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Gotcha. I misinterpreted at first and took "20% is not a great number" to mean "20% is not a large number". My bad. And you are absolutely right ... these are by no means members of the "anti-social element" in the black community. Which goes to show you that the notion of "respectability politics" only goes so far.
OAW
Oh, while we're on the math, 96% think they've been racially profiled. Which they have. They live in NYC, duh. Stop and frisk.
No one will condone this. But there is a long list of police union heads who, if the reverse situation happened, would let off enough hot air of outrage to make our current carbon emissions seem quaint by comparison. None will condemn it.
And the trend of grand juries refusing to indict cops who shoot unarmed black men continues ....
A Harris County grand jury on Tuesday cleared a Houston police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man in January.
The panel, which has been meeting for months, cleared officer Juventino Castro in the death of 26-year-old Jordan Baker.
The inquiry marked one of Harris County's first grand jury deliberations in a police shooting following recent unrest over the lack of indictments in the officer-involved deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York.
Baker's death has gained national attention as another unarmed black man killed by police, a trend that has sparked protests and calls for body cameras on officers.
Janet Baker, who spent most of Tuesday and Thursday last week awaiting a decision at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, had maintained that Castro profiled her son - who was wearing a black hoodie - as a criminal. Along with activists, she has been accompanied by mothers whose sons have been injured or killed in local shootings.
The grieving mother and her supporters had remained hopeful that the grand jury would indict the officer so that his actions can be considered by a trial jury.
The shooting happened in the 5700 block of West Little York near Antoine, where Baker encountered Castro.
The officer, who was in uniform and had been on the force for 10 years, was working an extra security job at the location because the strip mall's businesses had experienced a recent string of robberies, according to the Houston Police Department.
Castro's attempt to stop Baker in the parking lot led to a brief struggle and foot chase, an HPD news release said. When Baker stopped running away, he reached into his waistband and charged the officer, police contend. Castro fired his gun once and struck Baker. The officer was not injured in the incident, police said.
Castro was placed on standard three-day administrative duty immediately following the shooting. An internal investigation to determine if the officer violated any agency policies or procedures was set to begin after the grand jury delivered its decision, HPD Chief Charles McClelland confirmed last week.
Harris County grand juries have cleared HPD officers of criminal wrongdoing in all shootings since 2008. More than a quarter of the 121 civilians shot by the department's officials from 2008 to 2012 were - like Baker - unarmed, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis.
And once again we have the police claiming the unarmed black suspect "reached into his waistband" for a weapon that is NOT there and "charged the officer". Sound familiar?
No one will condone this. But there is a long list of police union heads who, if the reverse situation happened, would let off enough hot air of outrage to make our current carbon emissions seem quaint by comparison. None will condemn it.
Is there contrary evidence? I Feel like we've reached a point in the thread that, unless you have evidence, we have to accept DAs and GJs are not going to indict.
If anything, video proof of a chokehold isn't enough to indict, if you pick your charges carefully.
Windsor police, meantime, say the man was seen waving a handgun in the parking lot of a local McDonald's just 20 minutes before the incident at the border crossing.
They say officers arriving on scene ordered him to drop the weapon but he refused, and then pointed his gun at them.
According to the police statement, the man asked the officers "Why haven't you shot me yet?"
The statement says the officers tried to talk the man into surrendering, but he got back into his SUV and drove off before the officers could get back to their cruisers.
Not only did he survive, he escaped!
He then pushed his luck again.
the man stopped his car before the U.S. inspection booth around 3 a.m. Sunday and starting walking towards border officers while waving what turned out to be a replica handgun.
It says the CBP officers ordered him to drop the weapon but he then pointed it in their direction, prompting one officer to fire three shots and a second officer to fire a single round.
Only four bullets. That's restraint.
Edit: I'm sorry, it's the Canadien police that let him get away, eh.
