Obama: There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store, that includes meMy initial response to that is being followed is a rather common experience. I am often followed just shopping in my local Safeway supermarket (ironically and commonly, by security guards of color). Women are often conscious of it when it's late and they are walking to their cars. (I used to live in graduate student housing off the UH campus, on the way to student parking lots. One of my former students, a newly married coed, one day saw me, flagged me down and asked me to escort her to her car. For good reason, too; I may have mentioned in a past post that I often jogged around the circumference of campus at night; one night I notice a couple of young men of color on bicycles riding on the sidewalk approaching me; I was not paying much attention, listening to the music on my Walkman when one of young men as they passed me punched me hard on the face (I could feel his knuckle on my eyeball). I reported the incident to campus security, but there wasn't anything they could do about it. When my former audit professor saw me sporting a purplish swollen eye the following week, she asked me if I had walked into a wall. The incident was a random act of violence.)
The point to Obama, though, is that his explanation is more like an excuse, and no excuse is acceptable for physically attacking someone simply because you think you're being followed; you don't really know the reason: for example, if I follow someone into the airport restroom, it doesn't mean I'm tailing him. We coincidentally happen to be going to the same place for a similar reason. Granted, I don't like being followed in the supermarket, but I understand a store wants to control against shoplifting.
Walter Williams, one of my favorite economists, has an interesting post "In Defense of Profiling"; here is a telling excerpt:
You might say, “Profiling is unfair, and individuals should be judged individually!” Taken to the limit, such a position is ludicrous.... should they round up everyone, regardless of sex? I’m betting that most people would view the latter as stupid. But there is a near equivalent in government. Ninety-six percent of the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists are Muslim, and most terrorist attacks in the U.S. have been committed by young Muslim males. Despite this, the Transportation Security Administration people behave as if each person who seeks to board a plane is of equal danger. That’s why they search, frighten and inconvenience 5-year-olds and elderly people.D'accord.
OREILLY:"Talking Points" believes the President was correct in addressing the race issue and framing it with the Martin case. He's the leader of America and the country is talking about this.Dead wrong for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the DOJ is reviewing the Zimmerman case for possible prosecution, and any comments would be prejudicial and unfair to Zimmerman; DOJ reports to Obama. Second, if there ever was a time for Obama to show leadership, it would have been to appeal for calm the verdict time frame, not almost a week after the expected verdict. The verdict was used to rationalize attacks against unrelated people or property in Oakland and elsewhere. Third, it was unnecessary; Obama has already written or spoken on racial topics repeatedly and on Trayvon Martin specifically on a prior occasion. There was nothing new here; what? Instead of saying Martin was like the son he never had, he said that he himself could have been Trayvon 35 years ago? Give me a break! Fourth, if Obama is going to talk about black issues, he should address salient, big picture issues such as crime-ridden urban neighborhoods, failing public schools, and the irresponsible sexually obsessed culture and abnormal percentage of single-parent households, not a touchy-feely, politically correct discourse on racial relations. He should also notice a lot of these issues are local government problems, not the province of the federal government, and tempered expectations. It is true that federal government exacerbates problems, e.g., by labor policies that discourage hiring, by morally hazardous domestic welfare net programs, etc.; I don't think Barack Obama is ready to confront the fact that his domestic policies are part of the problem, not the solution.
By the way, when you hear a pundit or politician saying we should have a quote, "conversation" about race, that means you are in for a sea of bloviating which will likely lead nowhere.Not quite: when a "progressive" talks about having a "conversation", he means a monologue, not a dialogue, where he talks and you listen. Remember when Obama was trying to sell ObamaCare: over 30 speeches, and the majority of people were still opposed? It never crossed his mind that they opposed his healthcare
Trayvon Martin was killed because circumstances got out of control. He was scrutinized by a neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, because of the way he looked. Not necessarily his skin color, there is no evidence of that but because he was a stranger to Zimmerman and was dressed in clothing sometimes used by street criminals.No. Trayvon Martin was killed because of circumstances he was in part responsible for. He confronted an armed man and attacked him; Zimmerman shot Martin after, not before Martin broke his nose. I haven't reviewed Zimmerman's interviews in detail, but I suspect that he was being asked to reduce the gestalt of his experience; Bill gets it partially right: Zimmerman did not recognize Trayvon, a new local resident. it's not necessarily Martin's outer garb; personally, I don't know much about fashion in the hood. For example, if I see a dark figure scurry across my yard at night, it's very suspicious--even if I can't see him clearly or even know what clothes he's wearing. It could have been how Martin was walking, how Martin was responding to his car's approach. If I'm a 7/11 manager and I see a shopper looking not at products, but to see if anyone was watching him in the shopping aisle or over his head as if to check for cameras, that's suspicious behavior. I'm not saying something like that happened in Zimmerman's case, but I can easily see Zimmerman focusing on surface details versus saying something like "he kept looking back at me". O'Reilly may be correct, but he has no direct knowledge of what happened; it may be an oversimplified inference from various sources.
