While Ferguson burned this week, The Atlantic’s village idiot and race huckster “Ta-Nehisi” Coates sat in hipster Harlem and earned a couple thousand dollars calling for more looting and violence in a place where he most emphatically does not live and has no plans to ever do more than briefly visit.
What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. “Property damage and looting impede social progress,” Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority.
I can absolutely guarantee you than any application of this philosophy to Mr. Coates’ person — by, for example, setting fire to his home and then nailing him with a rock when he comes running out — would not meet with the same approval that he remotely grants to the people who deliberately victimized the man who was robbed by Michael Brown for a second time. Like most of the people who are wringing their hands over the Michael Brown shooting, he is fully protected by other police from the kind of violent reaction he’s encouraging elsewhere. Remember Bill Maher’s infamous rant about how how Americans were “cowards” because we were using “smart bombs” in the so-called War On Terror? How much more cowardly, then, to encourage violence in someone else’s neighborhood?
Mr. Coates is black, but his adherence to the SJW/SWPL narrative about Ferguson is as letter-perfect as if he were a Berkeley yoga instructor or the infamous Pajama Boy himself. White people all around America are up in (Facebook status) arms about the way that black people are the victims of police violence. They decry the violent, racist police rage that ends young black life and treats African-Americans like targets in a KKK-sponsored shooting gallery. They are determined to force American policing out of its racist rut and create a world where sacred Black men are far less likely than whites to be shot by police.
Good news — it’s already happened.
Turns out the science has been done on this already.
Officers were less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites — 25 times less likely, in fact
And officers hesitated significantly longer before shooting armed suspects who were black, compared to armed subjects who were white or Hispanic
“In sum,” writes Dr. Lois James, a research assistant professor with the university’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology who headed the study, “this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects” in their shooting decisions.
Couple that with Mother Jones burying the lede on a story about white incarceration rates rising while those for African-Americans is dropping, and it’s easy to see that the SJWs are fighting a war that’s already been won. Of course, that isn’t stopping them. The most idiotic article of the week is surely the one by FiveThirtyEight entitled There Are Millions Of Michael Browns In America. The article does Mr. Brown the usual media courtesy, also extended to Trayvon Martin, of referring to a six-foot-four, 290-pound man as a “child”, and it argues that there are plenty of kids in America who use drugs, steal things, and act all thug-like. This is certainly true. it’s also true that there are millions of people in America who drink to excess, and there are millions of people in America who drive automobiles. But if you drink and drive, you’re going to be treated like a criminal.
Michael Brown was no “gentle giant”, unless you see the treatment he’s meting out to another “person of color” in the above screen captures as “gentle”. He may have been a wonderful kid — I don’t know — but it’s hard to feel too sympathetic to someone who knocks around a store clerk for almost no reason at all. This was no little kid running out of a candy store with a bag of M&Ms. This was a grown man who brutalized his victim. (A contrary opinion can be found here.) Mr. Brown was larger than every heavyweight boxing champion in American history, and he was prone to violent behavior.
I don’t believe in police violence. I’ve criticized the behavior of police “supercitizens” on TTAC so much the readers are starting to accuse me of being a one-note piano. I’m not saying that what happened in Ferguson was justified. I wasn’t there, I don’t know. But I’d like to point out that the imaginary “police war on black youth” is just that — imaginary. And as a result of the media hysteria stirred up in Ferguson by the SWPLs and the SJWs and their allies in the media, there’s already been another young Black man killed and set on fire. The media’s death toll in this business is equal to that of the police. Would that second life have been lost if the Ta-Nehisi Coateses of the world had shut their racist, inflammatory, geographically distant mouths?
I doubt it.
As for Mr. Coates himself, I have an outstanding idea: I’d like to lock him, and anybody else who is pretending to seek justice in the Ferguson matter, in a room with Michael Brown or someone like him.
Or a convenience store.
How long would it take Mr. Coates to call for police assistance in that situation? How long would his principles last in the face of an enraged giant of a man?
You know the answer to that.
Did you see Coates’ blitheringly long demand for “reparations” a few months back? Charter member of the “Screw you, pay me” class.
rioting & looting is *never* the correct answer .
Even a dog knows better than to crap where it sleeps .
I have a houseful of Teenaged Foster boys and they all look at this crap and wonder why I’m so against violently acting out in The Ghetto .
Whomever talks in favor of this , should be forced to live in the middle of it until they learn better .
-Nate
It’s a good thing that ‘ol trusty Google was able to help me figure out the meanings of SJW, SWPL and Pajama Boy. Dog whistles, all.
I thought in order to be a “dog whistle” something had to be racist, amirite?
Naw, it just has to draw the attention of a particular group. The target audience already knows what SJW, SWPL and Pajama Boy mean.
I had no clue what they meant, and figure I’m part of the “target”. Seems that to anyone who might be left of center, EVERYTHING that is said against looting, burning stuff, general anarchy, etc is referred to as “dog whistle” racism. Both terms which are now so overused they no longer are even relevant.
