Who Is Racist?

[_EAllusion]

This expectation of yours is just more evidence that conservatives get their notion of what liberals are about from other conservatives in the bubble.

No, Tarski, its just a consideration based upon a long (at least 30 year) assertion, very popular within black studies departments, among Afrocentrist professors and public intellectuals, the black power movement, and leftist black media pundits, that blacks cannot be racists because blacks do not have political and social power in America - they are not the dominant political group, in other words.

According to this definition, racism isn't an individual psychological attribute but an expression of social dominance among racial/ethinic collectives who hold dominant positions of political and police power as members of ideologically undifferentiated in-groups.

Hence, the Black Panthers are not a racist group because they have no access to and do not wield political power in any significant or direct manner. The black teenager holding a gun to your head and telling you he's gonna blow your creepy-ass cracker head off for what your ancestors did to his people two centuries ago cannot be a racist because he has no political voice or power. In other words, to be a racist, he would have to wield political power in company with a dominant group of other blacks such that he could put you and other white people, by the force of law, in a diversity reeducation camp and have you shot there. Just putting a gun to your head and blowing your brains out because you're white doesn't rise to that level.

You are confused about what the groups you are shadowboxing with are actually asserting about the nature of racism. I suppose that's what happens when your only contact with those views is ethically dubious right wing websites explaining it to you.

Here's noted author John McWhorter, whose views you simultaneously describe as Neo-Marxist!!!1111!! and that of an important conservative intellectual, explaining the matter to you:

Last week was one of the most sociologically fascinating and complex ones in recent American history. Yet what interests many people most from it is that, moments before his death, Trayvon Martin is reported to have referred to George Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” when talking on the phone to his friend Rachel Jeantel. There would seem to be a contingent who feel that Martin’s use of cracker was the equivalent of a white person’s using the N-word. It wasn’t.

No doubt, Jeantel was dissimulating in claiming that cracker is not a racialized term. Of course it is, and she knows it. In the wake of my own writings and comments on this issue, some people have written me in what appears to be sincere confusion between some whites’ affectionate in-group adoption of cracker and its use as a slur, thinking Jeantel, asked whether cracker was racialized, was thinking of the "warm" use of cracker. But this would have made no sense. Indeed, whites of a certain class have been known to refer to themselves as crackers in the same vein as many blacks use the N-word. However, Jeantel is neither a white person nor does she give much evidence of hanging out with many. She is under no illusion that Martin was using cracker as a term of endearment.

he was trying to avoid defaming Martin, as we would expect of a friend, not to mention one inexperienced in public speaking or presentation. The larger question is more interesting: Was it wrong for Martin to use “the C-word” (notice how goofy it even seems to euphemize it as such)?

Yes, and there are three reasons that the aggrieved ones of the moment are missing.

First, there’s a difference between, say, the white man who once dismissed me as “just another nigger” when I bested him in an argument in 1993 and Martin referring to Zimmerman chasing him as a “creepy-ass cracker”: power. The N-word comes from above, historically for reasons too often elaborated to require recounting here, and in the present due to sociological realities resulting from the historical ones.

Hence there was a difference in the seventies between Archie Bunker’s talk of “coons” and George Jefferson’s yelling “honkey” (and Fred Sanford’s open anti-white ideology). I imagine there were people back then who found George and Fred as reprehensible as Archie, but they would appear to have missed the implacable centuries-long tragedy that had made the Civil Rights revolution necessary.

Now, there are limits to this kind of thing, as I have stressed over the years to the dismay of many black people and white fellow travellers. When anti-white hostility becomes a matter of red-blooded theatrics, less constructive than a balm for cultural insecurity, an easy score with an audience, then I’m against it. For example, George and Fred were a decade past Selma; for black characters today to talk the same way would be repulsive. Or, Exhibit A would be much rap music, which I have decried right along with the kinds of people who are now so angry about Martin’s saying cracker.

Here we get to the second thing people are missing: degree. Interesting, too, in that we are dealing with people who otherwise criticize black people for exaggerating the prevalence of racism (which many do), for making mountains out of molehills—i.e. for not understanding degree.

But degree here is key. Martin didn’t call someone a cracker in a public forum, nor did he call someone a cracker to his face. He referred to someone as a cracker in a private exchange that he had all reason to suppose would never be heard again by anyone. That’s different, even to the extent that using the term wasn’t ideal.

One must be consistent here, and I am: I argued last week that Paula Deen’s use of the N-word in private in 1986 was different from her hauling it out upon someone or popping up with it on the air or at a booksigning. Again, degree matters. I think Deen’s apologies were sincere—and enough. People almost never completely erase the psychological conditioning of their childhoods. Many note that Deen has spent most of her life living after the Civil Rights revolution, but remember, as a 66-year-old, Deen’s formative years were the fifties, in the Deep South. Of course such a person might pop out with the N-word in a private heated moment, even in her forties. Unideal, but unsurprising at her age (although I don’t mean that all Southerners of her years are so likely to pull it) and so many people do so much worse: I don’t think Deen should suffer the penalty of losing her livelihood because of it. I’d feel otherwise if she were 30: degree, again.

Then the final thing being missed: What happened to Trayvon Martin was symptomatic of a general relationship between young black men and law enforcement. Few understand that this narrative is the main thing keeping America from starting to truly get past race today. The main reason black America feels like racism is still what America is based on, even with a black man winning the presidency not once but twice, is the police (ask some black people and time how long it takes for the police to come up).

