“A news item about a prosecutor in the Detroit area being forced to resign for making online comments some critics have cited as coming from a mentality all too common among many in law enforcement and DA offices:”
She has to be an idiot of the highest order.
We can start by banishing the word “thug”. It is never used to describe white people rioting.
Word banishment ? Really ?
Why not? there are certainly already words we know not to use (well, most people know…)
There is no racial connotation to the word thug. In fact, I have most commonly seen it used to refer to members of the mafia, who are generally not black.
It is hard to admit that either your entire worldview is wrong, or that the people you side with are, in fact, racist in outcome if not intent (and I question intent). Both are very painful possibilities for good, thoughtful, well meaning people.
“3. Education is key, but they have to want it. Unfortunately it isn’t valued for many families.”
Education is the key. Unquestionably. But the fact is that the interests of the teachers’ unions are in direct conflict with the needs of students. Guess who wins? Heck, the interests if the teachers’ unions are often in conflict with the interests of successful teachers. And guess who wins there, Additionally, there are some hard and expensive and painful choices that would have to be made in order to make large changes in educational outcome. Not feel-good failed programs like universal pre-k, either.
White riots vs. Black riots (if you watch, there’s lots of cursing and the photos don’t necessarily match the riots he’s talking about).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk-gjRM49p8&spfreload=10
More on the pumpkin riots, sometimes seen through the lens of how the media views black riots. “How many of the defiant white youth, causing mayhem and destruction, come from fatherless families?” and “If white people continue to glorify pumpkin violence in their culture, they deserve the thug latte spiced stereotype”. It sounds funny but it’s about white privilege isn’t it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQWDbZYAZgU&spfreload=10
He hits the nail on the head in the last minute or so.
Poetsheart, I worked for years for a firm that was very committed to public service. At one point it instituted a program in all of its cities whereby young adults of color would be given their first jobs and helped to develop skills and experience on their resumes. The people all wanted to work and were wonderful people, but the program failed spectacularly because it was too late to help the participants develop the habits and social skills needed to work in a business environment. The firm then turned its resources to developing those skills in younger people. Hopefully that will be more successful. The intentions are great and a lot of money is involved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html?_r=0
This is an extremely interesting article on why some immigrant groups are able to be very successful and goes on to explain why the black culture is having such a difficult time escaping poverty. It describes those who become successful as having three simultaneous traits: a superiority complex, feelings of insecurity and Impulse control. It’s worth a read.
Mayor ended the curfew effective immediately. It’s clear it was being selectively enforced anyway.
How disingenuous is it to rhetorically skewer someone for an argument they never put forth? Exactly who is it that has blamed Fox News for unemployment and lack of economic opportunity in inner city Baltimore? What I blame Fox News for is race baiting, and encouraging its viewers to tsk, tsk and finger point as they self-righteously pinch “statistics” between thumb and forefinger and shake them ever so smugly in the faces of black people upset about being oppressed by agents of their own government, and having that same government determine with impunity that certain Constitutional protections absolutely do not apply to them. I blame Fox News for steadfastly insisting on conflating two very different sets of issues, as if the presence of one negates any reason to be concerned over the other. Do you really think black people don’t understand that oppressive action aimed at them by government is just as important an issue as any a people are likely to face, and certainly as important as any over which the Tea Party has taken to the streets in protest? Do you honestly believe black people are so stupid as to not know that such condescending rhetoric is aimed squarely with the intent to insult us and shut us down, even as, for those lobbing those reductive and rhetorically simplistic dung bombs, it serves the dual purpose of bolstering their own sense of self-superiority?
“I don’t know how they manage to keep the fast food restaurants open in Baltimore with so few black people willing to work low paying jobs. How ever do they do it in the face of so much drug dealing money jangling in the pockets of black youth? Construction jobs? Nope. They’re not willing to do hard work, just ask busdriver (and she ought to know, being personally familiar with so many of Baltimore’s inner city residents). If only they weren’t so lazy! And criminal. And prolific!”
