Eugene Kane Watch

The blog Ask Me Later now actually has a “Eugene Kane Watch.”

It’s a backhanded tribute to the black columnist at the Journal-Sentinel that anybody considers it worthwhile to have a “Eugene Kane Watch.”

We’ve tended to view Kane, whom we don’t read very often, as just another black hustler, expressing the kinds of opinions the white liberals running the Journal-Sentinel doubtless hired him to express.

Checking out his blog shows that this is sometimes the case. For example, he welcomes the vote of the Milwaukee Common Council requiring all firms doing business with the city to research and disclose any history of profiting from slavery.

The truth is that this is merely a racial hustle. Most firms with a long history and any interests at all in the South had some connection with slavery. In no case does that affect in any but the most trivial way how much they are worth nor how they do business today.

We’ve discussed this issue before.

Kane is also the “race man” in his discussion of the fact that President Bush has met with leaders of the NAACP.

It’s good to hear President Bush met with NAACP CEO Bruce Gordon and other black leaders at the White House this week. He also met with a group of African-American officials a few weeks ago. It shows he recognizes his image problems with many African-Americans need to be repaired. In previous years, he hasn’t had much dialog with the NAACP so I hope this is a positive sign of change.

Kane fails to mention the vicious attacks that the NAACP has made on the president, including (most notoriously) the 2000 presidential election ad that implied that Bush was somehow responsible for a racial murder in Texas.

The irresponsible behavior of the NAACP, in other words, has been the reason for their exile, and the organization’s election of a more moderate and conciliatory president has opened the possibility of a decent working relationship with the White House.

But where other issues are concerned, Kane can be a bit independent-minded.

He tends to stress how black people don’t have monolithic opinions, for example. A post titled “All blacks don’t think alike” deals with the caller response when Milwaukee station WMCS-AM (1290) discussed the execution of “Tookie” Williams.

About half of the callers felt Tookie should die because he hasn’t admitted his guilt in the deaths of four people in 1989. Others felt he should not be killed because he possessed the kind of street credibility necessary to convince young black males to reject a life of crime.

In another post, Kane links to an article on the blAckamericaweb.com attacking the Hollywood types who made a hero of “Tookie.” The author, Joseph C. Phillips, argues that:

Here again, wealthy celebrities are telling hard working, law-abiding citizens that the example offered by them is inadequate to save their communities; the models of competence, creativity and virtue that are alive in these neighborhoods are simply insufficient. No matter that hundreds of young people find the strength of character — the hope — to resist the gang life. No matter that many of the stars have themselves found the strength to rise out of the tough streets. All that means nothing as compared to the words and example of Tookie Williams.

That black people can be quite independent-minded isn’t news to us.

But it’s news to a lot of the politically correct crowd, for whom an article of faith is that all blacks think alike, and indeed all blacks think just like white liberals and leftists.

And if you don’t agree with the opinion of “all blacks,” you must be a racist.

Kane also sounds a bit conservative in some of his social views. Consider this:

With the recent death of Richard Pryor, some feel it might be time for more African-Americans to follow his example and never use the N-word again. This commentary is by Gregory Kane, a black conservative writer in Baltimore who makes a good case that too many blacks in hip-hop music like Kanye West and Snoop Dogg use the word way too much.

And again:

Not every black person liked Richard Pryor, either

Amid the praise for the late Richard Pryor, here’s a contrarian point of view by a black Daily News columnist who thinks Pryor’s legacy is flawed because of his vulgarity.

Again, all black people don’t think alike.

Indeed.

The mere fact that we have bothered to write this post is an admission that Kane, no matter how wrong-headed about so many issues, has indeed crossed a threshold.

He’s worth reading.

“Tookie” Williams’ Violent Heros

The late and (to sensible people) unlamented murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams was the hero of trendy activists and the Hollywood leftists.

Their claim was that, during more than two decades on death row, “Tookie” had rehabilitated himself, as shown by his having written children’s books warning youth away from gang violence.

When California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger reviewed the case, he didn’t buy the claim that Williams was really rehabilitated.

The following is from Schwarzenegger’s official statement denying clemency:

The dedication of Williams’ book “Life in Prison” casts significant doubt on his personal redemption. This book was published in 1998, several years after Williams’ claimed redemptive experience. Specifically, the book is dedicated to “Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the countless other men, women, and youths who have to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars.” The mix of individuals on this list is curious. Most have violent pasts and some have been convicted of committing heinous murders, including the killing of law enforcement.

