I've casually watched her statements over the last few days and I'd agree, she's "unique."
This reply to her over the weekend floored me. Theft is the result of being a thief.
š” Football Hall Of Fame Looted (Riots around the country.)
- Thread starter rocknthefreeworld
- Start date
This reply to her over the weekend floored me. Theft is the result of being a thief.
rocknthefreeworld
Member
Everyone has a camera, an opinion, and a platform. There is enough jetsam out there to support the view that society is foundering, and enough flotsam to support that it's sunk. I've tried to read some reasoned articles and essays on the issues, and that's it. Anyone checking the news more than twice a day first started by feeding on it, and now it's eating them. I've read recently that the articles that make us furious enact the same chemical response as fight or flight, and we begin to believe we must know every "fact" and read every "article", and fight back with tweets or whatever satisfies the craving.
Read the facts, not the screamed, unsubstantiated claims. Understand where we've been and where we truly are now on race.
www.wsj.com
www.wsj.com
These are both pretty long, and some may need a subscription to read. I'll post each in a following post.
Remain calm, all is well.
Read the facts, not the screamed, unsubstantiated claims. Understand where we've been and where we truly are now on race.
The Long Reach of Racism in the U.S.
Despite great progress across two centuries, exclusion and injustice remain the reality for too many black Americans.
www.wsj.com
Opinion | The Myth of Systemic Police Racism
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But thereās no evidence of widespread racial bias.
www.wsj.com
These are both pretty long, and some may need a subscription to read. I'll post each in a following post.
Remain calm, all is well.
Last edited:
The Long Reach of Racism in the U.S.
Despite great progress across two centuries, exclusion and injustice remain the reality for too many black Americans
By Orlando Patterson
June 5, 2020 11:55 am ET
One of the many ways, good and bad, in which America is truly exceptional is its experience of raceāits tortured embrace of black Americans and the paradoxical extremes in how it treats them. Race is the fulcrum upon which two radically different visions of America pivot. In the inhuman, banal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis we see the reactivated weight of the countryās darkest past. In the nationwide demonstration of young blacks and whites against it and other recent racist killings, we see the outraged, countervailing force of that other America which Martin Luther King Jr. imagined as the ābeloved community.ā
The despair of so many Americans in this moment of naked exposure of racismās persistence in the U.S. should not lead us to deny the successes of the civil rights revolution. Black Americans are now included in the public domain of the nation. They form an integral part of its political life and an important component of its military, and they play an outsize role in its intellectual and cultural life. The black middle class is real, however tenuous its economic base and downwardly mobile its male children. The majority of white Americans have also undergone a radical transformation in their racial views, especially the young, who are arguably the most racially liberal group of whites anywhere in the world.
Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a Cleveland audience, noting that 98% of blacks in the city live in ghettos, July 1965.
PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
But the civil-rights movement failed to integrate black Americans into the private domain of American life. American communities and schools remain highly segregated. Measures of segregation at the metropolitan level have declined in some cities but remain high, and cities such as Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee have become far more segregated. Moreover, as Daniel Lichter of Cornell University and his co-authors show in a 2015 paper in the American Sociological Review, once we move down to the level to the neighborhoods where people actually meet and interact, there has been little or no change in the degree of separation of black and white families, and segregation between cities and suburbs has gotten worse.
Between 1985 and 2000, a higher percentage of black childrenāabout two-thirdsāgrew up in high-poverty segregated areas than in the period between 1955 and 1970, according to a 2009 Pew Trust study by the sociologist Patrick Sharkey of New York University. This not only influences the kind of schools they attend but all the other major factors accounting for their social mobility and life chances, such as health and life expectancy. Today the majority of black kids, including those from upper middle class families, experience downward mobility.
At 20.8%, the black poverty rate is 2.5 times the white rate. The wealth gap between blacks and whites has also worsened. In 2016 the net worth of white families, at $171,000, was almost 10 times greater than that of the typical black household. The Economic Policy Institute reports that between 2000 and 2018 the gap between black and white incomes worsened at every level.
Still more important in explaining todayās unrest is the persistence of a hard core of racist Americans who are still fervently committed to the countryās white supremacist traditionāand who have found their voice again in the reckless populist politics of the moment. The killing of George Floyd placed in stark relief the institutional and sociocultural forces that made it possible, even normal, as well as the abiding power of this other, once dominant America. What are its origins?