Martin, as a black teenager minding his business suddenly pursued by a white (or white-looking) man, certainly felt himself as part of that scenario, in the same way that Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates blew up at Sergeant James Crowley in 2009 for stopping him on his own front porch, suspecting racial profiling. Here is an occasion where Martin would have rather naturally felt that the incident might have a racially-loaded implication. And at such a time, a black person might well, in what he thinks of as a private conversation, refer to the person coming after him with a vulgar, racially loaded term of dismissal. He might also preface it with "creepy"—a clear sign Martin felt under threat.

I suppose that many will insist that Martin’s utterance of that word in that context was the moral equivalent of Michael Richards yelling “He’s a nigger, he’s a nigger!” at a black heckler in 2006. I also suppose that such people will consider that position to be based on some kind of higher awareness—the achievement of which I openly admit my mental powers to be incapable.

[_Droopy]

And, by the way, the Ottowa's had vowed to "exterminate" all white settlers within their reach, and we know, as a matter of settled historical reality, that genocidal warfare was not in any measure unknown among the North American Indians.

Political correctness. Culture war. The project of destruction and dissolution of the Left (primarily the Frankfurt School/cultural Marxist tradition) upon America and the West.

And beastie one of their beasts.

How fitting.

[_Droopy]

quote="Droopy"quote="Tarski"
This expectation of yours is just more evidence that conservatives get their notion of what liberals are about from other conservatives in the bubble.

No, Tarski, its just a consideration based upon a long (at least 30 year) assertion, very popular within black studies departments, among Afrocentrist professors and public intellectuals, the black power movement, and leftist black media pundits, that blacks cannot be racists because blacks do not have political and social power in America - they are not the dominant political group, in other words.

According to this definition, racism isn't an individual psychological attribute but an expression of social dominance among racial/ethinic collectives who hold dominant positions of political and police power as members of ideologically undifferentiated in-groups.

Hence, the Black Panthers are not a racist group because they have no access to and do not wield political power in any significant or direct manner. The black teenager holding a gun to your head and telling you he's gonna blow your creepy-ass cracker head off for what your ancestors did to his people two centuries ago cannot be a racist because he has no political voice or power. In other words, to be a racist, he would have to wield political power in company with a dominant group of other blacks such that he could put you and other white people, by the force of law, in a diversity reeducation camp and have you shot there. Just putting a gun to your head and blowing your brains out because you're white doesn't rise to that level.

You are confused about what the groups you are shadowboxing with are actually asserting about the nature of racism.

Well, actually...uh...I'm not.

Here's noted author John McWhorter, whose views you simultaneously describe as Neo-Marxist!!!1111!! and that of an important conservative intellectual,

explaining the matter to you:

Last week was one of the most sociologically fascinating and complex ones in recent American history. Yet what interests many people most from it is that, moments before his death, Trayvon Martin is reported to have referred to George Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” when talking on the phone to his friend Rachel Jeantel. There would seem to be a contingent who feel that Martin’s use of cracker was the equivalent of a white person’s using the N-word. It wasn’t.

No doubt, Jeantel was dissimulating in claiming that cracker is not a racialized term. Of course it is, and she knows it. In the wake of my own writings and comments on this issue, some people have written me in what appears to be sincere confusion between some whites’ affectionate in-group adoption of cracker and its use as a slur, thinking Jeantel, asked whether cracker was racialized, was thinking of the "warm" use of cracker. But this would have made no sense. Indeed, whites of a certain class have been known to refer to themselves as crackers in the same vein as many blacks use the N-word. However, Jeantel is neither a white person nor does she give much evidence of hanging out with many. She is under no illusion that Martin was using cracker as a term of endearment.

he was trying to avoid defaming Martin, as we would expect of a friend, not to mention one inexperienced in public speaking or presentation. The larger question is more interesting: Was it wrong for Martin to use “the C-word” (notice how goofy it even seems to euphemize it as such)?

Yes, and there are three reasons that the aggrieved ones of the moment are missing.

First, there’s a difference between, say, the white man who once dismissed me as “just another n*****” when I bested him in an argument in 1993 and Martin referring to Zimmerman chasing him as a “creepy-ass cracker”: power. The N-word comes from above, historically for reasons too often elaborated to require recounting here, and in the present due to sociological realities resulting from the historical ones.

Hence there was a difference in the seventies between Archie Bunker’s talk of “coons” and George Jefferson’s yelling “honkey” (and Fred Sanford’s open anti-white ideology). I imagine there were people back then who found George and Fred as reprehensible as Archie, but they would appear to have missed the implacable centuries-long tragedy that had made the Civil Rights revolution necessary.

Now, there are limits to this kind of thing, as I have stressed over the years to the dismay of many black people and white fellow travellers. When anti-white hostility becomes a matter of red-blooded theatrics, less constructive than a balm for cultural insecurity, an easy score with an audience, then I’m against it. For example, George and Fred were a decade past Selma; for black characters today to talk the same way would be repulsive. Or, Exhibit A would be much rap music, which I have decried right along with the kinds of people who are now so angry about Martin’s saying cracker.

Here we get to the second thing people are missing: degree. Interesting, too, in that we are dealing with people who otherwise criticize black people for exaggerating the prevalence of racism (which many do), for making mountains out of molehills—i.e. for not understanding degree.

