Cheap Laughs: A Weekly Review of The NY Times

Georgetown sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson has made a very profitable career out of peddling lies about race in America. Unfortunately, there is a large market for the kind of falsehoods Dyson specializes in, especially among the liberal elite readership of The New York Times and on tony ultra-liberal college campuses. It is fashionable in these precincts to deride the rest of America as hopelessly racist and backward, and doing so doubtlessly provides some people a certain cheap thrill of smug moral superiority. But what is profitable for Dyson and pleasurable for ultra-liberals is poisonous for both America as a society and for our fellow citizens of all races.

Dyson is a professional race hustler, and his hustling has paid off with a tenured job teaching at Georgetown, and part-time gigs as a commentator for MSNBC and columnist for the NYT. In his column in this Friday‘s Times,“Racial Terror, Fast and Slow” Dyson recklessly invokes a word which should be used with caution and modesty. For example, during the Soviet “Red Terror” of 1918-1922 the Bolshevik “man-killing machine” extinguished a million or human lives.

“The killing this month of Walter L. Scott by Officer Michael T. Slager highlights two interlocking truths: Social protest forces us to see realities we would rather avoid, and blacks live in mortal fear for our lives in a manner that most whites don’t see or understand.”

Regarding the first claim, there have been noisy protests about the shooting of black people by the police, so widely publicized by the media during the last year. Sometimes social protest does force people to confront difficult realities, but the “Black Lives Matter” protests have been designed specifically to create a misleading and essentially dishonest narrative about both the police and the dilemmas faced by many African-American communities in America.

And the second claim is even more absurd and ugly. Dyson goes on to argue that blacks “live in mortal fear” of being gunned down execution style by the police.

“The lived experience of race often feels like terror for black folk, whether that terror is fast or slow. Fast terror is explosive and explicit; it is the spectacle of unwarranted black death at the hands of the state, or displays of violence directed against defenseless bodies.”

Every modern society gives the state a monopoly on the use of violence to keep civil order. In return, the state is bound to follow the rule of law. And when the police kill civilians they are accountable for their actions. Do the police make mistakes? In a country with close to a million armed police officers, often doing their jobs in dangerous conditions, it would be ridiculous to expect zero mistakes. And the legal system may superficially appear not to hold police fully accountable for their actions, but in fact the system wisely established a high bar of proof to convict police officers of wrong doing.

The fact is, approximately 8,000 African-Americans die in homicides annually, most at the hands of other African-Americans. The number killed by police numbers around 100 to 200, depending on the source. And of those, in the last 12 months there have been a handful of highly publicized cases where the police may have wrongfully killed an innocent black man.

So if you’re a black man you’re 50 times more like to be killed by a criminal, and 40 times more likely by another black man, than by the police. And the odds a black man will be wrongfully killed by the police are minuscule--about one in five million, or few thousand times less than being murdered by a common criminal. And in fact, even far more African-Americans of both sexes fall victim to high rates of heart disease and other preventable health problems.

So the story line Dyson is trying to sell is just factually wrong. The average African-American male should be much more concerned for his health, and understandably worried about violent crime. But the odds that a policeman will mistakenly or even wrongfully kill him are about as remote as being struck by lightning or killed by a shark.

But these facts don’t fit the narrative scam artists like Dyson are feeding their gullible liberal audience. They want to believe that America is a fundamentally evil country with a repressive and racist state police apparatus killing innocent black men, execution-style. It’s shameful, because first of all, Dyson and his ilk are whipping up hysterical and misplaced fears and resentments. And even worse, distracting attention from the very real problems faced by our country, and particularly by our African-American communities.

Sadly, Dyson and his readers probably actually believe their own lies, because they are too convenient, and for Dyson too much to his own personal advantage. But they cast false blame on our police and grievously harm our country, which despite its imperfections is still the greatest country on Earth.

I had a white male friend from high school I ended up emailing for about a year. He was a liberal academic at a private school in the Northwest and very political as am I. Being a conservative I thought it would be a great way to find out how the liberal mind works since I felt they are so wrong-headed about so much.

He bought into this black narrative completely. I did my level best to explain the facts to him on this and many other subjects but it didn’t work. He simply could not see the truth or even entertain the idea of him being wrong about anything that didn’t fit his liberal views.

