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.

How can black men escape profiling?

I'm re-posting this in full.  Whitlock's main point is compelling: we know what to do about black-on-black violence, but nobody -- including our black male President -- knows how to overcome racial profiling of black men.  Nobody.  Think about that.

Consider also that Whitlock is not some blame-everything-on-poverty black man: "Navigating the ghetto is difficult. But it's not remotely impossible." That comment somewhat eases upper-class white guilt without disempowering the poor.

Here's how Whitlock sums it up [emphasis mine]:

Without a shred of corroborating evidence, the police assumed and the prosecution team unwittingly conceded Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman without reasonable provocation.

Imagine that. An agitated fair-skinned man with a gun followed an unarmed black boy and the assumptions drawn favor the gun-toting, non-black man.

If there's a blueprint for black men to follow that will reduce negative assumptions being made about us, reveal it.  Many of us will adhere to it religiously and focus all of our attention on the drug war, mass incarceration and the other policies that fuel black-on-black violence and the destruction of the black family.

Whitlock is a columnist for FOX Sports, by the way.  Good on FOX, I guess, for not firing him for making this commentary on HuffPo.

The Real Problem: Race Baiters' Inability to Think, Comprehend

By Jason Whitlock

July 26, 2013 | Huffington Post

Here's what the race baiters on the right fail to comprehend: There's a clear-cut, easy-to-follow blueprint for avoiding the ravages of black-on-black violence and crime. America has yet to provide us a comparable blueprint for avoiding racial profiling.

That's why it's impossible for ordinary, rational black folks to let go of Trayvon Martin and the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial.

We know all too well the horrors transpiring in Chicago and other urban areas where the neglected offsprings of America's prison-institutionalized and prison-values-corrupted engage in a predictable war of hopelessness and self-hatred. The consequences of our drug war and its companion, mass incarceration, do not stop at prison walls.

We know that. We do also, however, know how to escape their wrath.

When my mother caught a burglar climbing through our kitchen window in 1975, she promptly took a second job and moved me and my older brother to an Indianapolis suburb.

[Nowadays a black woman would be lucky to get first job. -- J]

Willie Clark, my best childhood friend, grew up in a home just a few blocks from my old neighborhood. You could walk out his family's backyard and reach a government housing project in less than a minute. The entire area was rough.

Willie's parents had little trouble keeping him out of trouble. They raised him and his two sisters in the church. They taught him to be respectful and careful of where he went and who he befriended. They supported his athletic endeavors, kept tabs on his academic progress, demanded that he avoid drugs and nurtured a belief he could achieve something in this country.

He was raised in the 'hood. He graduated from college, opened an American Family Insurance agency, married and built a home in the suburbs for his wife and three kids. He moved up and moved out.

My dad owned small taverns (think ghetto Cheers) in Indianapolis' inner-city for 35 years. I loved the places, visited them often as a kid and socialized at them as an adult. I never once had any problems.

Navigating the ghetto is difficult. But it's not remotely impossible. If you're intent on avoiding trouble, use common sense and choose to interact with all people respectfully, you can, short of bad luck, stay clear of the nonsense. And, if all else fails and you don't want to walk the tightrope, you can do what my mother did and take the necessary steps to leave the ghetto.

For a black man, there is no game plan for escaping racial profiling. You can't run from the police. No neighborhood is safe. There's no style of dress that protects you. Your level of education and wealth are irrelevant. Proper manners and a deferential tone do not matter.

Years ago, I worked for the Charlotte Observer. I lived in Rock Hill, S.C. My picture ran inside the newspaper alongside my occasional columns. One day I was driving home from work around 5 p.m. when a police officer decided I fit the description of a black man who had pulled a string of burglaries. He pulled me over. I was in slacks, dress shoes and a button-up shirt.

He demanded I step out of the car. When I did, I discovered there were six cops and three additional police cars surrounding me and my 1985 Honda Prelude. For the next hour, I stood alongside a busy street as the lead detective berated me and accused me of being a cat burglar. I told him I was a sports writer for the local paper. He didn't believe me. He didn't let me re-enter my car and drive home until a police dispatcher called the Observer and was assured by one of my co-workers that I worked there.

