Category: Race

In Defense of Profiling

Even Jesse Jackson does it!  This following is excerpted from the NYT piece, The Color of Suspicion (emphasis added)

Why a Cop Profiles

This is what a cop might tell you in a moment of reckless candor: in crime fighting, race matters. When asked, most cops will declare themselves color blind. But watch them on the job for several months, and get them talking about the way policing is really done, and the truth will emerge, the truth being that cops, white and black, profile. Here's why, they say. African-Americans commit a disproportionate percentage of the types of crimes that draw the attention of the police. Blacks make up 12 percent of the population, but accounted for 58 percent of all carjackers between 1992 and 1996. (Whites accounted for 19 percent.) Victim surveys — and most victims of black criminals are black — indicate that blacks commit almost 50 percent of all robberies. Blacks and Hispanics are widely believed to be the blue-collar backbone of the country's heroin- and cocaine-distribution networks. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 make up 1.1 percent of the country's population, yet commit more than 28 percent of its homicides. Reason, not racism, cops say, directs their attention.

Cops, white and black, know one other thing: they're not the only ones who profile. Civilians profile all the time — when they buy a house, or pick a school district, or walk down the street. Even civil rights leaders profile. ''There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life,'' Jesse Jackson said several years ago, ''than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.'' Jackson now says his quotation was ''taken out of context.'' The context, he said, is that violence is the inevitable byproduct of poor education and health care. But no amount of ''context'' matters when you fear that you are about to be mugged.

At a closed-door summit in Washington between police chiefs and black community leaders recently, the black chief of police of Charleston, S.C., Reuben Greenberg, argued that the problem facing black America is not racial profiling, but precisely the sort of black-on-black crime Jackson was talking about. ''I told them that the greatest problem in the black community is the tolerance for high levels of criminality,'' he recalled. ''Fifty percent of homicide victims are African-Americans. I asked what this meant about the value of life in this community.''

The police chief in Los Angeles, Bernard Parks, who is black, argues that racial profiling is rooted in statistical reality, not racism. ''It's not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail,'' Parks told me. ''It's the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they're going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.''

Chief Parks defends vigorously the idea that police can legitimately factor in race when building a profile of a criminal suspect.

''We have an issue of violent crime against jewelry salespeople,'' Parks says. ''The predominant suspects are Colombians. We don't find Mexican-Americans, or blacks or other immigrants. It's a collection of several hundred Colombians who commit this crime. If you see six in a car in front of the Jewelry Mart, and they're waiting and watching people with briefcases, should we play the percentages and follow them? It's common sense.''

Derbyshire’s ‘Racism’

I got wind of Derb's defenestration, and the concomitant crapstorm of Internet commentary, a little late, but I've been making up for lost time.  I found this curious passage over at RedState, a self-professedly conservative website (emphasis added):

Derbyshire likes to pepper his racist rants with “facts” that generally consist of social studies that are subject to numerous interpretational biases. To me, the question as to whether these studies are accurate or correct is uninteresting and irrelevant – a central tenet of decency demands that every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his or her own merits regardless of what social science may say about any group (racial, cultural, religious or otherwise) to which he or she might belong. It is this very basis which Derbyshire rejects, and that is what makes him (and has always made him) a racist. He is not, as his defenders at the execrable Taki mag say, confronting the world with uncomfortable truths, he is proudly declaring himself to be a racist and arguing that it is correct to be racist. This, I submit, is something that all decent people should reject.

This is exceedingly curious because the author seems to be saying that Derb is a racist whether or not the facts he adduces in support of the advice he gives to his children are indeed facts. But surely there are no racist facts.  A racial fact is not a racist fact.  So if the facts Derb adduces are facts, then his adducing them cannot be racist.  It therefore cannot be irrelevant whether what Derb calls facts are indeed facts: that is rather the nub of issue.

Here is one of the facts he adduces:  Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. Here is another: Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Now suppose that these are indeed facts.  Do they justify the advice he gives his kids?  Part of the advice is:

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

It should be obvious that the facts do justify the advice.  Derb is a father and he is talking to his children.  Being children, they lack experience of the world and the degree of good judgment that comes from protracted encounter with the world and its ways. Caring about his children, he advises: If all you have to go on is knowledge of the mean differences, then avoid situations where there is a large number of blacks unknown to you.

There is nothing racist about this.  It is excellent paternal advice.  To be racist, the facts Derb adduces would have to be non-facts. It silly in excelsis to suppose that it is irrelevant whther the sociological facts Derb cites are indeed facts.  (Please avoid the pleonastic 'true facts.')