But degree here is key. Martin didn’t call someone a cracker in a public forum, nor did he call someone a cracker to his face. He referred to someone as a cracker in a private exchange that he had all reason to suppose would never be heard again by anyone. That’s different, even to the extent that using the term wasn’t ideal.

One must be consistent here, and I am: I argued last week that Paula Deen’s use of the N-word in private in 1986 was different from her hauling it out upon someone or popping up with it on the air or at a booksigning. Again, degree matters. I think Deen’s apologies were sincere—and enough. People almost never completely erase the psychological conditioning of their childhoods. Many note that Deen has spent most of her life living after the Civil Rights revolution, but remember, as a 66-year-old, Deen’s formative years were the fifties, in the Deep South. Of course such a person might pop out with the N-word in a private heated moment, even in her forties. Unideal, but unsurprising at her age (although I don’t mean that all Southerners of her years are so likely to pull it) and so many people do so much worse: I don’t think Deen should suffer the penalty of losing her livelihood because of it. I’d feel otherwise if she were 30: degree, again.

Then the final thing being missed: What happened to Trayvon Martin was symptomatic of a general relationship between young black men and law enforcement. Few understand that this narrative is the main thing keeping America from starting to truly get past race today. The main reason black America feels like racism is still what America is based on, even with a black man winning the presidency not once but twice, is the police (ask some black people and time how long it takes for the police to come up).

Martin, as a black teenager minding his business suddenly pursued by a white (or white-looking) man, certainly felt himself as part of that scenario, in the same way that Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates blew up at Sergeant James Crowley in 2009 for stopping him on his own front porch, suspecting racial profiling. Here is an occasion where Martin would have rather naturally felt that the incident might have a racially-loaded implication. And at such a time, a black person might well, in what he thinks of as a private conversation, refer to the person coming after him with a vulgar, racially loaded term of dismissal. He might also preface it with "creepy"—a clear sign Martin felt under threat.

I suppose that many will insist that Martin’s utterance of that word in that context was the moral equivalent of Michael Richards yelling “He’s a n*****, he’s a n*****!” at a black heckler in 2006. I also suppose that such people will consider that position to be based on some kind of higher awareness—the achievement of which I openly admit my mental powers to be incapable.

This has no logical relevance to my post. Nor have I anywhere labeled anything McWhorter's said "neo-Marxist." (and its interesting how you and the other lefties here insist on holding conservatives to a standard of supporting and defending everything other conservatives say, on the sole basis that they are conservatives. This perhaps says more about the herd mentality of the Left than it does about conservatism. For the record, McWhorter does seem to be dissembling and splitting hairs somewhat here relative to differences between blacks and whites regarding the use of racialized terminology, and the "power" argument doesn't seem very compelling, even when it comes in a much more intellectually temperate and reasoned form that it would from, say, Jeffery Bell or Manning Marable).


Here, to get you up to speed, Def:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ0QfLkjujY

This is one of the leading black studies/multiculturalist academic intellectuals in the nation, and the views he espouses here have been standard and well established in the humanities and social sciences, most prominently in black studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, Afrocentrism, and multicultural theory for several decades now.

I could spend the next couple of hours online linking to major academic theorists among both the white and black Left who've been espousing this kind of thing since at least the early eighties, but why bother, as you're not really listening.

[_EAllusion]

This has no logical relevance to my post. Nor have I anywhere labeled anything McWhorter's said "neo-Marxist."

You labeled a paragraph I wrote that mirrored, in some places near verbatim, what McWhorter wrote as neo-Marxist. I realize you did it before you grasped my views were his, but doesn't change the fact that in your zeal to declare me as siding with neo-Marxists, you threw McWhorter under the bus at the same time. Of course, nothing I was saying was controversial or the domain of actual marxists, but you're a confused ball of rage who needed to label with the harshest terms that exist in your world.

Like other posters, I enjoy making fun of you for talking yourself into near constant self-contradictions. The article was meant to point out the simple thesis that differences in power and the historical context from which racial language and views arise impacts how serious we should think of it as. If you can't see the difference in how racial epithets are used and what they mean, that's a failing on your part. Unlike you, I've actually had cultural studies classes, and this was the standard argument.

Here, to get you up to speed, Def:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ0QfLkjujY

He's making a semantic, jargon based argument about the meaning of the word racism while simultaneously acknowledging that black people can be bigoted and prejudiced on the basis of race - the ordinary definition of the term racism. He's using the term to refer to what I, or McWhorter, would think of as racism that is serious in its impact because of differentials in power and capacity to be oppressive. It's a silly semantic argument in my opinion, but not what you are arguing is occurring. Is this because you don't understand it or because this is another example of you not actually examining what you link? If you do understand it, then you would agree that your previous post in reply to Tarski is equivocating senses of the term "racism," yes?

[_Droopy]

I should also point out that I do have problems with this statement by McWhorter:

Then the final thing being missed: What happened to Trayvon Martin was symptomatic of a general relationship between young black men and law enforcement. Few understand that this narrative is the main thing keeping America from starting to truly get past race today. The main reason black America feels like racism is still what America is based on, even with a black man winning the presidency not once but twice, is the police (ask some black people and time how long it takes for the police to come up).

