"Black people are prone to criminality" (CNN)

[Derived Absurdity]

This was said by an NYPD detective CNN.



Ok, well, to be excruciatingly fair, he didn't actually say that. What he did was cite off a bunch of crime statistics, and then Marc Lamont Hill said that he "just said that black people are prone to criminality", which he didn't technically do, and the guy responded with, "Well, they are!" And when Hill yelled at him he somehow both doubled down on it and denied he said it at the same time. And then everyone else, even Hill, rushed to defend the guy and basically say "Well, I know you don't really mean that", even though he literally said it and there's no reason at all to think he didn't mean it.



So I guess this is where we are now? You can just go on national television and basically agree that "black people are prone to criminality" and nothing will happen? No outrage, no trouble, no consequences, nothing? Ok then. I guess we've fully transitioned to "subtle thinly-veiled racism on television" to "outright overt KKK-style racism on television" now. That's nice.

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

And here's your problem.

[Derived Absurdity]

What?

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

What?

Not "your" specific. "Your" generally. As in there needs to be consequences for saying sh!t like that. Otherwise no one's going to take these things nearly as seriously as it should.

Which of course sounds like I'm victim blaming, so I probably need to rethink what I'm trying to say like that guy should have.

[Derived Absurdity]

Oh, okay.

The thing is, I still thought there were consequences for saying shit like this. My thinking was that even though America was racist, if you said overtly racist and bigoted things on the public stage, you still faced quite a lot of consequences and you were severely blacklisted and your reputation was essentially ruined (Michael Richards, Mel Brooks, Donald Sterling, etc). Also scientists (James Watson, Jason Richwine, etc). But now it seems even that doesn't happen anymore. You can spout some KKK-type shit on a major cable news channel and people will barely blink an eye.

[Boomer]

But there are some good cops out there, probably hanging out in Atlantis or riding unicorns in Shangri-La.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

Correlation does not mean causation. [One of my favourite sayings!]

There may well be higher crime rates amongst black people, but that's not because they're black and for someone to leap to that conclusion at the kindest they're really stupid but more likely they're choosing to ignore the real underlying reasons...

[Anakin McFly]

Yeah. Even if we were to remove all the social factors that contribute to higher crime (poverty, unemployment, low education, minority stress etc) which black people are much more likely to experience, and hypothetically still found a slightly higher crime rate among black people, there's also no shortage of biological factors that might be responsible (genes that correlate to high aggression etc) that have nothing to do with race per se - such as how some races have a statistically higher risk of or immunity to certain diseases. Given how arbitrary and hard-to-define race is on the biological level, it doesn't even make any scientific sense to declare that a particular race is more prone to crime.

[Cassius Clay]

Actually, I think crime statistics disparities have more to do with over-policing than poverty. And focusing on poverty as the main source just justifies more policing.

Also, it's a travesty how white supremacy can allow the dumbest person on that panel actually feel superior to everyone there.

And lol at the thumbs up at the end.

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

Oh, okay.

The thing is, I still thought there were consequences for saying shit like this. My thinking was that even though America was racist, if you said overtly racist and bigoted things on the public stage, you still faced quite a lot of consequences and you were severely blacklisted and your reputation was essentially ruined (Michael Richards, Mel Brooks, Donald Sterling, etc). Also scientists (James Watson, Jason Richwine, etc). But now it seems even that doesn't happen anymore. You can spout some KKK-type shit on a major cable news channel and people will barely blink an eye.

I'm saying I'm not sure Hill did the right thing in essentially defending the guy & I see a lot of this. in cable news and I wonder how muddled the message is getting when things like this happen.

[Anakin McFly]

Yeah, good point about over-policing. Plus the tendency to view the same actions by black people as criminal vs when done by white people.

[Cassius Clay]

Yeah, good point about over-policing. Plus the tendency to view the same actions by black people as criminal vs when done by white people.

Regarding the violence - and I remember someone making this important point a while ago, but I don't remember who - because of how police brutalize and harass black communities, black people(especially young black men) don't trust police at all. They know that the police aren't there to help or protect them. More privileged folks don't appreciate that they have the luxury of trusting the police, and depending on the police to do violence for them. A lot of people who whine about violence pretend to not understand that violence needs to be done sometimes, and that they get to keep their hands clean(and feel holier-than-thou) and/or turn a blind eye, while relying on the power of the state to do violence on their behalf. People live in these bubbles and are completely ignorant of how it is violence and force that allows them to live they way they do. People who don't have the luxury of the state doing violence for them have to do it themselves. When you're privileged, if someone gets in your territory, tries to invade your home, threatens you or tries to steal from you, you can just call the police. People brutalized by the police don't have that luxury.

So, one of the major root causes is horrendous policing(though, poverty obviously plays a part), whether it's by only targeting black people for crimes, or it's because black people justifiably can't rely on the police. And we have to be careful how we frame the discussion so that police don't escape any type of accountability by pathologizing black people and/or poor people.

[Derived Absurdity]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/steve-king-o ... ilization/

[Anakin McFly]

The article or the comments?

[Derived Absurdity]

Both!

[Anakin McFly]

I replied to a comment because I never learn, to explain that while white people did contribute most to Western civilisation, it was often done by exploiting and abusing other races, which is why people are mad. I got the reply:

"Asians seemed to do it pretty well. But I suppose you mean the lower IQ races, mainly blacks? Yeah, that cotton sure saved America, we only have to deal with 38% of black crime (the highest crime per population) being against whites, and a gun violence/murder rate that puts us scores above where we should be in crime. What a contribution."

I hate people.

[Cassius Clay]

I will state flatly that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect in the personalities, their lives, their grasp of realty, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.

-James Baldwin

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

-Toni Morrison

[Blade Azaezel]

I replied to a comment because I never learn, to explain that while white people did contribute most to Western civilisation, it was often done by exploiting and abusing other races, which is why people are mad. I got the reply:

"Asians seemed to do it pretty well. But I suppose you mean the lower IQ races, mainly blacks? Yeah, that cotton sure saved America, we only have to deal with 38% of black crime (the highest crime per population) being against whites, and a gun violence/murder rate that puts us scores above where we should be in crime. What a contribution."

I hate people.

I don't entirely understand the response.

[Cassius Clay]

On white cognitive dissonance:

My point of view certainly is formed by my history, and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.

This is the place in which, it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America.

The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea:

'Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage. I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Besides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I also despise the governors of Southern states and the sheriffs of Southern counties, and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing! What have you got against me? What do you want?'

But, on the same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, the white American, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much.

-James Baldwin

The epitome of having your cake and eating it too. The internal struggle of wanting to take credit and be proud of white history and supremacy, feel superior to other races and enjoy the privileges of whiteness...but not wanting the responsibility and accountability that comes with it...that is what a lot of this shit comes down to when you distill it.

[Cassius Clay]

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

-James Baldwin

[Anakin McFly]

Wow. That Toni Morrison quote in particular gives me a lot to reflect on.

I don't entirely understand the response.

Basically they were saying that the only thing black people contributed to western civilisation was their (slave) labour in the cotton fields and crime against white people, implying that slavery was black people's fault.