Race and School Discipline: The Leftist Fantasy

Now that Heather McDonald has received the honor of being shouted down and shut up by raving leftist campus bigots, it’s time to review another of her articles.

McDonald, one of our favorite scholars on criminal justice issues, is a “law and order” person. She believes that people who commit crimes should be punished. Since blacks commit proportionately many more crimes than whites, this makes her a racist in the eyes of the politically correct.

Remember, a key doctrine of the politically correct is that anything bad that happens to black people must be the result of white racism.

This past Christmas season, she noted the usual mall flash mobs, mostly consisting of black kids, and remarked on the connection to school discipline. Some key points from her essay:

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes.

Of course, while the media assiduously ignore the racial component of flash mob violence, they can’t resist showing the video. And that tells the story.

That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

. . .

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

. . .

Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths. Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register.

Read the entire article.

Of course, the real “school to prison pipeline” is what happens when schools teach kids they can engage in disruptive and even violent behavior with zero or trivial consequences. That is, unless it becomes the “school to getting yourself killed pipeline” for people like Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, who somehow thought they could attack an armed individual with impunity.

This whole business reveals the dirty little secret of the race hustlers and the social justice warriors. Deep down, they would rather articulate grievances than make things better for black kids. Of course, they won’t admit this (not even to themselves), but to face the issue squarely, they would have to admit that disorder in the black community creates these kinds of conditions in schools, and that white racism has virtually nothing to do with it.

And if they admit that, their whole world comes crashing down.

And Riots Accomplish What?

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.

Do Democrats Really Oppose Gun Violence?

From the Wall Street Journal:

That didn’t take long. Right after Orlando, President Obama promised he would “spare no effort to determine what—if any—inspiration or association” had sent Omar Mateen on his murderous spree.

Now, just one week later, his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, tried to have the Islamist “inspirations” and “associations” Mateen invoked scrubbed from the transcripts of the 911 calls released to the public—before being forced to back down on Monday. No one should be surprised. The impulse to edit out anything that confirms acts of terror are acts of war is fully consistent with standard operating procedure these past eight years.

And if Hillary Clinton is elected in November, it will be the same for the next four.

Like the president, Mrs. Clinton has used Orlando to relaunch the liberal offensive on the “gun lobby.” She promises “to do everything” to take “weapons of war off our streets.” She further calls for an “intelligence surge.”

Tough stuff, right? Unfortunately, the moment any of these efforts run up against political correctness, they will almost certainly collapse under liberal pressure. How do we know? There is no better example than the post-9/11 experience of New York under Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Mr. Kelly began his second stint as New York’s top cop on Jan. 1, 2002, when the city was still clearing debris from the Twin Towers. His charge looked impossible: Prevent another terror attack, and maintain the progress against gun violence begun under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Over the next 12 years the finest police force in America did just that. In so doing, Mr. Kelly pulled off what President Obama and Hillary Clinton now claim are their post-Orlando priorities—a full-fledged assault on gun violence, and “smarter” policies to identify terrorists before they strike.

Here’s the rub. The secret to New York’s success wasn’t just Mr. Kelly. It was also Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Bloomberg was a liberal rarity, a pol who would not throw his cops under the bus when successful policies produced politically inconvenient results.

Start with guns. Under Mr. Kelly, police expanded a tactic known as stop-and-frisk. Here’s a better way to think about it: gun control for bad guys.

Cops would be proactive. When they spotted someone behaving suspiciously, he would be stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked. Often police found an illegal weapon.

The gun control was not limited to the thousands of guns taken off the streets this way. Because the bad guys knew they might be frisked, they started leaving their guns at home. New York became America’s safest big city.

How was this success greeted? The cops found themselves denounced as racists, because the stops of black men were disproportionate to their percentage of the general population (but not disproportionate to suspect descriptions). The activists sued; an anti-cop federal judge egged them on; and Bill de Blasio made “racial profiling” by police a key campaign point in his successful run for mayor in 2013.

Never mind that as a result of the NYPD’s approach, thousands of young black and Hispanic lives were saved.