I did have one final thought about that reuters article. 25 police officers is not a good sample size, not in a city than employes thousands (I imagine) of cops. That's not scientific, so much as anecdotal. Anecdotes that line up with the observed evidence, true, but anecdotal none-the-less. I'd like to see a gallup style poll of the officers to draw some better conclusions. And that's still not all that scientific.
No one will condone this. But there is a long list of police union heads who, if the reverse situation happened, would let off enough hot air of outrage to make our current carbon emissions seem quaint by comparison. None will condemn it.
I think cops learned their lesson on this.
No one even blinks anymore when you say "**** tha police", and the people who popularized it now do things like make "fun for the whole family" road-trip movies, or sit on the board at Apple.
Rappers wish the cops would complain about them the way they did back in the day.
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Last edited by subego; Dec 24, 2014 at 02:42 AM.
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I'm not referring to situation, I'm referring to your outlook.
It's an apples to bananas comparison.
Funny, because I don't doubt that it was the terrible Grand Jury outcomes that it was a response to.
An all too typical response.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you're dreaming. This is important, so I'm happy to repost - indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like "chaotic" or "poor learning environment" or "lack of discipline" do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point -- something that occurs to even the dimmest white students -- blacks just tried to yell over each other.
It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman's class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.
Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again -- just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: "We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!" The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: "Clinton good!"
Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.
They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: "Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?" The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim--in the crudest terms imaginable -- that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, "She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh."
Black women love to dance -- in a way white people might call gyrating. So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.
Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students -- there are -- but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
"Black women be big Mr. Jackson," my students would explain.
"Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?" I ask. Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, "You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson." "Juicy" is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.
Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: "Dat shirt stupid. Yo' kid a bastard. Yo' lips big." Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: "You pick da half-breed." And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, "He half-breed."
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, "Where is the bathroom?" he may actually say "Whar da badroom be?" Grammatically, this is the equivalent of "Where the bathroom is?" And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.
It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a "country" accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as "I'm gonna gemme a Coke." Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.
Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn't want to do an assignment or they didn't like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was "diversity" history, in which every cowboy's black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn't care and they didn't want to do any work.
Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally "conservative" ideas. "We need to cut off people who don't work," was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of "We need more government services."
My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. "Yeah, it come from whites," she finally said. "They stingy anyway."
"Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people," I said.
She had an answer to that: "Dey half breed." The class agreed. I let the subject drop.
Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.
Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: "Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus' wanna have a fun time; you know what I'm sayin'?" A few black heads nodded in agreement.
My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: "Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?" By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. "Yeah" was the favorite answer. As one student explained, "Get dat green."
There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all -- well -- black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.
One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white "nerds," "hunters," or "Goths," for example.
How the world looks to blacks: One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is "racis'." This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? "Na, homework racis'." Why did you get an F on the test? "Test racis'."
I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was "Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a'?" I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: "Dat racis'!" One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn't like black people.
"Do you think I really hate black people?"
"Yeah."
"Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?"
"You just do."
"Why do you say that?"
He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.
My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family.
From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, "Where da black folk?!" The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.
Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have "good hair." Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: "You fat, Ridario!" Ridario smiles, doesn't deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, "You wish you light skinned."
They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.
My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
Whites were "racis'," of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I'm convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn't give Mexicans anything.
What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. I've witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It's more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, "When you gonna go wit' me?"
There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, "I don't wanna go out with you!" The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no.
There is only one response from the black boy: "You racis'." Many girls -- all too many -- actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks -- especially the boys.
Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It's uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.
Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy's white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.
The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.
There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other's hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.
Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don't know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.
Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you are in a black school is the coke cage: the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage. Rumor had it that before the cages went up blacks would turn the machines upside down in the hope that the money would fall out.
Security guards are everywhere in black schools -- we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.
There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl -- black or white -- became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.
One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.
One day, I asked him, "Why do you come to school?"
He wouldn't answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: "He get dat green and get dem females."
"What is the green?" I asked. "Money or dope?" "Both," said Yidarius with a smile.