Marchers protest segregation at Davison's department store in Atlanta in 1961.
PHOTO: ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
America is the only modern nation that had slavery in its midst from the very beginning. The institution and its neo-slavery successor, Jim Crow, played a formative role in the countyās social, economic, ideological and cultural development, especially in how it came to define freedom and citizenship.
As the eminent Yale historian Edmund Morgan demonstrated, Americaās passion for freedom emerged in some substantial measure from the bosom of Virginian slavery. It is no accident that so many of the nationās revolutionary leaders and Founding Fathers were Virginians.
As in the slave system of ancient Athens, the American idea of freedom sprung from the cauldron of slavery in a seemingly contradictory way. It meant, on the one hand, liberation from tyranny, celebrated in the Declaration of Independence and the modern worldās first Bill of Rights, which were drawn from the philosophy of John Locke and English constitutional tradition.
Thomas Jefferson as painted by Rembrandt Peale, circa 1805.
PHOTO: U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
At the same time, however, freedom was defined by the power to dominate and degrade others. It was justified by seeing slaves as property, only partly human. In ancient Athens, slaves were considered two-footed beasts of burden; for Virginians and other Southerners, they were three-fifths human, a ācompromiseā enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. As Thomas Jefferson candidly acknowledged, slavery engendered among Virginians āthe most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.ā
Over time, with the expansion of political rights for poor whites, citizenship in the American South came to mean belonging to the āsuperiorā race, which defined blacks as the group that could never belong but whose necessary presence, for essential labor, defined the minimum condition of inclusion. After the Civil War, the radical Reconstruction movement recognized the need to incorporate blacks into the body politic and initially succeeded in doing so, but once federal forces withdrew and power was restored to the local Southern elite, there was a vicious program of suppression of both black freedoms and their access to land.
One of the defining features of slaveryāthe exclusion of slaves from any recognition as legitimate members of the communityāwas restored in the Jim Crow laws and the use of terrorist tactics by organization such as the Ku Klux Klan. For many poor whites, as W.E.B. DuBois observed, white supremacy became a psychological wage that compensated for their penury. Ordinary whites also greatly feared wage competition from blacks and saw the suppression of their freedom as one way of preventing it. The often ceremonial lynch mobs were as much an assertion of white supremacy, citizenship and belonging as they were primitive mechanisms of control and symbolic exclusion of blacks from the body politic.
A ācoloredā drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, 1939.
PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
This identification of citizenship with white supremacy eventually permeated all of America. European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, who were initially rejected for not being truly white, slowly became fully American in the course of their acceptance as whites, the Irish being the classic case as the historian Noel Ignatiev has shown. Once these immigrants had won acceptance, they fled to the suburbs or relentlessly excluded blacks from their own neighborhoods. In this respect, segregation, whatever its proximate causes, is one of the most potent legacies of slavery, racism and the Southern notion of citizenship.
The outsize influence of Southern politicians on Congress also nationalized their supremacist views at the federal level, even in left-leaning policies. Thus the condition for the passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal welfare programs was the exclusion from them of black farm laborers and domestic workersāthe great majority of black workers at the time.
Even now, the Southern influence persists. As the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote conclude in a 2001 paper for the Brookings Institution, a major reason that the U.S. lacks a European-style welfare state is āAmericaās troubled race relations.ā Opponents of redistribution, they argue, have historically used race-based rhetoric to oppose generous welfare policies and have succeeded in large part because the poor are disproportionately black.
As for politics writ large, Richard Nixonās āSouthern strategyā laid the foundation for todayās Republican Party, winning the allegiance of white Southerners who rejected the political successes of the civil-rights movement. The strategy led to one of the great realignments of modern American politics as Southern whites shifted from their traditional support of the Democratic Party to the once loathed party of Lincoln.
American police departments and prison systems were integral in the extension of the dehumanization and exclusion of blacks. American police departments have long seen their role as protectors of the dominant āgoodā people of their precincts against undesirable newcomers and outsiders. During the 19th century, the police were used by urban elites mainly to control the disorder of those considered āthe dangerous classes.ā They brutally harassed immigrant newcomers and were used as strikebreakers. This continued into the 20th century, when they violently controlled immigrant communities and even more savagely implemented prohibition laws.