Funny. But are all the youth in Baltimore black? I said that I doubted the long lines for construction jobs would be filled with the youth of Baltimore, not black people. Why would you assume that every young person in Baltimore is black, and every drug dealer is black? Do you think there would be hordes of young people lined up for construction jobs? About one tenth of the population in Baltimore is addicted to drugs, there are plenty of customers, Do you think the young men who are involved in gangs and selling drugs are going to stop this, so they can work in construction?
Greenwitch, want to lay odds on how many posters to this thread will actually watch even one of the videos you linked, much less both?
@poetsheart - probably none! Are we all just preaching to the choir?
Of course we’ve heard of sports riots - remember the young woman who was killed by a rubber bullet after some World Series rioting in Boston? But I never realized that actual Canadians rioted too!
At the bottom of it is that white riots are less scary to white people. They’re either about sports (just being drunk and spirited) or about the IMF and World Bank (just those crazy fringe liberals). Nobody likes them but also nobody assumes that they are in any way representative of white people in general.
With black riots and looting it is seen more as - “here they go AGAIN, stupidly destroying their own neighborhoods and stealing electronics as soon as they think they can get away with it”.
Interesting, I didn’t know that riots are classified as white riots, and black riots.
I can tell you that the riots in Vancouver were terrifying to people. And the May Day riots that we seem to have every year in Seattle are violent and terrifying to people. I guess you would classify those as white riots. So much generalizing going on here.
Sax, that was an excellent and thought-provoking editorial piece by Amy Chua and Jed Rosenfeld, Absolutely stellar, and I think it deserves to stand as the basis for a thread of its very own. I encourage everyone to read it.
Excuse me if I point out that that wide-eyed expression of incredulity might come off as more than a wee bit disingenuous, busdriver. I mean, seriously? It doesn’t take a degree in aerospace engineering (which you may very well have earned) to follow the thrust of the point greenwitch was making about the differences in perceptions, and thereby subsequent labeling, routinely place on rioting carried out by predominantly white participants as opposed to those carried out by black ones.
This thread its very self has served as a veritable tsk, tsk fest of people pointing fingers at the lamentable social pathology of “those people” so depraved as to "burn down their own neighborhoods, and loot the very businesses upon which they themselves depend. The whole of Baltimore’s inner city population has been rhetorically hauled through the streets in an ever-growing litany of indictments against their collective character, in service to just this sort of masturbatory rhetoric, an indignity groups of predominantly white rioters never suffer. And that’s the whole point of greenwitch’ post. Obfuscation via diction nit-Pickery is bad faith in the extreme.
Happened to catch this person giving an interview on the Urban View radio channel…
http://www.afro.com/blackonomics-praying-and-fasting/
(It’s okay to look at the link it’s not religious)
Near where I live, there was a riot that grew out of a surf competition of all things ---- window smashing, looting, cars burning, fighting with police, the whole nine yards. Of course, since these were young white men, for the most part, the police fired rubber bullets and not one assistant prosecutor anywhere suggested that what police should have done was "shoot 'em. End of discussion."
Goodness, busdriver, you’re batting a thousand today. Concerning your post, #391, I can only shake my head in disbelief. If one didn’t know better, one might actually have been persuaded to believe this discussion about construction jobs aimed at Baltimore’s youth might have occurred in a vacuum and without context, never having been proceeded by posts (some having been written by you) whose subject was the black youth of Baltimore’s inner city. So how is it that you then immediately proceed to sabotage your own flimsy denial by asking if I thought gang bangers and drug dealers would work construction jobs? My answer is drug dealers aren’t likely to stop dealing drugs, and work construction jobs instead. But, not all gang memebers are drug dealers. I’ll be so bold as to say I believe some of them would jump at an opportunity to work a job that might pay a living wage. For the sake if this discussion, I’ll take at face value your stat that one tenth of Baltimorians are addicted to drugs. But that still leaves the other 90% who don’t call upon the services of pushers. Some of those even live in the inner city.
Before he fell to his death on a high rise construction site, my Uncle Sonny actually packed up his family of four and moved to Baltimore in order to work that very job in the late sixties. Until that point, he was damned glad to have had it. It wasn’t high paying, but he was able to support his family. I don’t think black men are wired any differently today. I believe there are still a lot of men like my uncle left in Baltimore. Of course, it’s obvious you don’t.