“Nothing To Do With Race”: The Simplistic Way Many Of Us Perceive The All-American Conundrum Of Race
It had nothing to do with race.
So said Sheriff Leon Lott, last week, in discussing a violent arrest by one of his officers, a white deputy named Ben Fields, of a black female student at Spring Valley High in Richland County, South Carolina. Fields, a school resource officer, was called in when the girl reportedly ignored a teacher’s instruction to stop using her cellphone and leave the classroom. He ended up overturning her desk and slinging her across the floor like a sandbag or a sack of dog food.
His actions, caught on cellphone video, have detonated social media, many observers expressing visceral fury over this treatment of a black child. But Lott, who later fired his deputy, said he doesn’t think Fields acted from racial prejudice because he has an African-American girlfriend.
It is a statement of earnest, staggering obtuseness that sheds no light on the officer’s overreaction, but reveals with stark clarity the simplistic way many of us perceive the all-American conundrum of race. Granted, it is not inconceivable that a white girl could have been subjected to the same brutality in a similar situation. But it is a matter of statistical fact that it’s more likely to happen to a child of color.Multiple studies have shown that those kids are subjected to harsher discipline in school than their white classmates. Indeed, numbers released last year by the federal government show that this begins in preschool where the “students” are little more than toddlers, yet black kids, who account for 18 percent of the population, get 42 percent of the suspensions.
Nothing to do with race?
The people who habitually say that operate under the misapprehension that racial bias requires intent or awareness and that it leaves obvious evidence of itself: a tendency toward racist comments, let’s say, or membership in the Ku Klux Klan. In that worldview, racial bias is incompatible with having a black girlfriend.
But that worldview is naive. Bias is frequently subterranean, something you carry without meaning to or knowing you do. In a country that has used every outlet of media, religion, education, politics, law and science for over two centuries to drive home that black is threatening, black is inferior, black is bad, it is entirely possible Fields could have acted from unconscious racial bias and yet had a black girlfriend. For that matter, he could have acted from unconscious racial bias and had a black face; African-American people are no more immune to the drumbeat of negativity surrounding them than is anyone else.
So “nothing to do with race” is a reflexive copout many of us embrace against all reason because to do otherwise is to face a mirror whose reflection does not flatter. Which is why the usual suspects — Steve Doocy, Mark Fuhrman, Glenn Beck and etcetera — have attempted to fix the blame for what happened here on the girl.
Let’s be very clear in response. It doesn’t matter if she was disruptive. It doesn’t matter if she was disobedient. It doesn’t matter if she was disrespectful. Those things justify discipline, but they emphatically do not justify this child being lifted and flung by a grown man as if she were an inanimate object. If she were white, that would likely go without saying.
One is reminded of all the other African Americans we have seen in just the last few years brutalized and even killed for no good reason. One is reminded of Trayvon Martin and Walter Scott and Eric Garner and Charnesia Corley and Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice and Sean Bell and Levar Jones and more names than this column has space to hold, more blood than conscience can contain. And how many times have we been offered the same simplistic assurance in response?
This had nothing to do with race, they say.
Of course not. It never does.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, November 2, 2015
“Failure To Fact Check”: The Real Problem With The CNBC Debate Was The Moderators’ Inability To Call Out The GOP’s Nonsense
Big applause lines: “lamestream media,” a la Sarah Palin, or “Democrats who have the ultimate super PAC, it’s called the mainstream media,” a la Rubio. When in doubt, bash the media.
And it didn’t take long before the Republican National Committee blasted out a press statement that because of the CNBC debate, it was ready to cancel the party’s upcoming NBC debate. Over the weekend, the various campaigns met to “set the rules” about future debates.
Now let me get this straight: the Republicans get 24 million viewers on Fox, 23 million viewers on CNN and 14 million viewers on CNBC – up against the second game of the World Series – and they are complaining? Trump bragged about how he and Ben Carson changed the rules of the CNBC debate by threatening to pull out. Maybe this group would like to determine not only who asks the questions but what the questions are?
But make no mistake, it plays to their base to bash journalists and it also serves to intimidate the media. Sad but true.
