It's not that surprising that Ted Nugent seems to think he knows a lot about "the negro," if one judges by
this piece in Salon. It's also not surprising that what he thinks he knows isn't really all that much. For example, Ted is convinced that the fact no suspect identification has been provided for the people who—completely separate from the ongoing protests in that city—
shot at a two Ferguson police officers this week, means that
he knows exactly who should be suspected and whom police should focus their attention on.
Nugent wonders why “the media have made it a point not to describe the suspect or suspects the police are searching for,” and then proceeds to draw his own conclusions about the suspects.
“Based on crime stats in Ferguson and elsewhere,” Nugent writes, “it would be a safe bet to assume the two thugs the police are looking for are black males between the age of 15 and 25.”
And he further predicts ...
the two thugs being searched for were raised by a single parent, have criminal records, are high school dropouts, don’t have jobs and are very likely to be members of a gang.
For Teddy the absence of evidence is, of course, evidence. Because it's not like
white people have ever shot at cops, right? Yet the thing is, Ted is far from alone in hop, skip and jumping to this "safe bet" conclusion without any facts what-so-ever. Nor is Ted alone in his next claim that the reason for the existence of these "thugs" in our society is the implementation of liberal spending policies in their evil government "Fedzilla." As ridiculous as Ted may seem at times, I believe that he lays out in his piece the core
raison d'etre for not just the Tea Party, but also the entire GOP over the past six years and for the foreseeable future.
Follow me over the flip to read more.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not just yet again saying that "Ted Nugent is a racist." It's not like that isn't clearly self-evident after he called the president a "subhuman mongrel," (while proclaiming he didn't mean it in a "racial way"). And he said Stevie Wonder was "brain-dead" for choosing to boycott stand-your-ground states like Florida since it's so obvious that Trayvon Martin was a "dope-smoking hoodlum" who deserved to get himself killed by George ["He who might shoot some FBI"] Zimmerman, but y'know, that wasn't "racial" either.
Saying "Ted Nugent is a Fatuous Unrepentant Racist Gasbag" again would just be pedantic. It's a given. What makes this interesting to me is that Ted—and I strongly suspect many Conservatives of his ilk—seem to think, still, that they're not the racists, liberals are.
To examine that view, I have to first say I'm not sure where Ted gets his "internet," but according to the one the rest of us use, the "crime stats" in Ferguson, Missouri, tell a very different story than the one he's spinning.
Ferguson police are much more likely to stop, search and arrest African American drivers than white ones. Last year, blacks, who make up a little less than two-thirds of the driving-age population in the North County city, accounted for 86 percent of all stops. When stopped, they were almost twice as likely to be searched as whites and twice as likely to be arrested, though police were less likely to find contraband on them...
The crucial thing is that last part. Police may focus on and stop black drivers more often, and search them and their vehicles more often, but they
aren't finding more drugs or guns or stolen items or anything more often on black people.
Last year, Ferguson police searched 12.1 percent of black drivers they stopped, compared to 6.9 percent for whites. Contraband was found 22 percent of the time when the driver was black and 34 percent when the driver was white.
If the police are finding illegal items on white people in 12 percent more of their searches, why exactly are they stopping them 40% more often?
Perhaps they, like Ted, are trying to play the "safe bet" even when they keep coming up snake-eyes more often than they bother to admit. If you truly look at the stats, police are apparently wasting their time, on the taxpayers' dime, repeatedly stopping and searching black people who are more often perfectly innocent than the whites who are stopped and searched.
There is very clearly a bias at play here that is affecting the behavior and choices police make but isn't being reflected in actions or "criminality" of the people they're choosing to focus the "safe bet" on.
But not to Ted. He doesn't see innocent people, he sees "black thugs" who've been made that way—by liberals.
“It is liberalism that engineered and created the very conditions that have decimated and destroyed black American families and their communities,” he continues. “Astonishingly and regretfully, the overwhelming majority of black Americans continue to vote for the very political party that has destroyed them.”
“It is deaf, dumb and blind liberalism that has shoveled over $20 trillion into Fedzilla’s welfare crack programs over the past 50 years. Their big lie is that this was all done to eliminate poverty. What it really has done is waste this gargantuan pile of money while doing nothing to eliminate poverty,” he says.
