Lying to Black People

From Andrew Klavan, whose videos are great, but who’s also good when he chooses to be a columnist:

Leftists — aided by our corrupt news media — are past masters of replacing truth with narrative. Ninety-seven percent of scientists believe in catastrophic man-made climate change. Women are paid 77 cents on the dollar. These statements are indefensible lies, but when you have a leftist press trained in leftist universities to repeat the assertions of leftist politicians, it’s easy to make these “facts” part of what ordinary people think they know.

Especially impressive is the way in which leftists manage to bake dishonesty into the language itself. Take the repellent phrase “objectifying women,” which is used to support the equally repellent philosophy of feminism. The phrase essentially asserts that the normal male sex drive, with its emphasis on visual cues, is somehow in and of itself immoral, that it’s wrong and unfair for guys to desire the beautiful Giselle Bundchen, say, more than the dumpy Lena Dunham. Men, simply by being as God made them, are in some sense doing wrong — and if you fight back against this calumny, you are accused of “man-splaining.” Well, I intend to continue man-splaining until feminists begin to girl-understand.

When it comes to the problems of black Americans, the left outdoes itself in the art of deception. Virtually every assertion of the violent Black Lives Matter hate movement is a falsehood. Even the name of this vicious collection of groups is offensive. When challenged by those who respond with “All Lives Matter,” the BLM people thug-splain that what they really meant was “Black Lives Matter too.” But this assumes that white people don’t know this, that blacks in this country are treated as if their lives matter less than others.

The facts tell a different story. In about 85% of crimes involving whites and blacks, blacks were the attackers, whites the victims. Racial hatred of whites is at least — at least — as virulent among blacks as racial hatred of blacks is among whites. Assertions that black people can’t be racist are just more lies.

And, of course, as anyone who follows the data knows, the assertions made by leftists from Barack Obama to the Justice Department on down that police harass or over-police blacks always — always — fail to take into account the massive difference in the crime rates between black and white communities. When you consider that between 1980 and 2008 the black 13% of the population committed 52% of the nation’s murders, the phrase “racial profiling” is revealed to be what it always was: another leftist lie baked into the language, a nasty way of describing ordinary, heads-up police work.

In Milwaukee this weekend, blacks rioted after police shot and killed a fleeing suspect who was brandishing a stolen gun. The racist rioters targeted white people for beat-downs as if “whites,” whatever that means, were to blame. In Democrat-owned-and-operated Chicago, meanwhile, 65 people were murdered in July alone. No need to ask what color the victims and killers were. Only 3.5% of Chicago murders are committed by whites, 4.6% of the victims are white, just about all the rest of the murderers and the dead are either black or, to a lesser extent, Hispanic. No riots in Chicago though. What would the rioters have said: “We demand we take responsibility for our own lives!” I don’t think so.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder is famous for claiming that we as a nation need to have an “honest conversation about race.”  That, in fact, would be the last thing Holder would want.

He and his leftist buddies want to berate whites about  “white privilege” and “institutional racism.”  They are prepared to label “racist” anybody who disagrees with them.

But in fact, an honest conversation is going on online.  Just check the comments sections of news stories about the recent riots in Milwaukee.  Don’t check conservative outlets: go to daily newspapers and TV stations.

Most whites are not about to feel guilty about slavery, nor about Jim Crow.  Those were deplorable, but are ancient history.  Most whites know they pay lots of taxes for schools and social programs, and that doesn’t seen to have made things better in the inner city.  They know they have not impregnated a black woman or girl and failed to marry her.  They know they have not assaulted or robbed or raped or killed a black person.

In short, if Holder actually talked to a representative sample of whites who were bold enough to tell him what they really think, he would be thoroughly chastened.  In fact, if he had to step out of his politically correct bubble, he would freak.

Lack of School Discipline: Politically Correct Victimization of Poor and Black Students

We are not used to anybody in Milwaukee electronic media having the time or the resources to do real investigative journalism, so we are really impressed with this:



The politically correct liberals and the black activists who pander to them (like former Attorney General Eric Holder) like to pretend that black students are the victims of racist and excessively harsh school discipline.