If there was a fault with CNBC it was that the moderators were not tough enough on this crowd of candidates. They raised questions that were answered falsely or not at all and did not hold the candidates’ feet to the fire. There simply weren’t enough follow up questions. Whether they were intimidated or did not have the full research in front of them is hard to say, but they should have pushed harder.
Some examples: Cruz would not answer the question about his opposition to the debt limit and instead used his time to attack moderator Carl Quintanilla. Finally, Cruz shot back: “You don’t want to hear the answer.” It reminded me of the great scene in “A Few Good Men” when Jack Nicholson loses it on the stand and shouts, “You can’t handle the truth!”
Cruz should be forced to compare his position on raising the debt limit to Ronald Reagan’s and to that of every other president who understood what it would do to the country if we were to default.
Becky Quick asked Donald Trump about his criticism of Mark Zuckerberg for urging an increase in visas and Trump shot back that it was false. She backed off, but in fact it was true. Trump’s claim got a “Pants on Fire” from Politifact.
Carly Fiorina made the outrageous statement that 92 percent of jobs lost during President Barack Obama’s first term were women’s jobs. Politifact rated that false, and noted that the number of women with jobs actually increased by 416,000.
Ben Carson said it was “total propaganda” to assert he was involved with the disgraced nutritional supplement company, Mannatech, and the anchors had the evidence but, again, did not push back. Politifact also rated Carson’s statements false.
Probably the most important debate should have been on the various tax plans from the candidates. The New York Times editorialized against them,citing the absurdity of the 10 percent and 15 percent flat tax proposals. The effect of the Republicans’ economic policy is the same old trickle down with the biggest tax benefits going to the wealthy who, lord knows, don’t need it. As the Times’ editorial made clear none of the Republicans “has a tax plan coherent enough to be the basis of a substantive discussion, let alone one that could meet the nation’s challenges.”
It is the job of the press and, let’s face it, the Democrats, to point out that this crew of emperors has no clothes.
With all their bashing of the media and the attempt to use it to mobilize their base, it became clear that the Republicans simply did not have the answers. Pollyanish predictions of astronomical economic growth was all they could offer.
The candidates complained afterwards that there wasn’t enough time to talk about substance. Baloney. They simply don’t want hard questions. The most destructive result of all the back and forth after the CNBC debate, complete with the Fox Business Channel attacking CNBC in paid ads, would be if the Republicans intimidate the press and control the format and the questions. After all, this isn’t Russia, the last time I looked.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 2, 2015
“Trouble In The Ranks”: GOP Debate Revolt Falls Apart
John Kasich, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie have all refused to sign the GOP letter proposing debate changes, their campaigns said Monday night.
“We are declining to sign the letter,” Kasich spokesman Chris Schrimpf told The Daily Beast. “We’re happy the group decided to agree with us to not alter the Fox debate. As the governor of Ohio he is used to answering tough questions all the time.”
Schrimpf clarified that by “group,” he meant all the representatives for the campaigns in attendance at the meeting. He did not respond when asked who all was in attendance.
When reached for comment, Christie’s communications director Samantha Smith pointed The Daily Beast to comments Christie made on Fox & Friends this morning. “Stop complaining,” Christie said. “Do me a favor, set up a stage, put podiums up there, and let’s just go. Okay?”
Carly Fiorina didn’t even attend the meeting on Sunday night. Deputy Communications Director Sarah Isgur Flores shared an email with the Daily Beast that she sent to Ben Ginsberg, the lawyer running the closed door session. Flores claims that they skipped the meeting and opted for dinner at Applebee’s instead.
“Our campaign choose not to attend your closed door meeting last night,” Flores wrote. “We had dinner at the Applebee’s in Pella, Iowa instead.
“These debates are an important chance for voters to see conservative candidates under pressure and over time. We have consistently and successfully discussed our concerns with the networks and the voters–and not behind closed doors like the political class seems to like to do. We encourage each of the campaigns addressed here to do the same.
“As we have expressed publicly, we encourage the RNC to sanction conservative networks such as the Blaze and One America News to host and moderate a debate. We do not care whether it’s 67 degrees or our green room isn’t as plush as another candidate.
“Team Carly will not be signing this letter.”
