Professor Zero over at Hot Air’s Green Room has a brilliant post today on the vulnerability of black men in America, riffing on one of Skippy’s lines.
One thing black men are definitely vulnerable to is violent crime. Blacks represent about 14% of the general population, but they make up nearly half of murder victims. For decades, they have been thirty to forty percent more likely to suffer from violent crime than the general population. You will notice that white liberals are much more enthusiastic about springing black criminals from their “disproportionate levels of incarceration” than the law-abiding black citizens who must deal with them, once they’ve ditched their orange jumpsuits. The best things society could do to help innocent black men avoid being robbed and murdered are providing enhanced access to lawful, registered firearms for self-defense, more aggressive prosecution of the criminal element, and more police protection. Professor Gates is not doing black men any favors on the latter count, and I doubt they can expect much help from President Obama on the first two, even if he can get through the rest of his term without calling the police “stupid” on national television.
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
Comments 4
I must say, I get a helluva charge out of going to another blog and seeing a “Zombie Contentions” trackback. Wonder if the Czar is still considering a “Rule 5 Sunday”?
July 24th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Bruce: “Rule 5 Sunday”? Quoi?
July 24th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Howard, it’s here
July 24th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
The arguments in the linked essay are of course perfectly sound and rational, but like so many of their ilk they bank on members of relatively insular groups behaving as independent-minded individuals rather than as participants in a psychological collective, subject to immense peer pressure – or, to put it most crudely, as herd animals. That’s not how things work. Southern whites didn’t dribble into the Republican Party in the 1960s, nor did their black counterparts slowly migrate in the opposite political direction during the civil rights era – both groups defected en masse and retain their loyalties to this day. Other tight-knit ethnicities have displayed comparable behavior. I don’t know if or when a proverbial “tipping point” was reached in each case, but the magnitude of the demographic shifts suggests that outsized political forces were at work. I can’t imagine what it would take to provoke a wholesale switch of blacks (or evangelical whites)(or Jews)(or Latinos) from their current affiliation, but the decisions are not likely to be made in the brain’s problem-solving regions, but in more instinct-oriented ones. Which is not to say that appeals to rationality have no place, or are incapable of influencing marginal voters. But we are playing on the demagogue’s turf.
July 25th, 2009 at 10:03 am