The year just ended—2015—was one during which the primary civilizational conflict of our times began to come to a head. It’s not necessarily a conflict between Christians and Muslims. It’s not necessarily a conflict between progressives and conservatives, or between blacks and whites. Instead, it appears to be a conflict between those who choose to live in a world that fits their worst preconceptions, and those who are willing to discover that some things may not be exactly as they seem.
Following the 2015 killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Freddie Gray, Jonathan Ferrell, and Eric Garner, those who believe they already have every answer and that all of these people “had it coming” have grown louder and more strident as they attempt to shout down those who oppose them. Those opponents are crying just as loudly for justice. In each of those cases there was either no indictment returned by grand jury after grand jury, or else the trial jury failed to reach a verdict against the officers who killed these unarmed men and boys.
And the battle rages on.
Those who support those results proclaim that you need not fear police if you’ve done nothing wrong, that you can “Breathe Easy: Don’t Break the Law.” We’ve seen gang members come together in opposition to violence in Baltimore while biker gang “thugs” run amok on a killing spree in Texas. Domestic terrorism grows and kills more and more people, yet we hear a clamor to “do something” in violation of human rights, civil liberties, and the Constitution only when those terrorists are brown and/or Muslim. Police can not only slam teenagers at a pool party to the ground, or slam a teen sitting quietly in a class room, or body slam a woman face first even when she’s already been handcuffed—they can even slam a pregnant woman stomach first to the ground for failing to show ID, without repercussions. Those who call the cops for aid can be shot down “accidentally,” and police and their supporters are far more likely to act as if even that person still somehow “had it coming.”
There are those who are just fine with all of the above, who simply proclaim “these things are gonna happen,” but there are those of us who feel differently. Those of us who feel that none of this is acceptable and all of it is absolutely avoidable and unnecessary.
This week, a striking battle in this conflict was waged on local TV between Rev. Graylan Hagler and Dan Joseph of the conservative Media Research Center on WJLA. Both echoed arguments we’ve seen brought out all year long and even in years prior, but rarely has it been as heated and visceral as this.
Via Rawstory, the reverend stated his case against the constant complaints about “political correctness:”
“Political incorrectness is racist, it’s xenophobic because it really in a sense diminishes people’s humanity,” Hagler explained. “It characterizes people in negative ways, it stereotypes people in ways that are ultimately destructive.”
The pastor contended that the political success of Trump was tied to America’s history of racism, and to the way some whites feel threatened by the election of President Barack Obama.
“People basically tried to restore the Confederacy and did so after the compromise,” Hagler noted. “And we’re really facing this white supremacist paradigm all over again.”
“You need to wise up and open up your eyes and see that there has been an historical pattern in this country of white supremacist violence against black people!” the pastor exclaimed. “I’m saying you need to sit down with people long enough to know something about them, to know something about what’s going on.”
But as expected, Joseph essentially blew him off.
“The last thing the Black Lives Matter movement is doing is being respectful,” Joseph opined. “They are saying all cops are bad, they are saying all cops are racist, they are rioting in the streets.”
“Because the Black Lives Matter movement is a disgusting anti-American liberal movement,” he added. “The way that they’ve been taking the things that are not facts and telling the country that they are in order to promote their agenda, that is wrong.”
Joseph went on to proclaim that it’s “a lie” that Michael Brown had his hands up, even though that isn’t nearly what the Department of Justice said. He claims that statistics justify the actions of police, even though the Bureau of Justice Statistics consistently shows that police are biased against black people, stopping them twice as often even if they haven’t broken any laws, searching them twice as often even when they find drugs and guns less often, arresting them twice as often, and using non-lethal force against them three times as often.
The table above shows that the percentage of blacks arrested during traffic stops is twice as high as white drivers (4.7 percent vs. 2.4 percent). And similarly, their likelihood of being ticketed is greater (58 percent to 53 percent)—although Latinos top them both at 62 percent—and the likelihood of receiving a written warning (14.8 percent vs. 17.7 percent) or a verbal warning (6.0 percent vs. 11.2 percent) is consistently lower.
A similar differential can be seen when it comes to officer uses of force against persons of different races and ages.
You can see that from 2002 through 2008, black citizens encountering police consistently received threats of force or use of force at least three times more often than white citizens. Latino citizens were threatened with force or had force used on them about twice as often.
Police are also killing blacks about four times as often, and those killed are twice as likely to be unarmed.
An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed
Meanwhile the rate of police solving crimes and murders committed against blacks—even by other blacks—is dismally low. The vast majority of those who kill black people get away with it, while almost everyone who currently sits on death row in America is largely there because they killed someone white.
Black men constitute 61 percent of homicide victims in Louisiana — nearly 13,000 black men were killed in this state since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Yet only three people have been executed for killing a black man in all of this time. That’s less than 6 percent of the rate of executions for individuals who kill someone other than a black man, and 1/48th of the execution rate for people who kill white women, according to a study that will appear in the Loyola University of New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law.
It’s not the case that all police are racist. It’s a larger issue, because those who aren’t racist risk losing their careers if they dare to stand up against bias and brutality.
Instead of relying on any of those facts, Joseph proclaims that the “real” problem with black people is that they have a 70 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate. Technically that is correct, but it doesn’t explain any of the above. It also ignores the 66.9 percent rate for Native Americans, and 53 percent rate for Latinos. It doesn’t explain why, even after they are born out of wedlock, black kids are being pushed out of schools with higher discipline, suspension, and expulsion rates. It doesn't explain why black unemployment is twice as high (and for young black men of “marrying age” it appears as high as 50 percent), and why it continues to lag behind even when those applying have college degrees.
In 2013, the most recent period for which unemployment data are available by both race and educational attainment, 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate stood at just 5.6 percent. The figures point to an ugly truth: Black college graduates are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.
Black people still face discrimination in housing and in lending, and very clearly in voting. But to people like Joseph, merely saying all of that is “anti-American.”
This is the battle: Getting people who are directly invested in not listening to hear what’s actually being said, and facing what’s actually happening in people’s lives day to day.
Is discrimination still a nearly insurmountable wall that blocks the progress of black and minority people? No. That wall was shattered by the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. But what we all then neglected to do was pick up the rubble and shattered pieces left behind. These remnants remain and can occasionally trip you up if you fail to avoid them. They can be dodged, but not by everyone. They can be leapt over, but not everyone can jump high enough. It’s still sadly true that when you’re black, or poor, or female, or a minority in this country, you have to be twice as good to get half as far. That’s unacceptable. That’s un-American.
We need to redouble our efforts to pick up all these pieces, even against the cries that attempting to do so is being “politically correct.” Failure to do so allows for the continuing structural bigotry and bias to go unchallenged and uncorrected.
We have to continue to fight this fight against the nay-sayers and those with blinders on who think attempting to address any racial or ethnic issues somehow takes something away from them in their privileged, white-bread positions. There are those who would leave those remaining blocks in place by vehemently denying they even exist. But they do exist. We know they are there, and we must not let accusations that “Black Lives Matter starts riots”—or claims that accusations of racism are just some “ploy” to gain some type of social advantage—deter us in the struggle to clean this mess up.
This is particularly true as we watch similar barriers being newly erected against Muslims, and against women and their reproductive health, and against the LGBTQ community, still.
This is the battle we face. Are you willing to take up the cause?
Monday, Jan 4, 2016 · 2:48:19 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
One more thing about that “70% black out-of-wedlock birth rate” is the fact that even though that number is true, the CDC also says that the rate of black fathers being involved in their children’s live — even whey they aren’t married to the mother — is consistently higher than other fathers level of involvement.
Although black fathers are more likely to live separately from their children—the statistic that’s usually trotted out to prove the parenting “crisis”—many of them remain just as involved in their kids’ lives. Pew estimates that 67 percent of black dads who don’t live with their kids see them at least once a month, compared to 59 percent of white dads and just 32 percent of Hispanic dads.
So there’s also that to consider.