The letter features stipulations for future debates, including guaranteed opening and closing statements of at least 30 seconds for each candidate. It threatens that candidates will back out of debates if the demands are not met. Donald Trump similarly rejected the letter earlier today, reportedly opting to negotiate directly with the television networks in question.
Ben Carson’s campaign, which was the principal architect of the meeting, has not responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, November 2, 2015
“Pursuing An All-Purpose Teflon Uniform”: Rubio Assaults The MSM, Which Loves Him
Speaking of Marco Rubio… a big part of his boffo performance at the CNBC debate the other night was his claim that the MSM had become a “Democratic Super-PAC,” with the supposed evidence being its cover-up of HRC “lies” about her behavior after Benghazi! “exposed” by Trey Gowdy’s committee. Yea, verily, the MSM went “around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
Now before you even unpack this pack of–well, mischaracterizations–it’s worth noting in passing that it wasn’t just the MSM that adjudged HRC’s appearance before the Benghazi! Committee as a triumph for her over her inquisitors; conservative commentators generally agreed.
Beyond that, as WaPo fact-checker Glenn Kessler concluded, Rubio, not HRC, is the one with the Pinnochios on this subject.
After untangling and refuting Rubio’s claims, Greg Sargent has a pungent interpretation of what Rubio is trying to accomplish here:
It’s important to understand that the claim that the hearing is what unmasked Clinton’s “lie” is crucial to the story Rubio is trying to tell, a tale told to the GOP base…. The narrative that the media deliberately obscured this on Clinton’s behalf helps discredit media scrutiny of Rubio’s own distortions, and that scrutiny will in turn likely be converted into evidence that Rubio poses a dire threat to Clinton — the liberal media perceives this threat, and thus wants to tear him down. But the highest-profile foundational claim Rubio has thus far offered to support this narrative structure just doesn’t hold up.
In other words, Rubio’s pursuing an all-purpose teflon uniform against any slings and arrows that come his way from the MSM, which is obviously shilling for Hil. But here’s the thing: Best I can tell, at this very moment the MSM is busy all but crowning Rubio the Republican nominee. So why is he all but calling them Enemies of Freedom? It could be that GOP rank-and-file media hatred has assumed quasi-religious proportions, and he’s just exploiting it. Or maybe there really is some dirt on Rubio that could soon come out.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 30, 2015
“We’re All The Same Underneath”: When White People Take Drugs, It Stops Being A “War”
Chalk up another piece of evidence for the longstanding notion that the nation’s “War on Drugs” is simply another aspect of institutionalized racism: it seems that now that heroin addiction is raging through white middle-class families, the nation’s appetite for tough-on-crime tactics is waning.
When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.
“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation.”
Apologists can try to claim that the racial disparity in understanding and treatment of the problem is due to people with more power having the ability to change the conversation.
But given the history of the enforcement of the drug war in the United States–starkly and painfully exemplified in the hysteria over “crack cocaine”–it’s a difficult stance to take.
The evidence suggests, rather, that American public policy has been centered around harsh punishment of populations that were at first openly and then more quietly assumed to be naturally subhuman and more prone to violence than whites. Racism, in other words. The drug war is another reflection of that same mentality. A large number of Americans harboring racial prejudice have an image of minority communities seething with chaos just under the thin veneer of civilization, with barbarism ready to strike at any moment in a toxic stew of drugs, handouts violence and uncouth music. The response is a war on drugs, tough-on-crime laws, hatred of taxes, and arsenals of guns for “protection.”
It’s no surprise, then, that when white people do drugs it’s not seen as the same kind of threat–because in minds of far too many Americans it’s not really the drug that is the problem, but the ability of the drug to release the supposedly natural tendencies of certain types of people. The same is true of guns: when a white person carries a gun they’re a patriot; when a black person does it they’re a criminal thug. Because it’s not about the gun, it’s about the person carrying it.
Racists don’t see this as a form of racism. They see it as a form of common sense. But it’s racism through and through. And unfortunately even for the racists, their public policy reactions in terms of gun proliferation, poor public safety nets and harsh criminal justice systems hurt not only minority communities but white ones as well.
America will make progress as a society only when we can move beyond these prejudices and realize that we’re all the same underneath, and we need policies of tolerance and understanding that reflect that fact.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 31, 2015
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