I was not cited for any traffic violation. I had broken no laws. I was guilty of being black when the police were looking for a black burglary suspect.

I drove to my apartment and cried for the next two hours. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.  It's difficult to adequately convey the mix of outrage, fear and vulnerability I felt throughout the encounter.  I've never forgotten it. Twenty years later, the scar is still there. It burns every time a well-intentioned employee follows me as I shop for clothes.

Maybe this is a price the race-baiters on the right think black men should pay without objection for the privilege of living in this country. If that's their logic, then what they're really arguing is that black men are not full citizens with inalienable rights in this republic.

Or maybe their position is racial profiling is a tax all black men should pay because our criminal justice system and popular culture have judged and portrayed black men as inherently criminal.  Interesting.  Do we then retain the right to judge all white men as inherently racist and the masterminds powering a system that has dehumanized and criminalized black men for 400 years in this country?

Surely there's some middle ground. Surely reasonable men -- regardless of political bent and color -- can comprehend black people's angst over racial profiling and subsequent fear the Zimmerman verdict symbolically deputized non-black civilians to treat all black men as criminals on sight.

I don't wear a hoodie. I was never suspended from school. I never posed as a wannabe thug. But I know exactly how Trayvon Martin felt at 7:09 p.m., on Feb. 26, 2012. He felt a mix of outrage, fear and vulnerability.

The system (police and prosecution) apparently never even considered the possibility that in the rain and the dark a cowardly, wannabe cop provoked a kid he deemed an "a--hole" and a "punk" by approaching him with his hand on his holstered weapon or with his weapon drawn.

Without a shred of corroborating evidence, the police assumed and the prosecution team unwittingly conceded Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman without reasonable provocation.

Imagine that. An agitated fair-skinned man with a gun followed an unarmed black boy and the assumptions drawn favor the gun-toting, non-black man.

If there's a blueprint for black men to follow that will reduce negative assumptions being made about us, reveal it. Many of us will adhere to it religiously and focus all of our attention on the drug war, mass incarceration and the other policies that fuel black-on-black violence and the destruction of the black family.

Cornel West: Obama's racism speech hypocritical, too late

Brother West was having none of President Obama's bland and measured post-post-trial statement on the "not guilty" verdict of George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin:  

I think we have to recognize that [President Obama] has been able to hide and conceal that criminalizing of the black poor as what I call the re-niggerizing of the black professional class. You’ve got these black leaders on the Obama plantation, won’t say a criminal word about the master in the big house, will only try to tame the field folk so that they’re not critical of the master in the big house. That’s why I think even Brother Sharpton is going to be in trouble. Why? Because he has unleashed—and I agree with him—the rage. And the rage is always on the road to self-determination. But the rage is going to hit up against a stone wall. Why? Because Obama and Holder, will they come through at the federal level for Trayvon Martin? We hope so. Don’t hold your breath. And when they don’t, they’re going to have to somehow contain that rage. And in containing that rage, there’s going to be many people who say, "No, we see, this president is not serious about the criminalizing of poor people." We’ve got a black leadership that is deferential to Obama, that is subservient to Obama, and that’s what niggerizing is. You keep folks so scared. You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they’re still scared. And as long as you’re scared, you’re on the plantation.

Most liberal and moderate pundits gave Obama high marks for his unprepared remarks last week about being a black man in America.  Nevertheless, it's kind of pathetic that we need our President to interpret the African-American experience for us.  If you're black, you already know about it. If you're white, and you don't acknowledge your own prejudices, then you're kidding yourself and lying to everybody else.  So who was Obama addressing, the history books?

Cornel West: Obama’s Response to Trayvon Martin Case Belies Failure to Challenge "New Jim Crow"

Interview with Amy Goodman

July 22, 2013 | Democracy Now!

URL: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/22/cornel_west_obamas_response_to_trayvon