Race Riots, Journalists and Academics

From a syndicated column by Walter Williams:

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character, and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don’t bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let’s look at it.

“A Clash of Police Policies,” a column written by Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics:

Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice [Earl] Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today’s crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit’s deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts.

In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it’s close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today, over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the “legacy of slavery” argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing.

Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support “a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.”

It’s easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.

In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, “One thing for thee and another for me.”

And Riots Accomplish What?

Milwaukee Riots: Race Hustler Spouts the Usual Clichés

Race hustlers like Rainey claim to represent the community, but in fact lots of blacks condemn violence, and even refuse to blame whitey for the problems of the inner city.

A good sample of views from the Sherman Park area (where the recent riots happened) can be found in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Yes, some of the people there give standard, politically correct answers:

Ceasar Stinson, a 44-year old who grew up in the Sherman Park area, jumped in the conversation. He said the violence and reaction to the killing — regardless of the circumstances surrounding the shooting — are symptoms of deeper issues and historical white supremacy.

“There’s a historical hatred and fear of African-American men,” he said. “Police have it. We have it. … We have a fear and hatred for one another.”

Others are more willing to point to problems in the black community:

Like many others contemplating what happened, Yvette McFarland said one of the main solutions starts at home.

“Parents need to parent their kids,” she said. “Parents need to teach biblical morals and values.”

She raised two children in the area in the 1990s before moving to Wauwatosa.

“I’m just sad to see how our black community is in such a rage,” she said.

Nearby, a pastor debated a longtime resident about the actions of those responsible for torching four buildings.

“I think it’s wrong,” said the Rev. Jeffery Hawkins of the Church of Living God and West Side Missionary Baptist Church. “It’s senseless.”

Hawkins is a postal carrier, and the gas station that burned was the last stop on his route for 10 years. He knows the neighborhood and the people well.

“Everyone wants to be politically correct instead of spiritually right,” he said. “You’re upset because police are killing black men … and you’re saying ‘Aw, the white man is keeping me down.’ But if you don’t change your way of thinking, you’re dooming yourself. ... You’ve got too much hate. You have to overcome hate with love.”

Hawkins, who is African-American, said his children are in college and that one of the reasons African-Americans in Milwaukee might not have opportunities is because they haven’t learned to read. “My wife and I sit down and read with (our kids). We have to teach them.”

Regardless, the reaction of the community was heartening. As one community resident explained:

“The good thing is that to get up early in the morning, a Sunday morning, and watch so many people come out to help out, just to help out because it’s the right thing to do — it proves not just to this community, (but) to the city, to the world, that we have more good in this world than we have bad. We just tend to focus on the bad.”

Media Silence About Race Riots

From Thomas Sowell, writing in Front Page Magazine:

When I first saw a book with the title, “White Girl Bleed A Lot” by Colin Flaherty, I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.

That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I added to the revised edition of my own book, “Intellectuals and Society,” published this year.

That phrase was spoken by a member of a mob of young blacks who attacked whites at random at a Fourth of July celebration in Milwaukee last year. What I was appalled to learn, in the course of my research, was that such race riots have occurred in other cities across the United States in recent years — and that the national mainstream media usually ignore these riots.

Where the violence is too widespread and too widely known locally to be ignored, both the local media and public officials often describe what happened as unspecified “young people” attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. But videos of the attacks often reveal both the racial nature of these attacks and the racial hostility expressed by the attackers.

Are race riots not news?

Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.

Such mob attacks have become so frequent in Chicago that officials promoting conventions there have recently complained to the mayor that the city is going to lose business if such widespread violence is not brought under control.

But neither these officials nor the mayor nor most of the media use that four-letter word, “race.” It would not be politically correct or politically convenient in an election year.

Reading Colin Flaherty’s book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities across America.

Flaherty’s previous writings have won him praise and awards, but this book has been met largely with silence or abuse. However much ignoring the ugly realities that his book reveals may serve the interests of the media or politicians, a cover-up is a huge disservice to everyone else — whether black, white or whatever.

Even the young hoodlums who launch these mass attacks on strangers would be better off to be stopped now, rather than continue on a path of escalating violence that can lead to a lifetime behind bars or to the execution chamber.

The dangers to the nation as a whole are an even bigger problem. The truth has a way of eventually coming out, in spite of media silence and politicians’ spin. If the truth becomes widely known, and a white backlash follows, turning one-way race riots into two-way race riots, then a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge can spiral out of control, as has already happened in too many other countries around the world.

Most blacks and most whites in the United States today get along with each other. But what is chilling is how often in history racial or ethnic groups that co-existed peacefully for generations — often as neighbors — have suddenly turned on each other with lethal violence.

In the middle of the 20th century, Sri Lanka had a level of mutual respect and even friendship between its majority and minority communities that was rightly held up to the world as a model. Yet this situation degenerated over the years into polarization and violence that escalated into a civil war that lasted for decades, with unspeakable atrocities on both sides.

All it took were clever demagogues and gullible followers. We already have both. What it will take to nip in the bud the small but widely spreading race riots will be some serious leadership in many quarters and that rarest of all things in politics, honesty.

Race hustlers and mob inciters like Al Sharpton represent such polarizing forces in America today. Yet Sharpton has become a White House adviser, and Attorney General Eric Holder has been photographed literally embracing him.

Marquette, of course, has been implicated in this politically correct conspiracy of silence, refusing to reveal the race of offenders who have threatened and robbed people near campus.

None of this helps black people at all. It simply engenders cynicism about the media (which conceal important information) while being completely ineffective at convincing people that black youth are no more likely to commit crime than white youth. Everybody knows that is untrue, and it poisons the racial environment to have a class of people whose thuggish actions get special protection from powerful politically correct interests.

And of course, no progress can be made to solve the problem when people deny that there is a problem.