Tuesday, July 16, 2013

"We can't keep on blaming the white man." Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial

The left wants to blame black criminality on racial animus and 'the system,' but blacks have long been part of running that system.
Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause.
"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control of city governments."
. . . Did the perception of black criminality play a role in Martin's death? We may never know for certain, but we do know that those negative perceptions of young black men are rooted in hard data on who commits crimes. We also know that young black men will not change how they are perceived until they change how they behave.
The homicide rate claiming black victims today is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.
So let's have our discussions, even if the only one that really needs to occur is within the black community. Civil-rights leaders today choose to keep the focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility, but their predecessors knew better.
"Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The article says:

"Nor does it matter that Martin was unarmed and minding his own business when Mr. Zimmerman approached.

"All that really mattered in that courtroom is whether Mr. Zimmerman reasonably believed that his life was in danger when he pulled the trigger."

It really does matter whether or not Trayvon was minding his own business.

Was Trayvon simply attempting to defend HIS own person from, say, unlawful detention?

If so, then he had every right to forcefully incapacitate an aggressor - armed, even.

What did Zimmerman do when he got to Trayvon? This matters.

Yes, it's true that the "black community" [well spoken, Paul X] tried to turn the whole thing into a race war; and it's true that the media lied about many things toward that end, as well.

But it still may be that Zimmerman committed murder, depending on what he did when he got to Trayvon.

We don't say that an armed robber didn't commit murder, having broken into a home, and then defended himself against the attacks of the homeowner!

"The homeowner tried to kill me after I broke into his house. It was self-defense." :D

Anonymous said...

their is a solution to this and we all know what it is.