Posted on 02/17/2015 1:07:14 PM PST by RicocheT
The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.
Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?
(Excerpt) Read more at imprimis.hillsdale.edu ...
His conclusion: "Obama was doing [in criticizing the Zimmerman verdict] exactly what the Left has been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more about revelling in their good intentions or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in white America, is still prejudiced."
This is a great piece.......its good to see Jason step up and recite some common sense and reject the discrimination of low expectations.
Excellent observations.
The picture is also much worse than your gentle comments suggest. The Black to White crime ratio was never nearly so bad as the level it reached in the 1960s, when the personal responsibility that Booker T. Washington advocated so eloquently for his people, when he opposed the antics of NAACP (created by White Leftists in 1909); nor as bad in the South where his influence was greatest, as in the North. Clearly, the Leftist blame & grievance game has not only not solved anything, it has made the problem infinitely worse.
Ferguson was a perfect example of how destructive is the whole Big Lie technique that the Left has followed since the days of the Jacobins, through the days of Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, LBJ & now Obama. There is nothing in the least accidental about the result. When you blame all the problems of the poor on the behavior of those who do what is wise & provident; you can hardly expect to upgrade those whom you influence.
William Flax
Blacks might be 13 percent of the population - the the blacks doing the killing are about 4% of the population. We can subtract the 6% of blacks that are female, and take away another 3% for black kids under 10 and black adults over 50.... Basically 4% of the population is committing half the murders...
Blacks might be 13 percent of the population - but the blacks doing the killings are about 4% of the population. Subtract the 6% of blacks that are female, and take away another 3% for black kids under 10 and black adults over 50.... and you get the true number. Basically 4% of the population is committing half the murders...
bkmk
Discussion? What discussion? Lots of screaming and shouting past one another, maybe, but no discussion.
...about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police.
Which is off limits because TRUTH IS THE NEW HATE SPEECH.
The general low intelligence and poor impulse control of that demographic is never discussed. This failure to address the issue blocks research into medications to increase intelligence and drugs to lengthen the time between stimulus and response. A large part of that demographic’s problem is biologically based.
"If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing."
Jason L. Riley has written a very scholarly and common sense piece on race relations here. Every American should read it.
A YouTube of Jason L. Riley at a Heritage Foundation event is also very good.
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