The Departments of Justice and Education have explicitly embraced a “disparate impact” standard for judging racial discrimination. If any policy affects white and blacks to a different degree, that is presumed to be evidence of discrimination. The implicit assumption, in this case, is that black students and white students misbehave in equal numbers. But this is absurd. As Heather Mac Donald explains:

The feds have reached their conclusions, however, without answering the obvious question: Are black students suspended more often because they misbehave more? [Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan, of all people, should be aware of inner-city students’ self-discipline problems, having headed the Chicago school system before becoming secretary of education. Chicago’s minority youth murder one another with abandon. Since 2008, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed in the city, mostly by their peers, according to the Chicago Reporter; virtually all the perpetrators were black or Hispanic. In 2009, the widely publicized beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert by his fellow students sent Duncan hurrying back to the Windy City, accompanied by Attorney General Eric Holder, to try to contain the fallout in advance of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics (see “Chicago’s Real Crime Story,” Winter 2010). Between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white ones were arrested at school, mostly for battery; black students outnumbered whites by four to one. . . . So when Duncan lamented, upon the release of the 2012 discipline report, that “some of the worst [discipline] discrepancies are in my hometown of Chicago,” one could only ask: What does he expect?

Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.

In this, as in so many things, the white liberals and affluent black race hustlers have the huge luxury of avoiding the chaos their racial policies create. Ensconced in affluent suburbs, or in trendy urban neighborhoods with their kids in selective public schools, magnet schools or private schools, they can feel really good about their quest for racial justice. Other people’s kids (mostly poor and black) have to suffer the chaos.

The story is not new, even in the Wisconsin context, but such a good radio documentary is a surprise.

Which brings us to Producer Dan O’Donnell. He has been, for a while, second banana to Mark Belling at WISN radio, filling in occasionally and doing the news. While he may not be a candidate to displace the very talented Belling as an on-air personality (nor any other of Milwaukee’s excellent radio talkers), we expect this documentary to gain him some attention. Is there some media organization (perhaps a TV station in a larger market) that wants somebody to do long-form documentaries and investigative pieces?

We would not be surprised to see Dan O’Donnell moving up.

Leftists: Frail, Fragile Black Sensibilities

From Frontpage Magazine:

You can never be equal if you’re always angry and afraid.

There is a war on black people.

You hear about it from powerless black men like Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Al Sharpton. Black people can hardly leave the house without being shot by a cop for no reason at all. That’s what you hear from the activists of #BlackLivesMatter who illustrate the point by blocking traffic, harassing white people in restaurants and shoving elderly Democratic presidential candidates… without getting shot.

Black racist activists and their white leftist allies like to talk up “White Fragility” which means that white people are used to sitting down for brunch without having fat black women yell in their faces about genocide. Or as the official definition would have it, white people are so insulated from critical dialogues about race that they get upset when those women, who are actually working on their PhDs in critical race theory, loudly accuse them of white supremacy.

Or as the official definition goes, “call them out” for their white privilege.

That’s what Eric Holder meant when he accused Americans of being a “nation of cowards” when it comes to race. The former Attorney General and future drug cartel lobbyist was referencing “White Fragility.” White Americans were just fragile cowards unwilling to admit their guilty white privilege.

But if any group is fragile when it comes to racial dialogues, it isn’t white people. It certainly isn’t your average melanin-challenged cisgender heterosexual who has to dive into a safe space or demand censorship the moment that he encounters a dissenting view.

Political correctness is a culture of fragility for minority groups. Every member of a political identity group is a fragile survivor who veers from outraged protests to panic attacks. And any minority who doesn’t act like a manic-depressive twit is a traitor who is no longer a part of his “community.”

To be a true member of the political identity community is to be both angry and fragile.

The hysteria of #BlackLivesMatter embodies angry and fragile. Its members shriek that they’re being murdered on every corner while behaving in ways that would get anyone else murdered. Their racist tantrums are justified by their racial fragility. Their victimhood entitles them to victimize others.

That is black privilege which is based on false claims of black fragility.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose latest memoir sits on every good liberal’s bookshelf, takes black fragility to new lows. In his world, “black bodies” are constantly being victimized by “white supremacy.” Even the 9/11 firefighters are “not human to him” because they could “with no justification — shatter my body.”

Why would the FDNY set out to shatter Ta-Nehisi Coates’ body? The black fragility of Coates or #BlackLivesMatter isn’t rational, it’s racist. Its exaggerated sense of peril is really prejudice. When a white man suspects any random black man of being out to get him, he’s a racist. When a black man suspects any random white man of being out to get him, he’s just being #BlackLivesMatter.