And “the bullet-proof truth is that our hard-earned tax dollars were torched by Democrats to create a permanent voting block out of black Americans. Money is the bait, and they took it, hook, line and sinker. Now President Obama has proposed shoveling another $10 trillion over the next 10 years for more Fedzilla welfare crack.”
If the key elements of this rant sound familiar, they should, because Ted is essentially saying the same thing that Cliven Bundy said
about the Negro.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
And then there's what Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty
said about black people being "happier" in the "pre-entitlement" era.
In addition to his remarks about homosexuality, Robertson also suggested in the interview that black people he grew up with were happier under Jim Crow laws of segregation.
“They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!” Robertson said. “Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
But it's not just coming from fringe personalities. Nugent's essentially quoting what Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld said about the "failed" War on Poverty just last month.
Claiming that we've spent $22 trillion on the "War on Poverty" is a very popular right-wing meme. They also like to claim it hasn't done any good over the last 50 years, but the chart below from Pew Research (which I've used before and will likely use again) tends to dispute that.
The highest point of poverty shown on the chart is at its beginning in 1963 (15 percent for whites, 42 percent for blacks), whereas its lowest point is in 2000 at the completion of the Clinton presidency (7 percent for whites, 23% for blacks). Conservatives would like to pretend there has been no reduction in poverty rates since 1967. They say this all the time, but you can very clearly see a very
sharp reduction at the beginning of the program for black people. You can also see that immediately after the year 2000, when Republican policies were in place, the rate of poverty began to steadily rise. (One can largely presume this rise was tied to the twin Bush crashes—first Energy/Dot Com Bubble and then the Housing Bubble—and the loss of both jobs and homes that they entailed)
That many of the people in the lower economic rungs may also happen to be working while receiving government subsidies for their food and their healthcare because they aren't being paid enough to afford it on their own doesn't seem to enter into the conservative equation. They argue that raising the minimum wage, whose current buying power is at a 25-year low, would cost jobs. But the Congressional Budget Office says something different. It does say that raising the minimum wage to $10 would cost about 500,000 jobs (although at the current rate of employment growth those jobs could be regained in two-to-three months) the CBO also says this:
Real income would increase, on net, by $5 billion for families whose income will be below the poverty threshold under current law, boosting their average family income by about 3 percent and moving about 900,000 people, on net, above the poverty threshold (out of the roughly 45 million people who are projected to be below that threshold under current law).
Almost twice as many people who might, for a time, lose their jobs (and also it should be noted that some of those people may in fact already be working multiple jobs, so losing one of them while being paid more at the other is a net wash) will be lifted out of poverty and onto the first rungs of the middle class if we would simply raise the minimum wage to pay workers enough to get by without government subsidies.
It's also very clear that there is a vast racial disparity in this chart. That black people started at being at almost 45 percent in poverty in 1967 is no joking matter. It's not exactly reasonable to expect that people are began with a 42 percent disadvantage are going to see that gap completely disappear magically all by itself without some special effort being assigned to that task.
Yet, it has been the conservatives, who've opposed putting forth that effort. Whether to improve minority public schools with bigger budgets (rather than siphoning their funds off to privatized charter schools that don't produce better outcomes even after cherry-picking the easiest-to-teach students), or to offer better lending, housing or contracting opportunities for minority business, or you name it, conservatives are against it. All of it.
But you don't really see them railing against things like this:
In a 1989 HUD-sponsored study of 3,800 realty offices in 25 cities, Syracuse University and the Urban Institute discovered that 58.9 percent of black home buyers, 55.9 percent of Hispanic home buyers, 53.3 percent of black renters and 46.1 percent of Hispanic renters suffer some incidence of discrimination. Earlier this year the Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington conducted 468 tests of telephone and mail job applications, with each Hispanic applicant matched with a non-Hispanic white with a slightly weaker résumé. The Hispanics encountered discrimination 22.4 percent of the time.
And this...
