trailer load of men in and out of your house, in front of your kids, each one of which eventually is called a "no good nigga" in front of that very impressionable child.
It is not reading to your children and not encouraging them to read. it is teaching them to speak so called "ebonics" rather than the proper pronounciation of words because you don't want them to "sound white".
It is teaching them to disregard authority figures so that when they do get to school they don't respect the teachers and other elders so they get into trouble.
it is thinking that those rules of conduct are "racist" and don't apply to your children.
It is all these things and more. But it's rarely the school's fault. The school didn't make you have a child you couldn't afford to have. School didn't make you a piss poor parent (I mean attitude not money). You did that. And the school has to put up with the messed up kids YOU sent there.
And of course we have The Horse(tm)
Yet people continue to make such arguments, which can usually be distilled to some variation of this: Black dysfunction is mostly or even solely the result of black pathology.
Because black dysfunction, where it exists is "mostly" the result of something or someone other than the folks exhibiting said dysfunction.
I bet Blow believes trannies are sane as well.
If a person or group of people's behavior are not predominantly caused by their own choices then those persons are effectively agent-less (is that a word?). Blow has asserted that black dysfunction, where it exists cannot be mostly the result of pathological thinking or even culture. His argument is that they are the fault, mostly, or white folks
as if America is not the progenitor — the great-grandmother — of African-American violence.
Because America! Meaning white folks. Always with the white folks with these folks.
Today, too many people are gun-shy about using the word racism, lest they themselves be called race-baiters.
I agree and lets add to that that too many [black] people are willing to own up to ugly truths about ourselves lest we "give credence" to the "racists". So we'll act like Polar Bear hunting isn't a hate crime (for the record I don't like or agree with the concept of hate crimes). We'll act like the Bosnian killed by a hammer wielding black guy wasn't a hate crime. We'll act like the knockout game that has been going on for years, isn't a hate crime.
And we (not including me) won't admit that Michael Brown was a two bit thug who robbed a store, assaulted it's owner. Laughed about it to his boy DOrian, punched a cop in his face when that cop tried to stop him as a suspect in that robbery, went for his gun, got shot in the hand and then got dead because of his behavior.
No Mr. Blow doesn't want real deal, fact based conversation. He'd be out of a job 'cause he wouldn't be able to trot out that "No Agency" horse.
Oh and by the way...
New York isn’t about making a martyr of “Big Mike” or “Big E” as much as it is about making the most of a moment, counternarratives notwithstanding.
Liar. Cause in August Blow said
Mike Brown was a stand in for black men.
There he wrote:
Brown had just finished high school and was to start college this week. The investigation will hopefully clarify what led to his killing. But it is clear even now that his killing occurred in a context, one that we would do well to recognize.
Before he even KNEW anything about the facts of the case. Now he wants to distract us from his utter failure in August to see.
Here he is doing the
"gentle giant" thing:
The response to the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown — whom his family called the “gentle giant” — by the Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson — who was described by his police chief as “a gentle, quiet man” and “a gentleman” — has been anything but genteel.
Here is Blow on the Funeral:
And when the person being shot is shot not by one of the bad guys (people all parents teach children to avoid as best they can) but by one of the people we as a society count as one of the good guys (police officers sworn to protect and serve) there are obviously going to be questions that need answering.
Of course Brown WAS the "bad guy". And did blow bother with fielding the "questions that need answering"?
Nope. He has not spent a single piece in discussing the facts of the case that are available to all to read and see for themselves. This is a guy I'm supposed to take seriously on his proclamations about racism and black pathology?
No thank you.
