Race Is Always the Issue

[Blue_Tires]

Every conversation about resources in the United States is also about race and racism. Like parents choosing a neighborhood for its “good schools,” Americans talk about prison and crime as a means of discussing race and racism in polite company.

One needn’t hate Hispanics to choose a school system with no Hispanics. One need not say that black people are violent apes to call the police when an injured human being who happens to be black knocks on your door for help. Freedom—from being stopped and frisked; from predatory criminal justice fines; from cells—is arguably the resource from which every other resource flows: education, marriage, income, wealth, happiness, actualization. In “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a decoder ring for the language of criminality, revealing that it rests on the idea that America can only be great so long as America is fundamentally white.
The Age of Mass Incarceration
More from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October cover story
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The articulation of America’s greatness is rarely as strong as when the country is preparing to elect its next leader. If nothing else, the political class generates tons of text and ideas for ordinary readers to parse. Coates parses the ideology of white racism in crime policy and rhetoric from the Fugitive Slave Clause through Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and on to Bernie Sanders. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

During my doctoral training, Moynihan was offered as a cautionary tale to young academics. Moynihan, they said, dared to tell the truth about the culture of poverty in black communities. As a result, the liberal elite and angry black-activist oligarchy ran him out of society’s good graces, if not exactly out of town. We were warned against dabbling in social prescriptions: “Look what they did to Moynihan!”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/race-is-always-the-issue/405295/

[Chitown Kev]

1. Yes

One needn’t hate Hispanics to choose a school system with no Hispanics. One need not say that black people are violent apes to call the police when an injured human being who happens to be black knocks on your door for help.

This seems to be a hard concept for white liberals to get their head wrapped around; in this case, some people are taking offense to the urban white liberal migration to Vermont in the late 60's and early 70's as a case of "white flight".

[kwassa]

2. This is why I love The Atlantic.

for publishing really excellent articles like this one.

More from it:

As fortune (or power) would have it, the narrative of a crime wave is reemerging. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests all across the country, standing against police brutality and extra-judicial murders, mass media, and the pundit class are coalescing around a narrative of growing violence in the streets. A Wall Street Journal reporter puts a fine point on the connection: “The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.” Waves in the bathtub aren’t even that simple to explain, much less crime waves. No one with any serious training in data, statistics, and crime attributes isolated crimes to a national trend armed with only nine months of data.

But when crime is really a proxy for talking about race, the threshold for conclusions to be seen as scientifically rigorous always shifts. Always. Were the issue actually crime, statistics would tell you that crime continues its longitudinal trend downward nationally. Were the issue criminality, science would tell you that civil unrest stems from very different social processes than those which produce criminals. Were the issue safety, public policy would protect black taxpayers from being indiscriminately murdered by the police.

[Starry Messenger]

3. K&R

Good to see you, BT.

[steve2470]

4. k&r! nt

[Number23]

5. Always. It is ALWAYS the issue. No matter how many people try to pretend otherwise

But when crime is really a proxy for talking about race, the threshold for conclusions to be seen as scientifically rigorous always shifts. Always. Were the issue actually crime, statistics would tell you that crime continues its longitudinal trend downward nationally. Were the issue criminality, science would tell you that civil unrest stems from very different social processes than those which produce criminals. Were the issue safety, public policy would protect black taxpayers from being indiscriminately murdered by the police.


Powerful. K&R