The author above speaks of a "central tenet of decency" according to which every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his own merits regardless of group affiliation and regardless of what we know about the group.  That too is silly.  Consider the Hells [no apostrophe!] Angels.  We know quite a lot about this motorcycle gang.  If we were to follow the "central tenet of decency" we would have to leave out of consideration this knowledge in our encounters with members of the gang.  But this would be very foolish indeed.  For example, suppose all I know about Tiny is that he is a Hells Angel and what I can know by observing him at the end of the bar. (E.g., he is covered with tattoos, muscular, about 220 lbs, 6' 2" in height, and about 35 years of age.)  Knowing just this, I know enough to avoid (eye or other) contact with him.  For I know that if an altercation should ensue, his fellow Angels would join in the fight (that's part of their code) and I would be lucky to escape with my life.

Now unless you are a very stupid liberal you will not misunderstand what I am saying.  I am not saying that blacks as a group are as criminally prone as Hells Angels as a group.  I'm showing that the above decency principle  is incoherent.  One cannot abstract from group characteristics when all you have to go on are group characteristics and immediate sensory data.

Racism?  What racism?  And what do you mean by 'racist' anyway?  Derb adduces some facts that bear upon race and you call him a racist?  Then please tell us what you mean by the term. 

 

Derbyshire’s Defenestration

In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window.  Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture.  In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry.    Derb's  free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there.  And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.

Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece.  If nothing else, it will hold your interest.  It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation.  If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal.  If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent.  If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy. 

I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully,  a second time.  What is so offensive about it?  Facts are facts.  What's true is true.  The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology.  Consider this piece of advice:

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

That could use some qualification.  If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid.  But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting.   But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above  sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town wihout feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.

So what's to take offense at?

The Trayvon Martin Case and the Growing Racial Divide

Utterly outstanding analysis by Victor Davis Hanson.  I have but one quibble.  Hanson writes,

Millions of so-called whites are now adults who grew up in the age of affirmative action, and have no memory of systemic discrimination. To the degree some avoid certain schools, neighborhoods, or environments, they do so only on the basis of statistics, not profiling, that suggest a higher incidence of inner-city violence and crime.

My quibble concerns Hanson's use of 'profiling.'  He is suggesting a distinction between avoidant behavior based on statistics and such behavior based on profiling.  But there is no difference.  To profile is to predict the likelihood of a person's behavior based on statistical information.  A fiftyish Mormon matron from Salt Lake City does not fit the terrorist profile, but a twenty-something Egyptian Muslim from Cairo does.  To screen the two equally at an airport is therefore unreasonable, and to take a more careful look at the Egyptian is entirely reasonable. 

Who fits the heart attack profile?  Is it the obese and sedentary fiftyish smoker who has bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  or the nonsmoking, vegetarian, twenty-something marathoner?  The former, obviously.  Of course, it doesn't follow that the marathoner will not have a heart attack in the near future or that the fat man will.  It is a question of likelihood.  Similarly with the Mormon matron.  She may have a bomb secreted in her 1950's skirt, but I wouldn't bet on it.  If the Muslim is stripped-searched this is not because of some irrational hatred of Muslims but because of the FACT that twenty-something Muslim males  are more likely to be terrorists than fiftyish Mormon matrons.

What I am objecting to is the use of 'profiling' to refer to blind, unreasonable, hateful characterizing on the basis of skin color or ethnicity.  All decent people are opposed to the latter.  But that is not what profiling is. Profiling is neither blind, nor unreasonable, nor hateful.

What Mr. Hanson is doing is acquiescing in the liberal misuse of 'profiling.' It is not a pejorative term.  Liberals want to make it a pejorative term, but we must resist them. 

Language matters. 

‘Institutionalized Racism’

Liberals love the phrase, 'institutionalized racism.'  A  racist society it is in which so many blacks achieve high political office despite the fact that blacks are a small minority of the population.  Indeed, we have a black president.  What better proof that racism is inscribed into our institutional structure?  But then again, Obama is only half black.  If George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin fame is a 'white Hispanic' as maintained in the Solomonic pages of the New York Times, then, by parity of reasoning, Barack Obama is a 'white black.'  Is that perhaps the proof of institutional racism?  You see, if the USA were not institutionally racist, then we would have a black-black president by now.