A very fat black interrupted from across the room: "We get dat lunch," Mr. Jackson. "We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss." He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. "Nigga, we know'd you be lovin' brickfuss!" shouts another student.
Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good.
Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist's fantasy--in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers--and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food--not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution is more diversity--or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work.
Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.
Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn't work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat's office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group -- I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.--sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: "These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?"
Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. "That one."
The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. "No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you."
The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until another one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere. Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children's poet Arnold Adoff.
These are some of the lines they read to the children: "Mama is chocolate . . . Daddy is vanilla . . . Me (sic) is better . . . It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched . . . there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors."
Teaching as a career: It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults -- especially, or even, with their parents -- so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.
A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.
Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.
There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world.
Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush. Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about Beethoven or Sherman's march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about nothing I tried to teach them. When this goes on year after year it chokes the soul out of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching for The Bell Curve on the Internet.
Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom, and leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship. Without intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful--whether it be your belief in human equality, your daughter's innocence, or even the state of the hallway.
Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words "F**k Whitey." Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika.
The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on social science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate such values as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a democratic form of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast ideology into whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not receptive to education of any kind beyond the merest basics.
It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much further than the fact that you live in a big house and "we in da pro-jek." Of course, there are a few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few sensitive blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the characteristics of its exceptions.
Once I asked my students, "What do you think of the Constitution?" "It white," one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh. And I caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii's volcano simmers, while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I love, and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.
I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store along the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. "Job, boss, (I) work good, boss," he pleaded. "You give job."
"What happened to your old job?" the expatriate white asked. The black man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: "We drove out the whites. No more jobs. You give job."
At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. "What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?"
"We screwed," a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.
I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. "I cain't do dis," Mr. Jackson. "I black."
The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the black man's interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and starves. Most whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so irrational. They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers by with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.
For those of you with children, better a smaller house in a white district than a fancy one near a black school.
I have been in parent-teacher conferences that broke my heart: the child pleading with his parents to take him out of school; the parents convinced their child's fears are groundless. If you love your child, show her you care -- not by giving her fancy vacations or a car, but making her innocent years safe and happy. Give her the gift of a not-heavily black school.
The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you're dreaming.
What a bunch of racist right wing dribble.
Its even worse that you chose to post this during Kwanzaa when young unarmed African American teens leave the confines of their segregated neighborhoods and venture out to other communities as emissaries of goodwill and holiday spirit.
Night two of Kwanzaa here in the city showed the principle of Self-Determination on exhibit at two cross town locations both in the tourist zone and in a neighboring suburban mall
It was quite a week here in the Windy City but let's pay credit to other black communities who followed our lead this very weekend and sent their teens out to join in the celebrations.
I think we all agree there's no vein of cultural anti-social behavior running through the black community in this country that could lead police who have to patrol their neighborhoods to be weary of violent tendencies. Stop being a jerk Powerbook
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Last edited by Captain Obvious; Dec 28, 2014 at 11:39 PM.
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Barack Obama: Four more years of the Carter Presidency
Racist white people stupidity personified. Grab a litany of black stereotypes and put them into an "essay" that sounds like someone for whom English is not even a first language and this is about what one would expect to read. I will say this though. This thread has a way of revealing true colors.
Interesting how the author of this rant thinks it's okay for him to respond to an environment where nobody cares by not caring himself, yet if a student gets put in the same environment and dares come to the same conclusion, they're being one of "those blacks".
Black Africa is the poorest part of the world by far. When African governments are not openly plundering their nations economy, they are simply incompetent. The argument that colonization accounts for Africa's poverty is so easily refuted that it should have gone out of currency long ago.