Alas, it’s the same sad story for the cause of better intelligence. Under Mr. Kelly, police set up a demographics unit. The Associated Press would win a Pulitzer for a sensationalist series of stories falsely implying it was about blanket spying on Muslims. In fact, the unit was about getting smart—learning where, for example, terrorists such as the Tsarnaev brothers might look for shelter had they made it to New York (as they’d planned) after bombing the Boston marathon.

Or what about the 2007 NYPD report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat”? Here’s a sentence from the first paragraph of the executive summary: “Rather than being directed from al-Qaeda abroad, these plots have been conceptualized and planned by ‘unremarkable’ local residents/citizens who sought to attack their country of residence, utilizing al-Qaeda as their inspiration and ideological reference point.”

Substitute “ISIS” for “al-Qaeda” and these words today look prophetic.

So how did the liberal world react to this effort to smarten up? In January, the de Blasio administration agreed to pull the report from the NYPD website as part of a settlement with Muslim groups who had sued. Two years earlier the NYPD had disbanded the demographics unit, also after much litigation and pressure.

Bottom line: when stopping violence collides with political correctness, Democrats will opt for political correctness.

Indeed, the entire liberal push for gun control is the result of cultural bias. Liberals stereotype “gun nuts” as middle aged white males, living in rural areas, listening to country music, driving pickup trucks and voting Republican. Those are the gun owners least likely to actually shoot a person, but they are “the other” in the minds of the secular urban liberal elites.

On issues like this, liberals will sacrifice the welfare of ordinary black people to pursue an ideological agenda. They don’t like prisons, but their campaign against “mass incarceration” is a campaign to put on the street criminals who will mostly victimize black people. Likewise, their campaign against discipline in the nation’s schools inflicts little harm on kids in affluent suburbs.

This is the sort of thing that happens when the cultural biases of a group, and not sober policy analysis, drives their politics.

Do Black Lives Matter to “Black Lives Matter”?

From National Review, a discussion of the recent dismissal of charges against cop Edward Nero in Baltimore. Key part of the article:

We are now more than one year removed from Gray’s death. In that time, hundreds more black men have died in the course of dramatic crime spikes in major American cities. At the same time, in many of those same cities, police have made fewer arrests, executed fewer stops, and confiscated fewer weapons. At least one prominent skeptic is now asserting that the so-called “Ferguson effect” is the “leading hypothesis” to explain the crime surge, and statistical site FiveThirtyEight has done more than anyone to document its existence in Chicago.

There is a chance that the Nero verdict will strike at least a small blow for sanity and reason, but it’s more likely that the outcome will cause Black Lives Matter and its sympathizers to redouble their efforts. As soon as the decision came down, there was an ugly scene outside the courthouse in Baltimore as protesters chased and surrounded Nero’s family — people unquestionably innocent of any wrongdoing.

No one believes that every single police officer is a person of integrity. And certainly no one with any sense believes that all police are law-abiding. When there is probable cause to believe that an officer has committed a crime, they should face prosecution to the same extent as any other citizen. But when politicians respond to riots with indictments — and then when activists respond to acquittals with chants of “no justice, no peace” — it is certainly understandable that police feel besieged.

Black Lives Matter activists and their white-progressive enablers seem not to care. In the rough calculus of social justice, it appears that lives taken by civilians matter far less than lives taken by police, and if hundreds more have to die to save the few, then so be it. After all, isn’t there an old saying about omelettes and eggs that applies?

Officer Nero rightly walks free. Now would be the ideal time to rethink the anti-police witch-hunt, but I won’t hold my breath. The narrative of police oppression is too fixed in the leftist mind, and progressive elites still have too much to gain by keeping it that way.

Black Lives Matter, quite simply, only seems to care about the lives of blacks shot by cops. And it doesn’t seem to matter to them whether the cop was at fault or not. He’s white, therefore, he’s guilty.

Quite simply, these race hustlers would rather have a series of grievances than to save black lives. Black lives only matter to them if their loss promotes a political agenda.

And who is the judge who let Nero off, rejecting the unfounded theory under which he was prosecuted? His name is Barry Williams. Not all black folks are race hustlers.