I do not think there is any intellectually honest person who would argue with the hypothesis that racists are made and not born. The environment that teaches someone to hate an entire group of people based solely on their race, is an essential part of forming a racist. If the proceeding premise is accepted as truth, then the antithetical to it is also true, i.e., victims of racism are also created by their environment and not born that way. The case could also be made that if someone who is a committed racist had been placed from birth into a family of the race that is the object of his hatred, he would grow up not hating people of that race.
A black gentleman I know was once telling me how many times he was pulled over by the police when he was younger, and implied it was a result of his race. I too was pulled over multiple times by police when I was younger, but I did not attribute it to my Middle-Eastern heritage, but to the fact that I was young. That and I was usually driving a beat up car with three or four other young men in attendance. The gentleman I previously referred to thought his being stopped was a function of his race rather than his age because it has become more honorable in our society to be victim of racism than of ageism.
The development of feelings that one is a victim of racism that leads to every negative experience or vocalization being a function of that racism, is a learned behavior taught to young minorities by a civil rights industry and Leftist politicians. Many times the experiences of racism sighted by minorities did not even happen to them, but they are convinced that they had. These tales of racism are repeated so often by the media and politicians hoping to advance themselves politically, that many minorities feel that if they aren't a victim of bigotry against their race, they are not truly a member of their race.
I do not intend to infer that there are absolutely no racist acts committed in this country. But saying that individual acts of racism exist in a random fashion in our society is a far cry from accepting that every police interaction, every foul word spoken and every dirty look that a minority receives is a result of their race. The Reverend Martin Luther King once said he longed for a day when every man could be judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. It is ironic that the very civil rights movement that Reverend King was instrumental in founding has been co-opted by charlatans who have driven this country further away from the good reverend's dream by the teaching of racial victimhood.
ReplyDeleteThe following data were collected from over 42,000 cars in New Jersey. The team also conducted the same analysis in Maryland and Ohio. There is no doubt. African-Americans WERE STOPPED more often than were white drivers. And you can read how the surveyors accounted for controlling the parameters.
Here's the LINK.
The teams recorded data on more than forty-two thousand cars. With these observations, Lamberth was able to compare the percentages of African- Americans drivers who are stopped, ticketed, and arrested, to their relative presence on the road. This data enabled him to carefully and rigorously test whether blacks were in fact being disproportionately targeted for stops.
By any standard, the results of Lamberth's analysis are startling. First, the turnpike violator census, in which observers in moving cars recorded the races and speeds of the cars around them, showed that blacks and whites violated the traffic laws at almost exactly the same rate; there was no statistically significant difference in the way they drove. Thus, driving behavior alone could not explain differences in how police might treat black and white drivers. With regard to arrests, 73.2% of those stopped and arrested were black, while only 13.5% of the cars on the road had a black driver or passenger. Lambert notes that the disparity between these two numbers "is statistically vast." The number of standard deviations present--54.27--means that the probability that the racial disparity is a random result "is infinitesimally small." Radio and patrol logs yielded similar results. Blacks are approximately 35% of those stopped, though they are only 13.5% of those on the road--19.45 standard deviations. Considering all stops in all three types of records surveyed, the chance that 34.9% of the cars combined would have black drivers or occupants "is substantially less than one in one billion." This led Lamberth to the following conclusion:
Absent some other explanation for the dramatically disproportionate number of stops of blacks, it would appear that the race of the occupants and/or drivers of the cars is a decisive factor or a factor with great explanatory power. I can say to a reasonable degree of statistical probability that the disparity outlined here is strongly consistent with the existence of a discriminatory policy, official or de facto, of targeting blacks for stop and investigation. . . .. . . .. . . Put bluntly, the statistics demonstrate that in a population of blacks and whites which is (legally) virtually universally subject to police stop for traffic law violation, (cf. the turnpike violator census), blacks in general are several times more likely to be stopped than non-blacks.
Thanks for the comments. I suppose some people think that because blacks are stopped at a higher rate in these selected areas would be enough of a reason for police not to stop them for any reason.
ReplyDeleteAndie and Damon,
ReplyDeleteIf you took the time to read the study, that's not what the conclusions are.
I don't read fiction.
ReplyDeleteHas anyone here read John McWhorter's Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America. I highly recommend the book! I discovered the book from a black client who was sick and tired of her son's spewing victimhood crap. She also sent her son to live in Ghana for a few years; there he was not black enough and tormented by Ghanians.
ReplyDeleteAOW,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the recommendation!
Andie,
DeleteThe book is available in most of the large public library systems.