African societies south of the Sahara that had not had contact either with Europeans or with Middle Eastern traders showed no signs of modern development. No precontact African society had devised a written language or had discovered the wheel. None had a calendar, or built multi-story buildings. No African had learned how to domesticate animals. The smelting of iron was widespread, as was fire-hardened pottery, but the continent did not produce anything that could be called a mechanical device. It was trade with Europeans that introduced modernity to Iron Age Africa. Far from hobbling and holding the continent back, colonization laid the foundations for whatever evidence of economic progress can now be found in Africa. It was Europeans who built roads and rail lines, introduced piped water, schools and telecommunications, and built national administrations. Nothing suggests that Africans would have achieved any of this on their own. There is no question but that life for Africans improved steadily under colonization. Africans had no concept of the biological origins of disease, and attributed personal misfortunes to the work of evil spirits. Slavery was widely practiced, and deeply rooted in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans. There is no reason to think that, left to themselves , Africans would have risen from the primitive conditions in which Europeans found them. The European slave trade, though unquestionably harmful to Africa, was hardly the depopulating scourge it is often made out to be. When the 15th century Portuguese began sailing down the coast, they met long-established slave traders keen to sell off surpluses. Europeans almost never went on slaving expeditions into the interior. They bought slaves from dealers, which mean that other Africans first enslaved slaves taken from Africa.
For any knowledgeable African who has looked into the question as to ‘What lessons can Africa learn from colonization? There seems to be little doubt that Africans have brought misery upon themselves. Whether it be in Africa, Haiti, or Washington (DC) , Africans show little evidence of an ability to organize and run a modern economy. Just as economic refugees from Africa working in developed countries like Europe or United States in which they may form a majority community have failed to exercise authority, so have Africans desolated a continent bursting with riches. Of course, it is not permissible to conclude that this is because of natural, genetic handicaps from which blacks suffer, so anti-white arguments inevitably rush in to fill the explanatory void. Blacks the world over, whether they live only among themselves or among people of other races, are said to lead lives of failure and misery only because whites have oppressed them in the past and continue to oppress them in the present. It makes no difference that this explanation falls apart under scrutiny. It is the only one that is permitted because the alternative does not conform to current political dogma. There can be no pleasure in saying so, but the facts point to one conclusion. Whether in Africa or America, Haiti or Great Britain, blacks are poor because they are, for the most part, incapable of lifting themselves from poverty. Africa is poor, just as Harlem is poor, because it is populated by Africans.
JONES H. MUNANG’ANDU (author)
I see these attempts to derail the thread have become increasingly desperate and pathetic. Moving on ...
Two former Jasper police officers won’t face criminal charges for assaulting a woman in their custody last year, the last chapter in an incident that became a flashpoint for racial tension in the East Texas town.
The Beaumont Enterprise reported in November that a grand jury had cleared officers Ricky Grissom and Ryan Cunningham, who are white, for a violent encounter with a black woman named Keyarika Diggles inside the Jasper City Jail. Overhead cameras caught the officers grabbing Diggles by the hair, slamming her face onto a counter and pinning her to the floor, before dragging Diggles, by the feet, into a holding cell. According to her lawyers, Diggles spent hours in the dark “detox” cell before being strip-searched by police dispatcher Lindsey Davenport.
Along with the damning video footage, the case was troubling because Cunningham and Grissom had arrested Diggles at home that morning for nothing more than an unpaid traffic ticket. And the ticket wasn’t quite unpaid—the single mother of two had been paying down her debt in monthly installments. Even after those payments, she still owed $100 at the time Grissom and Cunningham knocked on her door—but it’s still not clear why they’d chosen to arrest her that day.
It was already a touchy time for Jasper’s police. The city’s first black police chief, Rodney Pearson, had been removed in 2012 by a City Council stacked with new members who ran, in part, on a pledge to replace Pearson with a chief they deemed more qualified; all the serious candidates they considered were white. It wasn’t until October 2013 that the council hired the current chief, Bob MacDonald, who spoke freely about the need to reach out to the city’s black community and build trust. One of his first initiatives was to buy body cameras for the city’s police force.
