Pitts: Black crime not a racial statement

Right on time, my man Leonard Pitts nailed it:

No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you [as a black person], you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.

Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.

We poor, oppressed white people!  Oh Lord, deliver us from this reverse racism!  

Hey, here's an idea: let's all overdose on tanning pills like C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man and then we'll be living on easy street... right? Right?  [Crickets chirping].

This white guy figured out how to beat reverse racism back in 1986.

Killing of Christopher Lane not a racial statement

By Leodard Pitts

August 27, 2013 | Miami Herald

I have nothing to say about the murder of Christopher Lane.

Except this:

The killing of this Australian man, allegedly by a group of boys who were bored and could think of nothing better to do, suggests chilling amorality and a sociopathic estrangement from the sacredness of life. The fact that these teenagers were able to get their hands on a gun with which to shoot the 22-year-old student in the back on Aug. 16 as he was jogging in the small Oklahoma town of Duncan, leaves me embarrassed for my country — and thankful I am not the one who has to explain to his country how such a thing can happen.

None of this will satisfy the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who have written me emails demanding (it is always interesting when people think they can demand a column) that I write about this drive-by shooting as an act of  racial bigotry, an inverse of the Trayvon Martin killing, if you will. There is a numbing repetitiveness to these screeds: Where is Jesse Jackson, they demand. Where is Al Sharpton? Where are you? Or as one subject line puts it: “Why no outrage!”

Actually, I have plenty outrage. Just not the flavor of outrage they would like me to have.

It is, for some people, a foregone conclusion that any time violent crime crosses racial lines, some kind of racial statement is intended. But violent criminals are not sociopolitical theoreticians, and violent crime is not usually a social manifesto. With relatively rare exceptions — we call them hate crimes — the fact is, if a thug shoots you, it is not because you are white, black, gay or Muslim, but because you are there.

So is Lane’s shooting one of those exceptions? A case can be made that it is. One of the young black suspects, after all, tweeted his anti-white bigotry back in April. The hashtag: HATE THEM.

But a case can also be made that it isn’t. Of the remaining two suspects, one is reportedly white and the other, the alleged shooter, apparently has a white mother. The prosecutor told the Duncan Banner newspaper there’s no evidence Lane was targeted because of his race, and in any event, bringing hate-crime charges is a moot point. In Oklahoma, hate crimes are misdemeanors; the boys are already facing felonies.

Again, none of this will satisfy those dozens, if not hundreds, of email writers, not to mention the authors of similar screeds on right-wing websites. What they’re doing is simple. They are using tragedy to play a cynical game of tit-for-tat: “I’ll see your Trayvon Martin and raise you a Christopher Lane.” In other words, they want to use this tragedy to validate their view that white people are victims of black racism.

And if all that was meant when African Americans decry racism is that sometimes white people do violence against you, then the email writers and right-wing pundits might have a point. But it isn’t and they don’t.

No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you, you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.

Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.

Last week, Christopher Lane was killed for no good reason, apparently by three morally defective boys.

Sorry, but he’s the victim here. White America is not.

Pitts: 'Race is the stupidest idea in history'

Sums up Pitts:  "Race is the stupidest idea in history. It is also, arguably, the most powerful."

His meditation on race -- and humanity's relatively recent preoccupation with race, and how it determines identity -- is worth reading in full.  

In America, attitudes and prejudices about race concern mostly blacks, and mostly black males, in negative ways.  Ironically,

When Africans were gathered on the shores of that continent to be packed into the reeking holds of slave ships for the voyage to this country, they saw themselves as Taureg, Mandinkan, Fulani, Mende or Songhay -- not black. As Noel Ingnatiev, author of How The Irish Became White, has observed, those Africans did not become slaves because they were black. They “became” black because they were enslaved.

On the flip side, continues Pitts:

I’ve often thought the word “white” had a tendency to discomfit the people to whom it is applied, to carry some hint of accusation that is no less real for being unspoken. In my experience, white people are often ill at ease with being referred to as white people.

There is, I think, a reason for that. “Black” and “white” are equally artificial, but black fairly quickly took on the contours of a real culture.