But the inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems.⁷

And footnote 7 explains the facts about George Jackson:

⁷George Jackson was a militant activist and prison inmate who founded the violent Black Guerilla Family prison gang. Jackson was charged with the murder of a San Quentin correctional officer. In 1970, Jackson’s brother stormed the courtroom with a machine gun, and along with three inmates, took a judge, the prosecutor and three others hostage in an attempt to leverage his brother’s freedom. Shooting broke out. The prosecutor was paralyzed from a police bullet, and the judge was killed by a close-range blast to his head when the shotgun taped to his throat was fired by one of the accomplices. Jackson’s brother was also killed. Then, three days before trial was to begin in the correctional officer murder case, George Jackson was gunned down in the upper yard at San Quentin Prison in another foiled escape attempt on a day of unparalleled violence in the prison that left three officers and three inmates dead in an earlier riot that reports indicate also involved Jackson.

The trendy leftists’ reaction to the Williams case harks back to the late 60s when the fashionable crowd tingled with pleasure at the idea of militant violent black males taking revenge on white America for centuries of oppression and injustice.

The ambiance of this milieu was captured by Tom Wolfe in his classic essay “Radical Chic.”

Of course, the trendy types were not volunteering themselves to be victims of black militant rage. They were volunteering other people: prison guards, law enforcement officers, judges.

And, when push came to shove, they didn’t really insist that it had to be whites that got killed. Thus most of the victims of the gang violence that Williams instigated have been black.

Just killing people would do.

The Williams case shows that these people have learned little. But happily, Schwarzenegger saw to it that Williams was terminated.

All Blacks Are Death Penalty Opponents, Right?

Politically correct people want to see all issues in terms of race, and then to insist that if you don’t take the “pro-black” position on the issue, you must be a racist.

Of course, the “pro-black” position often has nothing to do with what real-world black people think, and everything to do with what white elites think.

And thus it is with the death penalty.

With the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams late Monday night, black people in Los Angeles were supposed to be rioting in the streets. After all, the Hollywood types were telling us that this was a huge racial injustice.

But it didn’t happen.

Why? Some indication can be gotten from an article by Earl Ofari Hutchinson in the LA Daily News.

The small crowd of clergy, community activists and death-penalty opponents that gathered in front of the Los Angeles courthouse to demand clemency for Stanley “Tookie” Williams was no different than most other such gatherings. But there was one very loud exception.

A young African-American man shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer who should die. This was no agitator or crank. He represented a body of pro-death penalty sentiment among blacks that has seldom been publicly heard during the great Tookie debate.

I was not surprised that there are many blacks such as this fellow who want Williams dead. The instant I publicly went to bat for clemency for Williams, and against the death penalty in general, the e-mails and angry comments came hot and heavy.

Black critics were especially bitter in reviling me. They were adamant that Williams must pay for his crimes and for the murder and mayhem the Crips gang, that he helped found, has unleashed on poor, black communities.

These hardened attitudes fly in the face of conventional wisdom that blacks are passionate opponents of the death penalty. They aren’t.

During the past decade, even as more whites say they are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty or oppose it, more blacks have said that murderers, even black ones, must pay with their lives. A Harris Interactive poll in August 2001 found that nearly half of black respondents supported capital punishment. Three years later, a Gallup Poll found that black support for the death penalty still hovered at near 50 percent.

The death penalty debate can no longer be neatly pigeonholed into a black-versus-white racial issue. In large part, that’s because whites generally are not at risk from black criminals. Other blacks are. They are more likely to be victims of violent crime or to have friends or relatives who have been crime victims.

Hutchinson goes on the deal with the notion that blacks are anti-police.

A hint of that came in a June 1999 Justice Department survey which found that blacks in a dozen cities generally applauded the police. This shocked and confounded some black leaders who assumed, like everyone else, that blacks are inveterate cop haters. They aren’t. They are anti-racist and abusive police officers, and demand efficient, fair policing in their communities. In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other cities, they have also repeatedly demanded that blacks break their code of silence toward the cops and help identify shooters.

People who have been paying attention to public opinion polls have long known that blacks, although less in favor of the death penalty than whites, are fairly evenly split on the issue.

Perhaps the best way to get a sounding on a group which (like blacks) constitutes a minority of the population is to use a survey like the General Social Survey, which is repeated every year or two asking the same questions. Piling together all the surveys can get us a large and statistically reliable number of black respondents.