A water cannon is used on young African-Americans in Birmingham, Ala. during a protest against segregation in May 1963.
PHOTO: FRANK ROCKSTROH/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
In the South, policing grew directly out of the slave patrol groups of the antebellum era. Their main initial roles were to control and discipline freed slaves and apply Jim Crow laws. Only slowly did more professional organizations grow out of this post-slavery system.
Elements of these early developments persist, especially in the attitudes of police toward minorities and immigrant communities. Those who are thought not to belong are too often viewed as an enemy to be controlled through show of force, a warrior mentality and an institutional culture that emphasizes internal solidarity and loyalty.
The higher rate of crime among a minority of urban blacks, herded into overcrowded ghettos with limited job opportunities and dysfunctional schools, offers easy justification for heavy-handed profiling and harassment. But we shouldnāt look past the underlying causes. In a 2019 study in the Journal of the National Medical Association, researchers at Boston University looked at data from 69 of the largest cities in the U.S. and found that a higher rate of fatal police shootings was significantly associated with higher degrees of racial segregation.
Police violence has become increasingly difficult to control, a result of the Supreme Courtās fateful 50-year-old doctrine of āqualified immunityā (protecting law-enforcement officials from being sued), the āblue wall of silenceā among police and the strong reluctance of juries to convict even the most egregious of bad cops: 99% of killings by police between 2013 and 2019 did not result in the killers being charged with a crime, according to research by Mapping Police Violence. Closely related to the disproportionate killing of blacks by police is the rise of mass incarceration in America since the early 1970s and the disparate imprisonment of black Americans, who make up about 40% of the nationās 2.3 million prisoners (not to mention the incredible 3.6 million on probation).
A view of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. African-Americans make up about 40% of the U.S. prison population.
PHOTO: WILLIAM WIDMER/REDUX PICTURES
How does a nation that celebrates freedom as the centerpiece of its civil religion end up as the most carceral state in the history of the world? As Rebecca Neusteter of the Vera Institute of Justice and her collaborators have shown, the racially biased enforcement practices of police are a major proximate factor accounting for high incarceration rates. The chronic propensity of the police to lock up those encountered and arrested for often minor offenses helps to explain why the nationās prisons remain so crowded, even as their overall population has declined modestly in recent years.
Beyond factors such as electoral politics, the war on drugs and public opinion, a growing number of social scientists have come to see the growth of the punitive modern carceral state as the continuation of a familiar post-emancipation pattern. As sociologist Christopher Muller of the University of California at Berkeley notes, āimprisonment has typically increased after periods when African-Americans made significant economic, social and political gains,ā most notably after Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement.
Between the horrifying supremacist throttling of George Floyd and the noble rage of young Americans against such historic evil, then, we see the two contrasting visions that have defined America. The former is now terrifyingly assertive after long being dismissed socially and politically and condemned to the fringes of civilized life; the foundational institutions and norms of the latter, liberal-constitutional tradition currently face their gravest assault in the modern history of the nation. It is hard to believe that the better angels of America will not prevail. But, in these times, it is naive not to be deeply worried.
ā Mr. Patterson is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His many books include āSlavery and Social Death,ā āFreedom in the Making of Western Cultureā and āThe Ordeal of Integration.ā
Despite great progress across two centuries, exclusion and injustice remain the reality for too many black Americans
By Orlando Patterson
June 5, 2020 11:55 am ET
One of the many ways, good and bad, in which America is truly exceptional is its experience of raceāits tortured embrace of black Americans and the paradoxical extremes in how it treats them. Race is the fulcrum upon which two radically different visions of America pivot. In the inhuman, banal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis we see the reactivated weight of the countryās darkest past. In the nationwide demonstration of young blacks and whites against it and other recent racist killings, we see the outraged, countervailing force of that other America which Martin Luther King Jr. imagined as the ābeloved community.ā
The despair of so many Americans in this moment of naked exposure of racismās persistence in the U.S. should not lead us to deny the successes of the civil rights revolution. Black Americans are now included in the public domain of the nation. They form an integral part of its political life and an important component of its military, and they play an outsize role in its intellectual and cultural life. The black middle class is real, however tenuous its economic base and downwardly mobile its male children. The majority of white Americans have also undergone a radical transformation in their racial views, especially the young, who are arguably the most racially liberal group of whites anywhere in the world.
Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a Cleveland audience, noting that 98% of blacks in the city live in ghettos, July 1965.
PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
But the civil-rights movement failed to integrate black Americans into the private domain of American life. American communities and schools remain highly segregated. Measures of segregation at the metropolitan level have declined in some cities but remain high, and cities such as Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee have become far more segregated. Moreover, as Daniel Lichter of Cornell University and his co-authors show in a 2015 paper in the American Sociological Review, once we move down to the level to the neighborhoods where people actually meet and interact, there has been little or no change in the degree of separation of black and white families, and segregation between cities and suburbs has gotten worse.
Between 1985 and 2000, a higher percentage of black childrenāabout two-thirdsāgrew up in high-poverty segregated areas than in the period between 1955 and 1970, according to a 2009 Pew Trust study by the sociologist Patrick Sharkey of New York University. This not only influences the kind of schools they attend but all the other major factors accounting for their social mobility and life chances, such as health and life expectancy. Today the majority of black kids, including those from upper middle class families, experience downward mobility.
At 20.8%, the black poverty rate is 2.5 times the white rate. The wealth gap between blacks and whites has also worsened. In 2016 the net worth of white families, at $171,000, was almost 10 times greater than that of the typical black household. The Economic Policy Institute reports that between 2000 and 2018 the gap between black and white incomes worsened at every level.
Still more important in explaining todayās unrest is the persistence of a hard core of racist Americans who are still fervently committed to the countryās white supremacist traditionāand who have found their voice again in the reckless populist politics of the moment. The killing of George Floyd placed in stark relief the institutional and sociocultural forces that made it possible, even normal, as well as the abiding power of this other, once dominant America. What are its origins?
Marchers protest segregation at Davison's department store in Atlanta in 1961.
PHOTO: ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
America is the only modern nation that had slavery in its midst from the very beginning. The institution and its neo-slavery successor, Jim Crow, played a formative role in the countyās social, economic, ideological and cultural development, especially in how it came to define freedom and citizenship.
As the eminent Yale historian Edmund Morgan demonstrated, Americaās passion for freedom emerged in some substantial measure from the bosom of Virginian slavery. It is no accident that so many of the nationās revolutionary leaders and Founding Fathers were Virginians.
As in the slave system of ancient Athens, the American idea of freedom sprung from the cauldron of slavery in a seemingly contradictory way. It meant, on the one hand, liberation from tyranny, celebrated in the Declaration of Independence and the modern worldās first Bill of Rights, which were drawn from the philosophy of John Locke and English constitutional tradition.
Thomas Jefferson as painted by Rembrandt Peale, circa 1805.
PHOTO: U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
At the same time, however, freedom was defined by the power to dominate and degrade others. It was justified by seeing slaves as property, only partly human. In ancient Athens, slaves were considered two-footed beasts of burden; for Virginians and other Southerners, they were three-fifths human, a ācompromiseā enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. As Thomas Jefferson candidly acknowledged, slavery engendered among Virginians āthe most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.ā
Over time, with the expansion of political rights for poor whites, citizenship in the American South came to mean belonging to the āsuperiorā race, which defined blacks as the group that could never belong but whose necessary presence, for essential labor, defined the minimum condition of inclusion. After the Civil War, the radical Reconstruction movement recognized the need to incorporate blacks into the body politic and initially succeeded in doing so, but once federal forces withdrew and power was restored to the local Southern elite, there was a vicious program of suppression of both black freedoms and their access to land.
One of the defining features of slaveryāthe exclusion of slaves from any recognition as legitimate members of the communityāwas restored in the Jim Crow laws and the use of terrorist tactics by organization such as the Ku Klux Klan. For many poor whites, as W.E.B. DuBois observed, white supremacy became a psychological wage that compensated for their penury. Ordinary whites also greatly feared wage competition from blacks and saw the suppression of their freedom as one way of preventing it. The often ceremonial lynch mobs were as much an assertion of white supremacy, citizenship and belonging as they were primitive mechanisms of control and symbolic exclusion of blacks from the body politic.
