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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (66256)	7/16/2013 10:00:28 AM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Recommended By greatplains_guy ManyMoose Respond to of 71588

Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial The left wants to blame black criminality on racial animus and 'the system,' but blacks have long been part of running that system. By JASON L. RILEY July 15, 2013, 7:12 p.m. ET George Zimmerman's acquittal of murder charges in a Florida court has been followed by predictable calls for America to have a "national conversation" about this or that aspect of the case. President Obama wants to talk about gun control. Civil-rights leaders want to talk about racial profiling. Others want to discuss how the American criminal justice system supposedly targets black men. All of which is fine. Just don't expect these conversations to be especially illuminating or honest. Liberals in general, and the black left in particular, like the idea of talking about racial problems, but in practice they typically ignore the most relevant aspects of any such discussion. Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. "High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments." The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and "the system," but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and '80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks. The jury's only job in the Zimmerman trial was to determine whether the defendant broke the law when he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year in a gated community near Orlando, Fla. In cases of self-defense, it doesn't matter who initiated the confrontation; whether Mr. Zimmerman singled out Martin because he was a black youngster in a neighborhood where there had been a series of burglaries by black youngsters; or whether Mr. Zimmerman disregarded what the police dispatcher told him before he got out of his car. Nor does it matter that Martin was unarmed and minding his own business when Mr. Zimmerman approached. All that really mattered in that courtroom is whether Mr. Zimmerman reasonably believed that his life was in danger when he pulled the trigger. Critics of the verdict might not like the statutes that allowed for this outcome, but the proper response would not have been for the jury to ignore them and convict. Did the perception of black criminality play a role in Martin's death? We may never know for certain, but we do know that those negative perceptions of young black men are rooted in hard data on who commits crimes. We also know that young black men will not change how they are perceived until they change how they behave. The homicide rate claiming black victims today is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. So let's have our discussions, even if the only one that really needs to occur is within the black community. Civil-rights leaders today choose to keep the focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility, but their predecessors knew better. "Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves." Mr. Riley is a member of the Journal's editorial board online.wsj.com

To: ManyMoose who wrote (66256)	8/11/2013 9:59:22 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Forget the Old South: Trayvon Martin Was No Emmett Till By Michael Barone - August 2, 2013 Why are so many people so desperate to hold onto the idea that America is as racist as it has ever been? The phenomenon is apparent in much of the commentary on the George Zimmerman case. Facts were blithely ignored -- the fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, by current standards; the evidence that he and not his victim, Trayvon Martin, was pummeled and wounded; the failure to find any hint of anti-black bias in Zimmerman's past. Instead there was a desperate longing to see this unhappy incident as a case of a white racist hunting down and murdering an innocent black -- with a view to establishing that this kind of thing happens all the time. It isn't. Yes, young black men are homicide victims in large and tragic numbers. But the perpetrators are almost always other young black men, as in President Obama's hometown of Chicago, where almost every weekend there are multiple such murders. Nevertheless, journalism is full of opinion articles, many written by people who should know better, likening the death of Trayvon Martin to the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Till was a 14-year-old black boy raised in Chicago who, on a summer trip to his native Mississippi, "wolf-whistled" at a white woman. Two white men abducted and brutally murdered him. They were tried, and the all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating 67 minutes. Months later, the defendants told Look magazine's William Bradford Huie that they had indeed killed the young man. The Emmett Till case attracted national attention, with heavy media coverage. Rep. Charles Diggs, one of three blacks in Congress, attended the trial. National magazines ran pictures of the grinning defendants. In the process, Northerners were forced to confront the brutality with which white Southerners enforced the subjection of blacks. This went beyond the laws requiring segregated schools, buses and drinking fountains. Also in place was an unwritten code of behavior, breach of which could result in violent retaliation. Blacks were called by their first names and could approach whites' houses only by the back door, and black men could never, never ogle white women. This was unknown to most Northerners. As I explain in my forthcoming book, "Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics," there was almost no migration between South and North in the years between the Civil War and World War II. Southern mores were so unknown in the North that Yale psychologist John Dollard's 1937 book "Caste and Class in a Southern Town," based on five months' field work in Indianola, Miss., was hailed as a great revelation, akin to Margaret Mead's writing on Samoa. Yet everything in it was common knowledge for every 10-year-old, black or white, in Indianola. The great genius of the civil rights movement was to make Northerners face the reality -- and the violence -- of the segregation system. The Emmett Till case was one of the first incidents that forced them to do so. It was followed a year later by Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955 and Martin Luther King's resulting Montgomery bus boycott. It is sometimes said that laws cannot change customs. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning racial discrimination in hiring and public accommodations, did in fact change behavior in the South. It not only ended legally enforced segregation but effectively ended the unwritten code of black subjugation. Which is to say that the America of our time -- the America of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman -- is hugely different from and hugely better than the America of Emmett Till. Back in the 1950s, most Americans -- not just in the South but across the nation -- opposed interracial marriages. As blacks were migrating in large numbers to Northern cities, whites moved out of neighborhoods when they moved in. Today things are different. Our president, twice elected with majorities of the vote, is the product of a mixed-race marriage. Black presence in neighborhoods no longer results in rapid white flight. Yet many Americans have a desperate need to believe nothing has changed. They yearn for the moral clarity that enables almost all Americans today to retrospectively condemn the old Southern code. The irony is that those who claim they lead the civil rights movement today have a vested psychological interest in denying its great triumph. Michael Barone is Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. realclearpolitics.com