For example, during the years 1996-2004 the General Social Survey asked respondents: “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?” The results:

Whites:

Favor: 76.5%
Oppose: 23.5%

Blacks:

Favor: 48.4%
Oppose: 51.6%

So while blacks are quite a bit less likely than whites to favor the death penalty, there is no robust black majority against the penalty. Rather, attitudes are split.

Other surveys yield the same results. For example an ABC Survey in 2002 found that among non-whites 52% favored the death penalty, and 38% opposed it.

Liberal and leftist whites have no business pressing black people into service behind their political agenda. It’s true that a fair number of black “leaders” will tell the white leftists what they want to hear. But, on this issue at least, they aren’t the authentic voice of the black community.

Europe and the Williams Execution: What a Bunch of Airheads!

An Associated Press dispatch on how “Europe” responded to the execution of “Tookie” Williams for the brutal murder of four people.

Of course, “Europe” here means the elite activists. Public opinion polls in Europe often show majorities favoring the death penalty.

Some of the especially stupid comments:

In Graz, Schwarzenegger’s hometown, local Greens said they would file a petition to remove the California governor’s name from the city’s Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium. A Christian political group suggested it be renamed for Williams.

“Mr. Williams had converted and, unlike Mr. Schwarzenegger, opposed every form of violence,” said Richard Schadauer, chairman of the Association of Christianity and Social Democracy.

[...]

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI’s top official for justice matters denounced the execution.

“We know the death penalty doesn’t resolve anything,” said Cardinal Renato Martino. “Even a criminal is worthy of respect because he is a human being. The death penalty is a negation of human dignity.”

Most of the outcry in Europe came from opposition political parties, city leaders, human rights groups and churches, with national leaders remaining silent.

“Schwarzenegger has a lot of muscles, but apparently not much heart,” French Socialist Party spokesman Julien Dray told RTL radio.

In Italy, Franco Danieli, vice president of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, criticized executions as an act of “dehumanization.”

“The execution of Tookie Williams is even more intolerable exactly because he had managed to transform the negative into the positive, violence into nonviolence,” Danieli said.

Much of this appears to be the result of European activists simply being ill-informed. The notion that Williams really was rehabilitated is belied by the fact that he refused to confess to the murders he obviously did, and the fact that he refused to cooperate with the police by giving them information they can use to fight gang violence.

But then, the ignorance is willful ignorance.

This indignation and claim to moral superiority is farcical coming from nations that have a history of Nazi or Fascist regimes, or a history of sympathy toward fascism or appeasement of Naziism.

If they weren’t so insecure about their own sordid past, they would approach the issue in a more rational way.

More on Tookie — The Brutal Murderer and His Fans

From Eminent Domain:

. . . a nice post, with a lot of information, about Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the murderer who is scheduled to die tonight in California.

Governor Schwarzenegger is under intense pressure to commute his sentence.

Doing so would be a major blunder on his part. Democrats do not and never will like Schwarzenegger, and if he alienates Republicans ever further, he will be a governor with essentially no base of support.

Oxford Was a Hoot!

We posted here that we were going to Oxford to debate the death penalty at the Oxford Union.

We are back, caught up on sleep and other pressing things, and finally getting around to report on the event.

First, there is no way that trans-Atlantic travel can be anything but an ordeal. One can’t sleep on the plane, and we took the bus to Chicago O’Hare, flew to Dublin, and then connected to a flight to Heathrow airport and then took a bus to Oxford. It was about 18 hours, arriving in Oxford about 1:00 p.m., with our body telling us it was 7:00 a.m. and we had not slept.

We stayed in Queens College, one of several colleges at Oxford. The building was charming and old looking on the outside, but the insides had been gutted and rebuilt as a pretty typical college dorm. But a pretty high class dorm, with oak floors.

Food was bland. We tried ordering things that would always be tasty here, like a panini or chicken pesto pasta. It seems it is possible to make both of those things in a bland style.

On the evening of the debate members of the Oxford Union, some guests and all the debaters had dinner before the debate. We toasted the Queen (your humble blogger rather likes Queen Elizabeth II, and was happy to do this) and before the meal a prayer was said in Latin.

The Debate

Our debate partner supporting the death penalty was one Peter Hitchens, a columnist for the Sunday Mail, and rather a conservative curmudgeon. He’s a charming guy, and a good debater, well-travelled and well informed on lots of things.

On the other side was Barbara Becnel, identified as “author, activist and film producer who was a close friend of Crips street gang founder Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams.” Williams, who brutally murdered four Asians with shotgun blasts a point-blank range, was executed in 2005.

