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When viral videos of conflicts between blacks and law enforcement officers, blacks being harassed by white women comedically known as “Karens,” or blacks being criminally profiled by overzealous white males are released, I make it a point to say as little as possible – especially on social media.
Paternalistic, with a lot of White Savior Complex. No surprise coming from David French.
I’m reminded of one of his multitudinous screeds against evangelical Trump voters where he only singled out white evangelicals. Why? Does he think black evangelicals have no agency? Are black people somehow excused if they vote for Donald Trump?
(I think you wrote about that one, too, Derryck.)
My reading list is a French-free zone, so I won’t pretend to have read his piece. But I have no idea how anyone would know if there’s an unreasonable fear of black men. Are there rational criteria for establishing this or do we need to be mind readers?
I am wary of all minorities, especially blacks. It is best to avoid such people as much as possible. If they are up to no good then it is best to let them have their way unless it is directly damaging to yourself and thus giving yourself no choice. Even then if you are forced defend yourself you are at extreme risk from the political might they wield. If minorities shop or eat at a place I frequent then I will go elsewhere and let them have it. If I have to work with such people it is best to avoid them much as possible, do not engage in conversation except what business requires, since any conversation is a political bomb that can end your career. I know too many that have made a mistake in this area and have seen the results.
I did indeed!
You made a whole lot of very consequential assertions and I agreed with all of them. There is no button for that, so I’m using Reply.
If the proggies launch a final offensive, and we need to send a small group of intellectuals to a secret elaborate bunker underneath a resort hotel in West Virginia to keep the American dream alive, you are among my nominees.
It’s my understanding that as for interracial violence it is 90% black inflicted upon white. If this is true then it would be rational for whites to be fearful of blacks. I don’t know for a fact that this statistic is correct. I personally have not been a victim of black violence nor for that matter any violence. It is also my understanding that black violence perpetrated upon blacks is 90% by other blacks. Again I don’t know that as a fact. My only reason to make these comments is to add to the conversation.
But can he cook?
Count me among white people who think that prejudice against black men is not “unreasonable,” particularly when it comes to crime.
When there is a better than even chance that if I dig into media accounts of a violent crime I discover that the perpetrator is a black man, even though black men constitute less than 15% of the male population in the US, developing a bias against black men does not strike me as unreasonable.
As we have been seeing in the last few days in Minneapolis (and have previously seen in other episodes), if I see that black people are apparently unable or unwilling to control their anger to the extent that they trash the property of innocent bystanders (what does trashing a Target store or burning down an Autozone store or a new apartment building have to do with a complaint against the city police department), is it really unreasonable of me to conclude that special suspicion should be directed to black people?
I feel bad for the many law-abiding and otherwise upstanding black people in the United States, but the behavior of a non-trivial number of black people who are apparently unable or unwilling to control themselves causes more than some of us to be suspicious of black people in general.
How about this? The reasonableness of fear of black men should not be judged by the percentage of crimes against the person committed by black men, but by the percentage of those perpetrators committing crimes against the person to the black male population as a whole. I’d suggest that crime statistics and incarceration rates are not a very accurate gauge of this since they include numbers influenced by circumstances that the average white is unlikely to encounter.
I watched an interview with Maj Toure, the founder of Black Guns Matter and left thinking he and I have the same perspective,and I wouldn’t mind meeting him on the street.
And for what it’s worth, Jesse Jackson’s quote emphasized black-on-black crime.
There’s no easy answer to this. There can’t be when the primary factor is something so arbitrary like skin color. I have a long story, but I’m on my smart phone and posting with it sucks. Hers part one:
I grew up in the ghetto in Chicago. I’m white. My ghetto used to be a Polish immigrant entry point which was mostly a Mexican immigrant entry point by the time we moved. In the ghetto there’s all kinds of people. Some you should avoid altogether. Being part of it, you kind of just know; little signs and word of mouth that aren’t readily apparent just by looking at skin color. I assume it’s the same in black ghettos and Mexican ghettos. They know who’s a bad guy and who’s alright but maybe just a little rough around the edges. Skin color has nothing to do with it when you’re all mostly the same skin color.
Demeanor. Dress. Attitude. Crossing all appropriate social and personal boundaries. Listen to your gut. These are what to look for. Oh, also, everyone should be looked at warily, never flash your cash, always be aware of who’s around you and what they’re doing, avoid certain areas, try to stay in groups, be prepared to make it clear that any encounter will not end cleanly and without injury for any potential attacker. Hang out with devils and others will think you’re a devil too, and eventually you’ll get burnt.
