The President did us a great service yesterday by gently and pointedly Black-splaining to half the country just what the Trayvon Martin case really means to the other half.
Its something that shouldn't have had to be said because it should've been obvious. But it wasn't to many, and therefore it had to be said and it had to be said by this President because he explained that even he has felt the sting of being Funny Vibed, of being feared, watched and stalked simply for daring to exist in an America that is clearly uncomfortable (and guilt riddled) with his being here.
My first tweet after his comment was.
But what he actually said went a bit further. He gave authenticity to the Black experience in America. One that is fraught with tremendous highs, aspirations and inspiration as well as devastating crushing lows.
Even a person whose reached heights as great as actress/singer Jennifer Hudson could feel the sting of horrific violence as three of her family members were gunned down in domestic violence.
Even the seemingly mighty and the powerful can not escape the impacts of the cancer of violence that has been inflicted on the Black community for Centuries and has seeped somewhere deep into the marrow of our national bones.
Obama explained this to you. He explained it for us. Now begins to the to take the next step and discuss what, if anything, can be done about it.
I've been having this Conversation Off-and-On for about 20 years now. Online, In-person, in what ever venue it seemed appropriate. With Black people, with White, with Liberals and Conservatives.
I've found most of us agree on most of the basics. The ones who don't agree, are the Conservatives. Make no mistake, this is partisan as much as it is racial. To them there is No Racism in America. None. If Black people aren't being chained and sold on an auction block anymore they have nothing to complain about, and if they do complain their simply being whiners, filled with Racial Grievance, trapped in Government Dependance unable and afraid stand up on their own two feet, and if only they would escape the grip of the Democrat Party they could see that.
Yes, seriously. It's all your fault, see?
Damn dirty Democrats from those who first hid under KKK sheets in the old south to those who now "pretend" to care about Blacks and Minorities, but in reality are only using them to further their own personal agenda and line their pockets by incessantly playing the Race Card. Conservatives don't even want to talk about Race, because doing that simply justifies more "Racial Grievances".
They say everyone should be "Color-Blind" - which to me is another way of saying "Color Ignorant". Or at least they say that until it comes to Profling and then think paying attention to color - is Just Fine. Yet they don't think that the IRS Profiling, Surveiling and Scrutinizing the Tea Party was just fine - now did they?
For them all Black people need to do to escape Racism is essentially - stop being SO Black. I expressed it this this way.
And trust me no one is more strident about that than Black Conservatives. I had one tweet to me that I was a "Thug By Association" because I supported Trayvon's First Amendment right to dress as he pleases, even wear a Hoodie in the rain. And I would post that tweet now, but I blocked his dumb ass.
Somehow these guys just seem to magically ignore the Hate Crime Stats from the FBI. http://www.fbi.gov/...
Among the single-bias hate crime incidents in 2011, there were 3,645 victims of racially motivated hate crime.
. 71.9 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-black bias.
. 16.3 percent were victims of an anti-white bias.
. 5.2 percent were victims of a bias against a group of individuals in which more than one race was represented (anti-multiple races, group).
. 4.8 percent were victims of an anti-Asian/Pacific Islander bias.
. 1.9 percent were victims of an anti-American Indian/Alaskan Native bias.(Based on Table 1.)
So if there is "No Racism" in American anymore - what's all that about?
But the largest bias is clearly within our Judicial System with ineffective flawed and damaging policies like Stop-n-Frisk.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
The statistics are overwhelming. An independent study of the city’s stop-and-frisk program found that 87 percent of the 685,724 stops in 2011 — a record high — were of blacks and latinos. Young black men between the ages of 14 and 24 were stopped 106% of the time — as in, there were more stops of young black men than the entire population of young black men.
The evidence does not support Bloomberg’s claim that stopping more minorities will lower the city’s crime rate. Stop-and-frisk had a 90 percent failure rate in 2011, and in the first three months of 2013, when the number of stops fell by 51 percent from the same period last year, the crime rate dropped as well
And then there's the disproportionate
drug arrests and prosecutions.
Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data,” reported the New York Times yesterday. So what else is new? Will they report today that water is wet.
On February 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “prison sentences of black men were nearly 20% longer than those of white men for similar crimes in recent years, an analysis by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.”
It's clear that these policies in turn have an impact on the final incarceration rate numbers which indicate that about 32% of Black Males will at one point in their lives - be in jail.
http://www.bjs.gov/...