Diggles settled a civil rights lawsuit against the city and the officers last December for $75,000. And less than a month after the incident, Jasper’s city council voted to fire Cunningham and Grissom. That alone was a stronger response than many allegations of police brutality get, and Jasper Mayor Mike Lout said the council would work with the district attorney to consider criminal charges against the officers. Lout and other city leaders stressed that the Diggles case wasn’t a sign of some deeper racial divide in the city, but an isolated incident with the perpetrators swiftly punished.
“The law is the law for everyone, and just because you have a badge on doesn’t mean you have the right to break the law, or do something wrong,” Lout said at the time.
These days, in the week since the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury cleared Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, that hasn’t exactly been the prevailing sentiment. We’ve been reminded of how easily prosecutors can secure indictments when they want, and how rarely police officers are indicted for shootings and other allegations of misconduct. Emily DePrang’s Observer series on impunity in the Houston Police Department detailed those same problems last year.
The Jasper grand jury’s decision, coming so long after Diggles’ beating, but a few days before Darren Wilson was no-billed in Ferguson, is at least another marker of just how wrong it is to suggest that “the law is the law for everyone.”
It bugs me when people do what Captain Tightpants does a fair bit, and assume that their experience is some representative sample for the entire country. This is a sample size bias. It wouldn't bother me if it was presented as a personal essay, but it seems to be presented as being intended to represent America as a whole. Sorry Tightpants, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just tying my comments here to discussions we've had in the past. There is obviously a natural inclination to profile based on our personal experiences.
I'd like to ask the author to come up with a profile of white people.
It bugs me when people do what Captain Tightpants does a fair bit, and assume that their experience is some representative sample for the entire country. This is a sample size bias. It wouldn't bother me if it was presented as a personal essay, but it seems to be presented as being intended to represent America as a whole. Sorry Tightpants, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just tying my comments here to discussions we've had in the past. There is obviously a natural inclination to profile based on our personal experiences.
I'd like to ask the author to come up with a profile of white people.
Then you probably shouldn't do it either.
In every major metropolitan area of the country violent crime rates are substantially higher for blacks than other races, very often they're many times higher. Now, I'm a "combination of factors" believer.
It isn't just higher poverty rates.
It isn't just the lack of parental guidance.
It isn't just a more violent subculture.
It isn't just a more prejudiced justice system.
All of those have multiple subfactors, all are connected, and none of them exist without contributing causes. While we can point at what brought this about all day, the real question right now is what do we need to do to change it? The system isn't geared to solve this, it's only setup to feed and promote the behavior and then punish it.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
In every major metropolitan area of the country violent crime rates are substantially higher for blacks than other races, very often they're many times higher. Now, I'm a "combination of factors" believer.
It isn't just higher poverty rates.
It isn't just the lack of parental guidance.
It isn't just a more violent subculture.
It isn't just a more prejudiced justice system.
All of those have multiple subfactors, all are connected, and none of them exist without contributing causes. While we can point at what brought this about all day, the real question right now is what do we need to do to change it? The system isn't geared to solve this, it's setup to feed and promote the behavior and then punish it.
No disagreement from me, which is also why I'm not a big fan of these sorts of essays that don't have much actionable take-home from them. I'm already convinced, like you now, that there aren't simple narratives.
What changed your thinking, or am I misunderstanding you?
It bugs me when people do what Captain Tightpants does a fair bit, and assume that their experience is some representative sample for the entire country. This is a sample size bias. It wouldn't bother me if it was presented as a personal essay, but it seems to be presented as being intended to represent America as a whole. Sorry Tightpants, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just tying my comments here to discussions we've had in the past. There is obviously a natural inclination to profile based on our personal experiences.
I'd like to ask the author to come up with a profile of white people.
That article you posted is ignoring some fairly basic questions of climate and geography.
Where civilization flourished has nice weather, a (relatively speaking) non-competitive ecosystem, and is more or less a continuous strip from Portugal to Korea.