Martin, as a black teenager minding his business suddenly pursued by a white (or white-looking) man, certainly felt himself as part of that scenario, in the same way that Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates blew up at Sergeant James Crowley in 2009 for stopping him on his own front porch, suspecting racial profiling. Here is an occasion where Martin would have rather naturally felt that the incident might have a racially-loaded implication. And at such a time, a black person might well, in what he thinks of as a private conversation, refer to the person coming after him with a vulgar, racially loaded term of dismissal. He might also preface it with "creepy"—a clear sign Martin felt under threat.

This expresses some of the classic racialized paranoia and racial balkanism common within certain segments of black America, centered mostly, it must always be pointed out, in communities where - interestingly - violent crime and crime of all kinds exists in massive disproportion to the surrounding society.

While McWhorter is obviously no "neo-Marxist" this does inexplicably lend intellectual aid to some of the worst aspects of contemporary black popular culture and the culture of black urban America, where these attitudes are centered.

Here's another view:

Are Cops Racist?

In much of the liberal media, large-scale confrontations between police and people who are breaking the law are usually reported in one of two ways. Either the police used "excessive force" or they "let the situation get out of hand."

Any force sufficient to prevent the situation from getting out of hand will be called "excessive." And if the police arrive in large enough numbers to squelch disorder without the need for force, then sending in so many cops will be called "over-reacting." After all, with so little resistance to the police, why were so many cops necessary? Such is the mindset of the media.

Add the volatile factor of race and the media will have a field day. If an incident involves a white cop and a black criminal, you don't need to know the facts to know how liberals in the media will react. You can predict the words and the music.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute does have the facts, however, in her new book, Are Cops Racist? (Click HERE to purchase). Unfortunately, those who most need to read this book are the least likely to do so. They have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by facts.

For the rest of us, this is a very enlightening and very readable little book. Ms. Mac Donald first tackles the issue of "racial profiling" by the police and shows what shoddy and even silly statistical methods were used to gin up hysteria. Then she moves on to police shootings and other law-enforcement issues.

Suppose I were to tell you that, despite the fact that blacks are just 11 percent of the American population, more than half the men fined for misconduct while playing professional basketball are black -- and concluded that this shows the NBA to be racist. What would your reaction be?

"Wait a minute!" you might say. "More than half the players in the NBA are black. So that 11 percent statistic is irrelevant."

Donate to JWR

That is exactly what is wrong with "racial profiling" statistics. It is based on blacks as a percentage of the population, rather than blacks as a percentage of the people who do the kinds of things that cause police to stop people and question them.

A professor of statistics who pointed this out was -- all too predictably -- denounced as a "racist." Other statisticians kept quiet for fear of being smeared the same way. We have now reached the dangerous point where ignorance can silence knowledge and where facts get squelched by beliefs.

Heather Mac Donald also goes into facts involving police shootings, especially when the cops are white and the suspect is black. Here again, an education awaits those who are willing to be educated.

People in the media are forever expressing surprise at how many bullets were fired in some of these police shootings. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised.

What surprises me is how many people whose ignorance of shooting is obvious do not let their ignorance stand in the way of reaching sweeping conclusions about situations that they have never faced. To some, it is just a question of taking sides. If it is a white cop and a black suspect, then that is all they feel a need to know.

The greatest contribution of this book is in making painfully clear the actual consequences of cop-bashing in the media and in politics. The police respond to incentives, like everyone else.

If carrying out their duties in the way that gets the job done best is going to bring down on their heads a chorus of media outrage that can threaten their whole careers, many cops tend to back off. And who pays the price of their backing off? Mainly those blacks who are victims of the criminals in their midst.

Drug dealers and other violent criminals have been the beneficiaries of reduced police activity and of liberal judges throwing out their convictions because of "racial profiling." These criminals go back to the black community -- not the affluent, suburban and often gated communities where journalists, judges, and politicians live.

The subtitle of Are Cops Racist? is: "How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans."

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell073103.asp

The following brilliant evisceration of the don't-ask-don't-tell wall of obfuscation surrounding contemporary inner city black social conditions and the ultra-racialized interpretations of everything that happens between blacks and whites emanating from the Left and from the black pop political and media culture needs to be digested and internalized by much larger portions of the American public and political class before its too late to matter:


http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0427hm.html

What We Should Have Learned
Police must put down violence immediately and without apology.

27 April 2012

Could it happen again? That is the taboo question on the 20th anniversary of Los Angeles’s murderous Rodney King riots, just as another racially charged prosecution—this time in Florida—captures headlines across the nation. Sadly, the answer is yes. As the Oakland riots in 2009 and 2010 following a transit officer’s fatal shooting of a parolee made clear, the threat of riots—what Fred Siegel has called “riot ideology”—still hangs over interracial incidents of violence when the victim is black. And just as the press cynically manipulated the facts in the Rodney King beating in order to increase racial tensions, it has done so again in the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida.

The best hope for avoiding a repeat of the L.A. mayhem, should blacks not be satisfied with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, is that police forces across the country have learned the lesson of the Rodney King riots: that outbreaks of civil anarchy must be immediately and unapologetically suppressed.

Anniversary coverage of the 1992 riots (or, as the New York Times is still willing to put it, “civil unrest”) has whitewashed the violence and imposed a predictable storyline: that the riots were caused by the Los Angeles Police Department, not by the individuals who viciously assaulted motorists and shot Korean storeowners. “The reason we had this riot was because we had the total emasculation and humiliation of an entire community,” civil rights attorney Connie Rice declared at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last Sunday. “It was kindling built on kindling built on kindling.” And not only did the LAPD’s alleged racism cause the violence, according to the official narrative, but its failure to practice community policing also prevented the department from anticipating the violence. Had police officers in South Los Angeles “been plugged into their neighborhoods,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks, “the city might have seen [the violence] coming.”