White criminals go to jail. Black criminals are victims of “mass incarceration.” White criminals just get shot. But when black criminals are killed, it’s genocide.

A white man who knocks over a convenience store and then dies after getting in a fight with a cop, is a statistic. A black man inspires protests, t-shirts, riots, an Obama investigation and bad hashtags.

There’s a reason #BlackLivesMatter activists hate the rival hashtag #AllLivesMatter. If all lives matter equally, then the rationale for turning random black criminals like Michael Brown into causes comes apart. It’s only by elevating black lives above white lives that the facts of the case stop mattering and it’s only the cult of black fragility that turns the tribal emotions of its activists into a political cause.

Black fragility says that real black people are victims who are afraid all the time. Its protests are exercises in hysterical black fragility in which to be black is to constantly live on the edge of death. America is a white supremacist country out to kill black people, before electing some of them president.

And you are either a fragile angry black activist yelling in panic about the police being out to shoot you while blocking traffic on the interstate or you are one of the race traitors trying to get to work and wishing the activists would get out of the way and get a real job.

If you’re Latino, you’re supposed to spend all your time fearing that the Republicans will deport you, even if you’re not an illegal alien, but have been living in this country for generations. If you’re a female college student, you’re expected to retweet inflated campus rape statistics and treat all men as rapists. If you’re gay, you’re supposed to believe that if Ted Cruz is elected, he’ll send you to a gay labor camp.

Forget hope. Fragility is all about fear and hate. All black people are victims. All white people are oppressors. All women are victims and all men are oppressors. An oppressor can ally with the oppressed only if he recognizes his privileged role. Any space that doesn’t recognize this dynamic is a space of privilege.

And fragile minorities need a safe space to go back to after protesting those privileged spaces.

Social justice warrior activists define a space. Then they campaign to take it over while treating any criticism or opposition as a threat to their collective identities and their fragile politicized “bodies.”

The term “social justice warriors” is ironic because SJWs make a fetish of their fragility. Challenge an SJW and it immediately runs to a safe space to play victim. The SJW cyberbullies opponents when it has a numerical advantage on social media and whines about being terrorized to the press when it doesn’t.

Assertions of fragility end every discussion about SJW causes because fragility has become the cause. Every campaign is really about the fragility of the activist. The facts don’t matter and don’t even exist. Debate doesn’t happen. Criticism is something that activists “endure” on their way to achieving their goals. The focus is never on the ideas, but on the suffering of the activists as they struggle to be heard… despite enjoying a total monopoly on the news and editorial side of every mainstream media outlet.

Fragility isn’t a cause, it’s a cult. Like most cults, it fills true believers with the conviction that the outside world is evil and that they are vulnerable because of their unique sensitivity. Its safe spaces are cult spaces in which believers reinforce their programming and their fear of the outside world.

Like most cults, fragility doesn’t teach love. It programs hate and fear.

Black fragility is a racist cult that disrespects both white and black people. It tells black people that to be authentic they must be afraid. It tells white people that they are evil because of their skin color. It offers a blatantly racist narrative in which all black problems can be reduced to white people which is why it disregards the killing fields of gang violence to focus on black criminals who are shot by white cops.

Black fragility denies black equality. It says that black people can’t compete with white people for jobs or college admissions. That they can’t be expected to live by the same laws as white people. That minorities can’t even participate in dialogues on the same terms as everyone else without invoking fragility terms like “White Privilege” or demanding politically correct censorship so comprehensive that it’s indistinguishable from political repression.

We can have equality or fragility, racial progress or racial fragility, but we can’t have both.

Black people are not as fragile as #BlackLivesMatter, Eric Holder or Ta-Nehisi Coates would like white liberals to believe. It’s the cause of the leftist radical activists that is fragile because it depends on infantilizing black people and all political identity group minorities as victims who endure rather than achieve, who struggle rather than thrive, who need safe spaces even when they’re in the White House.

Black fragility is the real war on black people. It’s a war on their dignity and their self-sufficiency. It’s a war waged against their equality. You can never be equal if you’re always angry and afraid.