I’m not a fan either of militarized police tactics, no knock warrants, shoddy investigation tactics, and entrapment mentality. Therefore I tend to ignore both. If you wanna burn down your own neighborhood, don’t came back later sniveling about no stores left in your ‘hood. Tough titty, sucks to be you. And if jackboot cops are getting exposed as the small minded, short penis, power tripping douches that some are, good. You are a public servant, not our master.
For those so inclined, I would recommend reading some of Fred Reeds columns. He has a way with words that I can only dream of.
Most of your I Wanna Burn Stuff crowd aren’t the locals; they’re the asshats bused in from CloudCuckooLand who don’t know how to do anything else except stir up trouble. The lot of them could be steamrollered with no damage to the body politic.
Ironically enough it was Francis Galton who invented the dog whistle.
I agree and disagree with this in equal measure. Your points on Mr. Coates’ incitement are well taken. Your dismissal of a real problem with police behavior in black neighborhoods stands in stark contrast with all of my personal experiences. It’s not the isolated killings that are the problem, it’s the immediate recourse to violence, verbal disrespect and punitive charging that drives residents to truly mistrust and hate the police.
If the end goal is no rioting and a functional police force then police behavior needs a 180 degree change in these communities. i would add that police focus on low level crimes is a major problem when combined with the accepted lack of professionalism. You can safely assume that the kid you see getting thrown around on the subway platform is in that position for for act which anyone would consider pretty at best, and which wouldn’t even be enforced in the suburbs.
I’m not saying there isn’t a real problem with police behavior EVERYWHERE.
What I’m saying is that the popular narrative of “open season on black kids” doesn’t seem to reflect the reality.
“Broken windows” policing works. Giuliani proved that. The problem is that you replace one oppressive force — unchecked criminality — with another — power-mad cops with perhaps too much discretionary power. Nonetheless, the fact that you can walk through Times Square at 3AM unscathed suggests that discriminatory, racist, hateful, jackbooted police behavior has real and tangible benefits, at least in terms of economics. 🙁
Hmmm, I can’t really disagree with that. I think it turns from useful to problematic when it becomes a long term strategy and not a temporary clean up tool.
My take is that immunity from oversight plus arrest quotas plus petty law ovser-enforcement makes everything more dangerous for everyone. Much like the opposite does. Police shouldn’t be terrified of da’s, but the da’s shouldn’t be on side with them either. In my neighborhood the cops are a real and tangible threat, criminals are not right now, and I don’t look like/am not a criminal.
Yeah - I’ve always wondered how much correlation there is between studies like the one linked and actual on the job behavior.
It’s one thing to behave a particular way when you’re involved in what you know is a study in fictional scenarios versus how you behave every day on your job. I would bet that if you looked up the actual incidents of unarmed shootings in the US it’d be heavily skewed towards minorities.
Aside from that, Radley Balko over at Washpo had a pretty good article that at least to me went a long way to explaining why people who live in that area are so frustrated with their police/judicial system.
That said - totally agree anyone actually supporting the rioting and looting is a joke- and you know that the moment people start looting his locally sourced flannel and selvage denim boutique he’ll be the first to call for the tear gas and ‘tough policing’
The NYT, which has been beating the drum for Ferguson riots for a month now, has a piece that admits there’s a paucity of reliable data:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/sunday-review/race-and-police-shootings-are-blacks-targeted-more.html?_r=0
I’d suggest that the fact that the federal government knows your call detail records for the last ten years but can’t quite put its finger on police shooting statistics is a bigger problem than any particular racial issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBhaiJ5YNiM
Oh, the motor city’s burnin’
It ain’t no thing in the world that I can do
Don’t ya know
Don’t ya know the big D is burnin’?
Ain’t no thing in the world that Johnny can do
My home town burnin’ down to the ground
Worser than Viet Nam
Well, it started on 12th and Clairmont, this mornin’
I just don’t know what it’s all about
Well, it started on 12th and Clairmont, this mornin’
I don’t know what it’s all about
The fire wagon kept comin’
The snipers just wouldn’t let ’em put it out
Fire bomb bustin’ all around me
An’ soldiers was ev’rywhere
Well, fire bomb falllin’ all around me
And soldiers standin’ ev’rywhere
I could hear the people screaming
Sireens fill the air
I don’t know what the trouble is
I can’t stay around to find it out
I don’t know, I don’t know
What the trouble is, this mo’nin’
I just can’t stay around to find it out
Takin’ my wife an my family
And little Johnny Lee is clearin’ out
The motor city’s burnin’
Ain’t a thing that I can do
Well, the motor city’s burnin’
Ain’t a thing that I can do
I just hope, people
It’ll never happen to you
Yes, yes, I could hear the fireman
Said, ‘Look, get outta here’
It’s too hot.