Actually, the LAPD (which, by 1992, was in fact enthusiastically engaged in community policing) did see the violence coming, but the department so feared provoking the “community” with visible riot preparations that it barely readied itself for the possible mayhem. And when the violence broke out at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues, police supervisors initially held their cops back from intervening, lest a forceful response be caught on videotape and circulated worldwide as yet more proof of a brutal LAPD. Such passivity allowed the anarchy to escalate and violated the department’s duty to protect the public—but it is an indication of how thoroughly the LAPD had been demoralized by the media treatment of the Rodney King beating that it would allow itself to fail the city at such a moment. (And indeed, its fears about a backlash were hardly irrational. Racial tensions escalated several days into the riots after a National Guard unit shot and killed a man who had tried several times to run over Guard members with his Datsun. The attacks on Korean store owners by rioters, of course, did not produce similar racial tensions.)

True, the LAPD had a troubled history with blacks in South Central Los Angeles. But the Rodney King beating was not a function of that history. In the 1950s and 1960s, LAPD Chief William Parker responded to the perennial problem of L.A. policing—too few cops, too much ground to cover—by cultivating an imperious command-and-control attitude in officers that sometimes merged into outright racism in the city’s high crime black areas. But by the 1980s, despite Parker’s earlier efforts to insulate the department from political interference, it was anti-cop politics, not the Centurion ideal, that most shaped the LAPD. The department lowered physical standards to meet hiring quotas for females and minorities; those lowered standards increased the risk that officers would resort to firearms and other instruments of lethal force to subdue recalcitrant suspects. A ban on the use of the chokehold likewise made use of the baton more likely.

The Rodney King beating was the outgrowth of these political pressures. Pumped up on alcohol and drugs, King led officers on a high-speed chase across L.A.’s freeways and residential streets far north of South Central. When the officers finally stopped him, they tried nonviolent means of arresting him—verbal commands, a group tackle, handcuffs, and, finally, a taser—but he fiercely fought all of them off. Only after King lunged at the officers did they resort to the baton. A civilian video captured much of the stop, but the media edited out the nonviolent prelude to the baton blows. The loop beamed around the world thousands of times appeared to show an unprovoked beating of King, agonizingly prolonged because the main protagonist, the diminutive Laurence Powell, was physically overmatched by King and incompetent in use of the baton. (King’s two passengers, by comparison, complied with the officers’ orders and were arrested without incident.)

Unlike most of the public, the jury that decided the excessive-force charges against the officers saw the full video. They acquitted the officers. By then, the media had disseminated the relentless message that the biggest threat facing blacks in L.A. was the cops, not the hundreds of gangs that murdered blacks every week with zero protest from racial advocates. The verdict itself, according to the advocates and their press allies, could only have been produced by a criminal-justice system stacked against blacks.

That interpretation was utterly false, as Lou Cannon showed in Official Negligence. But even if it were the case that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice, nothing could justify the violence that followed. Attributing grand political or social meaning to riots inevitably ends up justifying individual decisions to destroy lives and precious civil order.

Moreover, mob violence never conforms to the exculpatory script some give it. If LAPD oppression was both the cause and the target of that violence, why did the mobs assault the following civilians, among many others, in the first two hours of violence alone? There were the son of the Korean owner of Tom’s Liquor Store at Normandy and Florence, beaten by gangbangers while the store was being torched; the white driver of a gray Volvo, who was dragged from his car and kicked in the head by assailants yelling “It’s a black thing,” and who barely escaped in his car (minus his camera and briefcase, naturally); the white driver of a brown Jeep Wrangler who was hit by a rock thrown through the front windshield, then smashed in the face with a bottle when he got out of the jeep; a Latino driver who was pulled from his blue sedan and beaten; a Latino man, woman, and one-year-old child who were pelted with bottles; a 30-year-old woman who sustained numerous injuries to the head; a Guatemalan immigrant who was yanked from his truck, robbed, and bashed in the forehead with a car stereo while a rioter tried to saw off his ear; the driver of a white van who was beaten to the appreciative cheers of spectators, and to the taunt: “That’s how Rodney King felt, white boy”; and, of course, truck driver Reginald Denny, dragged from his big rig, stomped on, and beaten so ruthlessly with his truck’s fire extinguisher that his cranium was fractured in 91 places and his left eye dangled into his cheek cavity.

And if the LAPD was the cause of what Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez calls “those epic days,” why were two white males in Long Beach, California—far south of the LAPD’s jurisdiction—dragged from their motorcycle, beaten, robbed, and then, as they lay semi-conscious on the ground, shot multiple times—one fatally? Why was there rioting as far afield as Atlanta and Las Vegas? And what does the mindless property destruction, with its self-serving, maudlin justifications, have to do with the LAPD? “People can’t keep living like this. People are tired of this,” bathetically explained a looter carrying beer out of a South Central liquor store. Over 20,000 employees were put out of work because their places of employment had been burned to the ground or rendered uninhabitable; few if any were employed by the LAPD.