Dogs often bite people. We should be wary of dogs.
Well, some dog breeds account for the majority of fatal injuries. We should be wary of those breeds.
Then again, those attacks tend to occur in certain areas with unleashed dogs. Those dogs usually belong to inconsiderate owners who encourage the aggression. An aggressive dog can be recognized by growling.
The point is: It’s easy to identify one condition — it’s a pit bull or a beagle, a big dog or a small dog, leashed or unleashed, sitting quietly or snarling — and suggest a response on that alone. But most of us, often subconciously, react to real situations based on a bunch of overlapping information. It’s a big snarling pit bull and the malicious thug who owns it left it unleashed. I should be wary.
A stereotype is simply logical pattern recognition as applied to people. Prejudice is refusing to consider anything that contradicts one’s preconceived expectations. Stereotyping is not prejudicial. It’s an observation, not a judgment. Recognizing a pattern does not prevent you from acknowledging exceptions or significant conditions.
When someone feels threatened because a black man is walking behind her, the black man in question is probably not neatly dressed, not looking with interest at other things or smiling, not chatting calmly with a friend or on the phone. They are probably not walking in a crowd or through a wealthy area. He’s probably slovenly dressed, talking like a gangsta, jeering, eyeing her hungrily or menacingly, etc. They are probably in a high-crime area or alone at night.
I don’t mean that a black man can be expected to act that way. I mean that if he is acting that way, she would be smart to assume the worst.
She would be recognizing a type which for particular areas is most common among a particular race. If she was in Tokyo instead of Harlem, she would look for danger signs among Asians. If she was in backwoods Arkansas, she would look for the danger signs among rednecks.
Nobody sees Walter Williams, Charles Payne, or Phylicia Rashad and feels threatened. Ethnicity is often a contributing factor to first impressions, based on public stereotypes and personal experiences. But it is always just one factor among many, especially in modern America.
I have special concerns over this issue, especially the Arbery shooting. In the 90s, the racial atmosphere was not as bad as in the past, and more importantly appeared to be on a natural and ineluctable course toward improving, and fulfilling Martin Luther King’s dream.
Now (and counter-intuitively since 2007 it seems) black/white relations are more and more under stress. Social divisions seem to be increasing along with the general economic disparities and polarization.
EVERY LIFE MATTERS.
With the Arbery shooting, the shooter was (to read some lawyers’ opinions) legally justified, even if he was morally wrong to try to make a citizen’s arrest or whatever he was trying. I fear for my wife. And it is not well for me to say, “Well, she would never be suspected of anything, or she would never put up foolish resistance, or she wouldn’t open her mouth and question those who were suspecting her of anything.” In fact this surreptitious excusing of racial aggressors, whether police or vigilantes, is insulting in that it means that, based on race, once being profiled and approached it is the responsibility of the one being profiled to wait patiently for an equitable resolution. This seems closer to pre-1960s Jim Crow than post-Great Society color-blindness.
I try to imagine this video: A Minnesota police officer is kneeling on the neck of a fallen inebriated forgery suspect, the suspect’s silver-haired head and shoulders can be seen by the police car’s tire. He’s white, and wearing a well-tailored suit. When the suspect stops struggling, the officer gently releases his knee and asks if he is ready to get into the police car. The police then pull him to his feet and place him in the patrol car and drive away. And the video is never released.
I can’t believe that they would have done what they did if he had been white, and richly attired.
I understand but respectfully disagree, and I think that this attitude is part of the current problem of race relations in the US.
I understand the argument that I could have arrived at my prejudices about “blacks” (who were “others” as I grew up) and “whites” (“our people, us“) purely by rationally analyzing crime statistics, or by rational analysis of personal experiences (which aggregate themselves indirectly into statistics) without any irrational influences. But when I reflect on my instinctive prejudices (against people I instinctively regard as “blacks”, for example), which were present from early childhood and only diminished over a long period of intellectual, moral, and spiritual development, I don’t see them as being justifiable by reason and biased data from experience, but rather as being dependent for their existence on tribal instincts, tribal culture, and man’s sinful vanity. I remember these childhood experiences and cultural inputs very clearly, and I understand now how I came to my instinctive prejudices.
Before talking about unreasonable fear we should look at the actual data on police killings: I believe there is no significant difference in the rates of police killing blacks vs. whites. It’s been a number of years but I think the DOJ’s uniform crime statistics database is useful here.
@markcamp You are too kind. Thank you for your words of encouragement.
