Where are the Adults in the Country?
Will the adults in the country come forward and make
themselves known? Or are we going to let
our streets and our country be taken over by “woke” children who act as if they
are in a junior college social justice seminar, rather than in real life. We need some veracity and common sense to
counter the false narrative that seems to have overtaken the country. We need to look at the actual numbers of
police and other killings in the country, rather than the fictional narratives
constructed by “woke” leftist and media activists, to get a true picture.
Am I the only thinking American outraged by what is
happening in our country? George Floyd,
a black American, was killed by bad cops in a terrible way, at least as seen
from a bystander’s smartphone video of the killing. The lead cop, with his knee on Floyd’s neck
was white. The other three cops who
helped, were black, Hispanic and Asian.
The killing was despicable, but where is the “systemic racism” in this
murder?
The cop kneeling on Floyd’s neck knew Floyd, and worked with
him as a bouncer at a local night club. The
two men obviously had history. Floyd
himself had a long criminal record, and had THC, fentanyl and methamphetamine
in his system. All of these are readily
available facts, not conjecture or conspiracy theories.
Not exactly a formula for the “systemic police racism”
against a “martyred” black citizen resulting in over two weeks of protests, rioting
and billions of dollars of destruction in our streets, and exacerbated by the
frantic media mob. This was a murder by
a diverse group of rogue cops, of someone in their custody, and they are being
prosecuted for that crime. A person was
killed, and that’s a terrible thing, but again, where is the “systemic racism”?
Some numbers, not rhetoric.
In 2016, the FBI reports that 2,870 blacks were murdered in the U.S., of
which, 243 were murdered by whites, and 2,570 were murdered by other blacks and
the balance by others. See any systemic
racism in these gross murder numbers? https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls
Heather MacDonald reports in the Wall Street Journal about
police killings, that: --
“In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of
whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter
of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since
2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would
predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter
armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have
been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in
the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the
population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed
whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32,
respectively, in 2015. In 2018 there
were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last
year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of
all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½
times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to
be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend, 2020 in Chicago alone, 10
African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. This past weekend, 80
Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims
overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of
homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal
violence is.”
No systemic police violence in Heather MacDonald’s Wall
Street Journal article and the Washington Post data, either.
As fellow Americans with the same rights, and living under
the same laws, we need to be sympathetic to American citizens who have a darker
skin color, because bigotry does still exist in parts of our American society,
and unfortunately this includes some of our law enforcement. That is not to
say, as identity politics professes, and that is now being echoed by every
left-wing voice in the country, that racism is “systemic” across our culture.
The vast majority of Americans in the 2020’s are tolerant and fair-minded
people that accept the equality and equal rights of all Americans, regardless
of skin color, ethnicity and ancestral origin.
But we continue to hear stories of black Americans, being harassed and killed simply because of their skin color. Although these stories are anecdotal, they are always egregious. The recent examples include the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna Taylor in her bed in Louisville. Similar brutal murders of white people are not treated with a similar urgency. They do not fit the identity politics narrative.
These are examples of that residual bigotry that needs to be
stamped out in our society. But how? These racist beliefs are ingrained in a
small segment of our society, and that includes some police, and cannot be
blasted out with laws, social mores or any other immediate social niceties.
Only long-term education can slowly wear down these unhealthy beliefs.
Legal, First Amendment demonstrations and protests can serve to highlight grievances, and raise awareness of abuses. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, every day since May 11th when George Floyd was killed, the originally peaceful protests have either been incited to violence and looting by outside elements such as Antifa and various other extreme left-wing anarchists, or hijacked by socialist democrat city administrations, which include so-called “social justice” leftists to support “police defunding” and other social upheavals reminiscent of Marxist-Leninist revolutions.
Where is the “SYSTEMIC” racism in our country, other than in the leftist rhetoric of the Trump-haters in the streets? And it is evident that the street crowds are nearly all “woke” children; 20-something, liberal, Trump-haters. I don’t see any of this crowd wearing MAGA hats, or carrying “Trump” signs.
Ray Gruszecki
June 8, 2020
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