Of course I am being sarcastic.  In dealing with notions as preternaturally idiotic as those of liberals, mockery, derision, sarcasm and the like are more effective than patient argument.  Reason and argument are effective only with those who inhabit the plane of reason. There is no point in talking sense to the denizens of the planet Unsinn.   Or if you are not in the mood to mock and deride them, if you are feeling charitable, then offer your help and therapy.  Those who are beneath reason do not need refutation; they need therapy.  They need care.  And we conservatives do care.  We want you liberals to be happy and successful and less stupid.  Of course we are honest enough to admit that our motive is partially selfish: the less stupid and unsuccessful and unhappy you are, the better it will be for us.

Actually, what we need is a 'proctology' of the liberal.  We need to understand how so many heads can inhabit that region where the sun doesn't shine.  But understanding is not enough: we need practical methods of extraction.  My fear, however, is that even an army of proctologists, each member of which enjoys the life span of a Methuselah, would not be able to bring the shrunken pate of even one liberal into the light of day.

And that's a pity. (I have successfully resisted the temptation to engage in scatological alliteration.)

For an example of the sort of idiocy I am excoriating, see here; for an antidote, go here.

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bicultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages.  My mother was both bilingual and bicultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a  difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values.  Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African?  Does he enjoy dual citzenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead.  There is no 'institutional racism.'  There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals.  Man up and move forward.  Don't blame others for your problems.  That's the mark of a loser.  Take responsibility.  We honkies want you to do well.  The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

But here is an encouraging development: many blacks according to yesterday's WSJ are rejecting the 'African-American' label.  

Insanity About Race: The ‘Niggerhead’ Non-Issue

I watched The O'Reilly Factor last night.  In one segment Bill O'Reilly and Brit Hume were discussing some word once used by locals as the name of a hunting venue that is connected with some trouble Rick Perry is in.  But they were so gingerly tip-toeing around the topic that I couldn't figure out what the offensive word was.  Was it perhaps 'Coon's Hollow'?   I ran through various possibilities, trying to guess what they were too chicken and pee-cee to plainly state. Turns out the word is 'Niggerhead.' This was a  name that long before Perry's visit to the site had been painted over.

Philosophers make a distinction between use and mention.  It is one thing to use a word to refer to someone or something, and quite another to talk about, or mention, the word.  Boston is a city; 'Boston' is not: no word is a city.  'Boston' is disyllabic; Boston is not: no city is composed of two syllables.  Same with 'nigger.' It's a disyllabic word, an offensive word, a word that a decent person does not use.  I am not using it; I am mentioning it, talking about it.  Same with 'Niggerhead.'  That was the name that certain locals used for the hunting venue in question.  I am talking about that name, not using it.

The 'reasoning' of the race-baiters is apparently that since Perry visited a place that once bore the unofficial name 'Niggerhead,' that he is either a racist or 'racially insensitive' or something.

What I would like to point out to these nasty liberal dumbasses is that reasoning is not association of ideas. Almost any idea can be associated with any other.  In the febrile and mushy mind of many liberals 'niggardly' suggests 'nigger' so that anyone who uses the former must be a racist.  That's pretty stupid, don't you think?  But it's par for the course for a liberal.  Or how about 'denigrate'?  Does the use of that word embody a racial slur?

This is important.  A man lost his job because he used the perfectly legitimate English word 'niggardly.'  This is insane.  If you are decent person, you will do your bit to oppose the scurrilous insanity of the race-baiting Left.

For more on 'Niggerhead,' read Bad Day at Racist Rock.

The Slanderous Left

When they lie about us we must tell the truth about them.  We must expose them for the moral scum that they are. The examples of their hate-driven mendacity are legion, but here is a particularly egregious instance of race-baiting slander.  Representative Andre Carson, D-Indiana, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the following: 

Some of these folks in Congress would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me … hanging on a tree . . .

Tea Party ‘Racism’ Again

This from an NPR interview of Julian Bond:

SIEGEL: Some people read into the Tea Party's almost neuralgic reaction to government spending, a sense that white people figure black people benefit disproportionately from federal programs. Do you suspect a racial subtext to that whole argument?

BOND: Absolutely. And I'm not saying that all of the Tea Party members are racist. Not at all. I don't think anybody says that. But I think there's an element of racial animus there and the feeling that some white people have that these black people are now getting something that I'm not getting and I should be getting it, too.

Yet another reason to defund NPR.  Neuralgic reaction to government spending? How obtuse can an obtuse liberal be?  Companion posts:

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over: The NPR Case

National Public Radio Needs Your Support!

'The Tit ofthe State': Krauthammer versus NPR's Totenberg