This fireball of racial hatred is being kept carefully offstage in the anniversary coverage, reduced to a few dry statistics: 54 dead, 2,328 hospitalizations, nearly $1 billion in property damage. Twenty years later, the media seems interested mainly in asking how Rodney King feels about things now and whether the LAPD has changed. The suggestion that individuals were accountable for the violence is absent, and the clear implication in the coverage is that society had it coming. No reporter or commentator has asked: what collapse of socialization could lead to such nihilistic violence? Or: Has anything improved in the black family or black culture to guard against such depravity in the future?

The same deflection of attention occurred in the immediate aftermath of the riots. After the usual genuflection to the “root causes” of the violence—racism, police brutality, and economic injustice—the subject was immediately changed to what government, corporations, and banks could do to rebuild South Central L.A. The media drew a curtain over the behavior that produced the need for that rebuilding in the first place, as if society could not look upon such savagery for too long without turning away.

The establishment answer to the question of whether the LAPD has changed is: Yes, sort of. Most important to liberals is the department’s racial composition. In 1992, the department was 59 percent white; today, whites make up only 37 percent of the force, former L.A. County District Attorney Gil Garcetti told the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Of course, such racial demographics are the least important thing about a department (and by 1992, racism was an insignificant problem in the department anyway). But though liberal elites remain clueless about what makes for good policing, the LAPD has changed. It is now intensely managed to fight crime with constantly evolving tactics and deployment. Thanks to Compstat, the data-analysis system brought to the Southland by former LAPD chief Bill Bratton, department commanders are unfailingly held accountable for the safety of their divisions. As a result of the Compstat revolution, the Los Angeles Police Department has saved hundreds of black males’ lives over the last decade, making it the only big-city competitor to the New York Police Department for the depth and length of its crime drop over the past decade.

L.A.’s professional cop critics, however, aren’t about to let go of their still-useful conceit of a racially biased LAPD. Press darling Rice complained at the L.A. Times Festival of Books that the police aren’t as committed as they should be to making every Los Angeles resident feel safe. Violence remains prevalent in certain neighborhoods, she griped, adding that the department’s ethos is still “You keep certain neighborhoods safe, you keep certain neighborhoods contained.” Her claim is 100 percent bogus. Compstat alone insures that the department focuses on the highest-crime neighborhoods; it is slanderous to accuse the force of slighting public safety in “certain neighborhoods.” And if violence is still prevalent in those neighborhoods, despite the tireless efforts of the police to protect residents, perhaps Rice should ask the parents of the gangbangers producing that violence why they aren’t controlling their kids.

The press could use the 1992 riots as an occasion for self-examination. Instead, history is repeating itself. The build-up around the Trayvon Martin shooting seems almost designed to provoke riots should the case not come out the way the race agitators and the media think it should. As with the King beating, the press has doctored evidence and suppressed relevant context. It is once again promoting falsehoods—that the criminal justice system is racist and that blacks are under assault from racist whites. (To the contrary, young black males are under assault from other young blacks, who commit homicide at ten times the rate of young white and Hispanic males combined. White-on-black killings are negligible compared with black-on-white killings and are a minute fraction of the over 6,000 blacks mowed down every year by other blacks. Blacks kill whites and Hispanics at two-and-a-half times the rate at which whites and Hispanics kill blacks, though blacks are only one-sixth of the combined white and Hispanic population.)

By now, media desperation to buttress its white-on-black violence theme has become outright comical, as the press scours the horizon for any remotely relevant story to fuel racial resentment. We have already been living with what appear to be small, rolling race riots for years now. But the possibility of something larger occurring if the Trayvon Martin prosecution is not satisfactorily concluded is being matter-of-factly contemplated by people who should know better—“There would’ve been a riot if they wouldn’t have arrested him,” the executive director of a Jacksonville nonprofit told the Wall Street Journal after Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, was indicted—and eagerly contemplated by those who don’t know better.

It seems almost unimaginable that a jury would acquit Zimmerman after the intense campaign insisting on the symbolic racial status of the case. But should such an outcome come to pass, every police department in the country should be prepared to put down any ensuing violence at its first outbreak, in the name of justice for all. This much we should all have learned from the ugliness of 1992.

[_Droopy]

You labeled a paragraph I wrote that mirrored, in some places near verbatim, what McWhorter wrote as neo-Marxist.

The idea that access to and ability to wield political power on a broad scale being relevant to whether one is or could be racist, and whether a racially charged term falls somewhere along a hierarchical scale of racial impropriety is, yes, a key concept within critical theory and its intellectual progeny, critical race theory, the outgrowth of which has of course been black studies, Afrocentrism, and multiculturalist claims centered on American blacks.

That's not my fault, its just the way these major theoretical structures have developed over the last forty years or so.

but you're a confused ball of rage who needed to label with the harshest terms that exist in your world.

You're too silly to take seriously, Def, and you always have been. Funny how the more you post the more you sound like Graham.

The article was meant to point out the simple thesis that differences in power and the historical context from which racial language and views arise impacts how serious we should think of it as. If you can't see the difference in how racial epithets are used and what they mean, that's a failing on your part. Unlike you, I've actually had cultural studies classes, and this was the standard argument.

I hardly need to take cultural studies classes when I've been encountering it for many years from primary sources on my own, and my hard disk is loaded with books, monographs, video lectures, and Power Point presentations on cultural theory, critical studies, critical race studies, multiculturalism, and the history and doctrines of the Frankfurt School. Of course, I've still got a long way to go in my personal study of these subjects, education being a life long pursuit, but it sounds like you do too.

the simple thesis that differences in power and the historical context from which racial language and views arise impacts how serious we should think of it as

Yes, pointing us to the collectivist assumptions of the theoretical template itself. At the bottom of this thesis is still the central presupposition that individual blacks who openly display racist or racial supremacist language and attitudes receive a moral and social waiver because of historical context and power relations affecting the entire collective over past history.