...African-Americans are murdered each year the civil rights industry looks the other way or makes excuses. They blame guns, poor education, lack of jobs, rarely do they define the problem accurately. So here it is. The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family.Whereas I do think single-parent households definitely are challenged in terms of quantity and/or quality of time in child-rearing and financially, the responsibility fundamentally rests with the individual, not with his or her parents, the government, etc. (I do agree there is a tendency in the racial grievance industry to try to rationalize failures in black communities or to dismiss them, noting things like a high illegitimacy rate go beyond black communities.) I do think government exacerbates problems with anti-competitive local education, enforcement of drug prohibition, dysfunctional compensation policies and licensing restrictions, and morally hazardous social policies that enable government dependency and a vicious poverty cycle. We also see declining religious influence and a sexually-obsessed culture. I will also point a 1961 MLK quote presented in a recent Riley WSJ op-ed , pointing out crimes in St. Louis were almost 60% committed by blacks, despite being only 10% of the population. Riley argues that the problem is a broader one, involving the black community, and I think Riley's position is well-taken (take, for instance, gang problems).
Right now about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. That drives poverty. And the lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised. When was the last time you saw a public service ad telling young black girls to avoid becoming pregnant? Has President Obama done such an ad? How about Jackson or Sharpton? Has the Congressional Black Caucus demanded an ad like that?Obama and black "leaders" promote unrestricted abortion to deal with the illegitimacy problem. I think many would argue that the Obama all-American family provides a model for the black community. I do think it would help if Obama talked about his expectations for the prospective suitors of his daughters, his daughters' friends, the values he and Michelle are teaching their daughters, etc. I also think that Obama is attempting to temper expectations of government results.
White people don't force black people to have babies out of wedlock. That's a personal decision; a decision that has devastated millions of children and led to disaster both socially and economically. So raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that; again, it is a personal decision.Walter Williams made a similar point in his recent essay Black Self-Sabotage. (In all fairness, this goes beyond the black community; the Latino community also has a high percentage of illegitimate births, and nationally almost a third overall.)
And then there is the drug situation. Go to Detroit and ask anyone living on the south side of the eight-mile road what destroyed their city? They will tell you narcotics. They know addiction leads to crime and debasementBill goes on a drug rant here. Personally, I think taking drugs is stupid self-destructive behavior. But the reason why prominent conservatives like Buckley and Friedman argued against drug prohibitions: scarce supplies drive up prices and lucrative profit margins that attract organized crime. Let the free market drive down prices and profits, and it will alleviate much related crime and violence.
Pumping money into the chaos does little. You can't legislate good parenting or responsible entertainment. But you can fight against the madness, with discipline, a firm message and little tolerance for excuse-making.Agreed; government money only addresses symptoms, not the disease. This is not unlike those irresponsible demagogues arguing for a bailout of Detroit, which does not to cure the basic problem: a failing business model. (You have to change the budget, including but not restricted to unsustainable labor/retiree costs, and the only way you can adjust those is through bankruptcy.) Is Obama going to preach individual responsibility vs. government redistribution? Hardly: when Obama talks "responsibility", he means that rich people should go with the flow as he takes ever more money out of their pockets. He is vested in "progressive" policies; he's not about to use his bully pulpit to make a conservative speech; black leaders have failed for decades to address problems in the black community. It's far easier to scapegoat others. Don't hold your breath; this isn't going to change anytime soon.