A new study of nearly 240,000 home loan applications from 1998 in New York City concludes conventional banks have largely ignored black neighborhoods, even those with above-average incomes, creating a vacuum that has been filled by high-cost and often abusive lenders.
And this...
As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.
These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.
Conservatives argue that the problem with black people is they don't respect and trust the police enough, they don't trust and respect our commercial institutions, and they don't trust and respect the idea that the American Dream is just as open to them as it is to everyone else.
That's because It's Not.
The stats show that, nationwide, black people are about 20 percent more likely to be stopped by police, 50 percent more likely to be searched (even though they don't find 50 percent more of anything, they find less), about twice as likely to be arrested and three times more likely to encounter some "use of force" by police used against them.
Is that because they're more likely to be criminals, or because police are more likely to take the "safe bet" and assume they're criminals without evidence?
Although Conservatives like to harp on the "black on black" crime rate—the numbers their trying to use are wrong and incomplete. It would be far more accurate to say we don't know who many of the perpetrators of these crimes, particularly murder, actually are because in nearly twice as many cases of black people being murdered 40 percent of the offenders are unknown compared to that being the case for 24 percent of white people who are murdered.
The numbers clearly show the vast majority of people arrested in America—are white (6.5 million) not black (2.6 million) and that's without taking into account the rate of disparate police scrutiny that black people receive, regardless of whether they're guilty of anything.
There is no definitive report on the racial bias in police killings, even though the law has required such a report for 20 years. But the data various people have individually collected on the matter, do not paint a pretty picture.
On top of this lovely
merde sundae of bias you have rundown schools, lending discrimination, housing discrimination and job discrimination that may not be as blatant as we all agree it was in 1967, but is. still. there. and does have
a negative impact.
But conservatives say none of this matters. It doesn't matter that police are killing black men by the hundreds every year, and that number gets very near a thousand when you include "justifiable homicide" by paranoid vigilantes—uh—other citizens. It doesn't matter that some people have advantages and black people don't. It doesn't matter that some people get connections and opportunities that black people don't. Because see, look—Oprah is rich!
So is Bill Cosby.
Jesse Owens beat the Nazis, why can't you?
Barack Obama is the president, what else do you want?
Isn't that enough for you people? How could any single individual black person succeed in anything if racism against them is really all that bad? Why didn't it stop them, too?
Which, of course, is not the point.
Just because some people have been able to beat the odds, and have accomplished what may otherwise seem nearly impossible, doesn't mean most people will. Based on the law of averages, most won't. The point is that having to be 2 percent, 30 percent or even 40 percent smarter, more honest, have better credit, and harder working than everyone else just to be considered EVEN WITH THEM is the very definition of Injustice.
Having to be Super-Human just to be treated as a Regular Human, or to get a reasonably fair shake, is just Fucking Bullshit.
If everyone who takes the "safe bet" can continually claim what they're advocating is "in no way racist" in intent, besides the fact it's obviously racist in result, then there never will be any equality in this country. We never will have a fair and equal shot. The scales will always be tipped slightly against us.
No one should use that as an excuse and let it stop them before they even bother to try. Neither should people try to pretend, if they have happened to beat those odds —as many of us have—that others of our fellow Americans, aren't still going to be left behind on the other side of the wealth gap, the education gap, and the prison gap.
It's not that black people have a "lack of respect and trust" in the American system—it's the other way around and has been for a very long time. If people like Ted, and Phil, and Cliven, and the people on Fox News think that constantly telling black people how "criminal" they are is the way to gain their respect, they have another thing coming.
Liberals don't have all the answers to these problems, but they do at least admit that these are problems that continue to need addressing. Liberals don't want everyone on welfare. They do, however, think things would clearly be far worse—for everyone—without it. See the beginning section of the poverty chart above!.
Liberals aren't racist to point these issues out, to admit that although we may never completely eliminate poverty we can and should try to shrink it as much as possible. But a pretty good argument can be made that Conservatives are racist in impact—regardless of their individual intent—for doing everything in their power to make sure the walls of inequity and poverty not only remain in place, but also are further fortified and anchored by fear, loathing, paranoia and the urge to take the "safe bet" by constantly assuming the worst without the slightest shred of specific evidence about black people.