The lifetime chances of a person going to prison are higher for men (9%) than for women (1%) and higher for blacks (16%) and Hispanics (9%) than for whites (2%). At current levels of incarceration newborn black males in this country have a greater than a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during their lifetimes, while Hispanic males have a 1 in 6 chance, and white males have a 1 in 23 chance of serving time.
Conservatives don't look at this data and see a cause and effect, they simply look at the last figure - seeing it as the "likelyhood of you being a THUG or Criminal" and say since blacks are 4 times more likely to go do jail, they must be
4 Times As Likely to Be Crooks. Therefore Trayvon got what he deserved for Looking Like someone who was
4 Times more likely to have been a Burglar - even though nobody even seriously tried to prove that he was.
They claim that we shouldn't be focused on Trayvon's case, we should be focused on Black on Black Crime and murders, even though when you look at the overall data for 1-on-1 Race vs Race Murders - Black people aren't in the lead, White people are as I wrote on Tuesday.
Straight from the 2011 FBI Uniform Crime Stats - No chaser.
Victim |
Total |
White Offender |
Black Offender |
White |
3,172 |
2,630 |
448 |
Black |
2,695 |
193 |
2,447 |
Totals |
5,867 |
2823 |
2,895 |
Note: there are more White on White Murders (2,630) than Black on Black (2,447) - although it should be noted this isn't all murders, simply those where both race of victim and offender have been identified as either black or white - with 1 victim and 1 offender each, yet this is only FBI Crime chart with this kind of racial breakdown so it has to do.
Here's a Percent Breakdown.
White Victim - White Offender 82% - Black Offender 14%
Black Victim - White Offender - 7 % Black Offender 91%
I have to say if 91% is bad, then 82% IMO should still kinda bad too, but really all this reveals is that most murders happen among people who know each other or at least are far more likely to come in common contact with each other.
This bias even manifests itself in more subtle ways involving things such as
housing and lending...
Discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Asians looking for housing persists in subtle forms, according to a new national study commissioned by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Though less likely to face overt obstacles, like being refused an appointment to see a home,minority customers were shown fewer available units than whites with similar qualifications, the study found.
And lastly when it comes to 'justifiable homiide" cases such as Trayvon Martin's, White People who Shoot Black People are between 250-345% more likely to be acquitted.
White people who kill black people in 'Stand Your Ground' states are 354% more likely to be cleared of murder
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
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The result was drawn from a study using FBI data conducted by John Roman, a senior analyst at Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center.
Roman analysed the pool of 43,500 homicides by race in states with Stand Your Ground laws and those without them.
He found that whites who kill blacks in non-Stand Your Ground states are 250 percent more likely to be found justified in killing a black person than a white person who kills another white person.
But in Stand Your Ground states, that number jumps to 354 percent.
But for Conservatives, none of this matters.
They really seriously don't get it, nor do they want to get it. They don't see the difference this makes and has made for generations. I even had one ask me the other day on twitter a question I frankly found astounding.
"What is Black Culture?"
To me that's like asking what is water. How wet is Rain? Dude, can't you see it all around you? Apparently not.
He then accused me of wallowing in "Racial Grievance" and blaming Slavery for all of our Ills, even though I didn't mention Slavery at all - and I mistakenly mentioned Blues twice.
This after he'd already said this.
And of course argued against the Civil Rights Act as Being unnecessary because no one would tolerate a business that discriminates.
Clearly plenty of businesses discriminated between the adoption of the original Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment and the implementation of the Civil Rights Act. Conservative Barry Goldwater opposed the CRA because he felt businesses had a right to discriminate, but I ask - where exactly are the special business rights to override the rights of individuals found in the Constitution? And as I tweeted, who went out of business during that 96 years, and for that matter whose gone out of business since? Clearly not Chik-Fil-A.
I think the larger point is this, if not for Jim Crow and a segregated military the amazing success that was the Tuskegee Airman would not have occurred. The responsibility and the pressure that was put on those young men was immense and they rose that challenge. They overcame it. Just as did Jesse Owens when he starred down Hitler at the Berlin Olympic and disprove the superiority of his Uber-men.
Black men and women have been pulling off the near impossible for a long, long time. I could have mentioned Soul Food in my list, because that is a cuisine that had to be invented because slaves were only given what was consider that inedible waste after all the "good" portions of a hog had been slaughtered. They literally did turn a sow's ear in a silk purse when they invented pickled pig's feet, and turned pig intestines into chitterlings.
That's resourcefulness for you. But it didn't come without a price.
It's not like they had a choice, it was adapt or die. It's a bit like the Flower Breaking Through Concrete phenomenon.