The other debater on the anti-death penalty side, Lord Ken MacDonald, was unable to make it and was replaced by activist Julian Knowles.

All the debaters made pretty much the standard points. We stressed that the best, most recent studies in the U.S. show a deterrent effect of capital punishment, and that claims by death penalty opponents of a very large number of “innocent” people who have been put on death row are grossly inflated.

Knowles played the race card big time, saying that the people who are executed will always be those unpopular to society, and even compared the execution of murderers to the burning of witches!

Hitchens discussed the rising murder rate in the U.K., and countered Knowles’ playing of the race card by pointing out that Williams had killed Asians, whom he referred to as “Budda heads.”

Becnel simply insisted that he client was innocent, and gave a few anecdotal accounts of actions on the part of prosecutors that she viewed a racist.

Neither Becnel nor Knowles seemed to know that blacks are underrepresented on death row in the U.S. This is apparently the result of the fact that most murders by blacks occur in the central cities of metropolitan areas, where black juries are less likely to impose the death penalty, and where District Attorneys are likely to be heavily burdened and unwilling to expend the extra resources needed to get a sentence of death.

As Hitchens had warned would happen, our side lost the vote at the end, 97 to 54. The audience, of course, was not judging on debate points but simply saying which side they agreed with at the end. Of course, with virtually no exceptions, the side they agreed with at the end was the side they came in agreeing with.

It was a great experience, in the world’s classic debate venue.

Milwaukee Black Columnist Eugene Kane Refuses to Mentor Black Youth

When journalist (now blogger) Jessica McBride took it upon herself to try to help a black inner city youth, one of the first things she did was to ask her colleague Eugene Kane to take over the role of mentor for the young man.

Kane turned her down flatly, with the comment that “If I wanted a kid, I’d have one of my own.”

When McBride told this story on her blog (without naming Kane), a reader inferred that Kane was likely the man in question, and e-mailed him about the incident.

Kane responded with an e-mail that the reader forwarded on to McBride, and McBride published it on her blog.

The key part of Kane’s response is as follows:

Mcbride asked me years ago, but I didn’t do it because I suspected her “prodigy” wasn’t the type of young man I could effectively help. As it turned out, I was right.

I resented her implication in her blog that because I turned her down it somehow meant I had “forfeited” my right to write about troubled black youth. In my opinion, she went on a mission to save one black male based on little more than a bleeding heart impulse that was destined to fail.

We happen to be against “bleeding heart impulses.” But is a kid who has just turned 16, is in school and has no criminal record known to be beyond help?

How is it possible to have compassion for “Tookie” Williams, but not for the kid whom McBride tried to help?

Sympathy For The Killers, Not the Victims

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe dissects the pathological (that’s the only word for it) attachment that liberal activists and Hollywood airheads have for a California murderer scheduled to die next week:

STANLEY “TOOKIE” Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection in California’s San Quentin prison next Tuesday. His death will occur nearly 27 years after he brutally murdered Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk in Whittier, Calif., and three members of the Yang family — Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang, and their daughter, Yee-Chen Lin — at the Brookhaven Motel in Los Angeles.

Unlike the peaceful, painless demise awaiting Williams, the deaths of his victims were horrific: He shot each of them at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun, shattering their bodies so that they died in agony. Their suffering amused him. “You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him,” Williams bragged after killing Albert Owens. According to the district attorney’s summary of the evidence, “Williams then made gurgling or growling noises and laughed hysterically about Owens’s death.”

Jacoby then goes on to explain that Williams has neither admitted to the murders he did, nor cooperated with the police by giving them information about the Crips, the street gang he founded. Then he concludes:

In its latest roundup of death penalty statistics, “Capital Punishment, 2004,” the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that at least 101 murderers now on death row were already in prison when they murdered their victims; at least 44 others were prison escapees. Lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key may sound appealing. But some murderers will always escape and murder again. Others will kill in prison.

Ultimately, the case for putting murderers like Williams and Boyd to death isn’t just a practical one, strong though the practical arguments are. It is also a moral one. When the state executes a murderer, it is making a statement about the demands of justice and the sanctity of human life — a statement as old as Genesis, and as essential as ever.

Death penalty opponents claim that executing murderers somehow sends the message that killing is alright, since the state is killing. This sort of logic says that sending an army to invade Germany in World War II sent a message that invasions are alright. Of course, it sent exactly the opposite message.

And executing murderers sends exactly the right message about the value of human life.