Ferguson and the Urban-Suburban Race Conflict (Hurl 'em if you got 'em)

The Daily Beast ^ | August 18, 2014 | Michael Tomasky

[tanknetter]

So even as black people pushed their way out into the suburbs, they typically haven’t done so in large enough numbers to gain real political power. This means that while the political power in many cities is in black hands today, whites still tend to run things in the counties within which those cities rest.

If anyone wants to know what the REAL problem is with race in this country today, the only thing that they need to look at is the above paragraph.

It treats holding and exercising power as an end in and of itself. Rather than a means to achieve things like good government, efficient management of government services, effective and appropriate distribution of public resources, etc.

What matters is making sure that the people holding and exercising power LOOK a certain way, rather than ACT a certain way. This is the crux of identity politics.

[caww]

How many times have white people rioted after a black thug has beaten us or raped our women?

(Maybe we should start.)

Difference is we are working at our jobs and cannot take weeks off to protest as this black community is doing now.

[caww]

....”there are a lot of black people in prisons because a lot of black people commit crimes”.....

Same with those not getting an education..they quit and or don’t apply themselves sufficient to do the work required...called study.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Now let’s get to the matter at hand in Ferguson: criminal justice. The specific issue is that juries in the United States are drawn from county-wide population pools. This means, as the criminologist William Stuntz has observed, that people from large counties with exurbs and farms are often sitting in judgment of urban kids. Stuntz was a conservative, but an apostate who came to believe that the American criminal justice system was pretty much hopelessly racist. In his last book before his death, The Collapse of the American Justice System, he noted that “counties that include major cities have a much higher percentage of suburban voters than in the past” and observed that this meant that black kids on trial were far less likely to get a jury that had any understanding of what their lives were like.

One might be forgiven for wondering if Al Sharpton et. al. have any interest at all in a judgement based on what Michael Brown’s- or Trayvon Martin’s - lives were like. Instead of the reality of Martin the 17 yo troublemaker, we were treated to a picture of a cherubic 13-yo before the advent of some of his family trouble.

We were treated to claims that George Zimmerman was in the wrong for exiting his car - in his own neighborhood, blocks from his own home - because that constituted harassment of someone he could not at that moment even see.

[2ndDivisionVet]

That’s like saying that only physicians or engineers should sit on juries of defendants with those backgrounds. It’s ludicrous. Funny story: In Des Moines I had a black lady on my team at the unemployment office. She was a social worker assigned to helping welfare recipients just like I was. But she was almost NEVER there. There are so few middle class blacks in Polk County that she was almost always on jury duty. Sweet deal for her, as you got paid by both the state and the court for the same time period, but not helpful to us as we were always one short.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

There are so few middle class blacks in Polk County that she was almost always on jury duty.

Yes, the obvious question is, if it is “acting white” to study in school, just where do they expect to find enough qualified blacks to serve as policemen? Maybe the question answers itself - they would have to have mostly policewomen - and then see how often the cops resort to firing their pistols!