This mentality is very much present at Marquette, where leftist activists deemed “racist” a bunch of Tweets from Marquette students who failed to be impressed by a bunch of demonstrators who blocked traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. How dare they say things like “stop using history as an excuse and start taking responsibility for your lives and your future!” How could any black person possibly not faint hearing things like that?

Likewise, the same leftist activists complained about “discriminatory violence in the classroom.” Since nobody has been beaten up or physically attacked in a Marquette classroom recently (or even in the distant past, so far as we can remember) “violence” must mean merely racial grievance mongers hearing things with which they disagree.

Are they such wimps?

No, this is just another ploy for claiming victim status, and demanding the privileges that go with victim status on a college campus.

Not a Real Conversation

A Conversation About Race: Really?

From Mona Charen in National Review:

Eric Holder dismissed America as a “nation of cowards” because we wouldn’t, he argued, have a “national conversation” about race. It’s a slander wrapped in a farce. We talk of race unremittingly. That’s the farce. The slander is hydra-headed.

No honest conversation about race is possible when accusations of racism replace reasoned arguments. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who mentioned high rates of crime among black males, was rewarded with the racist label within minutes by some of those (The Atlantic, Slate) who presumably agree with Holder that we are too timid when discussing race.

Many American liberals are achingly nostalgic for old-fashioned racism. It offered them a helium high of moral superiority. It was deserved ... in 1967. But by perpetuating the fiction that modern America has not changed, they’ve become more than ridiculous, more even than grossly unjust, they’ve become dangerous. Look around you. The violence and bitterness that have followed the Zimmerman verdict were virtually ordered up by convicted slanderer Al Sharpton and his many imitators.

The Zimmerman case was complicated. Any fair-minded person could see that it was difficult to conclude that Zimmerman was not acting in self-defense (however unwise his initial actions may have been). But the racial-grievance industrial complex doesn’t permit complexity. Racial enmity is their living. Stirring feelings of victimization and injustice among blacks and, to a lesser extent, among other designated minorities is their delight.

When you consider the steady agitprop churned out by the racial-grievance industrial complex, it’s amazing that race relations aren’t worse. The RGI has circulated falsehoods about black voter “disenfranchisement” in the 2000 presidential election, about a spate of “racially motivated” arsons at black churches, about George W. Bush’s “indifference” to the lynching of a black man in Texas, about voter ID laws being a conspiracy to suppress the black vote, about Republicans opposing the civil rights act of 1964 (MSNBC recently ran a picture of George Wallace that ID’d him as a Republican), about “racial profiling” by New Jersey state troopers and about “racist” killings of black immigrants by New York cops. Each of these is an outright falsehood. There was zero voter disenfranchisement in 2000, George W. Bush signed the death warrant of the killer in Texas, Republicans were more in favor of the Voting Rights Act than Democrats, the tragic shootings of two black men in New York were mistakes, and on and on.

This is not to suggest that racism has been expunged from the heart of every American. But while the RGI bravely fights the battles of 1954, African-Americans (and not only they) face new challenges that require serious attention, free of the cant and destructive incitement that characterize the grievance mongers.

The RGI propounds the myth that the criminal justice system is indelibly racist. Young black males, we are told, are far more likely than whites to be arrested and to serve time in prison. When it is observed that a disproportionate share of offenders are black; that significant numbers of most city police forces are black; and that most victims are also black, we are invited to consider the ultimate proof — the glaring disparity in the penalties for powder and crack cocaine.

The federal criminal penalties for crack, passed in the 1980s, were a response to the devastation crack was causing in black neighborhoods. The huge spike in crime during the 1980s — and the vast victimization of inner city blacks — was primarily attributable to crack addiction. If it was racist to impose these penalties, why were members of the Congressional Black Caucus the first to champion the legislation? Heather MacDonald noted in City Journal that the laws on crystal meth have a similarly “disparate impact” on whites. “In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants (nearly as many as the crack defendants) were 54 percent white, 39 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black.”

From 1976 to 2004, 65 percent of executions involved whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of murders. Evidence of anti-white bias in the system? You could make such a case, and it would have as much validity as the manufactured panic about anti-black bias in America.

America continues to muddle along. Black/white unions comprised 11 percent of marriages in 2008. Black married couple families had an average income of $63,566 in 2010. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 — which is evidence of poor judgment, but clearly not of the kind of racist cauldron the grievance industry eternally conjures.