A ācoloredā drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, 1939.
PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
This identification of citizenship with white supremacy eventually permeated all of America. European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, who were initially rejected for not being truly white, slowly became fully American in the course of their acceptance as whites, the Irish being the classic case as the historian Noel Ignatiev has shown. Once these immigrants had won acceptance, they fled to the suburbs or relentlessly excluded blacks from their own neighborhoods. In this respect, segregation, whatever its proximate causes, is one of the most potent legacies of slavery, racism and the Southern notion of citizenship.
The outsize influence of Southern politicians on Congress also nationalized their supremacist views at the federal level, even in left-leaning policies. Thus the condition for the passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal welfare programs was the exclusion from them of black farm laborers and domestic workersāthe great majority of black workers at the time.
Even now, the Southern influence persists. As the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote conclude in a 2001 paper for the Brookings Institution, a major reason that the U.S. lacks a European-style welfare state is āAmericaās troubled race relations.ā Opponents of redistribution, they argue, have historically used race-based rhetoric to oppose generous welfare policies and have succeeded in large part because the poor are disproportionately black.
As for politics writ large, Richard Nixonās āSouthern strategyā laid the foundation for todayās Republican Party, winning the allegiance of white Southerners who rejected the political successes of the civil-rights movement. The strategy led to one of the great realignments of modern American politics as Southern whites shifted from their traditional support of the Democratic Party to the once loathed party of Lincoln.
American police departments and prison systems were integral in the extension of the dehumanization and exclusion of blacks. American police departments have long seen their role as protectors of the dominant āgoodā people of their precincts against undesirable newcomers and outsiders. During the 19th century, the police were used by urban elites mainly to control the disorder of those considered āthe dangerous classes.ā They brutally harassed immigrant newcomers and were used as strikebreakers. This continued into the 20th century, when they violently controlled immigrant communities and even more savagely implemented prohibition laws.
A water cannon is used on young African-Americans in Birmingham, Ala. during a protest against segregation in May 1963.
PHOTO: FRANK ROCKSTROH/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
In the South, policing grew directly out of the slave patrol groups of the antebellum era. Their main initial roles were to control and discipline freed slaves and apply Jim Crow laws. Only slowly did more professional organizations grow out of this post-slavery system.
Elements of these early developments persist, especially in the attitudes of police toward minorities and immigrant communities. Those who are thought not to belong are too often viewed as an enemy to be controlled through show of force, a warrior mentality and an institutional culture that emphasizes internal solidarity and loyalty.
The higher rate of crime among a minority of urban blacks, herded into overcrowded ghettos with limited job opportunities and dysfunctional schools, offers easy justification for heavy-handed profiling and harassment. But we shouldnāt look past the underlying causes. In a 2019 study in the Journal of the National Medical Association, researchers at Boston University looked at data from 69 of the largest cities in the U.S. and found that a higher rate of fatal police shootings was significantly associated with higher degrees of racial segregation.
Police violence has become increasingly difficult to control, a result of the Supreme Courtās fateful 50-year-old doctrine of āqualified immunityā (protecting law-enforcement officials from being sued), the āblue wall of silenceā among police and the strong reluctance of juries to convict even the most egregious of bad cops: 99% of killings by police between 2013 and 2019 did not result in the killers being charged with a crime, according to research by Mapping Police Violence. Closely related to the disproportionate killing of blacks by police is the rise of mass incarceration in America since the early 1970s and the disparate imprisonment of black Americans, who make up about 40% of the nationās 2.3 million prisoners (not to mention the incredible 3.6 million on probation).
A view of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. African-Americans make up about 40% of the U.S. prison population.
PHOTO: WILLIAM WIDMER/REDUX PICTURES
How does a nation that celebrates freedom as the centerpiece of its civil religion end up as the most carceral state in the history of the world? As Rebecca Neusteter of the Vera Institute of Justice and her collaborators have shown, the racially biased enforcement practices of police are a major proximate factor accounting for high incarceration rates. The chronic propensity of the police to lock up those encountered and arrested for often minor offenses helps to explain why the nationās prisons remain so crowded, even as their overall population has declined modestly in recent years.