Where he's talking about has brutal weather, is one of the most competitive ecosystems on Earth, and has one sixth the space to expand laterally.
Over the last weeks, across the nation, and here in Nashville, we have witnessed many protests and demonstrations. Some of the demonstrations have been peaceful. Some have been violent, with significant property damage. Here in Nashville, persons have gathered to express their thoughts in a non-violent manner. I thank all involved for the peaceful manner in which they have conducted themselves.
I also thank you. As a member of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, you have responded to these events in a manner that clearly shows that this is a professional police department staffed by professional individuals who respect the points of view of all persons. Again, thank you for showing the Nashville public that, individually and collectively, they have a police department they can be proud of.
I wanted to send you this email to express my frustration and outrage at how the situation of these protesters is being handled in Nashville. The first night protesters marched here after the incidents in Ferguson they never should have been allowed to shut down the interstate. Instead of at least threatening to arrest them, they were served coffee and hot chocolate. I don't feel that is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars. It sends a message that they can do whatever they want and will be rewarded. Then, this past week, more protesters march around downtown for 3 or more hours and once again, no arrests, and it took THP to keep them from getting on the interstate again. Saturday night, marching and "die ins" at Opry Mills mall. How long are we going to allow these people to disrupt our city?
While I certainly appreciate your offer to intercede on my behalf with our Mayor, you should know that the Mayor has not issued any order, directive or instruction on the matter with which you take issue. All decisions concerning the police department's reaction to the recent demonstrations have been made within the police department and approved by me.
• "I just want myself and my family to feel that our city is safe, and right now we don't feel that way."
I have to admit, I am somewhat puzzled by this announcement. None of the demonstrators in this city have in any way exhibited any propensity for violence or indicated, even verbally, that they would harm anyone. I can understand how you may feel that your ideologies have been questioned but I am not aware of any occurrence that would give reason for someone to feel physically threatened.
That article you posted is ignoring some fairly basic questions of climate and geography.
Where civilization flourished has nice weather, a (relatively speaking) non-competitive ecosystem, and is more or less a continuous strip from Portugal to Korea.
Where he's talking about has brutal weather, is one of the most competitive ecosystems on Earth, and has one sixth the space to expand laterally.
Can the same can be said for tribes living in the Amazon?
That article you posted is ignoring some fairly basic questions of climate and geography.
Where civilization flourished has nice weather, a (relatively speaking) non-competitive ecosystem, and is more or less a continuous strip from Portugal to Korea.
Where he's talking about has brutal weather, is one of the most competitive ecosystems on Earth, and has one sixth the space to expand laterally.
You're getting suckered into the derail stop.
Originally Posted by Chongo
Can the same can be said for tribes living in the Amazon?
Take it somewhere else.
This thread is about police, not the perceived failures of africans civilizing.
Can the same can be said for tribes living in the Amazon?
I'd say yes. Extremely competitive ecosystem with crummy weather. Too much rain creates all kinds of difficult survival pressures, as anyone with some jungle rot on their feet will tell you.
It bugs me when people do what Captain Tightpants does a fair bit, and assume that their experience is some representative sample for the entire country. This is a sample size bias. It wouldn't bother me if it was presented as a personal essay, but it seems to be presented as being intended to represent America as a whole. Sorry Tightpants, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just tying my comments here to discussions we've had in the past. There is obviously a natural inclination to profile based on our personal experiences.
I'd like to ask the author to come up with a profile of white people.
Responding to Powerbooks essay, you go on to bitch about CPT's viewpoints, then suggest we solve the cause of whats got you upset by doubling down on racial profiling?
I can't even begin on how backwards this is.
What was your response to the article? I didn't see one.
Why do you think that CPT is the only one guilty of using their personal experiences to form opinions and why did you single him out in response to a post that had nothing to do with him?
What makes you think doubling down on racially profiling subcultures will have any positive effect what-so-ever to our discussion?