The Late Tupac, Thug, Poetic, Hustler, Inspirational Thinker and one of the few Hip-Hop Artists over the last two decades I can
even stand used talk about this in fairly eloquent terms.
For Black people we often feel as though we're expected to ignore the concrete - that the incredible accomplishment of simply surviving let alone thriving in such a hostile environment - is No Big Thang. And what about the converse idea, if the concrete wasn't there in the way - Wouldn't there be Field of Flowers By Now?
It becomes a chicken-and-the-egg argument over and over. Are black people culturally deficient and inferior as Conservative Columnist Robert Cohen recently suggested or are the simply reacting both postively and negatively to the circumstances they've found themselves placed in?
Yet I'm tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that I am a racist for recognizing the reality of urban crime in America. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.
...
The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday -- but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.
In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem. It does no one any good to merely cite the number of stops and frisks made on black males and not cite the murder statistics as well. Citing the former and not the latter is an Orwellian exercise in political correctness. It not only censors half of the story but suggests that racism is the sole reason for the policy. This mindlessness, like racism itself, is repugnant.
Cohen at least admits to the basic cause for this dysfunction, he doesn't pretend it doesn't have a historical roots, and if we look at situations like that of Trayvon Martin or more explicitly
Melissa Alexander current roots. What I don't see him suggest is a viable solution.
He thinks, as many Conservatives do, that Black people just need to straighten up and fly right.
Yeah, well - that's easy to say - but pretty hard to do. Case in point: Lindsey Lohan.
She's bright, she's white, she's smart, she's funny, she's talented and has everything in the world going for her except for being a
Rolling Train Wreck of a Drug Addict. Yes, I know she's in rehab, again, who seriously thinks that's gonna take this time?
Yet to Conservatives Black people are, after all they've been through and are continuing to go through, supposed to grab their ankles and Levitate, but nobody - nobody - can come along and save this girl from herself? If the idea of being asked to jump into her life and pull her out of her death-spin into the straight-and-narrow scares you - imagine how Black people feel when dealing with their most dysfunctional? Let me be blunt, it's Fucked.
Have you ever had a drug addict in your family? Is it easy to try and talk them out of it and change their life around? Imagine if they're a gang-banger? How'd you go about talking them down exactly? You think they'd Listen To You? Not bloody likely. Now multiply that times ten. Then multiply that times a thousand. Then another thousand.
The fact that few can do the near impossible is no reason to expect that the majority of those in the most impoverished parts of the country, in the most desperate circumstances are all going to just flip like a switch if they only buy into "conservative values". Shit don't work like that. It never has, it never will.
A few of them will beat the odds and survive, most of them won't - that's the law of averages.
And I'm not saying that government programs are a solution either, although we clearly have a long, long-way to go to implement fair and equal policing and sentencing practices. We need better schools, we need better drug treatment and gang diversion. We need better access to decent jobs, housing and lending than we're currently getting so people have rungs out of poverty and into the middle-class. Success is the best form of "Revenge".
We also have a long way to go in recognizing our own Confirmation Bias, and how that impacts how we react and treat each other even without Racism itself being in the mix. If this is going to be solved it needs to be all hands on deck. It can't just be the black underclass who have to do all the heavy lifting. It has to be a concerted effort on all fronts.
And that of course, is why it's been so hard for so long. We're all going in different directions, trying to cover our own butts, pointing the fingers at everyone else. "I didn't do it, you did it to yourself." The least we could do is admit all the facts in the shared reality of the situation, but even that seems to be too much to sask. Yes, Black people can look at the stats, look at the reality of their own lives and give into despair and hopelessness that things will ever improve significantly.
Some of them argue, this may be the best sliver of equality and freedom we can expect to achieve. This is it. Nothing's going to change or improve.
I think they're wrong. I think America - as a whole - can do better than this. Much better. I think that we can open our eyes, see everyone elses point of view and move forward together to a brighter future for all concerned.
It's just going to SUCK trying to get there.
In fact, the closer we get the harder it's going to become as more and more pile-on to say we've done "Enough" as we see with the Conservative SCOTUS peel back layers of the Voting Rights Act, a series of protections that also took nearly 100 years to erect in the first place.
It's more obvious than ever now that having Barack Obama as our President isn't the End of our Journey out of Racial Darkness, it's merely the beginning.
It'll be enough when the job is done, not one second before. Let's get to it.
Vyan
While you're pondering that Join Color of Change Campaign to Repeal Stand Your Ground Laws and get your asses Registered to Vote [Share the QR below], because at certain point - as I said yesterday - we have to start thinking what happens #AfterTrayvon