Welcome to one of the defining conflicts between the Left and the classical liberal/conservative intellectual tradition.

[_Tarski]

No, Tarski, its just a consideration based upon a long (at least 30 year) assertion, very popular within black studies departments, among Afrocentrist professors and public intellectuals, the black power movement, and leftist black media pundits, that blacks cannot be racists because blacks do not have political and social power in America - they are not the dominant political group, in other words.

According to this definition, racism isn't an individual psychological attribute but an expression of social dominance among racial/ethinic collectives who hold dominant positions of political and police power as members of ideologically undifferentiated in-groups.

Hence, the Black Panthers are not a racist group because they have no access to and do not wield political power in any significant or direct manner. The black teenager holding a gun to your head and telling you he's gonna blow your creepy-ass cracker head off for what your ancestors did to his people two centuries ago cannot be a racist because he has no political voice or power. In other words, to be a racist, he would have to wield political power in company with a dominant group of other blacks such that he could put you and other white people, by the force of law, in a diversity reeducation camp and have you shot there. Just putting a gun to your head and blowing your brains out because you're white doesn't rise to that level.

You are describing are real distinction (which you wish to ignore) and then objecting to a semantic issue (should consideration of long standing social structures play into the major sense of the word racism or not?). Either way, the reality remains.

I suppose that, in your mind, a Jew in Nazi Germany who learned to harbor negative feelings toward Germans would be exactly analogous to the anti-Semitism of conscious and active supporters of the murderous policies of Hitler's regime.
You know, like, um, major shame on Anne Frank if she ever let herself feel a generalized mistrust or animosity toward Germans. What a racist she would be.

Your denial of the existence and/or relevance of what exists at the level of society and institutions is idiotically bizarre as is your disingenuous appeal to some real or imagined aspect of "black studies" as definitive of what all liberals must be thinking.

By the way, ..all this wholesale cutting an pasting from the same set of cockeyed ideologically extreme sources just provides us more evidence of the total lack of either originality or open-mindedness in your thinking.

You are really quite simple minded in the end. For you, all that exists is "us" (the righteous people sitting inside the conserve-bubble) and "them"--the latter being labeled lefties and totally defined by myths and implausible edifices constructed of cherry picked anecdotes passed around inside the bubble and broadcast via amplitude modulated radio waves. You live behind a veil and are living in a diaphanous dream world.

The irony is this: Your Christ was foremost about love. But, the primary prerequisite for authentically loving your fellow human beings is a sustain effort to empathetically understand them on their own terms. You are farther from that than anyone I have encountered.
You are an 8-bit machine for distinguishing between us and them.

[_Droopy]

He's using the term to refer to what I, or McWhorter, would think of as racism that is serious in its impact because of differentials in power and capacity to be oppressive.

A 14 year old gang banger standing over me with a .357 magnum is a god. He has all power over me, life or death, mutilation or a wheel chair for life. His racism is no different than the racism of a 1950s Klansman riding around with some local good old boys looking for someone to lynch. Yes, in that place the sherrif, the defenses attorney, the prosecuting attorney, and the judge are probably also in the Klan, and most of the townspeople would be biased against any charges brought against the good old boys.

The racism itself as a personal characteristic, however, in a individual psychological, moral, and fully human sense, remains the same, and power is defined in any number of ways and in different contexts, whether one takes priority over another being well within the realm of the arbitrary.

The LA riots were, overwhelmingly, black race riots against non-black citizens, citizens outnumbered, overwhelmed, and bereft of police protection. Does that fall within the cultural studies understanding of "power" or not? Blacks were the dominant power group in the LA riots, united against much smaller Korean, Asian, and white bystanders.

Is this racist power in action, or something else?

[_Droopy]

quote="Droopy"

No, Tarski, its just a consideration based upon a long (at least 30 year) assertion, very popular within black studies departments, among Afrocentrist professors and public intellectuals, the black power movement, and leftist black media pundits, that blacks cannot be racists because blacks do not have political and social power in America - they are not the dominant political group, in other words.

According to this definition, racism isn't an individual psychological attribute but an expression of social dominance among racial/ethinic collectives who hold dominant positions of political and police power as members of ideologically undifferentiated in-groups.

Hence, the Black Panthers are not a racist group because they have no access to and do not wield political power in any significant or direct manner. The black teenager holding a gun to your head and telling you he's gonna blow your creepy-ass cracker head off for what your ancestors did to his people two centuries ago cannot be a racist because he has no political voice or power. In other words, to be a racist, he would have to wield political power in company with a dominant group of other blacks such that he could put you and other white people, by the force of law, in a diversity reeducation camp and have you shot there. Just putting a gun to your head and blowing your brains out because you're white doesn't rise to that level.

You are describing are real distinction (which you wish to ignore) and then objecting to a semantic issue (should consideration of long standing social structures play into the major sense of the word racism or not?). Either way, the reality remains.

Its not a semantic issue but core theory within the academic Left for decades. Let's see what you have remaining...