Beyond factors such as electoral politics, the war on drugs and public opinion, a growing number of social scientists have come to see the growth of the punitive modern carceral state as the continuation of a familiar post-emancipation pattern. As sociologist Christopher Muller of the University of California at Berkeley notes, āimprisonment has typically increased after periods when African-Americans made significant economic, social and political gains,ā most notably after Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement.
Between the horrifying supremacist throttling of George Floyd and the noble rage of young Americans against such historic evil, then, we see the two contrasting visions that have defined America. The former is now terrifyingly assertive after long being dismissed socially and politically and condemned to the fringes of civilized life; the foundational institutions and norms of the latter, liberal-constitutional tradition currently face their gravest assault in the modern history of the nation. It is hard to believe that the better angels of America will not prevail. But, in these times, it is naive not to be deeply worried.
ā Mr. Patterson is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His many books include āSlavery and Social Death,ā āFreedom in the Making of Western Cultureā and āThe Ordeal of Integration.ā
The Myth of Systemic Police Racism
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But thereās no evidence of widespread racial bias.
By Heather Mac Donald
June 2, 2020 1:44 pm ET
A demonstrator kneels before a police line in Washington, May 31.
PHOTO: SAMUEL CORUM/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
George Floydās death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is ātragically, painfully, maddeningly ānormal.ā ā Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a ānew normal,ā in which bigotry no longer āinfects our institutions and our hearts.ā
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from ābad policeā and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can āmake it home.ā That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.
Rioters Torch the Rule of Law
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the āstain . . . of fundamental, institutional racismā on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floydās arrest, it isnāt representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines āunarmedā broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18Ā½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continuedāa 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is āno significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,ā they concluded.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floydās death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of āThe War on Cops,ā (Encounter Books, 2016).
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But thereās no evidence of widespread racial bias.
By Heather Mac Donald
June 2, 2020 1:44 pm ET
A demonstrator kneels before a police line in Washington, May 31.
PHOTO: SAMUEL CORUM/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
George Floydās death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is ātragically, painfully, maddeningly ānormal.ā ā Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a ānew normal,ā in which bigotry no longer āinfects our institutions and our hearts.ā
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from ābad policeā and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can āmake it home.ā That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the āstain . . . of fundamental, institutional racismā on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floydās arrest, it isnāt representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines āunarmedā broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18Ā½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continuedāa 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is āno significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,ā they concluded.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floydās death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of āThe War on Cops,ā (Encounter Books, 2016).
mando
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The Long Reach of Racism in the U.S.
Despite great progress across two centuries, exclusion and injustice remain the reality for too many black Americans
By Orlando Patterson
June 5, 2020 11:55 am ET
In the South, policing grew directly out of the slave patrol groups of the antebellum era. Their main initial roles were to control and discipline freed slaves and apply Jim Crow laws. Only slowly did more professional organizations grow out of this post-slavery system.
Elements of these early developments persist, especially in the attitudes of police toward minorities and immigrant communities. Those who are thought not to belong are too often viewed as an enemy to be controlled through show of force, a warrior mentality and an institutional culture that emphasizes internal solidarity and loyalty.
The higher rate of crime among a minority of urban blacks, herded into overcrowded ghettos with limited job opportunities and dysfunctional schools, offers easy justification for heavy-handed profiling and harassment. But we shouldnāt look past the underlying causes. In a 2019 study in the Journal of the National Medical Association, researchers at Boston University looked at data from 69 of the largest cities in the U.S. and found that a higher rate of fatal police shootings was significantly associated with higher degrees of racial segregation.
Police violence has become increasingly difficult to control, a result of the Supreme Courtās fateful 50-year-old doctrine of āqualified immunityā (protecting law-enforcement officials from being sued), the āblue wall of silenceā among police and the strong reluctance of juries to convict even the most egregious of bad cops: 99% of killings by police between 2013 and 2019 did not result in the killers being charged with a crime, according to research by Mapping Police Violence. Closely related to the disproportionate killing of blacks by police is the rise of mass incarceration in America since the early 1970s and the disparate imprisonment of black Americans, who make up about 40% of the nationās 2.3 million prisoners (not to mention the incredible 3.6 million on probation).
A view of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. African-Americans make up about 40% of the U.S. prison population.