Whereas "white" includes all the categories not covered by anything else. Like on those applications and Census forms, where we white guys are supposed to check "Non-Hispanic White." [SPOILER ALERT: I'm white.] That's a pretty big catch-all, if you ask me.  Although there is a lot of truth to this, too: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ . So maybe a true "white guy" culture with our own shared historical identity -- shaped by pop culture and consumption trends -- is indeed coalescing in America?....

Seriously though, I should add that, among academics, the idea is taking hold that we should talk about ethnicity, not race. FYI, here's as good a definition of ethnicity or ethnic groups as any:

An ethnic group is a social category of people who share a common culture, such as a common language, a common religion, or common norms, customs, practices, and history. Ethnic groups have a consciousness of their common cultural bond. An ethnic group does not exist simply because of the common national or cultural origins of the group, however. They develop because of their unique historical and social experiences, which become the basis for the group’s ethnic identity. For example, prior to immigration to the United States, Italians did not think of themselves as a distinct group with common interests and experiences. However, the process of immigration and the experiences they faced as a group in the United States, including discrimination, created a new identity for the group. 

If you accept this definition then you must conclude, as Pitts has, that the term "African-American" is meaningless. Indeed, a long time ago I babysat for an African-American woman who emigrated from South Africa, and she was white as can be. But there are even more subtle but important distinctions than that among the so-called African-American community....

P.S. -- Happy New Year!  (That is, if you subscribe to the Western-European-centric Gregorian calendar....)

Dumbest idea in history? Race

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.

January 1, 2013 | Miami Herald

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/01/178695/commentary-dumbest-idea-in-history.html#storylink=cpy

Pitts: Obama can't fight or even acknowledge racist hatred

These days I don't have much sympathy for President Obama, but Pitts is right: on the basic charge against his very IDENTITY, Obama cannot fight back, and it must drive him nuts:  

So this is the paradigm of our age - self delusion on the one hand, a guy trying to govern on the other, while hemmed in by race, defined in crude, stereotypical imagery, yet unable to fight it, talk about it, or even admit he sees it, for fear of compromising his effectiveness, being dismissed as, God forbid - "an angry black man."

If Obama even for a second started to complain about the obvious and pervasive racism pitted against him on the Right, he would immediately make the whole race an issue of race.  And he's just not wired or inclined, politically, to open that front or wage that battle.  It's a losing battle anyway.  The Right would only say he's making excuses.  So he must remain silent about the (Republican) elephant in the room.  If you think he's not aware of it then you're kidding yourself.  He knows the score and must bite his tongue.  Post-racial country, my ass.  

What's worse, this racist sentiment emblazoned on his car, or the fact that he has no fear that somebody will seriously damage his automobile once they see it? Anybody who puts this kind of sticker on his car must feel pretty confident there are a lot more people out there like himself. Whereas in certain places in America, just having a pro-Obama bumper sticker could earn you an angry honk, a shaken fist, or a parking lot confrontation. It happened in 2008, I know it.

Again, the same old hate for President Obama

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

September 23, 2012 | Miami Herald

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/23/169413/leonard-pitts-jr-again-the-same.html

U.S. under attack by terrorists

Folks, we're under attack.  It's the Enemy Within.  We have to do something.  They have infiltrated our government; Congress should investigate.  Time to start profiling, requiring loyalty oaths, and demanding that all the "moderate" conservatives (if there any) speak out against the terrorists in their ranks.  Because if they don't, that means they're for the terrorists.

Looking for terrorism in all the wrong places

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.

August 17, 2012 | Miami Herald

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/08/17/162363/commentary-looking-for-terrorism.html

What do you expect of black students?

I like this better than one of Pastor Manning's sermons. Pitts makes the choice simple: Would we rather pay a little money now to help at-risk black students become law-abiding net producers, or would we prefer to pay a lot of money later to keep them locked up and become a net drain on society? None of us should let his principles stand in the way of supporting what works, even if it means spending more money and attention on black children than on whites to give them what they can't get elsewhere.

Bush was right to decry "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for black youth. Likewise, we should reject the belief that black at-risk youth are beyond saving, or that they don't respond in the same way as white youth do to the same stimuli: caring teachers, safe and nurturing schools, regular meals and medical care, opportunities to excel, praise and recognition from adults, and calls for personal achievement and responsibility.