I suppose that, in your mind, a Jew in Nazi Germany who learned to harbor negative feelings toward Germans would be exactly analogous to the anti-Semitism of conscious and active supporters of the murderous policies of Hitler's regime.
You know, like, um, major shame on Anne Frank if she ever let herself feel a generalized mistrust or animosity toward Germans. What a racist she would be.

1. Are you here asserting that Jews cannot be racist?

2. You appear to be conflating hatred of Germans for what they were doing presently to Jews with hatred/distrust of white people in a generalized way for what most American blacks born since the mid-sixties have experienced only fleetingly and which many have never and will never experience at all and which is centered in grievances reaching back generations (50, 60, 70 years ago to the era of Jim Crow) and then centuries, to the Atlantic slave trade under way two, three and four hundred years ago.

Your denial of the existence and/or relevance of what exists at the level of society and institutions is idiotically bizarre

What have I denied exists, exactly?

as is your disingenuous appeal to some real or imagined aspect of "black studies" as definitive of what all liberals must be thinking.

All liberals don't follow this kind of thinking, and I never said they did. However, black power and multiculturalist ideolgy have had vast influence on both academia and the pop culture, in various ways, usually in popular, simplified and domesticated form (but not always: see anything by Spike Lee or John Singleton).

By the way, ..all this wholesale cutting an pasting from the same set of cockeyed ideologically extreme sources just provides us more evidence of the total lack of either originality or open-mindedness in your thinking.

What source that I've used as material here can be considered "ideologically extreme" and why?

You are really quite simple minded in the end. For you, all that exists is "us" (the righteous people sitting inside the conserve-bubble) and "them"--the latter being labeled lefties and totally defined by myths and implausible edifices constructed of cherry picked anecdotes passed around inside the bubble and broadcast via amplitude modulated radio waves. You live behind a veil and are living in a diaphanous dream world.

Stop channeling Graham. Put away you're personally signed Michael Moore Limited Edition Ouija Board.

The irony is this: Your Christ was foremost about love.

And judgement. And standards. And "the straight and narrow way," and righteousness, and intelligence.

But, the primary prerequisite for authentically loving your fellow human beings is a sustain effort to empathetically understand them on their own terms.

Please describe for me how you would apply this standard above with a Neo-Nazi skinhead.

[_beastie]

I knew, I just knew I could draw the Morlocks out of their lairs into the disinfectant of light if I just took the bait a bit. Here is a case of the fish reeling in the fisherman.

This is one of the most poisonous and pernicious multiculturalist myths generated in the fetid swamps of academic political correctness on cultural record. There is not a shred of historical evidence that this was anything other than a tragic accident of biology and contact among previously vastly separated peoples (just as a similar epidemic among those the Spanish conquistadors came into contact with in Latin America).

What we have here is not anything resembling a serious historical claim but an artifact of multiculturalist ideology (and which, by the way, calls into serious question everything beastie's ever written about Mesoamerica or the Book of Mormon).

Fact is, on at least one occasion a high-ranking European considered infecting the Indians with smallpox as a tactic of war. I'm talking about Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of British forces in North America during the French and Indian War (1756-'63). Amherst and a subordinate discussed, apparently seriously, sending infected blankets to hostile tribes. What's more, we've got the documents to prove it, thanks to the enterprising research of Peter d'Errico, legal studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at (fittingly) Amherst. D'Errico slogged through hundreds of reels of microfilmed correspondence looking for the smoking gun, and he found it.

Yup, a conversation between two military officers. That's it in a couple of personal letters. That's the entire wad shot. Not even official government stationary. Beyond this, there is not a scrap of evidence from official documents or government texts showing any attempt or consideration of such a practice.

The abject stupidity (and ideologically generated gullibility) of such a claim is too obvious to bear repeating, but, as were dealing with the Left here, endless repetition of simple, logical connections and implications seems warranted. The smallpox epidemic of that time didn't just kill Indians, who were only more highly susceptible, but numerous whites as well. In other words, you are claiming that it was thought OK to kill thousands of Americans (including any soldiers/government officials coming into contact with them) in order to eradicate Amerindians.

Cough up some serious documentary evidence, beastie, just for once (not a letter between a local commander and a "subordinate") or give up the ship. Secondly, this was 1763, and "America" and "Americans" had nothing to do with any of it, even if the claim of "biological warfare" had the slightest historical merit (the source you quote gives away the game when he says, "To modern ears, this talk about infecting the natives with smallpox, hunting them down with dogs, etc., sounds over the top. But it's easy to believe Amherst and company were serious."
This and other similar statements are what historians say when they really mean "I have no idea one way or the other" but have a bias they wish to promote).

Michael Medved summed it up nicely:

Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based exclusively on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Indian populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there's no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy.

For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.

Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book (and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the exception.

The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents our "original sin" fails to put European contact with these struggling Stone Age societies in any context whatever, and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in young Americans.

A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future.

The only circumstantial evidence for the alleged "genocide" is in two unconnected and disassociated events some 74 years apart, the first being the letters between Amherst and his "subordinate" which suggested such a course of action (at all events independent of higher military command and of civilian government authority) and one claimed by the notorious academic fraud Ward Churchill, regarding the Mandan tribe in 1837. In that case, again, no evidence exists that there was any intentional attempt to infect anyone, and indeed, some evidence suggests that the settlers in that case attempted to prevent the outbreak.

Move along...nothing to see here.

As I predicted, you used the date of the event as your argument.

Of course, the written statements of the people involved count for nothing with you.