PHOTO: WILLIAM WIDMER/REDUX PICTURES
How does a nation that celebrates freedom as the centerpiece of its civil religion end up as the most carceral state in the history of the world? As Rebecca Neusteter of the Vera Institute of Justice and her collaborators have shown, the racially biased enforcement practices of police are a major proximate factor accounting for high incarceration rates. The chronic propensity of the police to lock up those encountered and arrested for often minor offenses helps to explain why the nationās prisons remain so crowded, even as their overall population has declined modestly in recent years.
Beyond factors such as electoral politics, the war on drugs and public opinion, a growing number of social scientists have come to see the growth of the punitive modern carceral state as the continuation of a familiar post-emancipation pattern. As sociologist Christopher Muller of the University of California at Berkeley notes, āimprisonment has typically increased after periods when African-Americans made significant economic, social and political gains,ā most notably after Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement.
Between the horrifying supremacist throttling of George Floyd and the noble rage of young Americans against such historic evil, then, we see the two contrasting visions that have defined America. The former is now terrifyingly assertive after long being dismissed socially and politically and condemned to the fringes of civilized life; the foundational institutions and norms of the latter, liberal-constitutional tradition currently face their gravest assault in the modern history of the nation. It is hard to believe that the better angels of America will not prevail. But, in these times, it is naive not to be deeply worried.
ā Mr. Patterson is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His many books include āSlavery and Social Death,ā āFreedom in the Making of Western Cultureā and āThe Ordeal of Integration.ā
I agreed with this once I did a bit of research into chain gangs that were so prominent across the Deep South at one time. Prisoners were even forced to collect the camps urine out put for sale. While Mr Patterson doesnāt fall into the race hustler category, he earns a good chunk of his income on elevating black issues. He is also wrong about the Irish. England dumped Irish slaves into the new world in huge numbers. It was infinitely easier for the Irish, Italians, Greeks, etc. to eventually integrate,
I have yet to see or hear anyone say that only 2 cops were white.
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planomateo
Member
Dumbfounded.
planomateo
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planomateo
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rocknthefreeworld
Member
The only way to defeat racism is to be racist. Duh.
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mando
Member
I may have already said this in another post but I will state it again if I have, I sure hope the adults in these areas show up soon. At this point I feel I have to defend what I say when I make that statement. I am NOT promoting police violence against minorities. I am saying cooler heads need to prevail and more realistic unemotional approaches need to be worked out. Really, do away with the police departments?
Also, I am sorry but when you riot and loot you lose credibility because you are breaking the law and hurting others doing it. Yes even minority owned businesses. That is how I see things through my old eyes. I also think there are absolutely instances of police brutality even to the point of murdering some as occurred with George Floyd. However you do not then turn around and shut down police departments because of what I believe to be a small minority of policemen. You hold those individuals accountable even to the point of prosecution. Ok rant over....
Also, I am sorry but when you riot and loot you lose credibility because you are breaking the law and hurting others doing it. Yes even minority owned businesses. That is how I see things through my old eyes. I also think there are absolutely instances of police brutality even to the point of murdering some as occurred with George Floyd. However you do not then turn around and shut down police departments because of what I believe to be a small minority of policemen. You hold those individuals accountable even to the point of prosecution. Ok rant over....
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XXL TideFan
Honest discussion must include the police problem. There is no way that my little city needed a new huge Ford 4 wheel drive vehicle that had to have cost north of $100K to patrol the streets. I agree that many areas need that to deploy for situations similar to recent events, the areas usually needing it are hamstrung by the liberal/socialist that caused the issues to begin with. Police have near blanket immunity from their actions, that has needed changing for quite a while. All the cops that I have known or interacted with have a Judge Dredd predilection vs Joe Friday.
rocknthefreeworld
Member
Escalation of the drug/crime war has caused a lot of the more major problems. It creates an us vs them outlook from police and the areas they patrol in a lot of places, especially once the armor and riot gear roll out.
To me, the biggest change that flat needs to happen ASAP is body cams that are automatically reviewed by an independent group for all interactions that have complaints, weapons discharge of any type, or in cases of resisting arrest. There should also be repercussions for cams that are off during those times and officers who have issues with theirs "not working" repeatedly.
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