Heh.(TM)
Be it Minneapolis, Ferguson, etc., etc. it always angers me that this kind of “protesting” *always* reinforces the worst negative racial stereotypes of blacks. What angers me just as much are various police departments in cities set ablaze and looted simply standing by and allowing these people to reinforce negative racial stereotypes while allowing their respective cities to be burned to the ground. All while blacks justify this destruction and call it “justice.”
If this is justice, then justice is no longer meaningful in any real way.
I feel threatened by Mr. Williams’ vastly superior expertise in economics. /rim shot
Interestingly enough, The Washington Post has kept stats on police-involved shootings for several years now. Every year, the number of unarmed blacks shot and killed by police has gone down. As a whole though, cops still shoot and kill more whites than blacks.
Also, I linked the UCR stats in the original post.
It all depends on the high school yearbook picture.
Speaking of citizen’s arrest, would anybody dare to arrest that cop that was snuffing out the life of George Floyd?
They couldn’t get close enough; he pulled out his mace, and the second officer was standing guard and warning people back.
I completely failed to see that link! Time to increase the font size or buy a bigger monitor. Also, I noticed the link to the excellent City Journal.
I blame it squarely on the creation of the 24/7 news cycle by the Liberal Media (that tired old phrase). Ever since this has started, the Media has gone out of its way to find the single most damning White on Black racial incident they can publicize, and then convince their audience that this is the norm. The proliferation of camera phones and video cameras in general has served to boost this abhorrent practice.
The average person , especially the young, doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to separate single incidents publicized in the news from actual trends that are happening around the country. In a country of 330 million people, no one can be expected to know what real trends are happening outside of their own small neighborhood or sphere of family and friends, without relying on accurate reports from knowledgeable outside sources.
On top of this, still pictures and especially videos go right to the emotional part of the brain while bypassing any logic or reason. If every one of these heinous incidents were reported only by written reports, hardly anybody would get riled up. We hear about millions dying in other parts of the World, but without pictures and sound, it means almost nothing.
Circumstances often matter more than skin color: In my college days I hung out with a crowd that included two black guys, one with a ‘fro (yeah, I’m dating us) and another with a razor cut, and both typically clothed in ratty T-shirts and jeans. Nobody thought a thing, because we were all computer nerds and
dressed like slobswere paragons of forthcoming fashion. If I’d run into the same two guys dressed the same way, not knowing them, on the streets of Detroit of the time, I’d likely have reacted very differently, and it would have been rational not unreasonable, for plenty of reasons cited above.Same thing with the Hispanic guys I knew in Silicon Valley years later. Lot of difference between knocking back cervezas while griping about the management, and perhaps meeting the same guys coming out of a 7-11 in the wee small hours in a not-so-good part of town.
What bugs me is how incidents like Arbery and Floyd and the rest get turned into caricatures and stereotypes overnight by the media and wokesters, and we’re all expected to take sides based on some political line instead of trying to understand what went down, and why. Supposedly as a white conservative I ought to say Arbery had it coming, but I’m also a firearms instructor, and learned and teach that while there’s forgiveness for a rightful shoot in self-defense, it doesn’t apply if you started the confrontation yourself. Which the shooters did in that case.
What bugs me about incidents like this is that the left seems mostly interested in yelling at white people about the unforgivable sin of being white. They really don’t seem to care about whether justice is done.
I saw a video of two white “citizens” and “hicks” as they called themselves, standing guard during the Minneapolis riots, and they were wearing AR-15s. Isn’t a high-powered rifle less of a close-quarters, defensive weapon than say a Glock? I’m all for open carry and self-defense, but it looked like potential overkill. Any thoughts?
Instead of a like button on everything, that should be replaced with a sliding scale –
100% disagree
50% disagree
0% neutral, but still read it
50% agree
100% agree
The slider would let you pick the exact percentage of agreement or disagreement you want to show. Genius! I should patent that.
Following comments will probably show 200 different places where this is already done, dashing my hopes for internet fame and fortune.
Indeed. The left is rarely interested in real solutions because those involve hard work changing the lives of individual people–which usually means persuading those people to change their attitudes and behaviors. Real solutions do not promise the pleasure of fomenting hate and exercising arbitrary power over helpless innocents–not to mention the wholesale theft of property. Violence and terror are much more fun for certain sorts of personalities.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
–an SDS radical, quoted by David Horowitz
“The worse, the better.”
–often attributed to Lenin, but more likely said by the Russian revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky