Tim Scott proves that Obama was right to predict he would downplay Racism

Doing here exactly what Barack Obama said he'd be doing - downplaying Racism.

"The truth of my life disproves the lies of the radical left" he says. 

Specifically, Obama said this.

"I think there's a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate Americans saying, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it," Obama said.

"The rhetoric of, 'Can't we all get along,'" should be accompanied by an "honest accounting of our past and our present," Obama said.

“An honest accounting of our past and present” isn’t really too much to ask I would think. But apparently, it’s far too much for the GOP or Tim Scott.

Let’s all recall that it was Tim Scott who grabbed the wheel and drove police reform efforts into a ditch.

    Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott once said his 2020 police reform bill would “defund” local police departments from federal grants for non-compliance, but he later attacked Democrats for proposing the same policies.    

Introduced in the summer of 2020, Scott’s JUSTICE Act was aimed at reforming the practices of local police departments in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.    

The bill, according to its text and summaries from the Congressional Research Services, in part used incentives from the federal government to force local police departments to enact change, withholding funding through two key programs from local police departments that did not comply with law.    

    “Our bill says that we will defund departments if they don’t ban chokeholds,” Scott said in one Facebook live in June 2020, describing one of the defunding provisions.    

    “You lose money from the federal government,” he added, if departments didn’t use body cameras. “It’s all tied to money. That’s the one penalty we can actually enact on the federal level.”  

Senate Democrats blocked Scott’s bill shortly after it was introduced in June 2020, saying the bill inadequately addressed reforming law enforcement and police misconduct.  

Almost 9000 protests in the streets, then we had “Black Lives Matter” being vilified as if they were God Damn ISIS or the Khmer Rouge and we didn’t get the George Floyd Act or any freaking act — no ending qualified immunity, no making it illegal to murder unarmed citizens — because of this guy, Tim Fraking Scott.

And he has the nerve to lecture Black People on what to expect in America?

Holy hell.

Ahem.

I honestly don't how the story Scott's life changes systemic bias in our justice system where black motorists are stopped, searched, arrested, assaulted and killed at 2-3x the rate of whites when there are *LESS* drugs and guns found on them.

For years, police records have shown that black drivers tend to be less likely than white drivers to turn up with guns or drugs when searched at traffic stops. At the same time, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be subjected to these searches, according to a 2013 federal survey.

You might object (or not) to the idea of racial profiling — officers taking race into account when determining whether to stop and scrutinize someone. But few would endorse racial profiling that clearly doesn't work. It's apparent, though, that ineffectual, biased policing continues in many places — more black people are stopped and searched for contraband, while more white people are found with it.

How does his life change the fact that black women are 5x more likely to die in childbirth than white women?

In the United States, Black-white disparities in maternal mortality—deaths related to pregnancy or childbirth—may be larger than previously reported, new research shows. Closing the gap involves addressing structural racism—that is, those aspects of social, political, economic, and health care systems that reinforce inequity, researchers say.

Because pregnancy is riskier to women’s health than abortion, state initiatives to restrict abortion could lead to more deaths, particularly among Black women, new estimates suggest.

Black Women Five Times More Likely to Die from Pregnancy-Related Cardiomyopathy, Blood Pressure Disorders Than White Women

By thoroughly reexamining death certificates from 2016 and 2017, researchers found that the maternal mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black women was 3.5 times that of non-Hispanic white women.¹ This is a dramatic increase from previous analyses, based on standard medical codes, that found that Black women faced a maternal death rate 2.5 times that of white women, according to Marian MacDorman of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC) at the University of Maryland, who led the study.

Why are majority black districts functionally gerrymandered out of the electoral process? 

More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.

The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.

Until this year.

Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.

“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”

[...]

Across the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.

But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.

“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”

Why is it that black people are denied mortgages at a rate that is 80% higher than others?

Discrimination in home lending goes back to the beginning of home lending itself. During the last housing boom, when subprime mortgages were all the rage, predatory lending to minority borrowers was rampant. When the mortgage market came crashing down, taking the economy with it, some major lenders were held accountable. They ended up paying massive, multibillion-dollar settlements to the federal government. But there is clearly still bias in the market.

A majority (59%), of Black homebuyers are concerned about qualifying for a mortgage, while less than half (46%) of White buyers are, according to a recent survey by Zillow, a home listing website, which launched its own mortgage lending arm, Zillow Home Loans, late last year. That is because lenders deny mortgages for Black applicants at a rate 80% higher than that of White applicants, according to 2020 data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.

I know that I am not the only one to go through this. I know I’m not the first. I know I won’t be the last, but at least I want someone else out there to understand that this is not normal, that this is not right.

Akili Akridge

Maryland homeowner

For refinances specifically, Black borrowers are denied mortgage refinance loans, on average, 30.22% of the time, far higher than the overall denial rate of 17.07%, according to an analysis of the HMDA data by LendingTree, an online mortgage marketplace.

Part of that high denial rate may be because minority consumers overall have lower incomes and lower credit scores than White consumers. They also tend to live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods with lower home values. None of that was the case with Akridge, whose townhome is in a brand new development in a quiet suburb just outside Washington, D.C.

Why is it that Black people face higher rental costs than White people?

Black and Hispanic Americans are paying extra money to secure rental housing in the U.S. compared with Whites, according to Zillow.

In a report this week, the real estate data firm said that, regardless of race, Americans paid an average of $700 in security deposits when renting an apartment. Yet renters of color paid $750 while White renters paid $600. White renters typically paid $50 for a rental application fee while Black Americans paid $65; Hispanic applicants paid $80 and Asian Americans paid $100. People of color also typically must submit more rental applications in order to find a place to live as well as pay more in related fees than white renters, Zillow concluded.

Zillow attributed the higher fees and number of housing applications for renters of color partially to their age, noting that they tend to be two years younger than the median White renter. White Americans also are more likely to rent in rural areas and in the Midwest, which are typically cheaper.

But racial disparities in rental costs also suggest many landlords often violate federal law, said Dan Corbitt of Housing Opportunities Made Equal, a nonprofit in upstate New York that fights housing discrimination. For example, some housing providers can sidestep fair housing laws by charging higher application fees for people with subpar credit sores, which tends to disproportionately affect lower-income renters.

Why is it that asthma and cancer have greater effects on black people who have been redlined into polluted areas?

Researchers uncovered stark disparities between white people and minorities across thousands of categories of pollution, including trucks, industry, agriculture and even restaurants.

Over the years, a mountain of evidence has brought to light a stark injustice: Compared with white Americans, people of color in the United States suffer disproportionately from exposure to pollution.

Now, a new study on a particularly harmful type of air pollution shows just how broadly those disparities hold true. Black Americans are exposed to more pollution from every type of source, including industry, agriculture, all manner of vehicles, construction, residential sources and even emissions from restaurants. People of color more broadly, including Black and Hispanic people and Asian-Americans, are exposed to more pollution from nearly every source.

[...]

Biggest Pollution Disparities

Nationwide, Black people are exposed to greater-than-average concentrations of a dangerous form of pollution known as PM 2.5. People of color face more exposure from almost every type of source, while white people are less exposed.

[...]

The study builds on a wealth of research that has shown that people of color in America live with more pollution than their white neighbors. Fine particulate matter air pollution, known as PM 2.5, is harmful to human health and is responsible for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year in the United States.

Racial and socioeconomic

ic disparities in exposure to PM 2.5 have been well documented and have persisted despite an overall decline in particulate pollution. But the researchers sought to get a better grasp of whether these disparities came from just a handful of sources, or whether the inequalities could be seen more widely.

[...]

These disparities have roots in historical practices, like redlining, under which the federal government marked certain neighborhoods as risky for real estate investments because their residents were Black. For decades, residents of redlined areas were denied access to federally backed mortgages and other credit, fueling a cycle of disinvestment and environmental problems in those neighborhoods.

“Communities of color, especially Black communities, have been concentrated in areas adjacent to industrial facilities and industrial zones, and that goes back decades and decades, to redlining,” said Justin Onwenu, a Detroit-based organizer for the Sierra Club. “And a lot of our current infrastructure, our highways, were built on — built through — Black communities, so we’re breathing in diesel emissions and other pollution just because we’re located right next to these highways,” Mr. Onwenu said.

We do have a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act — but just like making Robbery and Murder a crime doesn't STOP all robbery and murder, it’s doesn’t STOP all discrimination and it’s doesn’t clean up the generational damage that is left behind by discrimination, segregation, Jim Crow and Slavery.

Frankly, Barack Obama's own life is a better example of a black man accomplishing great things despite the massive forces that are arrayed against him.  It doesn't disprove that those forces exist, it shows that it's possible to defeat them,

Enterprise zones have been tried before - first implemented under President Clinton - and have been shown to be ineffective. "School Choice" ignores the problem of making bad schools better and instead funnels public funds into private and religious schools that limit which students they take to those that are the easiest to teach.  This leaves the most challenging students left behind in dilapidated schools who have even less funds and resources. That's a recipe for continued disaster.

"America is not a racist country," he says.

Actually sir, some of it definitely is, the facts and figures prove it as I've shown.  The real question is are we addressing and decreasing that racism or are we enhancing it?

Come join me in battling the unwashed, unshaven and unleaven with facts, truth, patience and snark in the belly of the beast itself on my exclusive and fancy Facebook group Army For Truth.