It was from him that I learned with certainty that liberalism truly is a mental disease; at least for the true believers. For those who go along with the pack in their youth; there is hope but not for those who truly buy into the entire liberal narrative. For them there is no hope. They are brain damaged for life. Only a frontal lobotomy can help those lost souls at this point.

It’s shameful, because first of all, Dyson and his ilk are whipping up hysterical and misplaced fears and resentments. And even worse, distracting attention from the very real problems faced by our country, and particularly by our African-American communities.

Even worse than that, people like Dyson are creating a burning hatred within large swaths of the black community that results in opportunistic violence towards non-blacks in retribution.

Perhaps this is the outcome people like Dyson are secretly after.

It is doubly difficult for them to change when their entire livelihood depends on it. If you were supporting your family on a comfortable professor’s salary and your professorship was based on race-baiting (or climate change or gender studies, or ...) how difficult would it be to abandon all that? For many, it’s not just their salary, but speaking fees, consulting fees, book royalties, etc. It’s easy to lie to others when you lie to yourself. And it’s easy to lie to yourself when you benefit so greatly from it.

I agree with the article.

HOWEVER, in defense of the attitude we are protesting, consider this example with the racial factor removed: Many people have a fear of flying, yet no fear of dying of lung cancer. They voluntarily smoke, but are afraid to travel by airplane. That behavior is statistically irrational because the smoking is far, far more likely to kill them than the airplane, but emotions are not always rational and they have a profound effect on our decision-making process.

Correct. The point here being that the racist killer cop meme ties in with their anger and hatred.

Killing each other, not so much.

All of which is not to say that American cops don’t kill too many people.

For example, American cops kill somewhere around 400 to 600 people a year. That we don’t know the exact number is itself quite revealing.

Meanwhile, German cops kill around 4 people per year.

To be fair, Germany is a smaller country (4x) and has a lower murder rate (5x) than America. Factor those in and Germany cops kill, proportionately, 80 people vs. our 400+.

That’s not a positive statistic, to my mind.

I understand exactly what you are saying but to me, if they know what they are doing is wrong, it makes it even more imperative to do the right thing.

Yes. I get the entire taking financial care of the family but what kind of parent lives a lie to do that?

What kind of role model are those kind of parents who are willing to lie, cheat, and do whatever it takes to make a buck.

Any parent who does that is nothing more than a prostitute for the almighty dollar without understanding the consequences of losing their soul in the process. To each their own though. If that's how you want to live your life; have at it. I choose to live and teach by example and not let the dollar dictate my every decision.

I entirely agree. I wasn’t defending or apologizing for such behavior, just trying to explain how I assume that people get to that point. I expect much of it is gradual, and that once they realize how deep they are in it, getting out becomes very difficult.

I believe it’s a bit like a cult. They make new members feel important, special, and part of the “in” group. It becomes self-reinforcing because they never look outside themselves; they live in a world where they pat each other on the back and constantly remind themselves and each other that they are correct in everything they think and do and not stupid or evil like those horrible conservatives.

It is a hard wiring of the brain, and the evidence for such an assertion is the incredible resistance to seeing any alternative view. In general, they cannot even entertain for the period of a discussion any alternative view.

There are libs who are Jewish, one of my brothers for example, who have no answer to how liberals can be so anti-Semitic. Normally an entirely logical and thought-out person, there is simply this gaping hole in his worldview that he is OK with just sitting there, unanswered. He has a comment on anything but this one just shuts him up. Crickets.

A good friend of mine for 45 years was raised in a classic red diaper family back East. But seriously, his parents were members of the CPUSA. Talk to him about any topic in the abstract; that hard work and competence should be the norm; that adherence to a set of principles and morals are the hallmark of a civilization, and he actually has entirely conservative views. But when it comes to the actual application of societal constructs, he is a flaming liberal. The underprivileged have suffered for so long, they are owed, big time. “Federalism” is, to him, the concentrated power of the Federal gov’t, not the empowerment of the separate states granting only those powers to the FedGov they agree to and automatically retaining the rest; “States Rights” is a bumper stick meme that says that southern states can and will set up separate lunch counters and drinking fountains.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.