No disagreement from me, which is also why I'm not a big fan of these sorts of essays that don't have much actionable take-home from them. I'm already convinced, like you now, that there aren't simple narratives.
What changed your thinking, or am I misunderstanding you?
That's what I've been saying this whole time, the problem is there are entire sections of the issue that people like OAW won't even admit exist. It's much like removing chapters of a book simply because you don't like them, then getting pissed off when someone else brings them up.
Young blacks, particularly males, are more violent/dangerous than young people from other groups. Acres of trees have been cut down to print gov't reports on the subject, terabytes of data are available online detailing this, but if we can't even agree that the problem exists then there's no conversation at all.
"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character." - M.L.King Jr
That's what I've been saying this whole time, the problem is there are entire sections of the issue that people like OAW won't even admit exist. It's much like removing chapters of a book simply because you don't like them, then getting pissed off when someone else brings them up.
Young blacks, particularly males, are more violent/dangerous than young people from other groups. Acres of trees have been cut down to print gov't reports on the subject, terabytes of data are available online detailing this, but if we can't even agree that the problem exists then there's no conversation at all.
Honestly, how could it be more clear that he agrees that statistically speaking, young black males are more likely to be violent/dangerous than other demographics? Is my re-characterization here off?
That's what I've been saying this whole time, the problem is there are entire sections of the issue that people like OAW won't even admit exist. It's much like removing chapters of a book simply because you don't like them, then getting pissed off when someone else brings them up.
Young blacks, particularly males, are more violent/dangerous than young people from other groups. Acres of trees have been cut down to print gov't reports on the subject, terabytes of data are available online detailing this, but if we can't even agree that the problem exists then there's no conversation at all.
If I had to take a guess I think these areas are hard for OAW because he might feel that discussing those areas is some form of admitting that blacks are somehow different and/or worthy of this phenomenon. It might help to approach the issue by making very clear that the phenomenon you are talking of is mostly because of the underlying socio-economic conditions and not a property inherent to blacks themselves.
If I had to take a guess I think these areas are hard for OAW because he might feel that discussing those areas is some form of admitting that blacks are somehow different and/or worthy of this phenomenon. It might help to approach the issue by making very clear that the phenomenon you are talking of is mostly because of the underlying socio-economic conditions and not a property inherent to blacks themselves.
Just a thought from my POV
Agreed, and as I've pointed out, some of his characterizations need tweaks too.
See CPT, even one of conservative brethren is getting stuck by your presentation, it's not just me.
Honestly, how could it be more clear that he agrees that statistically speaking, young black males are more likely to be violent/dangerous than other demographics? Is my re-characterization here off?
From what I can see, admitting it on its face and evaluating its impact to the issue at hand are two separate discussions. The former, true. CPT's point (without speaking for him too much here) is he does not account for them when discussing particular issues.
Agreed, and as I've pointed out, some of his characterizations need tweaks too.
See CPT, even one of conservative brethren is getting stuck by your presentation, it's not just me.
Besson, how petty.
All i'm trying to do is cross the divide here. I am not getting stuck by CPT's presentation, only highlighting why it seems that you're talking past each other. I have as many and more points for you too, but finding more agreement with CPT I thought it'd be easier to work from that side of the fence first in order to bring it down.
All i'm trying to do is cross the divide here. I am not getting stuck by CPT's presentation, only highlighting why it seems that you're talking past each other. I have as many and more points for you too, but finding more agreement with CPT I thought it'd be easier to work from that side of the fence first in order to bring it down.
It's an extremely emotionally charged issue. We all have to work together to succeed to that end. None of us can take it any farther than each of us is willing to listen.
@OAW
Do you belive that all police departments/policemen are racist and/or corrupt? This the impression I get.
"All"? Of course not. That's crazy talk. Police departments are a microcosm of American society. So there will be individual police officers who fall along the scale from "virulently racist" to "well-intentioned with implicit anti-black biases" to "simply well-intentioned". Just like any other person in this country. What police departments as institutions most definitely have is the Blue Code of Silence.