Kids are kids, people are people, and we all want and need the same things.

Commentary: What do you expect of black students?

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.

July 3, 2009 | CNN.com

Back in 1972, on an episode of "All in the Family," Gloria posed the following riddle to Archie and Meathead.

Father and son go driving. There's an accident. The father is killed instantly, the son is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon walks in, takes one look at the patient and says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."

The answer to the apparent paradox eluded Archie, Meathead and the guys down at Kelsey's bar for the balance of the half hour. They floated theories involving stepfathers, sons-in-law, priests, adoptions and returns from the dead. All of which Archie apparently found more believable than the true answer which was, of course, that the surgeon was the boy's mother. "If that's the answer," he spouted, "that's the dumbest riddle I ever hoid!"

Thirty-seven years later it is, perhaps, difficult to appreciate why this riddle ever was a riddle, how so apparent an answer could have stymied Archie, Meathead and, I would wager, the vast majority of the viewing audience.

The riddle speaks volumes not just about how the world has changed in four decades, but also about how unconscious expectations can blind us to the obvious. In 1972, one expected a man when one heard the word "surgeon."

Much as, in 2009, one expects a white kid when one hears the word "scholar."

People will deny this, will say all the right and politic things. But the disclaimers will be as thin and transparent as Saran Wrap. Black, white and otherwise, we are all socialized by the same forces and all carry, by and large, the same unconscious assumptions. One of which is that a certain level of achievement is black and another is white.

This is what you are hearing when a black kid speaks standard English and another black kid chides him for "talking white." This is what George W. Bush was alluding to when he decried "the soft bigotry of low expectations." And this is what we need to address forthrightly if we ever hope to close the so-called achievement gap that looms between black kids and white ones.

In 2007 and 2008, I traveled the country for a series of columns called "What Works," aimed at profiling programs that addressed that gap.

I traveled between big programs and small ones, from the Harlem Children's Zone, which encompasses 90 square blocks of holistic education, family counseling, medical care and tutoring in New York City, to the Freedom Project in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which offers field trips, martial arts and academic enrichment in a rural county where the median income is $25,000 a year and the teen pregnancy rate is said to be 25 percent.

I toured Self Enhancement Inc. in Portland, Oregon, a KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) School in Gaston, North Carolina, the East Lake Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, and many others. In all these places, I saw black kids -- well-spoken, clean-cut and noon-sun bright -- making a lie out of other peoples' expectations.

Over the course of 13 months, common themes began to emerge whenever I would ask why kids such as these were doing such wondrous work in these places and substandard work elsewhere.

We have more power to fire bad teachers and reward good ones, they said. We require parental involvement. We have a longer school day and a longer school year. We mentor children that need it. We counsel children and families that need it. We are invested in them and make sure they know it.

Most of all, they spoke of the simple power of expectation: making it a conscious point to look for greatness in black kids in whom people had not thought to look for it before. What I came to understand in those interviews is that we already know the secret to improving academic performance for African-American children. What is missing is the will to do so.

And that, I think, is because where they are concerned, we have other expectations.

I asked Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, how he justifies asking for money to uplift poor kids in Harlem. His response struck me: "Someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3,500 a year on `Alfred.' 'Alfred' is 8. OK, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year."

But then, we expect Alfred to be locked up, don't we? Expect it so blithely that we will not challenge the expectation even when it works against our own economic self-interest. Canada, after all, presents a rather stark choice: invest a smaller amount early and produce a citizen who pays taxes and contributes to the system or pay a much larger amount later for the upkeep of a citizen who consumes tax monies and contributes nothing.

That we consistently choose the latter says something about how we assess the educability, the salvageability, of African-American kids.

Thirteen months of interviewing young scholars left me more impatient than ever with a culture that writes off black kids because they are black kids. Somewhere between the 13-year-old in rural Mississippi who wants to go to Harvard and the second-graders in Harlem studying Vincent Van Gogh, I ceased being surprised and started being angry that what I saw was still the exception and not the rule.

Everywhere I went, there were black kids excelling. And at some point, you say to yourself: well, of course.

What did you expect?