Police culture or “cop culture," as it is sometimes called by police officers, has resulted in a barrier against stopping corrupt officers. Police culture involves a set of values and rules that have evolved through the experiences of officers and which are affected by the environment in which they work. From the beginning of their career at their academies, police are brought into this “cop culture."
While learning jobs and duties, recruits will also learn the values needed to make it to a high rank in their organization. Some words used to describe these values are as follows: a sense of mission, action, cynicism, pessimism, machismo, suspicion, conservatism, isolation and solidarity. The unique demands that are placed on police officers, such as the threat of danger, as well as scrutiny by the public, generate a tightly woven environment conducive to the development of feelings of loyalty.[8]
These values are claimed to lead to the code; isolation and solidarity leading to police officers sticking to their own kind, producing an us-against-them mentality. The us-against-them mentality that can result leads to officers backing each other up and staying loyal to one another; in some situations it leads to not “ratting” on fellow officers.[9]
And it is this "cop culture" that protects bad cops. Along with the inherent conflict of interest of the local DA who relies upon the local PD to get criminal convictions being the one who brings a case alleging police misconduct before a grand jury. Given these two realities ... Is there really any wonder why 99+% of the time the grand jury fails to indict a police officer? But that very same grand jury process nearly always indicts a civilian?
The thread title. Do police discriminate? Yes, some do, and engage in misconduct. Not all, some.
In case I have not mentioned it before, I'm of Mexican-Spanish descent.
In 1981, a friend (a Fijian), and I were pulled over in South Phoenix one Saturday night because I was was driving my sister's car (a Bug)with a burned out headlight. (Earlier in the day I tried to change the light but did not have a phillips screwdriver and tried to use a ginormous kitchen knife. I gave up and tossed in the back and forgot it was there.) My friend and I were asked to "exit the vehicle" (We we both stone cold sober.) I was asked where we where going. I said "home" from my cousin's house.(I live in North Phoenix), The cops asked if i would mind if they looked in the car. Not only did they find the knife, but a bottle of Jack Daniels my friend had. One of the cops shows me the knife and asked about it. I told him about trying to change the light. Did they toss us to the ground? Did we end up in jail. No. I was told to open the "trunk" He put the knife and the bottle of JD in and closed it. I was told "go home" and we did. We must have been lucky.
If I had to take a guess I think these areas are hard for OAW because he might feel that discussing those areas is some form of admitting that blacks are somehow different and/or worthy of this phenomenon. It might help to approach the issue by making very clear that the phenomenon you are talking of is mostly because of the underlying socio-economic conditions and not a property inherent to blacks themselves.
Just a thought from my POV
I've mentioned to CTP et al that I have no issue delving into that subject. But it's a topic for another thread. Which is PRECISELY why my challenge to start a new thread on this very topic has gone unmet. Because their objective is NOT to seriously discuss these issues. Their objective is to derail the actual topic of this thread.
OAW
PS: Does anyone here really think that these two cops going to this black female's home and arresting her over a $100 balance on an unpaid traffic ticket ... and then beating the snot out of her in the police station was due to "young black males aged 10-24" being "more violent" as a group than their non-black counterparts? Really?
"All"? Of course not. That's crazy talk. Police departments are a microcosm of American society. So there will be individual police officers who fall along the scale from "virulently racist" to "well-intentioned with implicit anti-black biases" to "simply well-intentioned". Just like any other person in this country. What police departments as institutions most definitely have is the Blue Code of Silence.
And it is this "cop culture" that protects bad cops. Along with the inherent conflict of interest of the local DA who relies upon the local PD to get criminal convictions being the one who brings a case alleging police misconduct before a grand jury. Given these two realities ... Is there really any wonder why 99+% of the time the grand jury fails to indict a police officer? But that very same grand jury process nearly always indicts a civilian?
Moving on ... 
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